INVITE | Heated Conversations by Cajetan Iheka | 13 Sept | 6pm (Johannesburg time)
You are warmly invited to the next session of WiSER’s online seminar series
Heated Conversations
Cajetan Iheka will speak on
Poetics for the City: Africa, Extraction, and the Worlding of Literature
Click here for paper
The African city has emerged as a robust site of intellectual work in literary criticism and cultural studies in the past two decades. This scholarship has emphasized the city’s precarity and creativity; formality and informality; the intersection of the local and transnational; and of the interaction of the rural and urban across the continent. Performativity is also a crucial element of the African city, which is seen as site of self-making and image laundering within this growing corpus. Overall, recent work on African cities has centered a poetics of the city concentrating on the image and agency of urban residents across Africa (Simone; Mbembe and Nuttall; Quayson). But what if we shift attention from the poetics of the city to the poetics for the city? My presentation explores the dynamics of this prepositional shift, drawing examples from African literature. This shift becomes necessary to appreciate the unique storytelling demands of the city in addition to the well-studied stories that the city tells of itself. What does the city expect from the countryside and what stories are, in turn, invented for the city? And what does the world figured as city demand of its signified bush—Africa? These questions stand to sharpen our understanding of the relationship between rural and urban spaces in Africa and help us to ponder the extent to which African aesthetics—including its literature—are best read as poetics for the city.
Cajetan Iheka is Professor of English at Yale University, specializing in African literature, ecocriticism, ecomedia, and postcolonial literature. He serves as Director of the Whitney Humanities Center and as Chair of the Council on African Studies at Yale. He is the author of Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature(Cambridge University Press, 2018), winner of the 2019 Ecocriticism Book Award of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and the 2020 First Book Prize of the African Literature Association. His latest book is African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (Duke University Press, 2021). Among other awards, it won the 2022 African Studies Association Best Book Prize, the 2022 Ecocriticism Book Award of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and the 2023 Harold and Margaret Sprout Award for Best Book in Environmental Studies from the International Studies Association. Professor Iheka is the Editor-in-Chief of African Studies Review, the multidisciplinary journal of the African Studies Association.
Wednesday, 13th September 2023
6pm (Johannesburg time)
Register here:
https://wits-za.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwlcO-srzgtHN3ITaJ6sNJr2gTmvz2xKOWl
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.