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- Convenors:
-
Madhu Krishnan
(University of Bristol)
Kate Wallis (University of Exeter)
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- Stream:
- Language and Literature
- Location:
- David Hume, Lecture Theatre A
- Sessions:
- Friday 14 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel seeks papers which engage with literary activism, defined as the creation of new spaces for literary expression and exchange, in contemporary Africa. How do these spaces offer new modes for thinking about social production in Africa today? What topographies can literary activism offer?
Long Abstract:
This panel begins from the premise that, in the absence of state-sponsorship or large-scale formalised structures, the creation of new spaces for literary expression and exchange functions as a type of activism through its de-centring of the topographies of knowledge production and its constitution of new types of social formations. We invite papers which explore the multi-faceted landscapes of literary activism operating in Africa today. From new writing prizes to literary festivals and spoken word nights; translation initiatives to mobile libraries and book distribution outlets; podcasting and social media to small magazines and print books, the African continent today is host to myriad modes of literary activism and engagement. These in turn offer new ways to conceptualise the boundaries of the social, through the creation of literary networks, collectives, commons and new literary publics. Here we look at the potential of forms of literary activism to bring together literary producers, writers and readers across languages and geographical contexts to ask: What histories and trajectories of literary activism can we map across the continent? What connections, networks and articulations emerge when we consider the long and multi-lingual trajectory of literary activism in its most robust form? How do self-defined literary activists conceive of their role in contemporary Africa? What forms of claims-making emerge around citizenship, society and public life through their work? What forms of literary activism in evidence in Africa post-2000 offer sustainable and portable models for long-term impact?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 14 June, 2019, -Nikitta Adjirakor (University of Ghana)
Paper short abstract:
This paper critically addresses the questions of ownership and patronage of performance poetry spaces in Dar es Salaam. Focusing on self-funding and crowdfunding, it explores their roles and impact in the conceiving and (re)shaping of performance spaces.
Paper long abstract:
This paper critically addresses the questions of ownership and patronage of performance poetry spaces in Dar es Salaam. Highlighting the question of funding, it focuses on what I will call 'internal funding', to refer to two specific funding forms: self-funding and crowdfunding. Drawing on fieldwork in poetry and performance in Dar es Salaam, this paper explores the role and impact of internal funding on performance spaces. The paper demonstrates that the featured funding forms highlight artistic agency by allowing artists to position themselves as activists for artistic freedom by creating spaces that resist foreign intrusion. Either funded by the artists themselves or by the direct audience, such spaces actively disrupt and reshape social as well as artistic boundaries by repositioning the literary scene as a form of engagement between audience and artists. Through this communal network, the line between artist, audience, patron and client becomes blurred. In addition, crowdfunding as a form of funding occurs both physically and digitally, thus creating networks that traverses across worlds.
The paper addresses the following questions. How are performance poetry events (re)shaped by the funding within which they are conceived? How do artists navigate the double role of artist and funder and what impact does this have on their sense of self in these spaces? How do questions of ownership and patronage play out in these spaces and what meanings emerge from them? ?
Susanna Sacks (Howard University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyzes the poetry and community organizing practices of Cape Town-based Lingua Franca Spoken Word Movement within the context of the movement to decolonize higher education. I argue that their work creates literary spaces for anti-colonial poetry production and education.
Paper long abstract:
In South Africa, poetry is often described as existing in two spaces, each tied into questions of cultural prestige: the alienated space of the classroom and the popular space of performance or protest. The recent push to decolonize higher education, however, has destabilized this division. As Rafael d'Abdon and Denise Newfield (2015) demonstrate, contemporary schoolrooms are negotiating space for a multimodal poetic practice. The divide between elite and popular blurs as works like Koleka Putuma's Collective Amnesia are assigned in university classrooms and slam poets like Roché Kester are included in elite events like Poetry Africa. This paper explores the decolonization of poetry in South Africa through the work of the Lingua Franca Spoken Word Movement. Lingua Franca is a poetry collective based in Cape Town, where they run youth poetry workshops, organize arts festivals, host open mics, and curate multicentric performances. At the 2015 Open Book Festival, Lingua Franca organized a panel on spoken word poetry that launched a debate about the current state of performance poetry - influenced by U.S. and British poets - and its future. Beginning from this debate, this paper traces Lingua Franca's institutional and formal influence on South African performance poetry. Over the past three years, Lingua Franca has hosted a series of performances and festivals focused on indigenizing the poetry scene in South Africa through multimodal performances. This paper argues that their hybrid approach to form, in conjunction with the poetry workshops and arts festivals, offers a model of anti-colonial poetry education.
Zamda Ramadhani Geuza (University of Dar es Salaam)
Paper short abstract:
This study investigates the changing patterns of Tanzanian book market in creation of the new identity and space by the publishers in the 21st Century for the new reading market. The study investigates the changing pattern through examining the text and visual materials in which the new market exist
Paper long abstract:
Publishers are agents of change; they work with authors in a producing content for potential readers who by their nature or interests find reasons to read books. In a commercial publishing industry, books are for financial or social benefit, thus making a living to publishers, authors and booksellers. This has not been the case especially after change from multiple textbook publishing to the state publishing in Tanzania. It is in during this period that we witness the birth of new groups of readers, creation of the new identity and space of the Tanzania publishers. The need to survive in a market where reading for leisure is not always overt call for the imaging of the new reading market through various means and forms. Thus, struggling to revive the order in which publishing is not only a means for literacy, but rather a tool for social identity. New forms starts to image especially with advancement of technology and publishers starts to play an active role in publishing books for the market that was unveiled. This study investigates the changing patterns of Tanzanian book market in creation of the new identity and space by the publishers in the 21st Century for the new reading market. The text and visual materials are analysed to understand these changing patterns with the new market in Tanzania. Therefore, the study investigates how publishers have managed to survive in the market through consumption and reception of new books framed to evoke interest through creating new reading patterns.
Jama Jama Musse (Redsea Cultural Foundation)
Paper short abstract:
This article focuses on the various stages of transitions the Somali society has gone through in relations to arts and culture and our efforts over the last fifteen years to help our society transition from oral to a written culture through the launching of Hargeysa International Book Fair in 2008.
Paper long abstract:
This article focuses on the various stages of transitions the Somali society has gone through in relations to arts and culture and our efforts over the last fifteen years to help our society transition from oral to a written culture through the launching of Hargeysa International Book Fair (HIBF) in 2008. In order to better understand the historical contexts and conditions in which we started HIBF and operate, the first part of this article provides the necessary background, followed by analysis of the state of Somali literature and the transformation we have witnessed. Lastly I conclude with some reflections on the impact of these efforts, HIBF and what I foresee both for Somali literature and in the wider African context.
Temitayo Olofinlua (University of Ibadan)
Paper short abstract:
The article is an investigation of Okadabooks, a Nigerian e-book publishing and reading platform in the light of similar innovations like Amazon. The article explores the relationship between writing online, self-publishing, e-book publishing and what it means for the Nigerian publishing industry.
Paper long abstract:
This article examines the book distribution challenge in Nigeria and explores the e-book publishing approach as a solution for local book production even as it ensures that books are published more easily, books are more affordable and available even as writers get paid for their talent. It also attempts an in-depth investigation of Okadabooks, a Nigerian e-book publishing and reading platform in the light of similar innovations like Amazon. The article explores the relationship between writing online, self-publishing, e-book publishing and what it means for the Nigerian publishing industry. Through interviews as well as analysis of the operations of Okadabooks, the article argues that Okadabooks is opening up spaces for homegrown Nigerian literary talent. Finally, the article highlights Okadabooks' online and offline efforts—partnerships, establishment of writing prizes, social media campaigns and community social responsibility efforts—to reach an emerging community of readers and writers online in a way that opens Nigerian literature to new reading publics.
Rashi Rohatgi (Nord University)
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on the interplay between institutional orientation and postcolonial literary activism, the chronicle of two Mauritian literary prizes' rise and fall in the early 2000s - one sponsored by a hotel, and the other by the vernacular movement.
Paper long abstract:
This essay is a comparative case study of two Mauritian literary prizes, held respectively by the market-oriented global hotel chain Le Prince Maurice and the market-critiquing local activist organization Ledikasyon Pu Travayer. Focusing on the interplay between institutional orientation and self-conscious postcolonial literary positioning, the chronicle of these prizes' rise and fall in the first decade of the 2000s reflects world literary concerns about literary excellence, literary freedom, and the risks and rewards of wielding literature as a object carrying the symbolic power of the centre. Following James English's observation that "today it is more than ever apparent that the economy of cultural prestige is a global one, in which the many local cultural markets and local scales of value are bound into ever tighter relations of interdependence" (259) in which, to follow Sara Broiillette, "difference [is translated] into a surface fetish" (2014: 116), the prizes' utter differences in context yet similarities in intent offer support to Graham Huggan's understanding of the prizes as things which "bring the ideological character of evaluation to the fore" (117). In each examined case - both of the company seeking tourists and the activists asserting significance - the literary prize served as a tool with which a Mauritian institution might perform internationalism; in both cases the trajectory of each prize's failure to break into international consciousness highlights the false hope of each institution that this internationalism could be characterized by an ahistorical equality.
Joanna Woods (Stockholm University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper engages with urban literary publics in contemporary Malawi and their digital networks. Using an example of a newly formed platform/initiative in Blantyre, the focus will be on the interweave of the local and the global; the community and the individual.
Paper long abstract:
Since around 2010 there has been a new wave of excitement about creative writing and literary expression in Malawi's second largest city, Blantyre. This paper particularly considers 'Story Ink Africa' which was concretized last year and has expanded both on the ground and digitally in 2019. The goal of Story Ink Africa is to encourage storytellers to write and share their work. Beginning as an individual's initiative, such literary exchange functions as activism, mobilizing communities and building publics locally and globally. Drawing on ideas about the literary field, this paper highlights that literary activism is a weave of the local and the global, manifesting in various coexisting structural ways (Krishnan, 2019). Following this, the paper goes on to consider individual agency and the significance of individuals' voices and perspectives in public-making (Bourdieu, 1999). The overall aim of the paper is to engage with the literary topography of contemporary Malawi.
Kate Highman (University of the Western Cape)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the role of the global writers' organisation International PEN in creating, and at times hindering, spaces for literary activism in South Africa, focusing on shifting understandings of the 'literary' shaped by different international, national, regional and local pressures.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the role of the global writers' organisation International PEN in creating, and arguably at times hindering, spaces for literary activism in South Africa. Drawing on archival work done as part of the Writers' Organisation and Free Expression project (www.writersandfreeexpression.com), the paper traces PEN's relationships with other writers' organisations and literary initiatives, its shifting understanding of the relationship of literature to politics and of literary activism, and the tensions between nationalism and internationalism inherent in the organisation's structure and founding vision. Until its reformulation in 2003, the PEN Charter proposed an understanding of literature as 'national in origin' that profoundly shaped its work. In this paper I wish to explore how this shifting understanding of literature as national/global/regional/local shapes PEN's literary activism today - comparing, for instance, the two current PEN Chapters in South Africa, one Afrikaans and one predominantly English, and whether they understand themselves as engaged in the same types of literary activism, for the same ends - and how such understandings of literature animate other writers' organisations and literary initiatives in contemporary South Africa. While focussing on PEN today, I will be drawing on PEN's history in South Africa to better understand its work. In particular, I will consider the short-lived Johannesburg PEN centre (1978 -1981) that was closely associated with Staffrider and incorporated a number of existing township writers' groups, the challenges it faced, and the response of other PEN Centres to it.