WiSER Spring Program in Critical Thought: Part 2

WiSER Spring Program in Critical Thought

The Institute is pleased to announce the second part of its 2016 Spring Program in Critical Thought. The first part was successfully launched with a series of Advanced Research Seminars in collaboration with various international Humanities centres. It was concluded with a three-part lecture by Tony Bogues on Sylvia Wynter’s work. Forthcoming events include:  

19 and 26 September

The Planetary Library Project

In addition to its ongoing postdoctoral working sessions, The Planetary Library Project will hold two more advanced research seminars on “Africa in Theory”. These will feature: Nancy Rose Hunt (University of Florida), author of A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo (2016) on September 19, 2016. Birgit Meyer (Utrecht University), author of Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana (2015) on September 26, 2016.

These seminars will take place from 10am to 12 in the WiSER Seminar room. Places are limited to 30 participants.   

To register for Nancy Rose Hunt’s seminar please email Joshua.Walker@wits.ac.za 

To register for Birgit Meyer’s seminar please email Sarah.Duff@wits.ac.za

Readings will be circulated once you have registered.  

27 September 2016

Invited Lecture by Peter Geschiere

Peter Geschiere (University of Amsterdam) is one of the best known anthropologists of our time, and the author of The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (1997); The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and Europe (2009); and Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust: Africa in Comparison (2013). He is the guest of a special session of the Wits Interdisciplinary Seminar in the Humanities on September 26, 2016. He will also lead an open discussion seminar on September 27, around his work. 

This seminar will take place from 10am to 11:30 in the WiSER Seminar room. All welcome.

13-14 October 2016

Invisible Boundaries and the Future of the Customary

This day and a half event will examine the ongoing transformations in South African rural societies and the afterlives of the Bantustan system in relation to the changing valencies of chieftaincies, customary law, land tenure, and new modes of subjection and patron-clients relationships. The extractive and rent-based economy underpinning these transformations will also be analyzed as well as the cultural and symbolic shifts in the social order. 

This event will open with a keynote address on the evening of the 13th and run from 10am to 5pm on the 14th October in the WiSER seminar room. The programme will be available a week or so before. All welcome. 

27 October 2016

Chick Lit in a Time of African Cosmopolitanism

This one day seminar aims to map the landscape, texture and colour of the chick lit genre in a transnational African context by creating a forum in which writers and scholars are in conversation.

This event will run from 10am to 3pm in the WiSER seminar room. All welcome. For more information, contact Pamila.Gupta@wits.ac.za or ronitf@uj.ac.za  

9 November 2016

The English Department

A one-day event, this seminar will consider past lives and current formations of literary studies in South Africa. It will open a discussion about how this discipline has shaped itself, or been shaped by divergent political, intellectual and aesthetic forces,  over the last fifty years and how it could be re-animated in the present. We will consider longstanding interventions in relation to curriculum change and canon reformation, newly confronted by demands for a different kind of university and epistemology. It will also consider the performative aspects of ‘the English department’ within a wider economy of humanities scholarship, often convened by, but distinct from ‘English’ (media studies, cultural studies, translation studies, African languages and others). All of this will lead us to ask: what does – and could – a twenty-first century literary studies in South Africa today look like? 

A one-day event from 9am to 4pm in the WiSER Seminar room. All Welcome. For more information, contact sarah.Nuttall@wits.ac.za or victoria.collis.buthelezi.uct@gmail.com   

The WiSER Spring Program in Critical Thought acknowledges the generous support of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, the University of California Humanities Research Institute, the Rock Ethics Institute, Pennsylvania State University, the National Research Foundation (South Africa) and the Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University.