New Online Series - Heated Conversations | Grace Musila | 29 March | 6pm
Welcome to the first session of WiSER’s online seminar series
Heated Conversations
We’re delighted to open our Series with Professor Grace A Musila speaking on Wangari Maathai’s Registers of Freedom
It is instructive that Rob Nixon’s influential book, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, draws its title from a chapter examining the Green Belt Movement in Kenya, and broadly, Wangari Maathai’s environmental and human rights activism. Nixon crystallises the movement’s activities as grappling with two questions: what does it mean to be at risk? What does it mean to be secure? This framing locates Wangari Maathai and the Green Belt Movement in the pursuit of freedom from multiple forms of insecurity: nutritional, cultural, economic, environmental, and political, which are interrelated. Using these questions as a springboard, this paper maps the ways in which Wangari Maathai’s choices, actions and thought, in her private and public life entailed the pursuit of freedom from the above forms of insecurity. It further suggests that her life and thought across the private- public continuum embodied different registers of freedom, in the full meaning of the term register as bearing witness, recording, acknowledging, and responding to suppressions of freedom and well-being produced by the alchemy of colonial violence, capital and heteropatriarchy. At the same time, the paper reflects on the controversial elements in Maathai’s life and thought, for the insights they shed on the inevitable constraints of the structures within which we craft freedom dreams.
Grace A Musila is an associate professor in the Department of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
Wednesday, 29th March 2023
6pm
Register for Zoom here
Please Click Here For Paper
Heated Conversations is a new seminar series convened by Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall
As global warming produces rising seas, falling dam levels and excessive droughts, generating new levels of multi-crisis in the world-now, so too are our conversations and discourses heating up in multiple ways. This seminar series takes up these questions of anthropogenic escalation and pedagogical shifts of gear. It does so in a context in which strengthening Southern bodies of knowledge is ever more crucial to engaging collectively with and comprehending these complex new rubrics and material dimensions. A forum broadly dedicated to the literary and cultural humanities, the seminar is hospitably open to wide participation from as many parts of the world as possible and will invite speakers to offer generative interventions for discussion and debate.
Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor Emeritus at Wits University; Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at WiSER, Wits.