The workshop series ‘Literatures of Change: Culture and Politics in Southern Africa’ is an initiative to foster a Nordic research environment on African culture and literature. Generously sponsored by the Nordic research councils, the series includes two workshops and three associated outreach events. In addition to the outreach events, the results will be disseminated in two edited volumes.

The series responds to a lacuna in the Nordic research landscape where African Studies have a strong social science base but a rather limited platform for humanities research. In launching a network on African culture and literature, the workshop series seeks to create viable connections in these fields between researchers in the Nordic countries and beyond, especially in African regions where such research is in fact quite robust. The workshops will focus on the relationship between literature and politics in Southern Africa with a particular emphasis on Zimbabwe. The analysis of recent upheavals in the region will benefit from the addition of a cultural studies approach. The organisers will facilitate discussion of how the network can establish itself more permanently and further extend the scope of its work.

Activities

Literature and the Politics of the Past in Southern Africa

Online event: Literature and the Politics of the Past in Southern Africa with Zimbabwean writer Petina Gappah and postcolonial literary scholar and fiction writer, Elleke Boehmer.

The event was co-convened by a group of Nordic-based scholars: Astrid Rasch, Norwegian University of Science and Technology; Amanda Hammar, University of Copenhagen; Minna Johanna Niemi, The Arctic University of Norway; Lena Englund, University of Eastern Finland; and Nicklas Hållén, Karlstad University.

Writing Repression 10-12 May 2019 at Nordic Africa Institute and Krusenberg Herrgård

‘Politics of the Past’ April 2020 at Centre of African Studies in Copenhagen and Gilleleje Badehotel

‘Arts and Politics in Southern Africa’ June 2020 at Litteraturhuset in Trondheim