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Title A name given to the resource 19th Triennial Conference AGM Minutes Subject The topic of the resource Administration Triennial Conference Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource July 13 2022 https://aclals.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/40bb7089f425d4ec073ca30d6c4ef840.pdf 6fb3242fb9754cb10ab8c467cfb965d6 PDF Text Text Jennifer MacGregor University of California, Los Angeles - English Formal Hybridity: Regenerating Sierra Leone in Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love Aminatta Forna’s 2010 novel, The Memory of Love, weaves narratives of three characters living through the aftermath of Sierra Leone’s 1992–2002 civil war. These narratives take multiple forms, which I argue critique nationalist and cosmopolitan methods of accounting for Sierra Leonean's post-war experiences of trauma. A dying man who seeks to establish himself in Sierra Leone's historical record recounts his memories in a first-person, realist narrative. This exposes the fictions inherent in realist narratives, which neutralize traumatic memories, stabilizing them textually and temporally with fabricated beginnings and endings. Alternate chapters interweave third-person, postmodern narratives about a Sierra Leonean doctor haunted by his traumatic memories and contemplating emigration, and a British psychologist who finds his foreign treatments futile amongst the ongoing atrocities of post-war Sierra Leone. Their nonlinear narratives enable their pasts to interrupt and dominate their lived presents, preventing them from leaving their traumas without physically escaping triggering locations. Forna concludes the novel with a hybrid realist-postmodern style. I argue this conclusion offers a powerful example for post-war countries that nullifies the traumatic power of memories, excludes ideologies of unidirectional aid, and instead promotes the rebirth of Sierra Leone’s creolizing society by strengthening transversal solidarities between citizens of post-civil-war nation-states. Biography of Presenting Author Jennifer is a doctoral student studying English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She earned her Master of Arts at the University of Pittsburgh. Her interests include form and the role of memory in dislocating character’s temporalities in contemporary postcolonial and global novels. She recently co-authored a chapter about Forna’s works, which is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press in The Contemporary British Novel Since 2000. Dr Rachael Gilmour Queen Mary University of London - Department of English ‘Them asylum-seeker eyes’: Brian Chikwava’s Harare North and the limits of English hospitality The asylum and immigration system represents the limits of recognition and belonging in contemporary Britain; central to what Paul Gilroy (2004) has called ‘the syntax of British racism’. This paper focuses on Brian Chikwava’s 2009 novel Harare North, a narrative that takes place in the atemporal limbo of the British asylum system, suspended in language, space, and time between London – the ‘Harare North’ of the title – and Zimbabwe. Chikwava’s novel conjures an existential state in which words and their meanings cannot be trusted, and systems of signification break down: from the terrible ‘forgiveness’ dispensed in Zimbabwe by his narratorprotagonist to the supposed enemies of ZANU-PF, to the uncertain signification of ‘asylum’ in Britain. This paper considers Chikwava’s narrator’s idiosyncratic local/global literary vernacular, lacing Zimbabwean English with Shona, British Black English, Cockney slang, and the ‘CNN creole’ (Apter 2006) of global capitalist culture, in the context of the novel’s crisscrossing by 1 �transnational flows – of emails, mobile phone calls, news reports, people, goods, and remittances. It argues that the effect of these flows is not to make the world feel connected, but to underline the novel’s sense of dislocation, of the collapse of communication and the foreclosing of interpretation. Biography of Presenting Author I am Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies in the Department of English at Queen Mary University of London, where I teach postcolonial and Black British Literature, contemporary literature, and translation studies. My publications include Grammars of Colonialism: Representing Languages in Colonial South Africa (2006), and (edited with Bill Schwarz) End of Empire and the English Novel since 1945 (2011; paperback 2015). My current research explores translational writing, literary multilingualism and language politics in contemporary Britain. I also run the Reading/Writing Multilingualism project with secondary school students and teachers in Tower Hamlets, London. I serve on the editorial boards of Wasafiri and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and from January 2016 will take over as co-editor of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Julia V. Emberley Western University - English and Writing Studies Indigenous Knowledges and the Queering of Christianity in Louise Erdrich’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse Erdrich’s novel, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, is another installment in her fictional series dealing with an imaginary North Dakota reservation in the United States. This novel focuses on a transgendered character, Agnes/Father Damien, a young woman of European background who becomes Father Damien, a priest on the North Dakota reservation for over forty years. Situating this combinatory figure in the context of current debates in Indigenous Sexuality Studies and Two Spiritedness, I argue that this transgendered figure, by crossing over gendered, geographical and religious boundaries, brings to the fore a contest between Indigenous epistemologies and European Christian knowledges of sexuality, gender and power. The importance of this epistemic encounter lies in how colonial rule set out to re-structure the meaning of kinship among Indigenous peoples in North America through the imposition of the Christian, European and bourgeois family. Like many Indigenous storytelling practices today, Erdrich’s novel contributes to the current re-vitalization of Indigenous knowledges, demonstrating the significance of questions of gender and sexuality to the diversity of kinship affiliations that exist today. Biography of Presenting Author Julia Emberley is Professor of English Literatures in the Department of English and Writing Studies at Western University and a member of the Royal Society of Canada. Her recent book publication is The Testimonial Uncanny: Indigenous Storytelling, Knowledge and Reparative Practices (SUNY 2014). 2 �Nandi Bhatia The University of Western Ontario - English Actresses and the Nation: Qurratulain Hyder’s The Missing Photograph This paper examines literary production of knowledge about actresses in colonial India. As women’s presence on public stages increased by the early 20th century so did concerns about their influence on social mores regarding gender and sexuality, as exemplified in the Hindi journal Madhuri in the articles in 1931 “Rangmanch par Istriyon ka Sthan” (The place of Women on Stage) and “Rangmanch aur Istriyan” (Women and the Stage). These articles discussed the role of the stage in maintaining notions of propriety, especially for middle-class women, who, as Partha Chatterjee contends, were seen as carriers of cultural traditions and therefore relegated to the private sphere of the home as opposed to the public sphere which was seen as the domain of men. Against the backdrop of these debates, I examine Hyder’s The Missing Photograph, a story set in the early 20th century which casts, as its protagonist, a film actress relegated to marginality by members of an upper-class feudal household when she marries into the family. I argue that these narratives collectively reference an “alternative” public sphere that foregrounds the contributions of actresses in discourses on gender, sexuality, and family despite their exclusion from the imagined community of the nation. Biography of Presenting Author Nandi Bhatia is Professor of English and currently Associate Dean of Research at the University of Western Ontario. Her books include Acts of Authority/ Acts of Resistance: Theater and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial India (2004), Performing women/Performing Womanhood (2009), Partitioned Lives (2008, co-ed. Gera-Roy), and Modern Indian Theatre (2011). Adrie le Roux Stellenbosch University - Visual Arts Wordless Picture Books: An exploration of their potential to encourage parent-child reading in the South African context The paper will report on findings of an exploratory study into the feasibility of the use of wordless picture books with the aim to develop a culture of and love for reading within the South African context, as approached from an illustrator’s viewpoint. Much literature exists advocating the use of wordless books in literacy development (Crawford & Hade 2000:67), yet little research exists on their use in the South African context. South Africa has a very low reading rate with children not being encouraged to read for enjoyment at home (Du Plessis in Van Heerden 2008). The characteristics of wordless books serve as motivating factors that could contribute to developing a more positive attitude to books locally. Using participative action research, research was conducted in literacy poor areas of Gauteng and included 24 parents and their pre-school child. The aim of the data was to investigate the use of these books in the home, focusing on multimodality, local content generation and community empowerment. The hope is to understand how wordless books could assist in ensuring that literacy poor families are supported 3 �as a child’s first educator and become “equal partners in supporting children’s early literacy learning” (Spedding et al 2012:4). Biography of Presenting Author Adrie le Roux is an artist, illustrator and lecturer based in Pretoria, South Africa. She holds an M(Phil) degree in Visual Arts (Illustration) from Stellenbosch University and is currently working towards a PhD in the same field, focusing on wordless picture books in creating a culture of reading. Teresa Hubel Huron University College - English Begum Samru and the Nautch Girl as Ruler Surely one of the most remarkable figures involved in the fierce militaristic politics that characterized the late 18th century in North India, Begum Samru was a historical personage rare for her time and for ours. A woman ruler initially described in glowing terms by a number of British authors as, for instance, “[e]ndowed by nature with masculine intrepidity, assisted by a judgement and foresight clear and comprehensive”, Begum Samru was said to have wielded her authority with greater skill and compassion than that possessed by her rival male contemporaries, even including the officials of the British East India Company. However, by the mid-19th century, when British control of North India was consolidated, Begum begins to get represented through the trope of the Oriental despot. In my paper I will trace the history of this representation in published and unpublished British texts, paying attention not only to its gendered implications but, more specifically, to the significance of the Begum’s supposed origins as a ‘nautch girl’ or courtesan. This sexual designation has a particular meaningfulness in British history and literature in part, I suggest, because it has no counterpart in British culture and so escapes being fully integrated into colonial discourse. Biography of Presenting Author Teresa Hubel is professor and chair of English at Huron University College, the University of Western Ontario, in Ontario, Canada. She has written numerous essays on a variety of subjects, most of which have arisen out of her continuing captivation by the literature, dance, film, and history of India and which have been published in such journals as Ariel, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Modern Asian Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, Dalhousie Review, and Kunapipi, as well as in diverse collections of essays. Duke University Press published her book, Whose India? The Independence Struggle in British and Indian Fiction and History in 1996. With Neil Brooks, she also edited a collection of essays entitled Literature and Racial Ambiguity and published by Rodopi. These days she is working on a book about the white working classes of colonial India and is also engaged in a new collaborative project on India’s marginalized performances traditions. 4 �Marlen Eckl LEER / Universidade São Paulo Between Two Worlds – Memory, History and Identity in Contemporary South African Jewish Literature Although being classified as “white” in the apartheid system, Jews did not fit into “white” social and legal framework. Due to the ambivalent status of in-betweenness the Jewish community was confronted with a contradictory place within the South African society. In the post-apartheid period questions of identity, memory, forgetting, exile, and home gained new importance. Contemporary South African Jewish authors such as Anne Landsman, Kenneth Bonert, Tony Eprile and Steve Jacobs, who now live abroad do not only share the migration experience with their protagonists. Writing from afar, they offer an inside view and at the same time outside view on their homeland delineating the Jewish immigrants’ life in South African society and contribution to its transformation. By this their novels mirror both South African and Jewish history and identity. The aim of the paper is to elucidate the cultural exchange and the political transition depicted in the novels of the Jewish South African writers who – by broadening the South African perspective to the Jewish dimension – not only contribute to a deeper understanding of political, historical and social development of the country, but moreover they enhance the South African experience of Jewish literature. Biography of Presenting Author Eckl holds a Ph.D in History (University of Vienna), an M.A. in Comparative Literature, Jewish Studies and Law (University of Mainz). She is currently Senior Researcher at the LEER/University of São Paulo. Research interests are German-speaking Exile in Brazil, Brazilian History (1930-1945) and Jewish Literature. Publications about her research, include Das Paradies ist überall verloren and Das Brasilienbild von Flüchtlingen des Nationalsozialismus (2010). Joan-Mari Barendse Stellenbosch University - Afrikaans and Dutch The representation of insects in Willem Anker’s Siegfried (2007) and Samsa-masjien (2015) In this paper I investigate the representation of insects in two works of the award-winning South African author Willem Anker within the framework of Human-Animal Studies (HAS) in relation to Anker’s novel Siegfried (2007) and his recently published play Samsa-masjien (2015). In Siegfried the character Willem Smit is constantly classifying insects, comparing people to insects, and also has a habit of eating insects. In Samsa-masjien, loosely based on Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the idea of becoming-insect is explored. Wolfe (2003), examining the “question of the animal” in contemporary times, describes the current global situation as a “social, technological, and cultural context that is now in some inescapable sense posthuman, if not quite posthumanist”. According to Woodward and Lemmer (2014) HAS “suggests the intertwining of human and nonhuman animal”. The question arises if depictions of insects in Anker’s works are indicative of this “intertwining of human and non-human animal”? Can the relationships between humans and insects portrayed in the works be described as “posthuman”, or do they still represent 5 �anthropocentric dualism? Furthermore, I discuss if the insect-human interactions portrayed in the texts comment on the position of the postcolonial, post-apartheid subject. Biography of Presenting Author Joan-Mari Barendse obtained her PhD in Afrikaans literature in March 2013. She conducted postdoctoral research on dystopian and apocalyptic South African literature, after which she lectured at the University of South Africa. In 2016 she started a new postdoctoral project on the representation of insects in South African literature at Stellenbosch University. Anne Loeber Department of New Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, IEAS, Goethe University, Frankfurt Layers of Postcolonial States of Mind in Rap Music Rap music rearticulates, among other things, western discourses on power and nationality; addresses social inequalities and allows identity formations beyond national scopes. Rap music has become 'a postindustrial signifying practice' (Pennycook 2007: 7) that has “significant cultural, linguistic, philosophical and educational implications” (ibid: 9). Especially the narrations of locality as well as social and cultural belonging allow valuable insights into transcultural dynamics and processes within postcolonial societies. Accordingly, research on rap music can play an important role in the analysis of postcolonial societies and should therefore be integrated into a vast number of disciplines. While artists like the British rapper Dizzee Rascal have incorporated a postcolonial state of mind that embraces Gilroy's idea of conviviality as “the processes of cohabitation and interaction that have made multiculture an ordinary feature of social life in Britain’s urban areas and in postcolonial cities elsewhere” (Gilroy 2004: XV); South African rap group Die Antwoord shows a controversial - sometimes even disturbingly provocative - postcolonial state of mind that deliberately plays with South African identities and stereotypes. This paper is going to show how postcolonial states of mind are expressed in multiple ways, taking into account lyrics, sounds and music videos and thus demonstrating that postcolonial states of mind are by no means limited to the lyrics of a rap song. Biography of Presenting Author Anne Loeber is a PhD-candidate at the Department of New Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, IEAS, Goethe University, Frankfurt and works in the administration of the research project “Africa's Asian Options” (AFRASO) at Goethe University, Frankfurt. Xiaoran Hu School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London - Department of English 6 �In the Cracks between Words: Childhood, Language and Body in J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus (2013) This paper argues that the child in J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus (2013) stages a postcolonial critique of the Cartesian mind/body duality. Coetzee’s writing constantly addresses the limitation of language and examines the ways in which language and writing inherently contain the danger of engendering various forms of authoritarian power that inevitably creates subjugation and exclusion. His latest novel The Childhood of Jesus in a minimalist manner dramatizes the dialectics of language and the body in the interaction between the young boy David and his custodian, the middle-aged Simon. The novel fully invests in a child’s special mechanism of comprehension through the physical faculty as opposed to the abstract and the linguistic. By letting the adult gradually taught and illuminated by the child, Coetzee envisions an empowerment of the physical body over ‘mind’ and ideas. Bearing striking resemblance to many of Coetzee’s previous characters that engage more obviously in colonial relations such as the barbarian girl in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and Friday in Foe (1986), the child David also serves as a postcolonial metaphor that points to a possible empowerment and liberation of the colonial subject excluded from a history constructed in writing. Biography of Presenting Author Xiaoran Hu, PhD candidate in English at Queen Mary, University of London. I am currently working on a project on the representation of children and childhood in South African literature under the co-supervision of Andrew van der Vlies and Rachael Gilmour. Lallmahomed-Aumeerally Naseem University of Mauritius - English Studies Formulating dissent post 9/11 in Ishtiyak Shukri's The Silent Minaret and Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist This paper suggests that diasporic novels staging Muslim protagonists post 9/11 have been confined by the defensive modes of writing back/against. Focusing on Shukri’s The Silent Minaret and Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, I argue that these two novels uncharacteristically engage the reader to reflect upon the need to re-think and re-claim the value of dissent beyond structures of polarised alternatives. Both texts juggle with notions of presence-absence, alluding to the de-realization of the anguish of some Muslims whose lives have been made spectral and whose resistance has been faded into the catch-all narrative of fundamentalism. Suturing together the vulnerability of Muslim lives and that of multiple other existences made equally precarious across time and space, both texts explore what Butler calls ‘new ties of identification’ and understand agency in terms of an ethics of responsibility. Issa cultivates liminality and Changez gradually resists the comfort of belonging and opens himself to the unfamiliarity of unlikely personal encounters as both disavow identity closure when faced with violence and loss. This paper will show that those two stories confront alterity as emerging from a place of violence, as per Levinas, wedged between the temptation to obliterate/absorb the other or recognizing a common precariousness. Biography of Presenting Author 7 �Dr. Naseem Lallmahomed-Aumeerally is a Senior Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Mauritius. Her areas of interest are multiculturalism, South Asian diasporic literatures and new media. She has published on multiculturalism in Mauritius and South Asia diasporic cultures. She is currently working on religious literacy in multicultural education. Nedine Moonsamy University of Pretoria - English Lynda Gichanda Spencer Rhodes University - English ‘Not the Story You Wanted to Hear’: Reading Chick-lit in J. M. Coetzee’s Summertime In the novel, Adriana Nascimento besmirches John Coetzee for his inability to assume the role of a romantic hero. In the text this is an uncommon complaint, as all the female characters echo her disappointment. J. M. Coetzee’s Summertime has been widely explored—both for its controversy and merits—as that which engages in ‘acts of genre’ where the inscription of an autobiographical narrative simultaneously serves as a metatextual and ideological critique of its form. Similarly, this paper on Summertime is intrigued by Coetzee’s ‘acts of genre’, but our terrain lies further afield, exploring how the narrative lapses from the lofty ideals of romance to the baser “truth” of chick-lit. Apart from the recurring narrative of romantic failure, we outline the various stylistic devices that firmly situates Summertime in the generic ambit of chick-lit. We suggest that Coetzee highlights how the more promiscuous intimacies of chick-lit serve as truer reflections of the nature of genre itself. This paper anticipates some aversion to reading Coetzee as one who dabbles in chick-lit. We read against the pre-existing exclusions in relation to Coetzee and chick-lit as a genre; we seek to include a story that floats from afar. Biography of Presenting Author Lynda Gichanda Spencer is a Lecturer in the Department of English at Rhodes University. Her research interests include contemporary women’s writing, Popular Literature in Africa, African Women’s Writing, Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies and Narratives of War. Kerry Vincent Acadia University - English and Theatre Censorship and the Banality of Power in Swaziland Crime Fiction The tension between a literature that has emerged largely under the proprietary umbrella of one publishing house whose chief interest rests with a local education market that itself is closely aligned with the state, and a written expression that freely articulates the concerns of its authors can be found in the publishing history of Eric Sibanda’s siSwati crime story, “Sagila Semnikati” (“His Knobkerrie”). The story, which follows a police probe into a ritual murder that has occurred during the incwala ceremony, was initially included in a secondary school anthology, but it was revised by an anonymous editor for a second edition with the incwala written out of the setting. 8 �Subsequently, Swazi writer and actor Sibusiso Mamba adapted the story into an English drama that was broadcast on BBC radio, reinserting the incwala in order to implicate traditional practice with violence towards Swazi women. Crime fiction’s capacity to represent and transmit social change reaches a global audience in Mamba’s English rendering; meanwhile, educational authority, publisher, writer, and editor perform a version of Mbembe’s “banality of power” in their unwitting attempts to make literal the original siSwati title, which metaphorically refers to “the one who does his majesty’s bidding”. Biography of Presenting Author Kerry Vincent lived and taught for many years in Zimbabwe and Swaziland. He is currently an Associate Professor with the English and Theatre Department, Acadia University, Canada, where he teaches courses on postcolonial literatures. Laura Moss University of British Columbia - English What Stories Float Afar? Disassembling Expectations in Global Literature In his review of We Need New Names, Helon Habila reproaches NoViolet Bulawayo for “performing Africa” and succumbing to “poverty porn” in her novel. Habila implies that the book was written to appeal to a non-African reading public with a limited set of expectations for work by an author from Zimbabwe. Habila’s ungenerous reading of Bulawayo’s work misses both the novel’s cutting political critique and its situatedness in a state of crisis. The review places the novelist in the position of having to wrestle with what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls the “danger of a single story” and what Binyavanga Wainaina satirizes in “How to Write About Africa”. Habila’s review, however, also raises important questions about how stories travel and what happens when they land. What books are reviewed? How does generic expectation function? How is it related to prize winning and sales? How is knowledge shaped by access to texts and how it is limited by a system of global recognition and distribution? In this paper, I will approach such questions by considering how literature is produced, received, and circulated globally. In short, I propose to ask, adapting the terms of the conference, what stories float afar? Biography of Presenting Author Laura Moss, PhD, is an associate professor at the University of British Columbia, Canada. She has taught Canadian and African, particularly South African, literatures for the past 18 years. She serves as the editor of the journal Canadian Literature. Her research is on the intersection of art and public policy. Caroline Kögler Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster - English 9 �Critical Branding in Postcolonial Studies This paper discusses the status of marketing and branding in Postcolonial Studies. After much attention has been paid to the status of literary writers in markets (Huggan 2001; Squires 2009; Brouillette 2011,2014; Ponzanesi 2014), it is time that the engagement of critics in market practices was more closely examined. Therefore, in this paper, I engage with the following questions: How can we theorise marketing and branding? How do these practices relate to commodification? How are inclusion and exclusion exercised through these practices in a) academic forums of faceto-face interaction (such as conferences) and b) in written works, e.g. texts of postcolonial theory? How are postcolonial politics actively facilitated by and through marketing and branding, and commodification? Can we understand Postcolonial Studies itself as a (symbolic) market? What are the ethical and political implications? Postcolonial criticism arises from material realities. In these material realities, postcolonial critics function simultaneously as intellectuals and entrepreneurs, branders and consumers, and discourse as well as market participants. Reaching beyond Arif Dirlik’s ‘complicity hypothesis’ (1994), I suggest that the question is not if we engage in market practices, but how can we do so critically and carefully, i.e. with regard for the wellbeing of others? Biography of Presenting Author Caroline Kögler is a lecturer and researcher at the University of Münster, Germany. Her recent PhD study “Critical Branding: Postcolonial Studies and the Market” (2015) investigated the diverse ways in which Postcolonial Studies incorporates market practice, such as marketing and branding. Caroline is the treasurer of GAPS, formerly GNEL/ASNEL. Gen'ichiro Itakura Kansai University - Faculty of Letters Screaming Horses and a Leopard Cub: Violence and Ethics in Nadeem Aslam’s The Blind Man's Garden In J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals (1999), his protagonist Elizabeth Costello compares her argument for equitable cohabitation of human and non-human species with the one for racial and ethnic equity. This controversial argument provides an insight into the post-9/11 representation of certain groups of people as the other, often accompanied by the justification of violence towards and inequitable treatment of those people as Homo Sacer. Such moral concerns are addressed, though tangentially, in Nadeem Aslam's The Blind Man's Garden (2013). Although the novel centres on a Pakistani father, the novel's 'blind man', and his son and fosterson, both of whom are involved in the post-9/11 military conflict in Afghanistan, it includes two apparently inconsequential episodes involving animals at the beginning and at the end of the book: screaming horses buried alive during the Great Indian Mutiny and the rescue of a leopard cub. This paper explores the link between a posthuman moral argument against cruelty towards animals and a critique of the production of 'bare life' in The Blind Man's Garden in order to comprehend a possible conflation of the two arguments in postcolonial, post-9/11 literature. Biography of Presenting Author 10 �Dr Gen'ichiro Itakura is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Letters, Kansai University, Japan. He has published books on British and postcolonial literature, articles in journals including ARIEL and has presented papers in international conferences including EACLALS. Nard Choi University of Cambridge - Faculty of Education Negotiating subjectivity in Sade Adeniran’s Imagine This: pushing cultural and genealogical boundaries of adult normativity This paper explores the construction of subjectivity for Lola, the protagonist of Imagine This, an initially self-published coming-of-age novel by Nigerian author, Sade Adeniran. I examine how the narrative engages with a fluid notion of selfhood and identity by situating the text within the critical discourse of children’s and young adult literature concerning issues of ideology and power. Starting with Maria Nikolajeva’s theory of aetonormativity and drawing from Homi Bhabha’s notion of the hybrid figure, I explore how the protagonist paves her own path to an intertextual sense of subjectivity that is all at once embroiled in her cultural and genealogical heritage and uniquely transcendent as the result of her resistance to it. The effort of writing an African fictional character into the contemporary global literary sphere involves complicated and multifaceted negotiations with narrative style, intertextuality, and modes of address. This paper addresses my concern that critics, despite making important progress in the study of African children’s literature, have not properly addressed these complexities due to their concentration upon issues of representation and authenticity. As such, my approach to the intricacies of subjectivity in Adeniran’s Imagine This acknowledges the validity of the diverse possibilities of interpretation a reader may encounter. Biography of Presenting Author Nard Choi is a first-year PhD candidate in the Faculty of Education at Cambridge University. Her research currently focuses on global and local dynamics of contemporary African adolescent literature as it exists in a complex network of interacting discourses across geographical borders, incongruities of address and readership, and material constraints. Raita Merivrta University of Turku - Department of European and World History Slum Clearances and Forced Sterilizations: Remembering the Emergency (1975-77) in Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance ‘The Emergency’ was a period of autocratic rule in India during which the press was censored, and judicial procedures and democratic rights, such as freedom of assembly, were suspended and opposition politicians arrested. Slum clearance campaigns and forced sterilisations constitute 11 �some of the worst excesses of the Emergency rule. Slum clearances and sterilizations targeted especially the lower social classes, the poor, the marginalized and the dispossessed in Indian cities. Two of the central characters of Rohinton Mistry’s novel A Fine Balance (1995) are representatives of this group: two homeless Dalits in search of work and shelter in the metropolitan city of Mumbai in the mid-1970s. Mistry has said of these characters: “I don’t think these people have been represented enough in fiction. Most fiction is about the middle class; perhaps because most writers are from the middle class”. In this paper, I discuss Mistry’s representation of these usually marginalized figures of Indian English literature. I examine the limits of civil and citizen’s rights in the world’s largest democracy as described in A Fine Balance as well as political exposés of the post-Emergency era. Biography of Presenting Author Raita Merivirta (PhD) is acting University Lecturer in the Department of European and World History at the University of Turku, Finland. She wrote her Ph.D thesis on representations of history in post-Emergency Indian English novels at La Trobe University, Melbourne. Elizabeth Jackson University of the West Indies, St Augustine [Trinidad] campus - Literary, Cultural and Communication Studies Interrogating national/cultural affiliations in postcolonial literature: inclusions and exclusions in the reception of Doris Lessing and V. S. Naipaul This paper compares the reception and categorization of the writing of Doris Lessing and V. S. Naipaul, who grew up in the colonies and arrived in Britain in 1949 and 1950 respectively. After her childhood and young adulthood in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Lessing settled in London at age thirty, where she was immediately included as a British writer, while still being categorized in Southern Africa as African. Naipaul, who journeyed from his native Trinidad to Oxford at age eighteen, also settled permanently in Britain (despite frequent travels), and yet his Britishness has always been much more qualified. Both were categorized as Commonwealth writers until that designation was superseded by “postcolonial” – a term still applied more frequently to Naipaul than to Lessing. This paper is a comparative and developmental study of the assumptions about national and cultural affiliations underlying the critical reception of Naipaul and Lessing. It argues that despite the obviously cosmopolitan nature of both writers and their works, the readier inclusion of Lessing as a “British” writer and the concomitant “othering” of Naipaul is explained less by the content of their writing than by the racialized contrast between their backgrounds as settler and colonial subject, respectively. Biography of Presenting Author Elizabeth Jackson is a lecturer in Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad. Her research specialization is South Asian fiction, and she is the author of Feminism and Contemporary Indian Women’s Writing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), as well as numerous articles in ARIEL, the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and other academic journals. 12 �Lucy Graham University of the Western Cape - English Representing Marikana This paper explores four works that deal with the massacre of striking mine workers by police at Marikana in August 2012: Rehad Desai’s "Miners Shot Down", a highly acclaimed documentary that carefully traces events leading up to the massacre; Aryan Kaganof’s "Night is Coming: A Threnody for the Victims of Marikana", an unconventional cinematic response to Marikana that raises questions of seeing and not seeing; "Mama Marikana", a film by Aliki Saragas that focuses on the previously untold story of the women of Marikana; and Ayanda Mabulu’s “Yakhal’inkomo”, a controversial painting of Marikana that was unofficially "banned" from the Johannesburg Art Fair.What do we see - and also not see - when we, like Desai and Kaganof, compare Marikana to Sharpeville? What historical links between places and events are suggested and/or occluded in different representations of Marikana? What does it mean to frame Marikana and economies of extraction within academic discourse on land and landscape? Why did Mabulu call his Marikana painting “Yakhal’inkomo”, which is also the title of Mongane Wally Serote’s first anthology of poetry, a title that references the words and works of artist Dumile Feni, as well as the jazz melody by Winston “Mankunku” Ngozi? Biography of Presenting Author Lucy Graham has a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford and is currently a Senior Research Associate at the University of the Western Cape. Her paper presented at the ACLALS conference forms part of her work towards her second monograph, which examines the cultural politics of post-"rainbow-nation" South Africa. Anas Tabraiz Zakir Husain Delhi College, Delhi University, New Delhi - English "Drawing the Divine Seed": India, Alterity and the Real in the Works of J.M. Coetzee Western philosophy has always sought freedom from being implicated in a system that they do not control themselves. Behind the human love of truth lies a desire to evolve an autonomous system of art, representation and signification that would contend with a system of natural 'things' controlled by a supernatural divinity. The confrontation between the two modes of being, the 'human' and the 'natural' has seen the modest 'human' realm, grow, through the renaissance, the enlightenment and modernity to the present era. In this meticulously managed trajectory, the champions of the human mind have successively siphoned off ever greater number of people to eventually form a formidable community. The works of the South African Nobel laureate, J. M. Coetzee, undertake a systematic critique of historical assertion of the power of the 'human' reality, rationality, language and signification at the expense of what, Lacan terms 'the real'. In my proposed paper I intend to discuss Coetzee's treatment of animality, alterity and difference in the fictional and non-fictional works that come after 1997. With a special reference to the growing attention to Indian mythology and culture, I propose to discuss Coetzee's views on the ethics of inclusion and exclusion in the postmodern world. 13 �Biography of Presenting Author Anas Tabraiz has been teaching English Literature at the Delhi University for the last twelve years. He has recently (September 2015) submitted his Ph.D. Thesis at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, titled "The Pursuit of Ethical Silence in the Works of J. M. Coetzee". His interests include linguistics, gender studies, culture studies, film studies and psychoanalysis. One of the recent publications is an essay in a book by Orient Blackswan, New Delhi, titled Fields of Play: Sports, Literature and Culture (Ed. Poonam Trivedi and Supriya Chaudhuri). Christine Prentice University of Otago - English and Linguistics ‘Fractured light’: from Globalisation’s Hyper-illumination to Culture as Symbolic Exchange Two recent novels by Maori writers, Rangatira by Paula Morris (2011) and Ocean Roads by James George (2006), respond to contemporary tensions between indigeneity, often associated with rootedness to place and bonds of community, and globalisation, often associated with ‘flows’ of peoples, goods, and ideologies, unrooted from ties to location and community. Both novels reach back to historical moments to present long histories of Maori travel and mutual cultural exchanges under (post)colonial conditions. These histories adumbrate even longer histories of travel and exchange characterising Maori as Pacific voyagers, traders, and settlers. However, it is the (post)colonial context that shapes these particular journeys and the cultural exchanges that take place: a delegation of high-born Maori escorted to England to meet the Queen and experience industrialising England (Rangatira); and New Zealand as the meeting point of stories of survivors and victims of global wars, with a Maori woman at the centre of the novel’s centripetal and centrifugal movements (Ocean Roads). This paper examines the novels’ treatment of these movements and exchanges, focusing on how they engage with the contemporary conditions of cultural exchange, as culture is increasingly unable to be experienced, even thought, outside the commodity form. Biography of Presenting Author Chris Prentice teaches and researches in the field of postcolonial literatures, theory, and cultural studies, at the University of Otago, New Zealand. Her research focuses on questions relating to the uses of culture and notions of cultural politics for decolonisation in settler (post)colonial societies. She is also interested in postcolonial disaster studies and in memory research. Dr Tal Zalmanovich The Hebrew University of Jerusalem - English Embodying Dissent: Pauline Podbrey, H.A. Naidoo, and the Communist Party, 1942-1956 Scholars of colonialism and anti-imperial struggles had shown how interracial couplings undermine colonial hierarchy. The apartheid state was also threatened by the association of white and black bodies, and legislated against it. The published personal recollections of activists 14 �involved in interracial relationships show these affairs to be gestures of political defiance. They are the embodiment of protest against the differentiation between populations, the erosion of civil and human rights, and the subordination of political freedom to the will of the state. Memoirs of individuals in interracial unions such as Pauline Podbrey’s White Girl in Search of the Party (1993), reveal the state’s mechanisms of suppression of dissent and of desire to be one. Podbrey’s memoir enables me to also ask: What was the role of the Communist Party in providing a contact zone for a white woman and a man of Indian descent, how communist ideology effected gender roles, and how Cold War politics shaped individuals routes of exile and work after the exit from South Africa. Biography of Presenting Author Tal Zalmanovich is a historian of Modern Britain with expertise in media and technology in the post-1945 era. Tal received her PhD from Rutgers University in 2013. Her current research examines the rhetorical and political function of narratives of interracial love and exile published during the apartheid and post-apartheid era. Shashikantha Koudur National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, India - School of Management Ambika G. Mallya Srinivas Institute of Technology Religion, Gender, Exclusion: Islam, Hindutva and the Case of Sarah Aboobackar in Contemporary Karnataka Sarah Aboobackar is a Kannada novelist in present day Karnataka who would identify herself with the Bandaya literary group (progressive/revolutionary) which came to prominence in the Karnataka of 1980s and thereafter. As a first prominent Muslim woman writer of Kannada, she had to fight with the strategies of exclusion which constantly played out against her by the religious and communal elements in Karnataka. She had to face the double challenge because of her being Muslim as well as a woman in a Hindu majority society. She builds up alliance with progressive elements/groups such as Karnataka Communal Harmony Forum (KCHF) and condemns both the fringe groups of the Hindutva and the Islamic fundamentalists, writing from coastal Karnataka. Interestingly, KCHF represents the alliance of not only progressive Hindus and Muslims but also some elements of orthodox Islam, closer to the fundamentalists, who would seek this alliance in response to a strong anti-Muslim atmosphere in the region. What is the essence of this alliance? What would be the response of the readership in such a scenario? Or, more importantly, what kind of inclusionary/exclusionary politics is being played out here? These are the questions the paper attempts to answer. Biography of Presenting Author Shashikantha Koudur is an Associate Professor at the National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, Karnataka. He holds a PhD from the University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad. His interests are literature and music. Ambika G. Mallya is a doctoral student at the National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, Karnataka. 15 �Veronica Austen St. Jerome's University at the University of Waterloo - English The Art of Loss in Goodison’s “So Who Was the Mother of Jamaican Art?” and D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts In Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery (2004), Arlene R. Keizer asserts that the contemporary narrative of slavery “re-imagine[s] the past for the benefit of the present and the future” (17). In other words, there is a “need to imagine those ancestors as psychically free if we are to imagine ourselves as psychically free” (17). Taking these observations as inspiration, this paper asks why Lorna Goodison in “So Who Was the Mother of Jamaican Art?” and Fred D’Aguiar in Feeding the Ghosts imagine their enslaved or formerly enslaved protagonists as artist figures. Both of these texts feature protagonists who carve wooden sculptures as responses to traumatic loss, namely the loss of children sold away and the loss of those killed as part of the Zong massacre. In discussing the artistic output of these characters, this paper asks: what is the significance of envisioning those bodily, psychically, and spiritually dehumanized as creators, and more specifically, as creators of art? As my paper will show, these artist figures may confirm that historical erasures can be combated with artistic expression, but they simultaneously warn against the dangers of commodifying the past and query the costs of representing the unrepresentable. Biography of Presenting Author Veronica Austen is an Assistant Professor, specializing in Canadian and Postcolonial literatures, at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, ON. Her research interests include visual experimentation in Caribbean and Canadian poetry and the portrayal of the visual arts in contemporary Canadian literature. Vedita Cowaloosur Stellenbosch University - English Portraying conflict, violence, trauma: Joe Sacco’s Palestine and Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s This Side, That Side In this paper, I will be looking at the visual depictions of the violence, conflict and trauma— including how violence plays out across generations. Looking at Joe Sacco’s Palestine and Viswajyoti Ghosh’s anthology, This Side, That Side, my paper will study the representations of the extreme violence that was the repercussion of the partition of India/Pakistan (and later Bangladesh), and Israel/Palestine. The questions I will address in my paper include: To what extent are graphic novels and stories effective in retelling stories rooted in estrangement and 16 �histories etched out in blood? How does the lightness, humour and satire, often associated with the very form of the graphic novel/story, contribute in conveying the violence, trauma and horror of partition more poignantly? Does the retelling of stories of partition from a distance or as an outsider (as is with the case with many of the authors I discuss) bring objectivity and neutrality in portraying its violence? Biography of Presenting Author Vedita Cowaloosur received her PhD in English and Comparative Literary Studies from the University of Warwick (UK) in 2014. Her PhD thesis examined the representation of English and bhashas in Indian fiction. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the English Department at the University of Stellenbosch (South Africa) where she is teaching and researching on the “immigrant genre”. She has previously worked in publishing in India and taught at tertiary level in Mauritius. Her research interests include Translation Studies, World Literature, South Asian Popular Culture and Indian Ocean Studies. Sabine Binder University of Zürich - English / Gender Studies Whose story is written on her dead body? The gender politics of the stories female victims are made to tell in some selected South African crime novels As spectacular beginning and silent centre of the crime novel, the female victim’s dead body becomes the material through which others write their stories: murderers, detectives, crime authors. Writing out of a crime-ridden society, many South African novelists accommodate this narrative multiplicity; yet they also recognise it as a potentially compromised practice which reexploits the victim. To counter this, they give prominence to the victim’s perspective and become her advocate. This paper seeks to examine this approach by drawing from South African studies on the gendered dimensions of bearing witness, from literary trauma theory, from Judith Butler’s notion of grievable lives, and from work on representations of the violated female body. I argue that by retrieving the female victim’s voice, these crime novels become both testimony of and political response to real violence against women. However, this tactic is undermined, for example, when representations of female pain become a spectacle for male pleasure. Can crime fiction that bears witness to the victim’s story, counterbalance the danger of sacrificing her anew in narrative, and thus take a stance against real gender violence? This paper looks to Margie Orford’s, Malla Nunn’s, Penny Lorimer’s, and Andrew Brown’s crime novels for strategies and answers. Biography of Presenting Author Sabine Binder holds an MA in English literature and linguistics from the University of Zürich, Switzerland. She teaches English and Psychology and is a doctoral student in the field of South African crime fiction at the University of Zürich where she is a participant in the Doctoral Programme Gender Studies. Tanaka Chidora 17 �University of the Freestate - English Reading the Lines of Flight of selected White-authored Zimbabwean Narratives A reading of critical works on white-authored Zimbabwean narratives reveals a deep-seated monolithic critical hegemony that lumps them into one racially-inspired discourse that Chennells (1982) termed the ‘Rhodesian discourse’. The belief that inspired this phrase and its continued use is that by virtue of their refusal to detach themselves from Rhodesia and the land, white authors get trapped in the politico-aesthetic regime of the Rhodesian discourse that has worked to exile black people from white imagination during the colony and continues to do so after independence. Subsequent scholars like Bhebhe and Ranger (1994), Moyana (1999), Pilosoff (2009) and Primorac (2010) continue to reproduce this monolithic reading of white-authored Zimbabwean narratives even where they profess to be offering new paradigms of reading such narratives. A reading of Rheam’s This September Sun (2011) and Lang’s Lettah’s Gift (2009) reveals the subversion of the infrastructures of the Rhodesian discourse so that these two narratives are difficult to attach to the taxonomy of Rhodesian discourse. This paper is part of an ongoing doctoral research and calls for a more open-minded approach to white Zimbabwean narratives without being trapped in the hysterias of the Rhodesian discourse. Biography of Presenting Author Tanaka Chidora is a doctoral candidate at the University of the Freestate. His study looks at post2000 white and black-authored Zimbabwean literature in English that tackles issues of exile and belonging. The research specifically focuses on what Glick-Schiller (1994) called the "paradox of our age" in which the globalization of the world has actually revived issues of identity and belonging. This lends a "tragic edge" to the experiences of exile. Bernth Lindfors Professor Emeritus, University of Texas at Austin - English Dennis Brutus in the Dock In May of 1963 Dennis Brutus was arrested at the offices of the South African Olympic Committee where he had gone to present the case of black and other non-white South Africans who were excluded from participation in the Olympic Games. In the following months, while awaiting trial, he escaped to Swaziland and was subsequently captured there by the South African security police who brought him back to Johannesburg. Realizing that no one might learn of his arrest, he attempted to flee from his captors on the streets of Johannesburg and was shot by one of the police officers. After being treated at a hospital, he was held in custody for fifteen weeks, during which time he spent more than a hundred days in an isolation cell in prison while the trial proceeded. He was found guilty on all five counts brought against him. On January 8, 1964, before being sentenced, he was given an opportunity to make an unsworn statement in court in mitigation of the sentence. I wish to examine this statement and the sentence he received. Biography of Presenting Author 18 �Bernth Lindfors has written and edited a number of books on Anglophone African literatures and on black performers, the latest being African Literatures and Beyond: A Florilegium, ed. with Geoffrey V. Davis (2013), Early African Entertainments Abroad (2014) and Ira Aldridge: The Last Years, 1855-1867 (2015). Louise Bethlehem The Hebrew University of Jerusalem - English and The Program in Cultural Studies Miriam Makeba in Conakry: Between Apartheid and Authenticité Exiled South African jazz legend Miriam Makeba moved from the United States to Guinea in 1968 together with her husband, civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael, at the invitation of President Ahmed Sékou Touré. The country was in the throes of a Socialist Cultural Revolution instigated by Sékou Touré the previous year. Sékou Touré embraced an idiosyncratic blend of African socialism, panafricanism and anti-imperialism. His doctrine of authenticité, stressing indigenous cultural transmission, was repeatedly set in opposition to Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Négritude— an opposition that played out against the Cold War politics of the era. On the basis of Miriam Makeba and James Hall’s 1987 memoir, Makeba, My Story, and other sources, this paper seeks to explore Makeba’s assimilation in Guinea as a preeminent symbol of anti-apartheid resistance who was also closely identified with Sékou Touré’s attempt to forge a modernizing Guinean national identity. How does Makeba negotiate the restless identities she inhabits and how may these be read off the surface of her text? This presentation forms part of a panel entitled: "Writing Lives in Cold War Landscapes" with the participation of Louise Bethlehem, Monica Popescu and Tal Zalmanovich. Biography of Presenting Author Louise Bethlehem lectures in English and the Program in Cultural Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has published widely on South African literature, postcolonialism and cultural studies. She heads a European Research Council project entitled “Apartheid—The Global Itinerary: South African Cultural Formations in Transnational Circulation 1948-1990”. Tomi Adeaga University of Vienna Locating African Diaspora Literatures within Global Literatures There is no doubt that the scope of African literatures has extended beyond the shores of the African continent. A number of African authors write their works today in the Diasporas and often use themes that reflect their African roots and their Western realities. Notable among such authors today are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Taiye Selasi, NoViolet Bulawayo, Helen Oyeyemi, Chika Unigwe, and many more. In the light of these shifts in the geographical locations in the literatures, this paper seeks to explore the implications of these literatures on African literatures written in Africa and how they are received by their audience on the continent. This paper will also explore their impact on global literatures, especially since books written by a number of 19 �these authors have won major prizes in Western countries. How do these young authors differ from the older generations of African authors, some of whom are still alive? Why are these young authors so popular that films are being made out of their books as has been the case of Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2013) and Uzodima Iweala’s Beasts of no Nation (2015)? These are some of the questions that will be analyzed in this paper. Biography of Presenting Author Dr. Tomi she received her doctorate degree in Germany in 2004. She lectures at the Department of African Studies, Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies of the University of Vienna, Austria. She is the author of Translating and Publishing African Language(s) and Literature(s): Examples from Nigeria, Ghana and Germany (2006). Her current research interests include translation studies, African literatures and Afro-European Studies. She has also published a short story called “Marriage and Other Impediments” in African Love Stories; An Anthology (2006) as well as poems including “Neger 3km” addressing the complexities of Europe-African dialogue. Annalisa Oboe University of Padua – Italy- Dipartimento Di Studi Linguistici E Letterari From the European South: relocating Italy through postcolonial representations The paper stems from the postcolonialitalia research project – www.postcolonialitalia.it – and it attempts to rethink the “location” of Italian culture, which is at the same time European, Mediterranean, and of the South. It discusses recent filmic representations of contemporary Italy as a country “in transit”, having become a vast migratory crossroads and facing unprecedented economic and social challenges. The current crisis has been made ‘visible’ in videos, documentary and feature films that, in the last two decades, have signalled the formation of a new kind of gaze, an inquisitive and proactive way of looking that scours the country for small stories connected to intractable macro-phenomena, such as immigration and racism. These stories produce representations that are distinctly postcolonial, reopen the archives of Italian culture, and celebrate the coming into history of other voices and new art forms. They create a kind of transitory history from below, as well as a poetic history, invoking the aesthetic moment as powerful and fertile, as able to intersect great global movements and local life experiences. The paper focuses on the work of Dagmawi Yimer and Andrea Segre, the former from Ethiopia, the latter from Padua in Northern Italy. Biography of Presenting Author Annalisa Oboe is Professor of English Literature and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Padua, Italy, where she directs the doctoral program in Linguistic, Philological and Literary Sciences. She works on postcolonial theory and literatures in English, contemporary British writing, South African and Black Atlantic cultures. Her publications include Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures (2011); Recharting the Black Atlantic: Modern Cultures, Local Communities, Global Connections (2008); Mongrel Signatures: Reflections on the Work of Mudrooroo (2003); Fiction, History and Nation in South Africa (1994). She is principal investigator of the postcolonialitalia research project, available at www.postcolonialitalia.it. Monica Popescu 20 �McGill University - Department of English Cold War Aesthetics: Es’kia Mphahlele and the Establishment of African Literary Studies I am interested in the aesthetic values promoted by Es’kia Mphahlele in his letters and essays from the 1960s, especially those written as Director of the Africa Program at the Congress for Cultural Freedom, as well as his later memoir, Afrika, My Music, that covers this period. In 1967 it was revealed that the CIA had masterminded and financed the operation of the CCF and its dozens of journals and projects, while at the same time allowing a certain degree of autonomy to the intellectuals involved. While it is quite certain that Mphahlele was unaware of the American involvement, the aesthetic cohesion of the journals and organizations supported by the CCF highlight indirect forms of influence that the superpowers exercised on cultural production in Africa and elsewhere. Mphahlele’s memoir, his correspondence from Paris and Nairobi, the projects he spearheaded, as well as the essays he penned in this period, reveal aesthetic intersections and tensions that resonate with the larger Cold War literary landscapes. Biography of Presenting Author Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar of African Literatures at McGill University. Author of two books: South African Literature Beyond the Cold War (2012 Arlt Award) and The Politics of Violence in Post-Communist Films. Co-editor of a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing on Alternative Solidarities: Black Diasporas and Cultural Alliances during the Cold War. Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba University of Manitoba - English, Film, and Theatre The Dangers of Tradition in Achebe's Novels The proposed study will examine the dangers of an idea of tradition that emerged in the postcolonial moment from the struggle against European colonialism. I will argue that this idea of tradition attempted to freeze history and stagnate community identity in a way that impedes community reconstruction of shared values and norms. To pursue this claim, I will revisit Chinua Achebe’s novels, Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. Contrary to popular readings of these novels as texts that basically reflect the disruptive nature of European colonialism on indigenous African society, I contend that these novels significantly highlight the dangers of inventing tradition and how the resort to tradition as the locus for community’s stability and progress inhibits an appreciation of history’s dynamism. My assumption is that Achebe’s novels show an awareness of the dangers of this idea of tradition and that these novels call attention to how struggles against oppressive structures of power often birth crippling ideas of tradition. Achebe’s novels will provide the basis for engaging present systems of traditions of indigeneity that refuse to permit redefinitions of community and shared identities in twenty-first-century Nigeria. Biography of Presenting Author Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba is a Ph.D candidate in the Department of English, Film, and Theatre, at the University of Manitoba, Canada. His doctoral research is on literary representation of 21 �genocidal atrocities in Nigeria and Rwanda. Anyaduba's research interests have been on genocide literatures, trauma studies, postcolonial studies, and African literatures. Khondlo Mtshali University of Kwa-Zulu Natal - School of Social Sciences Gugu Hlongwane Saint Mary`s University - Department of English Journeys, Paths and Healing in Simphiwe Dana’s Music Some African cosmologies portray human life as a journey in which an emerging human entity acquires its purpose from the spiritual world and actualizes it in the human world. Thus, living is imagined as a travel on a particular, purpose-guided path, way or street. From the perspective of these African cosmologies, illness is understood to be a disruption or misdirection of this journey. Healing is understood as a rebirth, a spiritual journey towards individual or collective purpose. Scholars influenced by the works of Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko, among others, argue that colonialism, as a type of psychological illness, swayed its victims from their individual and collective purposes. Thus the goal of the post-colonial projects is to rediscover this purpose. We argue that Simphiwe Dana’s music is influenced by African cosmologies as well as the works of Fanon and Biko. Focusing on selected songs from Dana’s two albums, The One Love Movement (2006) and Kulture Noire (2012), we argue that the role of her music is to facilitate the individual and collective healing of South Africans. Using the symbols of streets, roads, and ways, her music imagines healing as a journey to self and collective rediscovery. Biography of Presenting Author Dr. Khondlo Mtshali (Senior Lecturer): University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, School of Social Sciences, Scottsville, Pietermaritzburg. Dr. Gugu Hlongwane (Associate Professor): Saint Mary’s University, Department of English, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Jochen Petzold University of Regensburg - Department of English and American Studies Popular and Political: ‘Crime Writing’ as Commentary on South African Society One of the most noticeable developments in contemporary South African literature is the growing popularity of ‘genre fiction’ (cf. Warren 2003), a type of literature often marginalized or ignored in postcolonial studies. In his recent analysis of South African romance, Chris Warnes interprets this rise of ‘popular literature’ as a break with the political impetus of struggle 22 �literature, the end of apartheid “signalling the lifting of this literary-political injunction to be serious” (2014: 156). Crime writing could be seen as a case in point: limited to only a few cases (at least in English) before the 1990s, the situation has clearly changed, with numerous authors having started out as popular crime writers in the new millennium. However, as I will argue in my paper, despite falling under the heading of ‘popular culture’, crime writing can provide pertinent analyses of contemporary society, its anxieties and shortcomings. In my paper I will focus on Mike Nicol’s ‘revenge trilogy’ (2008-11), examining the interplay between wrongs of the past and problems of the present. The analysis will show how Nicol uses genre writing to comment on contemporary South Africa. Biography of Presenting Author Jochen Petzold is Professor of British Studies at the University of Regensburg (Germany). His Ph.D. project, “Re-imagining White Identity by Exploring the Past” (2002) examined the treatment of history in South African novels of the 1990s, and he has repeatedly published on South African fiction. Janet Neigh Pennsylvania State University, Erie - English Digitizing Indigenous Oral Memory in Janet Marie Rogers’s Peace in Duress Orality scholar John Miles Foley suggests that the Internet is well suited to represent the interconnectivity of oral forms. What happens “when stories that float from afar” become digitized? As these stories echo in online environments, do their unhomely evocations sound different? To what extent do digital forms lessen our dependence on print-centric ways of knowing? Through an examination of the Mohawk-Tuscarora poet Janet Marie Rogers’s sonic interpretations of poems from her recent collection Peace in Duress (2014) on her SoundCloud page, this presentation will explore these questions. Rogers’s poems recall the oral memory of the Guswenta 2 Row Wampum Treaty, the first agreement made between Native people and white settlers in North America in 1613, which prioritized peace and friendship. From a Haudenosaunee perspective, this agreement laid the foundations for all subsequent treaties. She engages with this story that floats from afar as a model for contemporary truth and reconciliation. Her experimental sound poems play with reverb and sampling to demonstrate the fractured nature of dialogue across media. Ultimately, Rogers undermines our overreliance on text by inviting her audience to cultivate new forms of listening. Biography of Presenting Author Janet Neigh is an assistant professor of English at Pennsylvania State University's Erie campus. Her research is forthcoming in The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry and has been published in Feminist Formations, Modernism/modernity, and The Journal of West Indian Literature. 23 �Danson Sylvester Kahyana Makerere University - Literature Interrogating the Obscurity of Akiki K. Nyabongo’s Novel, Africa Answers Back in East African Literary Scholarship First published in 1935 as The Story of an African Chief, Nyabongo’s novel Africa Answers Back (1936) remains largely unknown in East African universities. Using insights from Postcolonial Theory, the paper explains why this is so. It argues that to understand Nyabongo’s exclusion from the East African canon, it's important to appreciate the fact that Africa Answers Back is an anti-colonial novel published in the US at a time when Uganda was colonized by Britain. This means that its circulation in Uganda was more or less impossible since Nyabongo and other USeducated Ugandans were considered a threat to the colonial statusquo, as Ado Tiberondwa shows in his book, Missionaries as Agents of Colonialism in Uganda. The paper also argues that the novel’s subject matter – for instance its defence of eugenics and its valorization of polygamy – makes it a challenging read, especially for those readers who regard texts in functionalist lenses and who therefore find the ambiguities of the text troubling. Finally, the paper calls for a revisiting of Africa Answers Back as a foundational text that gives us insights into African society at the cusp of colonial rule and the nature of Africans’ incipient resistance to colonial rule. Biography of Presenting Author Danson S. Kahyana teaches in the Literature Department at Makerere University. He holds a PhD in English from Stellenbosch University and a Masters of Arts in Literature, a Postgraduate Diploma in Education and a Bachelor of Arts from Makerere University. Dr Maninder Sidhu PG-GCG, Panjab University, Chandigarh - Department of English Re-emergence of Logocentrism in Ethnocentric Postcolonial Language Theorizations Conceptually informed by the diverse yet subversive writings of Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (Decolonising the Mind), G. N. Devy (The Being of Bhasha), Chinua Achebe (“Politics and Politicians of Language in African Literature”) and Chantal Zabus (The African Palimpsest), the paper juxtaposes the interrogative stance of Derrida (Of Grammatology) with the native/hybrid predilections of the postcolonial thinkers. The Saussurean insights into arbitrariness involved in the construction/normativity of signification, and the poststructuralist interrogation of subject positions in the dissemination of knowledge have made the role of language intriguing. The polemical postulations have a curious significance in Subaltern Studies. On the one hand, on the strength of the deconstructive thrust the ‘cultural imperialism’ let loose by the colonial languages in Africa and Asia has been pinned and probed in an effort to reclaim pre-colonial cultural histories; on the other, ignoring the in-built hegemony in the structure of language, there is a 24 �marked upsurge to valorize the native languages to strengthen the nationalist discourse. Also, the appropriation of the vernaculars by cosmopolitan linguistic trends has flattened their phonocentric pitch. The paper analyses the dichotomies of speech/script, presence/absence, story/state, diachrony/synchrony, locus/focus, wisdom/information, local/global, to bring out the indigenous strengths and internal contradictions plaguing postcolonial languages. Biography of Presenting Author Professor of English, and Assistant Editor of Dialog (http://dialog.puchd.ac.in) Published in: Summerhill (Indian Institute Advanced Studies, Shimla), Indian Literature (Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi), Dialog (PU, Chandigarh), Critical Perspectives (Punjabi University, Patiala), In-Text and CoText (Rawat Publications), Tribune, Hindustan Times, Daily Post. Shortlisted for CDN award IACLALS Conference, Goa, 2015. Eddie Ombagi University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg - African Literature Becoming Queer: Rethinking an African Queer Theoretical Framework The current conceptualization of same-sex sexual expressions in Africa is framed within an explicitly antinormative foundation of queer studies and politics. While it has illuminated the presence of same-sex sexual expressions in Africa, it has not been sufficient to articulate and position same-sex desires, bodies and spaces epistemologically and theoretically. The frameworks have not been successful in capturing the contextual realities, and complex experiences of the African people and their multiple and varied sexualities. This study proceeds from this premise and I argue that local African realities and nuances need to be considered in knowledge production and in the structure of queer theories and epistemologies. This study reads Stories of Our Lives (2015), a “boocumentary” on same-sex bodies and spaces in the city of Nairobi, Kenya using Deleuzian framing of becoming that privileges sexual assemblage of various entities to express same-sex sexual. I draw on this analysis to contend that to adequately and forcefully locate same-sex sexual bodies, expressions, desires and spaces in the continent, a theoretical spectrum that calls attention to the incoherence and unintelligibility of sexualities in nuanced complexities around community and/or the social fabric as well as lived experiences, spatial subjectivities and embodied existences is necessary. Biography of Presenting Author Eddie Ombagi is a PhD student at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. His research interests are cultural studies, gender and queer studies, and literatures of the marginalised. Cheryl Stobie UKZN - English Studies 25 �Re-tailoring Can Themba’s “The Suit”: Queer Temporalities in Two Stories by Makhosazana Xaba Can Themba’s iconic short story, “The Suit” (1963), recounts the tale of a devastating punishment visited upon an adulterous wife, Matilda, by her formerly uxorious husband, Philemon. Recent texts have re-imagined this haunting story from various perspectives. Two short stories by Makhosazana Xaba, published in 2013, add significant elements to the basic fable. “Behind ‘The Suit’” is written in epistolary form by Philemon’s dying male lover to his daughter, thus queering the narrative and suggesting different mores possible in a new generation. “‘The Suit’ Continued: The Other Side” is recounted in first-person narration from Matilda’s perspective, uncannily after her suicide. It delineates the affair between Matilda and another woman, and their plan for Matilda to fall pregnant by a male lover so that she can leave Philemon and the two women can set up home together with the baby. Further queer temporalities are introduced in this story. Referencing such critics as Judith Halberstam, Elizabeth Freeman and Donna McCormack, I examine the effects created by Xaba in her re-fashionings of Themba’s Ur-text. I argue that both stories critique hetero-patriarchy; they queer marriage, procreation, Sophiatown, black communities and the South African nation; and they contribute meaningfully to postcolonial queer writing and reading. Biography of Presenting Author Cheryl Stobie is an associate professor of English Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg campus. She has published widely on topics including postcolonialism and representations of gender, sexuality, religion and spirituality. Her focus is mainly on South/African literature and film. She is one of the editors of Current Writing. Veronica Thompson Athabasca University - Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences “I can speak freely now that I am dead”: Audrey Thomas’s Local Customs Audrey Thomas’s Local Customs imagines the story of English poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.) from her courtship with and marriage to George Maclean, governor of the Gold Coast (now Ghana), to her death a few short months later at Cape Coast Castle in 1838. Letitia narrates posthumously and the novel alternates between her and George’s points of view, each augmenting the other’s tale. Like Thomas’s earlier novels, Isobel Gunn and Tattycoram, Local Customs blends history and fiction. As Thomas notes in her afterword, “All four of the principal characters in Local Customs are real people: George Maclean, Letitia Landon, Brodie Cruikshank, and Thomas Birch Freeman. Cape Coast Castle still stands” (202). Literary allusions to canonical imperial literature, such as Jane Eyre and Robinson Crusoe, are also prevalent throughout the novel. The narrative technique and the literary and historical intersections of Local Customs situate the novel within postcolonial debates regarding the remnants and recurrences of colonial power structures, as the novel unequivocally interrogates gendered and racial inclusions and exclusions. Works cited: Thomas, Audrey. Local Customs. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2014. Biography of Presenting Author 26 �Veronica Thompson is associate professor of English and dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Athabasca University. Her research interests include Canadian and Australian literatures, postcolonial literatures and theories, and women’s literature and feminist theories. She is the co-editor of Selves and Subjectivities: Reflections on Canadian Arts and Culture, and Familiar and Foreign: Identity in Iranian Film and Literature. Felicity Wood University of Fort Hare - English That which counts and what cannot be counted: rituals of counting in market-oriented academia ‘That Which Counts and That Which Cannot Be Counted: the Fetishism of Numbers and All It Excludes’. The near-numinous potency of the numerical has become a distinctive feature of many contemporary societies in which neoliberal economic forces wield sway. Numbers have acquired almost sacrosanct aspects, and rituals of counting quantifiable, measurable data have assumed pre-eminent significance. Meanwhile, the value attached to that which cannot easily be quantified and enumerated has concurrently declined. The "new fetishism of numbers" (Gudeman, 1998) now prevalent at numerous corporatised, market-driven universities in South Africa and worldwide is one dimension of this. University cultures have altered accordingly; symptomatic of wider socio-cultural changes. The valorisation of numbers is indicative of the extent to which the neoliberal ethos, which emphasises the measurable and quantifiable at the cost of much else, has permeated higher education and many other areas of contemporary experience in diverse societies worldwide. This also illuminates the way free-market capitalism has infiltrated numerous societies, engendering a foregrounding of calculable, monetary concerns. The particular damage this has inflicted on literary studies and also on neo-colonial societies is considered. In these and other contexts, the fetishisation of the numerical serves as a force of constraint and exclusion. Biography of Presenting Author Professor Felicity Wood works at the University of Fort Hare, South Africa. Her particular area of research interest is the way contemporary Western and Westernised societies partake in aspects of mystery, ritual and magic, especially in economic and socio-political contexts and the presentday workplace. She has published articles on this topic and has written a book entitled The Extraordinary Khotso: millionaire medicine man of Lusikisiki, which explores magic as a marketable commodity, focusing on the life of an early twentieth-century South African medicine man and entrepreneur. At present, she is writing a book entitled Sorcery in the Academy: universities and the occult rituals of the corporate world which examines the occult aspects of contemporary higher education and market-driven capitalism. She has also been publishing articles in this field. Felicity Wood University of Fort Hare - English 27 �Seductions and Exclusions in Neo-Colonial Cultures and Other Milieus This comparative analysis of the discourse of neoliberal economic approaches and oral accounts of the mamlambo, a South African wealth-giving spirit, explores the extent to which both these sets of narratives enchant and elide, and the power they wield in neo-colonial cultural contexts and other milieus as a result of their exclusions and omissions. These two narrative genres are interconnected. Among much else, key features of the former discourse have influenced the latter discourse in various significant respects, and both of these partake in areas of mystery and magic. Then, this study particularly explores the striking metaphorical parallels between oral accounts of dangerous wealth-giving spirits, the false promises and hazardous enchantments of neoliberalism and the corporate fabulation and managerial mythmaking now prevalent at restructured, corporatised universities. In conclusion, various African novels that illuminate certain key features of the fictions contained in these above-delineated narratives, including Okey Ndibe's Foreign Gods, Inc., Adaobi Tricia Nwaubeni's I Did Not Come to You by Chance, Ben Okri's The Famished Road and Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard will also be touched upon. Biography of Presenting Author Professor Felicity Wood works at the University of Fort Hare, South Africa. Her particular area of research interest is the way contemporary Western and Westernised societies partake in aspects of mystery, ritual and magic, especially in economic and socio-political contexts and the presentday workplace. She has published articles on this topic, and has written a book entitled The Extraordinary Khotso: millionaire medicine man of Lusikisiki, which explores magic as a marketable commodity, focusing on the life of an early twentieth-century South African medicine man and entrepreneur. At present, she is writing a book entitled Sorcery in the Academy: Universities and the Occult Rituals of the Corporate World which examines the occult aspects of contemporary higher education and market-driven capitalism. She has also been publishing articles in this field. Annie Gagiano Stellenbosch University - English Ironies of fame, appropriation & neglect regarding indigenous South African 'ecological' narratives While contemporary African novels exhibiting environmental concerns attract considerable fame [texts by Zakes Mda and Karen Jayes come to mind], recognition of indigenous verbal records that can be described as evincing an ecological vision of the southern African environment has been patchy in all but overlooking sources other than the abundantly publicised, translated and fought-over Bleek/Lloyd archive of /Xam testimonies. In my paper I want to draw attention to additional sources, two in particular – the Khoekhoen narrative "The Song of the Rain" told by the venerable "Hendrik" to the Afrikaans author E. N. Marais, who transcribed it along with three other tales first published in the 1920s as "Dwaalstories" [Wandering/ Wanderers' Tales]; and "The Story of Nomxakazo", a Nguni folk-tale translated from isiXhosa, written and published by the great umXhosa writer A. C. Jordan in his collection Tales from Southern Africa (1973). In the paper I draw attention to how both narrators evoke the need to tame power, greed and violence as an 'ecological' necessity/duty. Biography of Presenting Author 28 �Annie Gagiano is Professor Emerita in the English Dept of Stellenbosch University, where she continues to supervise doctoral students, conduct research and interact with colleagues. Her main focus is on African fiction (especially more recent writing) from throughout the continent, in English or English translation. Her research is concerned with the post-colonial present and examines issues of nationhood, power and gender (especially in texts by women) and representational issues, particularly in relation to child characters/narrators. She has a particular interest in the use of comparative reading practices relating African to postcolonial texts from elsewhere. Neil ten Kortenaar University of Toronto - English and Comparative Literature Can the Suborned Speak? The Meaning of Bribes in Achebe’s No Longer at Ease Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease, published in the year of Nigeria’s independence, opens and ends with the trial of Obi Okonkwo, a civil servant accused of taking bribes. Understanding what is or is not corruption is essential to understanding the postcolonial state. Most literary criticism is scornful of Obi for his passivity, and overlooks what is most salient about him: that he defines himself for most of the novel as the one man who does not take bribes. This paper will examine why Obi refuses to take bribes and why ultimately he does take them. Bribes need to be understood in terms of the circulation of debts and gifts within different networks. There is the horizontal system of mutual obligation associated with kinship, a similar system in development for the ethnic group, and a vertical system that involves placating potentially hostile strangers who wield power. Obi, however, identifies with the law, an absolute transcending these systems of reciprocal debt. One source of this identification is the secularization of the atonement in Christianity, which puts an end to cycles of debt and retribution through transcendent sacrifice. Biography of Presenting Author Neil ten Kortenaar teaches African, Caribbean, and South Asian literature at the University of Toronto at Scarborough. He is the author of Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (2004) and Postcolonial Literature and the Impact of Literacy: Reading and Writing in African and Caribbean Fiction (2011). Ralph Goodman University of Stellenbosch - English Photography and the Limits of Certainty Double Negative is an extended discussion of the nature of perception, through the camera on the one hand, and through the senses on the other. The somewhat gnomic title of Vladislavić’s text confirms the generally increasing mistrust of photography as a stable and reliable mediator between camera and audience, since photographs are routinely reworked to serve the photographer’s purpose. Taken mathematically, Vladislavić’s nonce term “double negative” might suggest a positive, but “double negative” may also be indicative of something unreliable or false, as in “white man speak with forked tongue”. In the text, Auerbach is a famous photographer, whose view of the world is modernist and allied to the camera, while Neville his apprentice represents a more postmodern stance, resulting in multiple and playful narratives in 29 �respect of the same scene. Neville uses his freedom to explore – even enter – objects or situations which are interpretable in more than one way, as overlapping layers, according to how they are apprehended. The reality experienced by Neville may be seen as part of the important body of “stories which call from afar”, evading absolute definition, space or community, but gently ambushing us with their penetrative truths. Biography of Presenting Author Ralph Goodman taught for many years in the Department of English at the University of Stellenbosch, and is now a Research Associate with the Department. He offers workshops which combine elements of memoir with personal growth and he writes poetry. Dr. Alex Nelungo Wanjala University of Nairobi - Literature and Sub-Department of French Emerging from the Barriers Erected by the Canon: Contemporary Forms of Kenyan Literature Kenyan critics search endlessly for the new Ngugi, Ogot, Meja, Macgoye or Binyavanga Wainaina. Each year we await the results of Literary Awards in order to establish the direction in which our Literature is headed. Given the classification used by the judges, it is evident that there is partitioning in aesthetic terms that determines which texts are the best suited to tell the Kenyan narrative. Texts that do not conform to these aesthetic standards suffer from critical exclusion. My paper seeks to subvert such exclusionary practices by studying a writer whose creative works only exist in social media platforms. “O_D_D”, started blogging in the earliest Kenyan Social Media forum; Mashada. He is still active today through blogs, where he narrates personal stories on life in Kenyan Universities seen through the adventurous pursuits of a character named ‘Masho Baya’. The Paper will focus upon O_D_D’s creative use of language through “Engsh” a variant of “Sheng”; a language used socially in Kenya. It will highlight the importance of the new platforms of media as purveyors of creativity. The paper will also examine O_D_D’s narratives as part of the literature of Kenya’s “Transnation”; in the sense suggested by Bill Ashcroft. Biography of Presenting Author Alex Wanjala is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literature and sub-Department of French at the University of Nairobi. He is the East African Regional Editor for Tydskrif vir Letterkunde, and the Chairman of East African Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (EAACLALS). John C. Ball University of New Brunswick - English Achebe’s Arrow of God and Vera’s Nehanda: Generic Exclusions and Gendered Inclusions In Nehanda, her historical novel about Zimbabwe’s Shona Rebellion, Yvonne Vera invokes Achebe’s Things Fall Apart when she names her British characters after his. But as exemplars of a satirized discourse who are as isolated stylistically (in their tonally anomalous chapters) as spatially and ideologically (in the dining rooms of their detached colonialist certitude), Vera’s 30 �Browning and Smith are much closer to Winterbottom and Clarke in Achebe’s Arrow of God than to Brown and Smith in Things Fall Apart. All three novels explore failed acts of resistance in the early decades of British occupation, but Arrow and Nehanda specifically examine the communal leadership of charismatic individuals whose authority is complicatedly premised on both personal qualities and their mediation of spirit realms. Exploring Vera’s debt to and departures from Achebe through lenses of genre and gender, I argue that the satiric narrative and cultural space both novels allot to British males is, in Arrow, offset by a parallel critique of individual, male African leadership, whereas in Nehanda it contrasts more starkly with the celebratory stylistic and communal space inhabited by its enigmatic female leader — whose authority was, paradoxically, both more grounded and more transcendent, later inspiring the nationalist struggles that created Zimbabwe. Biography of Presenting Author John C. Ball is a professor of English at the University of New Brunswick (Canada). He is author of Imagining London: Postcolonial Fictions and the Transnational Metropolis (University of Toronto Press 2004) and Satire and the Postcolonial Novel (Routledge 2003), and editor of TwentiethCentury World Fiction (Wiley-Blackwell 2011). Felicity Hand Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona - Filologia Anglesa The Ethics of Remembering: Dr. Goonam’s Coolie Doctor The late Aziz Hassim dedicated his debut novel The Lotus People to Dr. Goonam, “lest we forget”, no doubt thinking of her prominent role in the anti-apartheid movement. Devarakshanam Govinden refers to Coolie Doctor as a “struggle autobiography” in which Goonam shapes her identity based on her political commitment rather than on any specific Indianness. While Dr. Goonam’s participation in the resistance movement from the 1940s onwards is worthy of admiration, I wish to focus on the first part of her autobiography in which she relates memories of her privileged background which allowed her to travel abroad to study medicine and become the first Indian woman doctor in South Africa. Coolie Doctor recalls the sensory experiences of an enclosed Indian community, which did not immediately awaken a political consciousness in her as she would only discover what she calls “the inequalities of the white Raj” during her sojourn in Scotland. However, this paper argues that the first eleven chapters of Coolie Doctor reveal a curious longing – following the example of Jacob Dlamini’s Native Nostalgia – for a period of blatant discrimination when the home and the Indian community was a cocoon that insulated them from outside hostilities. Biography of Presenting Author Felicity Hand is senior lecturer in the English Department of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She teaches post-colonial literature and history and culture of the British Isles. She has published articles on various Indian and East African writers including M. G. Vassanji and Abdulrazak Gurnah and a full-length study of the Mauritian author Lindsey Collen. She is the head of the research group Ratnakara (http://grupsderecerca.uab.cat/ratnakara) which explores the literatures and cultures of the South West Indian Ocean. At present the group is working on a project financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness which focuses on the 31 �Indian community of South Africa. Felicity is also the editor of the new electronic journal Indi@logs. Spanish Journal of India Studies. Debayan Chatterjee School of Planning and Architecture Niyanta Muku School of Planning and Architecture Suzanne Frasier Morgan State University - School of Architecture and Planning Urbanism, Consumer Culture, and Civic Engagement in Contemporary New Delhi Arguably, there is nowhere on Earth that the disparity in wealth is more readily visually apparent than in India. Nothing is hidden from view. This paper describes the visual documentation of conspicuous consumption in India and as further revealed through autonomous theoretical analysis. Commercial continuity and extinction are described that relate eras of indigenous conspicuous consumption and creative as well as co-opted consumerism as historic phases characterized by urbanization in India. The investigation strives to define the uniqueness of Indian conspicuous consumption, as well as the specific cultural parameters through which attitudes and behaviours are shaped. It seeks to initiate a critical investigation of Indian consumer culture as it specifically applies to the collective, present-day idea of the self via displays of contemporary material culture and acquisition. The research reveals multiple systems of tension by considering the consequences of aggressive contemporary municipal city planning and commercial real estate development via a matrix of psychoanalysis (Miller), economics (Sen), and urban sociology, culture and enjoyment (Whyte; Sennett; Sassen; de Certeau; Krishnamurti). In this paper we would conclude with a concise reflection upon the consequences for urbanismrelated research and theoretical discourse in view of local, popular urban culture, and homegrown civic engagement. Biography of Presenting Author Suzanne Frasier is an Associate Professor at Morgan State University’s School of Architecture and Planning where she has been a faculty member since 2005. She is a licensed and registered architect with over 20 years of professional experience in the design and construction industry prior to becoming a full-time academic. She studied architecture at the City College of New York where she also earned her Master of Urban Planning and Design degree. As a 2012-2013 FulbrightNehru Teaching and Research Fellow in New Delhi, her pedagogical and research work focused on contemporary urban development in South Asia. Henrietta Nyamnjoh African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town 32 �Migrants’ Informal Economy and the changing dynamics: The case of Cameroonian migrants in Cape Town Drawing on the notion of ‘pitching’ (hawking), this paper focuses on migrants’ economic activities, particularly hawking and other forms of income-generating activities to understand how Cameroonian migrants in Cape Town navigate and negotiate their everyday livelihood. Using the concepts of ‘technologies of the self’ gained through the capacity to activate oneself to a level that makes efficacious action possible in the navigation of the everyday life economies, and ‘personhood’, which involves interdependency and the forging of identity through a cumulative series of practical activities I explore how migrants are able to achieve potency in their daily lives. Enhanced by the rapid development of communication technologies, migrants are able to do business differently from their parents; ICTs has increased opportunities and reduced mobility, with the mobile phone doing the mobility for them. To understand these entrepreneurial activities, I propose to situate this study from an historical perspective to comprehend how present activities are informed by the past. This paper questions what the social dynamics that underpin the production of the informal economy are, as well as how and to what extent the introduction of ICTs has changed patterns of mobility and trade. Biography of Presenting Author Henrietta Nyamnjoh is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town. She holds an MPhil degree in African Studies/Development Studies and a PhD both from Leiden University. Her research focus is on migration and mobility, transnational studies and migrants and urban transformation/appropriation. She recently completed a study the use of Information and Communication Technologies amongst mobile Cameroonian migrants in South Africa, the Netherlands and Cameroon. The study (Bridging Mobilities: ICTs appropriation by Cameroonians in South Africa and The Netherlands) seeks to understand migrants’ appropriation of the new Information and Communication Technologies to link home and host country and the wider migrant community. Dr Mathilde Rogez Université de Toulouse (CAS EA 801) - English (DEMA) "Only connect"? Damon Galgut’s Arctic Summer and South African rewritings of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India This paper will explore Damon Galgut’s rewriting of both E. M. Forster’s biography and his seminal novel A Passage to India in his recent biography of Forster, Arctic Summer (2014). “Only connect” is the key motif and motto in Forster’s novel, calling for “inclusion” and mutual understanding between peoples. “Only connect” is what Galgut does by rewriting Forster, but one may wonder about the relevance of Forster’s work, one of those “stories that float from afar”, in 21st century South Africa. One obviously thinks of the similarities between a moment in Forster’s life as purposefully insisted upon by Galgut in Arctic Summer and an episode of same sex love between soldiers in the bush in Galgut’s The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs, but also the structural parallels between A Passage to India and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, which both revolve around a core of silence, never directly represented, and its various re-tellings by several characters. This paper will analyse what these re-writings and re-tellings of Forster, his “inclusion” into South African novels, may bring to contemporary South African novelists, 33 �reflecting as well on what this interplay between multiple texts brings in return to a canonical work of English and Commonwealth literature. Biography of Presenting Author Mathilde Rogez is a Senior Lecturer at the Université de Toulouse, France. She has published articles and book chapters on South African and Zimbabwean writers and is the Commonwealth editor for Miranda (http://www.miranda-ejournal.fr/sdx2/miranda/index.xsp). She has recently coedited an issue of Etudes Littéraires Africaines on South African literature since 1994 (with Richard Samin, ELA 2014/38) and of Commonwealth, Essays and Studies (with Mélanie JosephVilain, CES 38[1], Autumn 2015). Marcia Blumberg York University - English, Graduate Theatre and Performance Performing Outsider Art: Athol Fugard's The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek By definition ‘Outsider Art’ represents exclusion and marginalization in terms of well-defined categories of modern or contemporary art movements. Yet at the same time the term offers a creative energy and an aesthetic that commands attention and ironically forms its own class of inclusion. Athol Fugard’s most recent play, The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek (2015) was inspired by the life of outsider artist, Nukain Mabuza, who lived in Barberton and generated his own domain by painting rocks on a nearby kopje in brilliant colors to enliven his bleak world. While the artist, J. F. C. Clarke has created various texts to represent the splendor of Mabuza’s vision, the site itself has unfortunately deteriorated in the past decades. The painted rocks at Revolver Creek have, however, metaphorically materialized through the transformative art of theatre. How do art and performance play a role in creating the inclusion of this outsider art from an aesthetic viewpoint? Perhaps more importantly how does Fugard’s fictionalized vision of the new political milieu of post-apartheid South Africa employ Mabuza’s art to alter the modality and foreground the aspiration for reconciliation and inclusion? Biography of Presenting Author Dr Marcia Blumberg is an Associate Professor of English at York University in Toronto and is also cross appointed to the Graduate Program in Theatre and Performance at York University. She has presented many conference papers at international conferences and published numerous articles on contemporary drama. She specializes in South African theatre. Senath Walter Perera University of Peradeniya, Peradeniya, Sri Lanka - English Coming to Terms with (Post) Conflict, Violence, Trauma and More in Noontide Toll Having spent nearly two decades depicting Sri Lanka as a lost paradise, or some kind of dystopia, in his fiction, Romesh Gunesekera takes on the challenge of characterizing an island that has emerged from a devastating ethnic war in Noontide Toll. If he was accused of peddling “demons” for their exotic potential in his previous work, here the demons are within the psyche 34 �of individuals who crave a “brave new world” but are shackled to the past. The world “out there” is not contrasted favourably with the author’s country of origin as was typified in Reef because the foreigners encountered here are encumbered by their own traumas. The post conflict island offers restlessness not repose. Vasantha, the van driver, who thinks he is “going somewhere” with his passengers ultimately realises that they are going nowhere—just “spinning in sand”. This paper argues that Gunesekera’s choice of narrator, his new-found awareness of the multifaceted nature of current life in Sri Lanka, and his eschewing the sensational for the philosophical have resulted in Noontide Toll being accepted not only by his many admirers but also his detractors to whom his previous fiction served as a lightning rod for their censure. Biography of Presenting Author Senath Walter Perera is Senior Professor in English, University of Peradeniya, chair of SLACLALS and the Gratiaen Trust, and a Bibliographical Representative for JCL. Formerly, he chaired the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia); edited SLJH, Navasilu and Phoenix; was articles editor for Postcolonial Text and on the inaugural Advisory Committee of the DSC Prize. Magdalena Pfalzgraf Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany - New English Literatures and Cultures Mobile City Worlds in Zimbabwean Fiction Post-2000: Valerie Tagwira’s The Uncertainty of Hope and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names How do literary representations of postcolonial urbanities articulate desires for belonging and participation against the politics of exclusion? This question is particularly pertinent in a Zimbabwean context where a profound cultural-nationalist project and an autochthonous and nativist state ideology have created rigid boundaries defining who belongs and who does not. Among the groups victimized through a nativist politics and rhetoric of exclusion are the urban poor, who have been portrayed as “totemless” and “inauthentic” and thus as not belonging to the nation space. This paper looks at urban mobilities and intra-urban border crossings in two novels which depict the effects of Operation Murambatsvina on Zimbabwean cityscapes: Valerie Tagwira’s The Uncertainty of Hope (2006) and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013). This paper looks at the ways in which both texts examine the structures of segregation and exclusion in postcolonial urban paradigms. Of particular interest are the ways in which the disenfranchised characters in both novels find spaces of defiance, exert ownership and the right to belong, often through the crossing and challenging of inner-city boundaries. Biography of Presenting Author Magdalena Pfalzgraf is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of New English Literatures and Cultures (NELK) Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. She is pursuing a thesis on representations of mobility in contemporary Zimbabwean fiction in English (supervisor: Frank Schulze-Engler). Peter Blair University of Chester - Department of English 35 �A Case of Marginalization: Daphne Rooke’s The Greyling The reception of Daphne Rooke (1914–2009) demonstrates how classification by genre can influence perceptions of an author’s oeuvre and canonicity, and how these perceptions are problematized by the inclusion or exclusion of an atypical text. Between 1946 and 1974 Rooke published eight South African novels, using a ‘popular’ romance mode to ‘serious’ historical effect, due to their inclusivities: they address a range of major events from 1868 to 1961, and are noteworthy for the diversity of the communities they explore and the narrators they employ. The Greyling (1962) was in key respects a departure: it was Rooke’s only contemporary and ‘political’ (as opposed to ‘historical’) novel, and was banned by the apartheid state; and though it retained ‘popular’ elements, it was more sombre, incorporating aspects of the liberal and protest traditions. Rooke was regarded as an essentially ‘popular’ writer who fell out of favour and suffered critical neglect until the 1980s, when revivalists championed her exuberant historical romances and promoted their underlying seriousness, with Mittee (1951) reissued as a Penguin Classic (1991). But this advocacy left the atypical Greyling on the margins. This paper will argue that the long-excluded Greyling deserves full inclusion in a postcolonial evaluation of Rooke’s oeuvre. Biography of Presenting Author Peter Blair is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Chester. His publications include journal articles on South African literature, a chapter in The Cambridge History of South African Literature, and two articles in The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies (Wiley-Blackwell). He is coeditor of Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine. Dr Sharlene Khan Rhodes University - School of Fine Arts ‘Postcolonial Masquerading’ and ‘Bio-mythography’ in Retelling the Postcolonial Lives of our Mothers Subjective storytelling compels the reader to acknowledge its invention. Feminist scholar Bell Hooks draws on Audre Lorde’s idea of ‘bio-mythography’ as a kind of remembering through which we can remember ‘a general outline of an incident’, the details of which are different for each of us. It is remembering as a textured re-telling meant to capture spirit rather than accurate detail. Narrative disjunctures and raptures evidence the falsity of monolithic truth claims but also allow the storyteller space to intervene. Employing this precept, I draw parallels with my own visual arts project ‘When the moon waxes red’ and the artworks of South African visual artists Mary Sibande and Senzeni Marasela who, like myself, use masquerade in enacting scenes from our mothers’ lives. I propose the concept of ‘postcolonial masquerading’ which allows us to explore colonial/postcolonial histories through visual arts masquerade and biographical narrativisation. My grandmother’s history intersects with British colonialism in Durban, while Sibande’s alter-ego ‘Sophie’ and Marasela's 'Theodora' show the race-gender-class limitations imposed on Black women during apartheid. Through elements of ‘dreaming’, ‘journeying’ and ‘imagining’, ‘bio-mythography’ and ‘postcolonial masquerading’ are used to envision the realities and fantasies of the women who struggled before us. Biography of Presenting Author 36 �Sharlene Khan is a South African visual artist whose work often incorporates a range of media that generate installations and performances that focus on the socio-political realities of a postapartheid society and the intersectionality of race/gender/class. She uses masquerading as a postcolonial strategy to interrogate her South African heritage, as well as the constructedness of identity via rote education, art discourses, historical narratives and popular culture. She holds a PhD (Arts) from Goldsmiths College, University of London and currently lectures in Art History and Visual Culture at Rhodes University. Mathilda Slabbert University of Stellenbosch - English Studies “Re-mark”: Damon Galgut’s Arctic Summer Critics of post-apartheid South African writing have identified dominant tropes that offer modes of understanding texts produced at specific intervals in this time. One of these tropes relates to works set in different locations and/or in different times and suggests an attempt to avoid, at least in part, the overt political realities of the here and now (Heyns, “Location and Locution Lecture” 2015). In this paper I focus on one such text, acknowledged as an example of this trend, Damon Galgut’s Arctic Summer (2014), a fictionalised biography of English author E. M. Forster’s life, named after Forster’s unfinished novel. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s notion of “the re-mark of belonging [which …] does not in itself belong” (quoted in Hill 65) and related genre and gender criticisms, I explore the ways in which Galgut’s narrative seems to transcend categorisations of genre which allows me to interpret the text as a ‘veiled’ form of writing the self. Furthermore, I read the author’s depiction of gender, especially queer, identities as a poignant source to reflect and remark on literary representations and debates about queer issues in South Africa’s past and present. Biography of Presenting Author Mathilda Slabbert lectures in the Department of English Studies at the University of Stellenbosch. Her research focuses on life writing, postcolonial ecocriticism, gender studies and revision literature. She has published articles in journals such as Literator and Acta Academica and contributed chapters to academic books, including: Locating Life Stories: Beyond East-West Binaries in (Auto)Biographical Studies; Britain and the Narration of Travel in the Nineteenth Century; and The Natures of Africa: Ecocriticism and Animal Studies in Contemporary Cultural Forms. She is co-author (with Dawid de Villiers) of David Kramer: a Biography. Doseline Wanjiru Kiguru University of Cape Town – English Language and literary awards: Expanding cultural boundaries This paper examines the centrality of language in African literary prizes. It starts by exploring the significance of the English language in major literary awards in Africa such as the Commonwealth Prize, Caine Prize for African Writing, Etisalat Prize or the South African Sunday Times Fiction Prize. The strict language requirements and the framing of the African writer from the lenses of the English language have historically contributed to literary exclusion for non-Anglophone 37 �writers, marginalising those who publish in other languages. However, recently established award institutions such as the Mabati-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature and the Tuzo ya Fasihi ya Ubunifu Kiswahili Literary Award are fashioned around language as a major influence in cultural production. The Commonwealth Short Story Prize has since 2016 also revised its language requirements to allow pieces written in Kiswahili, Bengali and Portuguese. This paper examines the efforts by award industries to expand the cultural and literary boundaries through language. Focusing on the Kiswahili literary awards, the paper analyses the effectiveness of this cultural and literary expansion by exploring the links between the award sectors and literary publications in other African languages. Biography of Presenting Author Doseline Kiguru is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of English, University of Cape Town. Her research focuses on literary awards and cultural production in Africa. Maria Geustyn University of Cape Town - English “High tide”: Reading the littoral in apartheid South African fiction The history of South Africa’s littoral zone is rooted in waves of colonialism and ideologies of segregation, with its high tide reflected in apartheid legislature. This paper offers an analysis of the representation of the littoral zone in two short stories and a novel: Nadine Gordimer’s “The Catch” (1952) and Zoë Wicomb’s “You can’t get lost in Cape Town” (1987), and Lewis Nkosi’s Mating Birds (1986), all set in an apartheid context. While scholarship on the littoral in South Africa is a novel field, existing studies primarily focus on reading the space through approaches in cultural studies (cf. Martin) or ecology (cf. Twidle, and Nixon). Few critics (such as Meg Samuelson) pay attention to the representation of the littoral zone in South African literary texts. Drawing on these criticisms I aim to establish a framework in which to read the littoral as troubling sites of segregation. This paper therefore consciously moves away from conventions that consider the littoral as liminal to argue that it is a multifaceted space, a tangled space, which complicates questions of categorization and belonging. Biography of Presenting Author Maria Geustyn is a doctoral student at the University of Cape Town. Her dissertation explores the literary history of the littoral zone in South Africa. Denise deCaires Narain University of Sussex - English Intimate proximities: narrating the ambiguous possibilities of sisterly solidarity-in-servitude in the work of Rhys, Antoni, Wicomb and Van Niekerk Recent postcolonial, queer and feminist scholarship has revisited notions of ‘sisterly solidarity’, attending to affect, empathy and other intimate registers of connection between women. Engaging with the tricky politics of postcolonial feminist empathies, this paper engages with differences between women on an intimate, domestic scale: relationships between ‘maids and 38 �madams’ - ‘the closest of strangers’ (Coullie 2004). I look at the connections, tensions, empathies and hostilities that mark relationships where the tedium of domestic labour is provided by one woman for another. I compare the ways that four texts narrate the complex antipathies and empathies of these necessarily intimate relationships. The selected texts, from the Caribbean and South Africa, where domestic work is one of the most likely ways women encounter each across class and race differences, provide compelling insights into the wider entanglements of race, class and sexual identities. Attending to the distinct ways that each text manipulates narrative and voice to convey the ambivalent proximities of maid/madam relationships, I argue that they offer fleeting if abrasive creolizing possibilities, signalling a more fractious idea of sisterly solidarity and prompting us to think more creatively about the stories we tell about feminism and ‘why these stories matter’ (Hemmings, 2011). Biography of Presenting Author Denise deCaires Narain is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Sussex. She teaches courses on postcolonial writing with an emphasis on the Caribbean and on women’s writing and postcolonial feminisms. She is currently working on a monograph on the relationship between ‘maids and madams’ in a selection of contemporary postcolonial women’s texts. She has published widely on Caribbean women’s writing, including two monographs, Caribbean Women’s Poetry: Making Style and Olive Senior in the ‘Writers and their Work’ series. Laura Zander EACLALS - Ludwig-Maximilians-University Postimperial Emancipation – Can the Empire write forward? Ashcroft and his colleagues with their seminal piece of postcolonial criticism The Empire Writes Back have implemented the postcolonial approach as counternarrative. Today, the object of resistance against Western domination reads as a pretext in this literary field. But if postcolonial literature is limited to the concepts of resistance, trauma or memory, it will be condemned to a literature of loss. The project of “writing back” inevitably results in a continuous “looking back” to the former colonizer instead of “looking forward” and more importantly “writing forward” towards a self-determined future – and literature. The variety of fresh and innovative literature postcolonial countries are creating focuses increasingly on agency and (post)postcolonial ethics instead of being limited to an heritage of loss. Perhaps, the authors of the former colonies have already surpassed the project of resistance in favour of a project of postimperial emancipation. In the spirit of the universal project of decolonization this paper will focus on postcolonial fiction as literature that appears not as a field created by Western domination and oppression, but as a one that benefits from a very unique mixed heritage – Western and non-Western literary tradition – resulting in an inheritance of gain, instead of loss. Biography of Presenting Author Laura is a lecturer at the English Department and a research assistant at the faculty of law at LMU in Munich. She is currently working on her Ph.D. thesis. Her broader research interests include postcolonial theory, apartheid and postapartheid South African literature, and Caribbean literatures. Laura is the Postgraduate Representative at EACLALS and will host the 2016 Postcolonial Narrations conference in Munich. 39 �Jogamaya Bayer Indepedent Scholar Mafika Gwala: Writer as a Cultural Worker This paper concentrates on Mafika Gwala’s reflections about writers and intellectuals’ role in the formation of national culture. It analyses their significance in the on-going discourse, which had actually begun before Frantz Fanon’s entry into it. Hannah Arendt points to George Sorel’s influence on Fanon; Sorel’s famous texts on violence in pre-war France constitute an important part of this discourse, these texts exclude intellectuals from the decisive confrontation between the proletariat and bourgeoisie. Gwala insists that, while exploring indigenous cultural roots, intellectuals and writers need to acknowledge their responsibility in the implementation of radical change in power relationships and to represent literature revealing the unattractive, ugly truth of the active present. Gwala’s inheritance of Fanon’s ideology becomes traceable when we regard Fanon’s analysis of a colonised writer’s three developmental phases. The writer first experiences assimilation by the occupant’s culture, then he evokes the memory of his autochthonous culture and tradition and lastly, decides to write to shake the people from lethargy and inspire them to fight for their rights. Biography of Presenting Author Jogamaya Bayer is an independent scholar. She is the author of Transgressing Boundaries: Essays on Postcolonial Literature (2013). Her publications include “Going Away/Coming Home: Searching for a Fixed Point in Postcolonial Indian Writing,” in Experiences of freedom in postcolonial literatures and cultures, ed. Annalisa Oboe & Shaul Bassi (New York: Routledge, 2011). Danson Sylvester Kahyana Makerere University – Literature Diasporic Identities and Authorial Perspectives in Noni Jabavu’s Drawn in Colour (1960) In 1955 Noni Jabavu (author of The Ochre People) spent some time with her sister in colonial Uganda. She wrote a book – Drawn in Colour: African Contrasts – that she describes as “a personal account of an individual African’s experiences and impressions of the differences between East and South Africa in their contact with Westernization”. In the book, Jabavu sees Uganda through supposedly South African eyes for while she travels to Uganda and writes the book as a South African, she lives in England. This raises a number of intriguing questions: in what ways are the differences Jabavu sees between Uganda and South Africa informed by her diasporic identity as a South African living in a Western metropolis? How is her portrayal of Uganda similar to or distinct from Western portrayals of the country, for instance Ruth Fisher’s On the Borders of Pygmy Land? 40 �What’s her intended readership and how does it inform her book? This paper is located within the emerging field of scholarship that’s interested in the cosmopolitanism/travels of Africans within Africa. Its objective is to examine the complex ways in which Jabavu’s identity as a diasporic African influences the kind of picture she draws of Uganda. Biography of Presenting Author Danson S. Kahyana teaches in the Literature Department at Makerere University. He holds a Ph.D. in English from Stellenbosch University and Masters of Arts in Literature, a Postgraduate Diploma in Education and a Bachelor of Arts from Makerere University. Laura A. Pearson University of Leeds - English Transcultural Graphic Fiction and Unorthodox Manga I begin with a question drawn from the present provocation for papers: “how do we guard against the triumphalism of English?” (ACLALS cfp 2016). The argument against the hegemony of the written word—possibly ignoring also the idea of language’s own “graphicness”—needs perhaps to be a starting point for histories of graphic fiction. Indeed, “the idea of world literature in an unequal world” takes on a different dimension if we consider the multimodal and often multi-authored medium of the sequential arts and graphic fiction and where that history takes us. A short review of Postcolonial Comics: Texts, Events, Identities (2015) reads, “this volume introduces a timely intervention within current comic-book-area studies that remain firmly situated within the ‘U.S.-European and Japanese manga paradigms’ and their reading publics”. My paper picks up this thread of “intervention” through readings of two contemporary graphic fictions by two Canadian, West coast-based transcultural authors: Red: A Haida Manga (2009) by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas and Yōkaiden Vols. 1&2 (2009) by Nina Matsumoto. Both of these artists, I argue, create provocative re-presentations of transcultural, visual-oral manga forms that disrupt complex and orthodox “U.S.-European and Japanese manga paradigms” and “Canadian,” place-based, literary-cultural contexts. Biography of Presenting Author Laura A. Pearson is currently completing her Ph.D. research in the School of English at the University of Leeds, UK. Her doctoral project, funded by the School of English and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, combines aspects of zoocriticism—the study of animals, literature, and (trans)culture—and comics studies, focusing on mediations of multispecies and nature-culture relationships in contemporary graphic fictions. Silvia Anastasijevic Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main - Department of New Anglophone Literatures and Cultures Inside/Outside the Joke: Forms of Exclusion and Inclusion in Transcultural Humor This paper explores the forms of postcolonial exclusion and inclusion in the context of transcultural humor in contemporary popular culture. Belonging to a community and being able 41 �to understand a joke often goes hand in hand, as this means one is on the "inside" of the joke. But including some implies excluding others, as comedian Naveed Mahbub suggests in his TEDxtalk on the utilization of humor in communication: "There is no such thing as victimless comedy". However, these networks of humor are not simply defined by national confines as long used terms such as British humor suggest. Rather, humor exists transculturally, based on spheres of identification such as profession, upbringing, class, personal history and more. Accordingly, one person is able to access varying kinds of humor. The primary material will be drawn from contemporary film recordings of popular comedians in Canada and the US with the main focus on Russell Peters, a Canadian comedian with Indian roots, and Trevor Noah, a South African born comedian and host of the Daily Show in the US. Biography of Presenting Author Silvia Anastasijevic is a Ph.D. student at the Department of New Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Her dissertation is titled "Transcultural Humorscapes in Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media: Humorous Representation and Communication in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States of America". Liani Lochner Université Laval - Département des littératures Zoë Wicomb: Writing, the Body, and the Nation Like Wicomb’s October, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions feature daughters whose bodies function as sites of negation and corporal punishment and tyrannical fathers whose actions are marked by the internalization of colonial discourse and cultural disavowal. The latter two novels are often read allegorically, as Andrade’s work on the parallels between “familial structures and the national imaginary” shows. Kambili’s and Nyasha’s embodied coming-of-age narratives are thus interpreted as reflective of a troubled Nigerian or Zimbabwean postcolonial national identity. October, however, complicates any straightforward mapping of the personal onto the political by staging a connection between writing and reproduction, narrative and the body. Mercia’s abortive attempts at writing her memoir are equated with her ostensible bodily failings as an adult, notably her childlessness. In its constant interruptions into the reader’s experience of the narrated world, I argue in this paper, Wicomb’s novel insists on readerly hospitality, revealing the self that writes and the self that reads not as predetermined essences, but as a set of historically situated possibilities brought to life, or birthed, by the acts/events of writing and reading. October thus complicates and offers fresh perspectives on the reception of these novels as national allegories. Biography of Presenting Author Liani Lochner is Assistant Professor of Anglophone Postcolonial Literature at Université Laval, Québec, Canada. Educated in South Africa and England, her research interests are in literary and theoretical refutations of contemporary networks of power, and she has published related essays on the works of Adiga, Coetzee, Rushdie, and Ishiguro. Her current project is a monograph on the life and writing of Zoë Wicomb. 42 �Shalini Nadaswaran University Malaya - English Department Wayde Compton’s The Outer Harbour and “The Creaking of the Word”. Literary Inclusions, Exclusions and Contradictions: Troubling Subversions of the ‘Child’ in African Literature This paper will discuss the rise of African children’s literature as key to African scholarly attention but also juxtaposes and explores how literary perceptions created within children’s psyche or imagination by African children’s literature tend to serve aesthetic purposes, creating tensions and contradictions to the representations of the figure of the child seen in works of African young adult and adult fiction. There is a troubling inconsistency between the fictional and scholarly work intent on representing or dismantling former stereotypes in African children’s literature with the continuous misrepresentation of conditions and social relations in Africa. An analysis of Abidemi Sanusi’s Eyo (2009) and Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: The True Story of a Child Soldier (2008) shows us the troubling subversion of the figure of the child in Africa by exploring issues of the commoditization of children through trafficking and children as victims of war. This paper will then discuss the politics of contemporary childhood in Africa vis-a-vis contemporary African children’s literature. Biography of Presenting Author Shalini Nadaswaran is a Senior Lecturer at the English Department, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. She received her Ph.D. from the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Her research interest examines the intersecting and evolving trends in African literature in local and global spaces. Heather Snell University of Winnipeg - English “I Am Also Having Mother Once, and She Is Loving Me”: Postcolonialism, Affect, and the Child in Uzodinma Iweala’s and Cary Fukunaga’s Beasts of No Nation Taking Uzodinma Iweala’s 2005 novel Beasts of No Nation and Cary Fukunaga’s 2015 film adaptation of the same title as a case study, I address the problem of representation as it pertains to the figure of the African child soldier. Images of and narratives about this figure function as therapeutic tools and fetishized objects for the benefit of the Westernized audiences to which many of them are directed. How do we, then, read the African child soldier as it circulates globally, oftentimes as a highly sentimentalized and culturally Othered good? Iweala’s novel has divided scholars in the field of postcolonial studies, frustrating some and provoking critical acclaim from others, suggesting that Beasts of No Nation is a particularly fraught engagement with the figure of the African child soldier. Engaging both negative and affirmative 43 �criticisms of the novel and its revisioning at the hands of Fukunaga, I explore the deeply ideological translation of the novel into film, arguing that the latter radically alters the politics of the former, particularly in its revision of the final scene. In the process, it raises questions about the affective value the child soldier accrues at a time when postcolonial trafficking in images of lost childhood has become common. Biography of Presenting Author Heather Snell is Associate Professor at the University of Winnipeg, where she teaches and researches in the fields of postcolonial cultural studies and young people’s texts and cultures. She is currently writing a monograph entitled Reading Urban Poverty: Children and Youth, Global Visual Culture, and Postcolonial Counter-Imaginaries. Dr. Bidisha Banerjee The Hong Kong Institute of Education - Literature and Cultural Studies “No breasts. Two dry scars…”: The Metaphor of Rape and Postcolonial Trauma in Mahasweta Devi’s “Behind the Bodice” In her story “Choli ke Pichhe” (“Behind the Bodice”) Mahasweta Devi uses the concept metaphor of the breast to critique gender oppression and police violence in postcolonial India. It is the story of Gangor, a Dalit woman who is photographed by Upin Puri, a freelance photojournalist. After the photos are circulated, Gangor is gang-raped by the police, her breasts hacked off, and she becomes a prostitute. Dalit women are the lowest of the low in the hierarchies of caste, class and gender in India. Gayatri Spivak has suggested, in Devi’s fiction, “Empire” and “Nation” are indistinguishable for the subaltern woman (Spivak 1993, 78). I will discuss rape in Devi’s story and argue that Devi uses the trauma of Gangor’s rape to critique patriarchy as well as the trauma of internal colonization perpetrated by the ruling elite in the postcolonial era. I will also argue that the very graphic nature of the descriptions of the woman’s body after the rape, and the complete absence of any shame and humiliation on Gangor’s part, forbids the subsuming of women’s exploitation and violence under issues of decolonization, even while the resonance of rape calls attention to the trauma of internal colonization and postcoloniality’s exclusions. Biography of Presenting Author Dr. Bidisha Banerjee is Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies and Director of the Centre for Popular Culture in the Humanities at The Hong Kong Institute of Education. Her research interests include South Asian diasporic fiction and film, as well as visual culture and urban studies, particularly the Hong Kong cityscape. Her work on South Asian diasporic fiction and film has appeared in journals like Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Asian Cinema and Postcolonial Text. Her current book project attempts to study the narrated image in diasporic literature which functions as a photographic metaphor to enhance the themes of the literary text. Dr. Michael A. Bucknor University of the West Indies, Mona Campus - Literatures in English 44 �Horizons of Desire: Altered States of Conception in Caribbean Queer Speculative Fiction Two Caribbean writers of speculative fiction – Jamaican Marlon James in his magic realist novel, John Crow’s Devil, and Guyanese Mark McWatt’s science fiction story, “The Visitor” in Suspended Sentences – have demonstrated both the possibilities in speculative fiction for constructing altered worlds and for articulating altered states of consciousness. As Wendy Knepper has pointed out, the twin issues of “sexual violence and homophobia” still haunt the Caribbean and the “richly experimental and dissident approach” of speculative fiction helps to contest identity structures of normativity and exclusion. Though Knepper, like other critics, still fixates on the paradigm of normalcy against which queer conceptualizing rails, my reading of James and McWatt would like to build on her concept of the “erotic imaginary” in speculative fiction as “virtual history” to show how this genre maps altered states of metaphysical conception in the material. As fictions of social constructivism, fluid identities and progressive ideologies that create the world as already unorthodox, these stories mine the body as a site of hyper-violence, disease, and sexual desire as well as a source of altered states of consciousness in conceptions of gender and sexuality. Biography of Presenting Author Dr. Michael A. Bucknor is a Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor, Head of the Department of Literatures in English, the Public Orator of the Mona Campus, UWI and the immediate past Chair of ACLALS. He is also co-editor with Alison Donnell of The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, carries out research on Austin Clarke, Caribbean-Canadian writing, postcolonial literatures and theory, diaspora studies, masculinities and popular culture. He is a Senior Editor of Journal of West Indian Literature and sits on the editorial advisory boards of Caribbean Quarterly and Lucayos. Pauline Kazembe University of Zimbabwe - English and Media Studies Zimbabwean female migrants and sexuality: Discoursing the postcolonial and identity This study draws attention to Zimbabwean author Tracy Kadungure’s Tanaka Chronicles: Sexual Awakening (2014), a novel about Tanaka, a young Zimbabwean girl in the United Kingdom, her sexual awakening and her ‘voyage into womanhood’. The study makes connections between migration, sexuality, female identity and the postcolonial condition. Studies commonly reveal how sexuality has often been used to fragment and alienate African female identities (Tamale: 2011). Basing on these revelations the study analyses literary representations of Zimbabwean female migrants’ sexual practices and how they are used to create new ways of being. This analysis will be achieved through the recognition that sexuality and gender are not free from social construction hence; both are at the centre of maintaining gender relations as well as individual or collective identities in every society. Drawing on ‘movement’ as one of the major foundations of the postcolonial, and the postcolonial theory’s conviction that it is both possible and necessary to break with tradition and institute absolutely new ways of living and thinking (Lyotard: 1992), the study explores how individuals specifically Zimbabwean women, change through their intercultural associations. The study further assesses the extent to which these changes reflect new Zimbabwean female identities. Biography of Presenting Author 45 �Pauline Kazembe is a lecturer and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and Media Studies at the University of Zimbabwe. Pauline’s research interests are in literature and gender related issues, sexualities and women’s studies, popular culture and literature. Martina Kopf University of Vienna Who is giving, who is taking? Stories of aid floating between Africa and Europe In one of her popular writings about missionary life in Central Africa in the 1930s, Mabel Shaw tells a story about Bemba schoolgirls knitting socks for poor English children on Giving Day. In 2012 the Norwegian Students’ and Academics’ International Assistance Fund produces the video clip ‘Africa for Norway’, featuring a fictive aid campaign that reverses the commonly associated roles of ‘giving’ and ‘receiving’. In this paper I understand these two versions as two poles in a continuum of cultural representations of aid discourses migrating between Africa and Europe from the colonial past to the present. What lies in between these two versions – if we understand this ‘in between’ not so much as a temporal space, but as a symbolic space of shifting meanings and truths concerning both factual and symbolic dimensions of ‘giving’ and ‘taking’ between Africa and Europe? To address this question I draw on the movie Hyènes (1992) by the Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambety. Reading his adaptation of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play The Visit as a philosophical reflection on truths and fictions of giving and taking, I will show how the movie opens an alternative perspective on aid discourses and relations in global orders of exchange. Biography of Presenting Author Martina Kopf is a lecturer in African Literature and in Cultural Development Studies at the University of Vienna. She has published articles and books and edited journals on development discourse in colonial and post-colonial fiction and narrative; on trauma and the ethics of representation and on representations of gender and sexuality in African writing. Barrington Marais University of Zululand - English Illuminating the Interstice: Masculinity, Mothering and the Moffie in Rayda Jacobs’s Confessions of a Gambler This article offers an analysis of the representations of queer Coloured masculinities through the maternal gaze in Rayda Jacobs’s 2003 novel entitled Confessions of a Gambler. The article dissects the poignant picture that Jacobs paints of arguably marginal identities as they exist at the intersection of race and religion, as well as gender identity and sexual identity. The novel’s action takes place within a traditional Cape Muslim community and uses the main protagonist’s vice of gambling and her son’s sexuality as tools to illuminate the interstitial and perilous social space occupied by women and gay men in South African Muslim society. Culture and tradition are both honoured and upheld as well as subverted in Jacobs’s work. Thus, beyond this text’s literary value it also acts as a tool of social commentary which problematizes hegemonic representations 46 �of gender and sexuality within Islam by giving voice to women and gay men; identity categories which remain largely voiceless in the dominant representations of monotheistic religions. Biography of Presenting Author Barrington Marais is a lecturer in English Studies at the University of Zululand. Catherine Makhumula Stellenbosch University - Drama Intermediality in 21st Century African Literature and Performance The ubiquity of media and its related technologies in African literature and performance cannot be overemphasized. Many African theatre scholars are still questioning whether this age of new media will be the end of literature and other live performance genres. Others have gone further to suggest ways in which literature and performances could evolve to stay competitive in the market place. Key publications on African literature and performance have fortified this viewpoint, with their discussions still emphasizing the boundaries between genres, disciplines, and categories in African theatre academic discourse. This in turn, has reinforced the myth of purity in African literature and performance practice. However, while scholarship has continued to reinforce unchallenged notions of medium specificity, contemporary practice and literature is increasingly experimenting with the media and media technologies. The paper argues for the need for a dialectic relationship between practice and scholarship as a way of re-defining its scope and producing new knowledge. The paper will utilise examples of literature and performances from South Africa and Malawi to prove the claim. Biography of Presenting Author Catherine Makhumula is currently enrolled as a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Drama at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. She holds an MA in International Performance Research from the University of Warwick and the University of Amsterdam. Catherine is also a lecturer in theatre Arts at the University of Malawi. Tina Steiner Stellenbosch University - English Defamiliarizing the Local: Reading Hawa J. Golakai’s The Lazarus Effect (2011) and The Score (2015) In a trajectory similar to author H. J. Golakai, the protagonist and principal investigator of the crime thrillers The Lazarus Effect and The Score, Voinjama “Vee” Johnson, left her native Liberia during the unrest leading up to the civil war and eventually finds herself in Cape Town. This paper argues that both novels defamiliarize the social landscape of South Africa by employing various narrative devices to foreground the perspective of the outsider. The constraints of the genre create a framework within which Golokai can offer a subtle though at times searingly critical commentary on South African society. Through an analysis of some of the narrative strategies of the texts which include the use of Pidgin English, stereotyping and prejudice, as well as tones of 47 �irony, sarcasm and humour, this paper discusses Golokai’s unique contribution to South African crime writing. Biography of Presenting Author Tina Steiner teaches in the English Department at Stellenbosch University. Her research areas comprise Eastern and Southern African Literature, Indian Ocean Studies, Translation and Migration Studies. Her monograph Translated People, Translated Texts: Language and Migration in Contemporary African Fiction was published in 2009; she is working on another book project. Prof. Dr. Walter Goebel University of Stuttgart, Germany - English and American Studies V. S. Naipaul's Autobiographical Gestures and Fragments Autobiography and Enlightenment have generally dovetailed in the ‘West’. Kant’s famous definition of the Enlightenment is little more than a clarion call to men to wield their own autobiographies and the foremost literary genre of the Western world, the novel, was formed on an (auto-)biographical model. Individualism, emancipation, imperialism and narcissism have inspired one another in history of the ‘West’, in colonialism and postcolonialism. In the works of V. S. Naipaul, the autobiographical formula of autonomous individualism is deconstructed, played with and also constructively used to present lives of experienced fragmentation and dissociation. Is it a gain or a loss – or both – that Naipaul questions autobiographical gestures of selfaggrandizement and offers life-fragments and alternative lives in his novels as much as in his inconclusive autobiographical texts? Doesn’t a tolerant multi-polar world of necessity preclude autobiographical closure? Or is this a neo-liberal dream which glosses over the tragedy of experienced coercion, homelessness and alienation? Biography of Presenting Author Walter Goebel is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Stuttgart. He has published books and essays in the fields of Postcolonial Studies, African American Literature and the history of the novel. He has co-edited three volumes on postcolonial literature and theory with Routledge. Murari Prasad D.S. College, Katihar - English Indian Diasporic Formations in Guyana: Reading Coolie Woman This paper deals with Gaiutra Bahadur’s recently published non-fiction narrative, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (2013). As a sequel to the end of slavery in the 1830s, the system of indenture, though equally exploitative, served as the source of voluntary migrant labour to manage the plantation economies in far-flung British colonies. In reconstructing the traumatic experience of her great-grandmother as an indentured worker uprooted from her homeland in 1903, Bahadur has meticulously researched archival sources from which we can extrapolate the adaptive persistence of nearly 240,000 Indians who migrated to Guyana between 1838 and 1917 48 �and became the vanguard of the Indian diaspora there. I propose to apply William Saffron’s (1991:83-84) six-point model laying down the features of diaspora to Bahadur’s empirical depiction and gendered articulations of the indentured Indian women, braving brutalities and, at the same time, recreating a cultural dynamic in the domestic sphere as well as shaping an incipient home in an alien regime. This paper will also probe the culturally reflexive data excavated by Bahadur to postulate that the Indian female immigrants, despite remaining fettered and embattled, contributed to family making and negotiated creolized change for cultural reproduction conducive to a distinct diasporic formation. Biography of Presenting Author Murari Prasad teaches English at D.S. College, Katihar , India. He has published a string of papers on Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy, Amitav Ghosh and Kiran Desai as well as edited critical anthologies on A Suitable Boy and The Shadow Lines, and has also co-edited a volume on the postRushdie fiction. Edward Powell Independent Scholar Where to now? The use of utopia after apartheid in Nadine Gordimer’s No Time like the Present In No Time like the Present, Nadine Gordimer looked back over the years following apartheid’s political demise, addressing how the utopian aspirations of apartheid’s opponents remained unrealised. The novel ends by affirming how these aspirations remain crucial to sustaining the fight against social injustice, even in the post-apartheid present. But what exactly is this a fight for? Gordimer appears to present a microcosmic plan of a utopian South Africa in the Suburb, whose inhabitants live in relative racial equality, sexual freedom, and communal harmony. Yet as a utopian enclave within an unequal society, the Suburb recalls Gordimer’s earlier portraits – in Burger’s Daughter and July’s People – of the Burger and Smales households, both of which illustrate the limitations of how communists and liberals respectively had envisaged a non-racial South Africa. Moreover, Gordimer generally avoided trying to imagine a fully-realised, allencompassing South African utopia, in favour of simply identifying elements of the present that could still give rise to a better future. This paper considers whether the Suburb represents Gordimer’s own utopian vision for South Africa, and how it differs to utopian spaces portrayed in her earlier writing, especially with respect to how this enclave relates to wider society. Biography of Presenting Author Edward Powell received his doctorate in 2015 from the University of Leeds. His thesis addressed how postcolonial thought figures the consciousness and intentions of the principal beneficiaries of today’s uneven global distribution of power. His more recent work engages with the logic of utopian thought, including within postcolonial studies. Gibson Ncube Stellenbosch University - Modern Foreign Languages 49 �(Re)framing home, and belonging in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names In this paper, I examine the notions of home and belonging in Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel We Need New Names through theoretical lens of nostalgia, migration and homemaking, proposed by Svetlana Boym. My central argument is that Bulawayo’s protagonist is caught in a fluid fault line in her attempt to create a self-identity and understand her relationship to the world. Upon migration to the USA, nostalgia allows the protagonist to deliberate on how in spite of cherishing her country of origin, the untenable prevailing there prevents her from returning. Simultaneously, although America offers vast educational and financial opportunities, she has to contend with racial stereotyping and profiling. Her existence persists in a liminal space in which she is perpetually renegotiating, not just her identity, but also her national belonging. I argue, as Toivanen, that “mobility becomes relevant: mobility enables encounters whereby certain prevailing positions become defined as abject” (2015: 15). As such, spatiotemporal displacement allows the protagonist to reframe and rethink diverse ideas about home and belonging in her endeavour to make sense of her being in a world that increasingly borders on precarity. Biography of Presenting Author Gibson Ncube is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and his research interest is in gender and queer studies, migration and the representation of power in African cultural imaginations. Israel Meriomame Wekpe University of Leeds - School of English/Workshop Theatre Owens Patricia Eromosele University of Benin - Department Of Theatre Arts and Mass Communication Ad/Dressing Narratives of (Dis)Connections in Nigerian Theatre Dressing in the theatre necessarily implies the essence and imperative of costume in telling a story or giving meaning to a performance. Thus, costume offers a prism of interpretation to the concept of a play production. Taking into consideration this theatrical element, the paper critically examines how costume substantiates ethnic diversity. The further explores how costume presents as a cultural marker, identifier and how it “separates” one group from another while probably creating tensions, conflicts and suspicions. Moreover, the paper recognises the multi-ethnic make-up of Nigeria and observes how costume is obviously appropriated in certain national platforms as socio-political tools of identity which at times may present as visual narratives that un/surreptitiously enable inclusions or encourages exclusions. Admittedly, the paper underscores, via the analysis of selected texts and performances, these attributes of costumes. The thrust of the paper is further extended when it juxtaposes how some texts and performances, which border as being national in outlook, have un/knowingly tended to present costume as a political tool of dis/integration. However, the paper submits and concludes that aside presenting its aesthetic imperative, costume definitely ad/dresses issues of Nigeria’s ethnocultural diversities and realities. Biography of Presenting Author 50 �Owens Patricia Eromosele is a theatre practitioner. Owens is currently a lecturer with the Department of Theatre Arts, University of Benin, Nigeria. Her research interests include Benin indigenous performance practices and contemporary appreciation of traditional costumes in Nigeria. She is a member of WAACLALS. Emma Laubscher Rhodes University - English “Madness slunk in through a chink in History”: the familiar and the insensible in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things Through the fictional Ipe family, Arundhati Roy dramatises history’s power to delimit the possibilities of relation in determining “who should be loved and how. And how much” (31). By illustrating the historical locatedness of the family, Roy renders visible the processes of exclusion that are necessitated by spaces of familiarity. Both history and the family are encoded by forces which act to construct a space of legibility in opposition to the existence of the unfamiliar. In the novel the unknowability of the unfamiliar is realised in the presence of ‘madness’. Sensible history is linked to the normative family and madness is reserved for when family members distort their roles and disturb the narrative of legible history. The neatness of the familiar/Other dichotomy is belied by the excessive realities of the novel’s incestuous, interracial and gender bending relationships. This essay attempts to examine the ways in which Roy’s characters unsettle the exclusionary production of both history and family by loving across the boundaries of the sensible, thereby introducing madness into the familiar. By destabilising familial politics through transgressive subjectivities, the novel gestures towards the potential of radical acts of love to allow for a history with room for the unfamiliar. Biography of Presenting Author Emma Laubscher is a student at Rhodes University currently writing her Master’s degree on Madness in the Postcolonial Family. Particular areas of academic interest include the fraught and fruitful relationship between history and literature, particularly in regard to the possibilities literature affords us to (re)imagine our pasts and futures. Katja Sarkowsky GAPS - English Department, Muenster University Writing lives, writing citizenship(s): Negotiating indigenous citizenship in Indigenous North American autobiographies In Domestic Subjects, Piatote investigates the intertwinement of Native American literature with law and with the conceptualization of ‘nation’ and 'citizenship'. The relationship between citizenship and literature has been intensely debated; Chariandy argues that “we narrate not only our identities and practices as citizens, but also citizenship itself in ways that inevitably reflect our sidedness and desires”, thus understanding the writing of citizenship as a form of critical discursive intervention. Taking up one of Piatote’s basic premises, this contribution looks at Indigenous autobiography in light of debates over tribal nationalism as well as the ongoing 51 �differentiation of ‘citizenship’ in transnational and postcolonial constellations. It argues that Indigenous autobiographies in North America tend to explore competing notions of national and tribal national citizenship and can be read as critical interventions into citizenship debates more generally. Indigenous autobiographies thus draw out the conceptual and narrative complexities of citizenship between formal membership and affective belonging that have complicated indigenous identification in settler-colonial nation states. Biography of Presenting Author Katja Sarkowsky is Chair of American Studies at Muenster University, Germany. She has published widely on Native American/First Nations' literatures, autobiography/life writing, and comparative ethnic studies in North America. She is currently president of the Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies (Gesellschaft für Anglophone Postkoloniale Studien, GAPS, formerly known as ASNEL) and editor-in-chief of the Zeitschrift für Kanadastudien (Journal of Canadian Studies). Uhuru Portia Phalafala University of Cape Town - English Department Time is “NOW”: Space-time conceptions in Keorapetse Kgositsile's poetry This paper investigates how Keorapetse Kgositsile’s poetic dismantles modernity’s episteme through mythified language whose concept metaphors challenge modernity’s monumentalised time, and reconfigures space. A keen awareness of the relationship between discourse, knowledge, and power has postured Kgositsile suspicious of the English language, and particularly the discursive practice of representation. As such, his conception of time and space in his poetry is informed by cultural and political commitments undergirded by a reverence of land, indigenous languages, and memory. The concepts of “memory” and “desire” function in tandem of one another in his poetry to challenge modernity’s linear and chronological time. Mazisi Kunene helps elucidate African philosophies of time and space as articulated in Kgositsile’s poetry, in which the latter uses mythified language, exemplified by his concept metaphors of the “NOW”, “future memory” and “coil of time”. Here the discipline of quantum physics and its theories on time and space find contiguities with those of African philosophy as expressed by Kunene, and as deployed in Kgositsile’s poetry. These congruities show how African philosophies of time and space predate those of quantum physicsand point to an epistemology that was lost through modernity and capitalism’s violence. Biography of Presenting Author Uhuru Phalafala is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Cape Town. Frank Schulze-Engler Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany - Institute for English and American Studies Afrasia at War: Transregional Imaginaries Beyond the Indian Ocean In recent years, classical notions of so-called ‘postcolonial’ literatures being defined through their relationship with ‘Europe or the West’ have increasingly been challenged by a renewed interest in literary relations among African, Asian, Latin American or Caribbean literatures. It is in this 52 �context that Indian Ocean Studies has emerged as a major focus point for explorations of transregional South-South relations. Yet African-Asian literary interactions in a globalized world are arguably too dynamic and complex to be contained within an Indian Ocean framework. Taking its cue from Ali Mazrui’s and Seifudein Adem’s Afrasia and recent research on AfricanAsian interactions, my paper will explore fictional and documentary accounts of African soldiers in Asia (including Biyi Bandele’s Burma Boy) and argue that the transregional imaginaries to be encountered in theses texts are not confined to historical relations across the Indian Ocean, but are intricately tied to new ‘Afrasian’ interactions, experiences and conflicts. Biography of Presenting Author Frank Schulze-Engler is professor of New Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the Institute for English and American Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt. He has published widely on African, Asian and Indigenous literature, comparative perspectives on the New Literatures in English, Indian Ocean Studies, postcolonial Europe, postcolonial theory, and transculturality in a world of globalized modernity. He is currently joint project leader of the research project “Africa’s Asian Options” (AFRASO) at Frankfurt University. Sindiswa Busuku-Mathese Stellenbosch University - English Monsters, Machines and Mayhem: the indigenous visions bleeding through the looking glass of South African Speculative Fiction Speculative, from the Latin root speculum “mirror” and the verb specere “to look at”. Speculative Fiction, as an exploratory mode, as an imaginative nexus, provides a conceptual framework for the uneasy entanglements of South Africa’s (protracted) post-transitional moment. I explore Charlie Human’s Apocalypse Now Now (2013) as an example of how Speculative Fiction experiments with a South African aesthetic concerned with rethinking hybridity, multiculturalism and indigeneity within the postcolony. Currently, a science fictioncentred euphoria has emerged within South Africa, what is striking is the scant appreciation of the ways in which Sci-Fi modes entangle with African folklore, mythology and indigenous spiritual and sacred networks. My readings of these networks are informed by Achille Mbembe’s principle of “simultaneous multiplicities”, as this application recognizes the intrinsic embeddedness of autochthonous modes of thought in the South/African imaginary. Apocalypse Now Now invites us to gaze into the strange and familiar South African visions, mythological creatures and African spiritualities, which now bleed through the literary looking glass. Human’s text proves valuable, as it counteracts the Sci-Fi disequilibrium, insofar as its fictional uses contribute to a nuanced critique of ‘South Africanness’ and the ontological boundaries to be rethought, revised and reinvented in light of indigenous specificities. Biography of Presenting Author Sindiswa Busuku-Mathese is a Doctoral candidate at Stellenbosch University. She is currently researching the concept and application of what could loosely be termed ‘neo-Gothic’ artistic modalities in selected examples of contemporary South African written, visual and sculptural ‘texts’. 53 �Sheunesu Mandizvidza University of Zimbabwe - English Tanaka Chidora University of Zimbabwe - English Voices from the margins: An analysis of the ecological and feminine in Bones Critical discourse on Chenjerai Hove’s Bones has tended to be dominated by land, politics and race while pushing to the margins ecological approaches that would add value not only to Zimbabwean livelihoods but to a comprehensive reading of the text. At a time when the land discourse has entered its most defining moments in Zimbabwean historiography, issues dealing with nature should come to the fore, not only because they invariably dwell on sustainability concerns, but because they represent an alternative way of perceiving and challenging the dominant hegemony. This paper thus attempts to reposition land issues by critically (re)reading Bones using ecofeminism which stresses on the link between the struggles for ecological survival to the project of women liberation (Wall, 1993). Ecofeministically speaking, such an approach rests on the premise that ecology, land and women find their very existence threatened in both colonial and independent Zimbabwe by both the white and black man and would thus need a reengagement with these forces in order to survive. An ecofeminist reading of Bones gives voice to victims of oppression – women and nature – and frees criticism of literature in Zimbabwe from an obsession with discourses that reinforce the existing nationalist hegemony. Biography of Presenting Author Sheunesu Mandizvidza is a lecturer in the Department of English, University of Zimbabwe. His research interests are land issues, literature and land, African literature and also African-American literature. Jyothirmai Dakkumalla Adikavi Nannaya University - English Dalit women’s struggle for education: analysis of secret short stories of Subhadra, Shyamala and Vinodini At the dawn of independence, majority of Dalits hardly dreamt of education in India. Segregated and suppressed for ages by the Hindu Brahminical Tradition and Colonialism in the last two centuries, ‘Dalits’ under leadership of Phule and Ambedkar marched towards emancipation. Their efforts proved fruitful when the constitution opened avenues for education. However, the patriarchal familial structures among Dalit communities privileged ‘Dalit men’ in garnering the fruits of education. Dalit women who faced triple oppression of gender, caste and poverty had to wage a battle for education. This paper traces the uncompromising struggle of Dalit women for education as portrayed in three translated Telugu short stories: “Raw Wound,” “A Bloody Mess in the Bathroom,” and “The Parable of the Lost Daughter: Luke 15: 11-32” written by Subhadra, Shyamala and Vinodini respectively. These are discussed to narrate the long journey of the Dalit women’s struggle for education from being victims of exploitation in rural India, the struggle to gain education in welfare hostels, and finally the realization that the stigma of caste remains. 54 �They expose the stigmatizing and exploitation of Dalits in the name of superstitious religious practices while unfolding their struggle for education. Biography of Presenting Author Jyothirmai Dakkumalla, Assistant Professor in the department of English at Adikavi Nannaya University, and 15 years of teaching experience in UG/PG levels. Areas of interest are literary criticism, contemporary theory, feminism/feminist literary criticism, poetry, and fiction. Besides teaching English literature, Dakkumalla is interested in reading 'Telugu/Dalit Literature' in the vernacular and translation, and writes articles on the necessity of awareness in the areas of feminism/activism. Rosemary Chikafa-Chipiro University of Zimbabwe - English Inclusion or Exclusion: An African(a) Womanist reading of Sembene's Faat Kine Sembene has been hailed not only as the father of African cinema but as a champion for the cause of African womanhood in his works (Murphy, 2000; Pfaff). His films are read as postcolonial subversions of Western images of African life, and African women in particular. Sembene asserted that the fate of African women is closely linked to cultural, political and economic issues (Murphy, 2000). In essence Sembene’s ‘feminist’ sensibilities sought to include African women in spaces where they were previously excluded. In Faat Kine Sembene negotiates the need for African women’s inclusion in the dynamics of post-independent Africa through Kine and her friends. However, the paper argues that Sembene’s ‘feminist’ sensibility may not in itself fully accomplish the inclusion of African women. Using textual analysis and an Africana womanist theoretical framework, his mediations of African women’s cause in Faat Kine may well prove inclusion and exclusion as ambiguous. This is so because he is part of the patriarchy that is responsible for his women’s demise. Most importantly, African(a) womanist theory itself is used as a theoretical conception that is resistant to exclusionary constructions of Western feminism. Biography of Presenting Author I am a lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe in the Department of English. I am currently studying towards a D.Phil in Film. Michael (Cawood) Green Northumbria University - English and Creative Writing Ghosting Through: Migrancy and Memorialisation Ghosting Through is a creative/critical paper that explores the implications for the postcolonial of what John Wylie calls a ‘spectral geography’. ‘Spectrality’ Wylie defines as ‘the unsettling of self, the haunting taking-place of place’; it ‘demands new, themselves haunted ways of writing about place, memory and self’. The critical self-reflexivity implicit in such a perspective is brought to bear on a recent migrant to the UK attempting to negotiate ideas of Africanness and Englishness through the rewriting of places linked by a statue in a small Northumberland village commemorating the death of a local officer killed in the ‘Anglo-Boer War’. Ghosting Through 55 �explores the unsettling ways in which these places are not so much geographically fixed as implicated within complex circuits at once contingent and the product of material relations of power. The inclusions and exclusions inscribed into intersecting contemporary and historical landscapes haunted by a heritage of Empire result in the usual authority accorded to the subjectivity of the writer, discovering, organising, and giving meaning to his material, being tested against his taking shape, materialising, in relation to material that is in itself shape-shifting, dynamic, fluid in terms of its expression of place, the past, and identity. Biography of Presenting Author Michael Green is Professor in English and Creative Writing at Northumbria University and Fellow of the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He is the author of Novel Histories: Past, Present, and Future in South African Fiction and numerous journal articles and book chapters. As Michael Cawood Green he has published two works of historical fiction and was awarded the Olive Schreiner Prize for Prose. Samuel M. Obuchi Moi University - Kiswahili and other African Languages Orality and Writing: The inescapable interdependence It is inescapably obvious that language is an oral phenomenon, yet human beings communicate in many ways as they use their senses: touch, smell, sight, hearing and feel. This paper examines Taarab music and EkeGusii circumcision songs that are rendered in two of Kenya’s widely spoken languages: Kiswahili and EkeGusii, respectively. The music and songs in question are rich artistic oral forms that use proverbs and various metaphoric expressions to communicate a people’s way of life. This paper argues that much has been studied with regards to the written texts, yet no serious research has gone into the oral text that has largely been left un-transcribed, untranslated and therefore unexamined. The author relies on the oral data as produced by the identified linguistic communities, to generate debates on the interface between orality and writing. Further, he discusses orality as a mode of expression that uses various senses to communicate invaluable messages as clearly evidenced by the songs and music in question. The author further demonstrates that orality and writing are two sides of the same coin and, as such, they work together to bring out a peoples’ way of life and consciousness. Biography of Presenting Author Dr. Samuel M. Obuchi studied linguistics at the University of Nairobi and is currently a Senior Lecturer in Moi University, Eldoret-Kenya. His research interests and publications are in Sociolinguistics, Discourse Analysis and Pragmatics. His books include: Discourse in Interactional Contexts (Verlag, 2006) and Muundo wa Kiswahili (Jomo Kenyatta Foundation, 2015). Neville Hoad University of Texas at Austin - English 56 �A Perverse Anglicanism in a History of Desire: A 21st Century Reading of John William Colenso John William Colenso became the first bishop of Natal in 1853, two years before the publication of his Remarks on The Proper Treatment of cases of Polygamy Converts from Heathensm, which inaugurated a long career as a controversial Biblical scholar and powerful advocate for the indigenous peoples of Natal. Remarks on The Proper Treatment of cases of Polygamy Converts from Heathensm shows how Colenso’s thinking on topics like marriage, divorce, and pre-marital sex come under pressure from his encounter with fundamentally illiberal, i.e., non-individualist forms of desire connected to animist religious beliefs, and non-privatized communitarian understandings of kinship, producing claims of radical cultural difference, evident in his advocacy for a CoAdamist version of polygenism and his rebuttal of claims of the literal truth of the Bible. Colenso’s tolerance of indigenous forms of desire and their socio-cultural institutions allows for a consideration of the relations between ideas of individual and group autonomy and selfdetermination and the place of sexual desires within these ideas in a frame of a universalizing missionary Christianity, largely without recourse to secularism. Revisiting Colenso in 2016 may provide intellectual resources for current debates about sex and secularism, desire and resurgent religious fundamentalisms, sexuality and cultural difference. Biography of Presenting Author Neville Hoad is Associate Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality and Globalization (Minnesota 2007) and co-editor (with Karen Martin and Graeme Reid) of Sex & Politics in South Africa: Equality/Gay & Lesbian Movement/the anti-Apartheid Struggle (Double Storey 2005). He is currently working on a book project about the literary and cultural representations of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa. Jean Rossmann University of KwaZulu-Natal - English Studies Endless Quest/ioning: Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf¸ Agaat and Memorandum. In an interview with Willie Burger (2009) the South African author, Marlene van Niekerk, points to the deliberate elusiveness of her tales. Van Niekerk tells Burger she wants to “frustrate the reader”, to write endings that are “entangled in the mouth of the beginning so that [the reader] can never be released from the labyrinth”, luring him/her into a “discovery of the unmapped possibilities of the self in language”. Van Niekerk’s allusion to the mystical, quest-like nature of her plots, and of reading, serve as stimulus for an exploration of Triomf (1999 [1994]), Agaat (2006 [2004]) and Memorandum: A Story with Paintings (with Adrian van Zyl, 2006) as philosophical-aesthetic quest narratives. Through an analysis of the endings of these novels, I discuss how narrative undecidability co-opts the reader into a journey of endless quest/ioning. Drawing on the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Theodor Adorno, I ask what the social and ethical implications of Van Niekerk’s dialectical thinking may be in terms of the encounter with alterity, the onus placed on the reader, and of communitas: community in flux, on the threshold. Biography of Presenting Author Jean Rossmann is a lecturer at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Her PhD was on Marlene van Niekerk's first three novels. Her research interests lie in contemporary South/African and 57 �transnational fiction, existentialism, psychoanalysis, and cultural theory. She is interested in texts that explore issues surrounding gender, sexuality and spirituality. Anthea Margaret Morrison University of the West Indies, Mona - Literatures in English 'Stories from England', stories from home: Competing voices in Caryl Phillips' In The Falling Snow In a poignant narrative in the non-fiction collection Colour Me English, the British/St.Kitts-born writer Cary Phillips describes the sense of exclusion experienced by a little black boy growing up in England, an awareness of difference complicated by his discovery of a passion for books. For his "illiterate" great-grandmother in St. Kitts, he becomes "the great-grandson who all these year later now sends her stories from England". In the 2009 novel In The Falling Snow, Phillips revisits the still not fully told story of Caribbean migrations, and once again foregrounds the vocation of the writer. The protagonist Keith Gordon, though born in England to West Indian parents, is manifestly drawn, in his long-deferred dream of writing a book on music, to the rhythms associated with his racial origin. Near the end of the narrative, Phillips inserts a disruptive "story within the story", the lengthy account told insistently by Keith's ailing father of his experience of racism in 1960s England. In the nuanced manner that characterizes this acclaimed writer, Phillips finally privileges orality through the voice of a character whose English is coloured by Caribbean creole idioms - without offering any easy answers about migrant or multicultural identities. Biography of Presenting Author Senior Lecturer in Comparative Caribbean Literature, Department of Literatures in English, University of the West Indies, Mona Campus. Morrison has published on Afro-Caribbean diasporic writers, post-Negritude francophone poetry and Caribbean women writers and is currently working on a study of contemporary Caribbean migrant literature. Karsten Levihn-Kutzler Goethe University Frankfurt - Department of English and American Studies Race, Risk, and the Politics of Pre-Emption in Janette Turner Hospital’s Orpheus Lost and Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows The paper explores how Janette Turner Hospital’s Orpheus Lost and Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows critique the ideology of pre-emptive counter-terrorism as it emerged after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The logic of pre-emption legitimises large-scale data collection and mandates acting on suspicious patterns rather than concrete evidence. “High risk” individuals are subjected to surveillance, disenfranchisement, and incarceration in the name of absolute security. Turner Hospital and Shamsie re-frame this logic by tracing its continuities with older forms of state violence, racism, and totalitarian ideology – Nazism, Australian xenophobia, and white supremacism in the US in Orpheus Lost, the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, the violence of Indian partition, and the US-sponsored anti-Soviet insurgency in Afghanistan in Burnt Shadows. Moreover, both novels take the perspective of falsely accused outsiders. Their respective protagonists are ethnically ambivalent cosmopolitans that defy the categories of pre-emptive 58 �security. As “foreign bodies”, they are suspect to a logic of pre-emptive action that acts on suspicion rather than evidence, and their unstable identities become misinterpreted as subterfuge. The novels thus foreground a racial undercurrent in the regime of pre-emptive security, a politics of life and death in which some lives inevitably matter more than others. Biography of Presenting Author Karsten Levihn-Kutzler studied English and Film and Media Studies in Frankfurt, Germany and Southampton, UK. He has worked as a freelance editor and educator and taught at the University of Frankfurt. He is currently completing a PhD thesis entitled “Writing Global Risk: Manufactured Uncertainty and the Imagination of Globality in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction” at the University of Frankfurt. His research interests are Contemporary Anglophone Literatures, the relation of literature and globalization, postcolonial theory, and environmental criticism. Prof. (Dr. Ms) Laksmisree Banerjee University of Kolhan - English & Cultural Studies Exclusion & Dissent for Impacting Reconfigurations & Reconstructions of New Human Bridges by Global Women Writers Our complex, migrant, conflict-ridden, whirlwind lives in the 21st Century with expansive spheres of human history, culture, memory and trajectory, have created the newly perceived urgency for a re-configuration of traditional literary perspectives, especially with reference to the Female Experience. This Paper focuses on the Prose and Poetic Writings of Modern Women Writers as divergent and similar as the Indian Novelist Arundhati Roy vis-à-vis the Black American Writer Toni Morrison and the Indian Poet Kamala Das vis-à-vis the American Poet Sylvia Plath. Significantly, their compositions of Authorial Dissent are no longer considered to be exclusionist or de-stabilizing acts of a specific ‘Feminist’ agenda but as inclusive, genuine and transparent movements towards the meaningful building of communicative human bridges for a more equitable world. Such contemporary writings by Women emphasize the need of the hour to create a new, multi-dimensional and composite Unity by conflating the Centres with the Margins, the Colonial with the Postcolonial, the Immigrant with the Indigenous and the Self with the Other, in order to create a re-structured Humanistic and Pluralistic Harmony. Biography of Presenting Author Prof. (Dr. Ms). Laksmisree Banerjee, a Senior Academic (originally from the University of Calcutta, now working in the Kolhan University), an acclaimed Indian-English poet, critic, musician, a national and international scholar-administrator, Keats Scholar and a Sr. Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Professor to various American, European & Asian Universities, is the Founder Pro-Vice Chancellor and Ex-Vice Chancellor of Kolhan University, India. A brilliant alumna of the Calcutta University, Dr. Banerjee was also the Chair of the Department of English and an active Rotarian (Paul Harris Fellow) associated with many well known socio-cultural organisations. She has served the cause of Higher Education and Indian Culture in India and across the globe. She was a Ministry of HRD Nominee-Member on the Board of Governors of the Central Inst/Univ of English and Foreign Languages (EFLU now), Hyderabad. She has been exposed to the best UniversitySystems of the World and has considerable experience in the administration of Higher Education. She is also a UGC Postdoctoral Research Awardee (honoured and awarded by the Ministry Of 59 �HRD- Govt.Of India) and an expert on several UGC (University Grants Commission) Committees for the Development of Indian Higher Education in its various spheres of operation. As a university professor of English and Cultural Studies, an acclaimed Indian-English poet and Indian radio and TV vocalist, she has served the cause of International Understanding through Art, Culture and Literature. Her Sr. Fulbright Award (USA, 1998-99) and UGC Postdoctoral Research Award (Indian Govt., 2006) were in recognition of her continuous and consistent writings, lectures, research rublications and teaching in the extremely significant, but often marginalized area of Comparative Studies of Global Women’s Poetic Writings in India and the West. As a poet herself, she has several books of poetry and Literary Criticism and has been published in journals and anthologies across the globe. She is the only Indian who combines the dual art forms of the various styles and genres of vocal (Classical and Ethno) Indian Music thematically with her Indian-English Poetry in her unique Theme-Concerts. In short her contributions are focussed mainly on Women and the World, manifesting her sincere effort to build bridges between Womanism and Humanism. Emmanuel Ngwira University of Malawi - Chancellor College - English “Daughterly Texts”?: Father-Daughter Relationships in Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun This paper analyses how the relationship between fathers and daughters is portrayed in Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). Drawing on Tiyambe Zeleza, Florence Stratton and Elleke Boehmer regarding female subjectivity in history and nation, this paper argues that through father-daughter relationships, both Wicomb and Adichie challenge certain dominant knowledges particularly those related to female subjectivity. The paper observes that the reproductive potential of the daughter’s body, which if exploited by the father would amount to shameful incest, is deployed to other more socially acceptable missions like the pursuit of certain racial aspirations and entrepreneurial gains. The paper further shows how the daughters break away from their fathers’ influence to assert their own subjectivity which fits into Wicomb’s and Adichie’s larger project of restoring female subjectivity to narrative, both historical and literary. Biography of Presenting Author Emmanuel Ngwira is a lecturer in the English Department at University of Malawi - Chancellor College. He obtained his PhD from Stellenbosch University in 2013. Asante Mtenje Stellenbosch University - English Negotiating Motherhood and Female Sexual Desire in Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives Notwithstanding significant shifts in contemporary understandings of gender and sexuality, sexuality continues to be a tool to control women’s capabilities and mobilities. Under patriarchy, 60 �women’s roles are often relegated to the private space of the home where they are reduced to their reproductive functions. The systematic suppression of women’s sexual and erotic inclinations has resulted in the “conflation of sexuality and reproduction within a heteronormative cultural and social matrix” (McFadden n.p.). In this paper I am interested in interrogating how contemporary African authors such as Lola Shoneyin in The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives revisit issues of female sexuality previously engaged with by pioneer writers such as Flora Nwapa and Buchi Emecheta, re-locating the concerns within more contemporary African contexts in order to examine continuities and discontinuities. I examine how she represents her female characters as subverting the limits placed on their bodies and sexualities by portraying polygamous marriage and motherhood as a potential spaces for women’s freedom to negotiate one’s sexual and erotic inclinations, which cannot otherwise be accommodated in other circumstances. Biography of Presenting Author Asante Lucy Mtenje is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Stellenbosch where she is working on a thesis titled “Contemporary Fictional Representations of Sexualities in Authoritarian Contexts”. Her research interests lie in Sexualities, Queer Studies, Gender Studies, Afro-Diasporic Studies and Malawian Oral Literature. Marciana Faula Were Stellenbosch University – English Exploring Orality in the Contemporary African Female Political Autobiography The contemporary African female political autobiography is a hybrid genre that combines Western tenets of the autobiography with African forms of storytelling. Ramphele Mamphela in her autobiography A Passion for Freedom (2013) characterises the autobiographical act in postapartheid South Africa as a storytelling tradition. She argues that storytelling is a way of dealing with trauma to forge a new imaginary for women. In this paper, I argue that the African female political autobiography is a hybrid genre that makes claims to orality to inscribe the female autobiographical voice in a style that accentuates female presence in a genre that is exclusionary in nature. My thesis is informed by the premise that while the African female political autobiography subscribes to universal tenets of the autobiography, it is essentially a distinct form that has been aesthetically crafted to represent the female voice in Africa that despite its existence within a patriarchal society, is nevertheless extremely powerful. Focusing on Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf’s This Child Will be Great and Wambui Otieno’s Mau Mau’s Daughter, I interrogate how orality in the autobiography re-invents the autobiographical genre, engendering the masculine archive of the self. Biography of Presenting Author Marciana Nafula Were is a third-year PhD student in the English Department, Stellenbosch University. Her research is in Life Writings tradition and her study is titled: "Negotiating Public and Private Identities: A Study of the Autobiographies of African Female Politicians". Marciana lives in Stellenbosch, South Africa. 61 �Clelia Clini John Cabot University - Communications The diaspora experience in South Asian diasporic cinema: dynamics of inclusion and exclusion In a world which is increasingly “multicultural” and in which people are constantly on the move, diaspora has gained growing currency as a theoretical tool to think of culture beyond the boundaries of the nation state. As Vijay Mishra observed, late-modern celebration of diasporic communities sees them as “fluid, ideal, social formations” which happily occupy a “border zone” (Mishra, 2005:1). And yet, we should be wary of romanticizing the diasporic condition in terms of its emancipation from nationalistic feelings or from national constraints. If diasporas increasingly occupy transnational spaces, they can also be, as Mishra observed, “bastions of reactionary thinking” (Mishra 2005: 8). This paper will aim to discuss the notion of diaspora through the analysis of the representation of the diasporic experience offered by South Asian diasporic filmmakers. In particular, the paper will address dynamics of inclusion and exclusion at play in the diasporic space – concerning both the diasporic community and the place of settlement. Who is included? And who is not? What dynamics of power structure norms of inclusion? By addressing these questions, the paper will discuss the important contribution that diasporic filmmakers can offer to the debate on multiculturalism Biography of Presenting Author Dr. Clelia Clini is Lecturer in Media and Communications at John Cabot University and at the American University of Rome, where she teaches courses in Media, Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Studies. She holds a PhD in Cultural and Postcolonial Studies from the University of Napoli l’Orientale (2011). Kristine Kelly Case Western Reserve University - English Virtual wandering: a post-colonial approach to global networks Foreseeing a post-national world created by digital technology and global migrations, Arjun Appadurai in Modernity at Large suggests that the global reach of electronic media “compel[s] the transformation of everyday discourse”. Appadurai argues that these media also “are resources for self-imagining as an everyday social project.” With greater trepidation, Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, on the other hand, emphasize the need for a critique of networks, asking if, “as networks continue to propagate, there will remain any sense of an ‘outside,’ a nonconnected locale from which we may view this phenomenon and ponder it critically”. In this presentation, I engage with these two divergent perspectives of network theory, considering their implications in narrative and the ‘WWW’ in terms of both individual empowerment and colonial legacies that maintain unjust practices. Through examples of mapped, walked spaces drawn from postcolonial fictions (such as Selvon’s Lonely Londoners) and from contemporary digital projects that re-map historical and contemporary networks of post-colonial power (such as Nieves, Soweto 76, and Bagnall and Sherratt’s Invisible Australians), I explore how the act of 62 �wandering (drift) through real or virtual spaces enables meaningful interventions into larger networks of control. Biography of Presenting Author Kristine Kelly is a lecturer in English/SAGES at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Her research and teaching focus on British colonial and post-colonial Anglophone literature and cultures. She also studies new media narratives and electronic literature. Katherine Hallemeier Oklahoma State University - English Pan-African Precarity in A Squatter’s Tale and GraceLand Chris Abani's GraceLand (2004) and Ike Oguine's A Squatter's Tale (2000) foreground the question of how the literary intersects with the political economy of globalized capitalism that enforces emigration from Nigeria to the U.S. For both Abani and Oguine, emigration is a necessity that engenders need. Their valuation of literature, however, hinges not on literature's potential to promote recognition of this need but on its exploration of how such recognition inadequately addresses the embodied experiences of necessity produced by what Eric Cazdyn calls contemporary bioeconomic regimes. This is to say that the novels, as they invoke other national and international literatures of the global Black diaspora, do not call for Nigerians to stay and transform Nigeria so that immigration is less necessary, or for Americans to transform the U.S. so that new immigrants face less need. Instead, the novels suggest literature’s potential for insisting on shared need as a basis for ongoing transnational political relationship. Biography of Presenting Author Katherine Hallemeier is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Oklahoma State University. She is the author of J. M. Coetzee and the Limits of Cosmopolitanism (Palgrave, 2013). Sanja Nivesjö Stockholm University and Stellenbosch University - Department of English Sexual entanglements of spatial belonging – Olive Schreiner's From Man to Man When Cherry Clayton calls the character Bertie “the first exiled woman in South African literature” (1997), she pinpoints the entangled network of sexual and gendered displacement and belonging in the colonial world that underwrites Olive Schreiner's novel From Man to Man (1926). This paper argues that Schreiner creates a web of spatial inclusions and exclusions based on sexual structures in her novel. Looking at Schreiner's work in this way allows us both see the importance of sexuality in the creation of spatial belonging, and lets us understand where some of the questions of inclusion and exclusion in post-colonial culture come from and how entanglements from a hundred years ago are still relevant today. Schreiner shows how colonial South Africa was shaped by a network of movements which where tightly controlled by sexual, gendered and racial structures which allowed some people to travel, to claim space and to belong and some people to be claimed, exiled and made foreign. Through looking at the 63 �entanglement of sexuality and mobility this paper investigates the struggle for spatial and sexual expression and for different ways of being in the world. Biography of Presenting Author Sanja Nivesjö is a PhD student at the Department of English, Stockholm University, Sweden, and a visiting researcher at Stellenbosch University for the first semester 2016. She is working on a project about sexuality, space and time in 20th century Anglophone South African literature. Neelofer Qadir University of Massachusetts Amherst - English Connected Histories of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds in Amitav Ghosh's Ibis Trilogy In this talk, I turn to Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy to explore resonances between nineteenth century colonial capitalism and contemporary forms of neoliberal capitalism. I focus on the narrative of Zachary Reid, son of a Maryland freedwoman, who finds work on the Ibis as it departs for its first voyage in the Indian Ocean. Formerly used to transport slaves across the Atlantic, the ship’s new assignment is to transport opium between India and China. However, unbeknownst to Reid when he begins the job, the ship will also transport human cargo (coolies) from India to Mauritius. This meditation on Reid’s experiences puts into conversation the rich emergent field of Indian Ocean Studies and the more established field of Atlantic Studies to craft connected histories of racial capitalism. Further, I argue that historical fiction has great utility in its ability to let us ‘look back’ to an earlier age of globalization not only in the form of documented archives but also through imaginative fashioning and inherited memories of family and community histories. Biography of Presenting Author Neelofer Qadir is a PhD student in English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is currently at work on her dissertation, “Afrasian Imaginaries: Global Capitalism and Labor Migration in Indian Ocean Fiction, 1990 – 2015”. Bernard Fortuin Stellenbosch University “Indotas and Cross-dressing Men: Structuring Dissident Desire” This paper engages the figure of the (“coloured”) “skollie” and argues that through his association with South African prison gangs he has become discernable and eroticized as queer. The influence of prisons and the Number Gangs is significant, particularly in Cape “coloured” communities. Here the structured heteronormative masculinity the gang’s structure maintains allows for the imagining of an engagement in same-sex sexual activities that escapes the binary structure determining sex to be between a biologically man and woman. In the context of the Cape Flats, where the most visible queer figure is the stereotypical cross-dressing coloured man or “moffie”, the image of the queered 28 gang member allows for a performance of homosexual desire that seeks to escape a heterosexual/homosexual binary that fixes gender and sexual identity in these communities. 64 �Biography of Presenting Author Bernard Fortuin is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of English Studies at Stellenbosch University. His work focuses on intersections between race, class, sexuality and gender. He is a keen gardener and proud co-owner of an elderly dog. 65 �Shelley Hulan University of Waterloo - English Language and Literature Why No One (in the West) Talks about Race in Alice Munro This paper investigates the strange scholarly silence on race, as well as ethnicity and indigenousness, in the work of Alice Munro. Few Canadian writers have attracted as much academic attention as Munro who, long before receiving the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature, enjoyed international critical acclaim in the West. By sheer volume, studies of her oeuvre inside and outside Canada have for the past twenty years affirmed her as one of the greatest writers of her time. Yet in these decades, and in the years since her Nobel win, there has been remarkably little diversity in the numerous approaches to her work. Much of the scholarly discussion about that work concentrates on formal analyses of her innovations to the short story, examinations of her depictions of women, and research into her intimate portraits of southern Ontario, all subjects that may be visited exclusively with reference to the White, Euro-settler characters who dominate Munro’s fiction. But these are far from the only characters in that fiction, and I will argue that the absence of discussion around race, ethnicity, and indigenousness in Munro’s work stems from Western scholars’ unwillingness to acknowledge their own neo-colonialism. Biography of Presenting Author Associate Professor Dr. Shelley Hulan (University of Waterloo) specializes in early Canadian literature. She has published essays on early, modern, and contemporary Canadian writers including “Alice Munro” in the Journal of Canadian Studies, “Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews” in University of Toronto Quarterly, and Mosaic, among others. David Attwell University of York ‘Send war in our time, O Lord’. Liberal violence and its afterlives: towards a cultural history of the African Resistance Movement (ARM) This paper will begin an inquiry into the cultural afterlife of the African Resistance Movement (ARM), a South African sabotage group whose operations aimed at government installations came to an end with the arrest of key activists in July, 1964. The movement’s political legacy has largely been eclipsed, but its cultural afterlife is extensive in theatre, fiction, poetry, autobiography, and prison memoir. In a tangible sense, the legacy of the ARM is cultural, not political. The purpose of the project is to collate and interpret ARM literature. If, as Étienne Balibar puts it, the role of politics is to convert violence into civility, then the same could be said for a literature whose purpose is to narrate the legacy of sabotage. Athol Fugard, Nadine Gordimer, Jonty Driver, Hugh Lewin, Eddie Daniels, Baruch Hirson, Nicolas Wright, Hilary Claire and David Beresford have all contributed to the story of the ARM and each contribution has left its mark on the national imaginary. Most (not all) of the ARM’s activists were members or sympathisers of the Liberal Party of South Africa. The idea of ‘liberal violence’ is an oxymoron: a commitment to violence does violence to liberalism’s ideas of itself. It is out of this contradiction that ARM literature develops, taking violence into the world of narrative. The subject of ARM 1 �literature resonates with the present, in offering a different history of armed struggle and the legacy of liberalism. Manav Ratti Salisbury University - English Alan Paton and the Idea of Justice in South Africa In this paper, I analyze Alan Paton’s varied representations of justice in his well-known novel, Cry, the Beloved Country (1948). I explore the specific literary mechanisms by which Paton shows both the constructedness of justice—and its attendant blind spots, especially racial—and the idea of a justice that is transcendental to human societies and their institutions, namely, a justice that is divine. The trial of Absalom—being tried for shooting Arthur Jarvis—becomes a climactic moment in the novel, raising questions of what justice should be in South Africa. The priest Kumalo urges his son Absalom to “be of courage,” and thus speak the truth at his trial, fully knowing that such truth will likely be interpreted by the courts as culpability. But Kumalo also reminds his son of a “great Judge”, with the text thereby deconstructing legal justice and placing it in dialogue with divine justice. Cry, the Beloved Country meditates on the potentials of (a) justice to liberate South Africa and South Africans from “the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear”. Nearly seventy years after its publication, what are the legacies of Paton’s meditations on justice—variously legal, racial, and religious—for a post-apartheid South Africa? Biography of Presenting Author Manav Ratti is Associate Professor of English at Salisbury University, Maryland, USA and Continuing Member at Linacre College, Oxford University. He has recently served as Research Fellow at Australian National University and Fulbright Scholar at New York University. He is the author of The Postsecular Imagination: Postcolonialism, Religion, and Literature (2014). Dr. Geraldine Skeete The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine - Department of Literary, Cultural and Communication Studies Refugees on "The Ultimate Safari" in Nadine Gordimer's Crimes of Conscience This paper explores the ways in which “[p]erhaps the most gifted post-1945 South African writer” (Ousby 377) and Nobel Prize-winner, Nadine Gordimer, treats with the theme of forced migration in her short-story collection Crimes of Conscience published in 1991. Migrants and refugees fleeing war, genocide, famine, natural disasters, persecution, etcetera, have constituted our past and present global, socio-political history. Beginning with a poignantly ironic title and epigraph, Gordimer’s “The Ultimate Safari” captures a war refugee experience through the perspective and voice of a child who loses some members of her family, home, and freedom as she and others journey from her village and through Kruger Park in South Africa to safety in another country. The paper analyses, by employing literary and linguistic tools, the literal and figural representations of the physical dangers, rejection, hunger and starvation they face; the meaning and significance of the story title and epigraph; the effect of having a child as the 2 �narrator-protagonist; and the impact of using both a first-person account and the short-story form to portray this forced migration. Of interest, too, is Gordimer’s authorial decision to create a dénouement that symbolises belonging, memory, and hope. Biography of Presenting Author Dr. Geraldine Skeete is a lecturer in Literatures in English at The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus. Her research interests are in Caribbean literature, gender and sexuality, stylistics, narratology, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. She is co-editor of The Child and the Caribbean Imagination. Dr Clare Barker University of Leeds - School of English Genetics and Biocolonialism This paper will explore the representation in postcolonial literature and film of biomedical research studies involving indigenous people. Population genetics, medical trials, genetic ancestry studies, and pharmaceutical research all frequently target the bodies and environmental resources of indigenous or isolated communities in the ‘gene-rich South’ (Barclay 2005) – often communities still living with the socioeconomic, cultural, and spiritual legacies of colonialism. Many commentators and activists identify this ‘plunder’ of genetic information as a new form of extractive colonisation, often referred to as biocolonialism (Harry 2000; Whitt 2009) or biopiracy (Shiva 1997). The paper will focus on genetic research initiatives, such as the Human Genome Diversity Project, which involve ‘mining’ the bodies of indigenous people for their genetic riches. Using texts by Patricia Grace, Thomas King, and Ann Patchett, the paper will explore the insights that emerge when we analyse biomedical science within a postcolonial framework. It will consider how postcolonial writing can nuance concepts such as intellectual property, cultural safety in healthcare practice and medical research, and informed consent, and will argue that creative works can provide conceptual resources for combining bioethics and research governance with indigenous self-determination. The paper provides an overview of my current Wellcome Trust-funded research project. Biography of Presenting Author Clare Barker is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Leeds. She is the author of Postcolonial Fiction and Disability: Exceptional Children, Metaphor, and Materiality (Palgrave, 2011) and has co-edited two special issues of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, ‘Disabling Postcolonialism’ (2010) and ‘Disability and Indigeneity’ (2013). She is co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability (forthcoming) and holds a Wellcome Trust Seed Award for her current research project, “Genetics and Biocolonialism in Contemporary Literature and Film”. 3 �Ganesh Vijaykumar Jadhav D.P. Bhosale College, Koregaon, Satara Maharashtra India - English Diasporic Consciousness in Sunetra Gupta’s So Good in Black Diaspora is the hot seat in the present cultural and transnational scenario. Immigration, exile, return to home, transgression are some of the other forms of this phenomenon. As there is drastic change in the communication technology, people migrate with different intentions. The predicament of these people is reflected in the diasporic literature. The present paper focuses Sunetra Gupta’s So Good in Black as the diasporic text. It highlights the consciousness of the characters before and after the immigration. Sunetra Gupta pinpoints at the issues like dislocation, alienation, nostalgia, homelessness, problem of assimilation, hybridity and exile in this novel. The constant shifts of immigrant character from homeland to the host land and again back, affect their psychological outlook. The central figure Damini, to whom all the major characters are related with their emotional as well as personal bonds, is the journalist by profession. Being a journalist she undertakes the social work by opening the orphanage for weaker sections of the society, which are the women and the children. The Diasporic characters often yearn for their past for the solace of mind to escape from the present critical circumstances. Biography of Presenting Author Dr. G. V. Jadhav Assistant Professor, Dept. of English, D.P. Bhosale College, Koregaon, Dist Satara. Ph.D. received in 2013 from Shivaji University, Kolhapur; two minor research projects completed sanctioned by UGC; four books written; 13 papers published and one book under publication. Jaywant Mhetre Mhetre - Head, Dept. of English SBS College Karad, Maharashtra, India The Use of Politeness Principle in Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh, deals with the socio-cultural milieu in a small village on the borders of India and Pakistan, caught in the turmoil of the partition of India in 1947 on the eve of freedom. The cross-section of the Indian community presented here includes Hindus as well as Muslim families, who have lived together quite amicably, but are now caught in the emotional turmoil, violence and deep sense the insecurity as well as sorrow of leaving the habitat for generations of their own. This cross-section of society includes variety of characters with different social standing and authority. As a result, there are ways of polite addressing, use of terms of respect, polite epithets and expressions, etc. The use of these expressions throws light on the interpersonal relationship between the interlocutors and their social status. This paper attempts to present the use of ‘Politeness Principle’ and its maxims, according to the framework presented by Leech in his Principles of Pragmatics. Politeness depends on different factors such as 4 �tactfulness, generosity, modesty, sympathy, approbation, cost and benefit, which are classified by Leech in different Maxims such as the Tact Generosity, Approbation, Modesty, Agreement, Sympathy, Benefit and Cost Maxim. Biography of Presenting Author Jaywant work as an associate professor & head of the Department of English at SBS College, Karad. Chairperson – BOS in English Shivaji Universitay Kolhapur, in between 2005-2010. Unit Writer & Editor of English Compulsory, Optional & SIM, more than 20 books published by Shivaji University, Kolhapur; and attended three international conferences and read research papers. Ten research papers have been published in journals. Jaywant also works as a research guide to M.Phil and Ph.D students. Asha Varadharajan Queen's University - English "Something else and something other": Race, Caste, Biopolitics In “Playing with Fear,” David Parkins discusses right-wing populism in North America and Europe (2015). In India, the Dadri lynching, the killing of “rationalists”, the continued rise in sexual violence, and the threats to maim Dalit writers, might equally be perceived as forms of populism fuelled by so-called extremist factions of a majoritarian government. It has become customary to think of biopolitical governance in terms of a logic of containment, or as a logic of depletion where the implacability of debt and the certainty of environmental havoc are concerned. However, these socio-cultural manifestations of “rage against a dangerous world” (Parkins) indicate, not the limits of control, but the new face of control. Parkins calls this world one of “illiberalism,” but the inadequacy of Enlightenment values as antidotes to the rage he describes suggests that our world requires a reconceptualization of the familiar terrain and vocabulary of (bio)politics. To this end, I offer a meditation on caste and race, as categories of identity that have arguably been the most subject to biopolitical forms of governance and surveillance, that continue to transgress and traverse the borders among the human, nonhuman, and the posthuman; and inhabit, as revenants, the domain of desire. Biography of Presenting Author Asha Varadharajan is Associate Professor of English at Queen's University, Canada. She is the author of Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said, and Spivak (1995). Her writing and public speaking engages the broad sweep of postcolonial, cosmopolitan, global, secular, rights, and development debates. She continues to participate in projects that intervene in the media-ted public sphere to promote the humanities and the causes of justice and community. Feroza Jussawalla University of New Mexico - English (Mis)Interpreting Jihad: Literary Representations In the current conversations about Jihad, the U.S., U.K. and France, are struggling to understand “homegrown terrorism”. Are forms of neo-colonial exclusion and inclusion possibly pushing our 5 �youth into the arms of radical, recruiting cells? Contemporary postcolonial writers like Hanif Kurieshi, Mohsin Hamid, Monica Ali and Zadie Smith illustrate how fundamentalist Islamic recruiters purport to provide a home under unhomely circumstances of “unbelonging”. My paper looks at literary works such as Hanif Kureishi's “My Son, The Fanatic”, Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and Zadie Smith's White Teeth, where alienation and exclusion, lead young men or second generation youth, into joining militant Islamic groups as a means of belonging. Conversely, Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist shows how a mal-treated foreign student in the US, returns home to become a fundamentalist. What do these narratives encourage us to think about? How can we make our own society more inclusive so young people don't turn away? What hostilities are they playing out? How can our literary conversations help us address this pressing issue of global geopolitics, that needs immediate addressing? What are the theoretical concerns regarding marginalization that have been raised by such postcolonial authors and critics as Tariq Ali and Tariq Madood? Biography of Presenting Author Feroza Jussawalla is Professor of English at the University of New Mexico. She is author and editor of several critical works on Commonwealth/Postcolonial Literatures including co-editor of Interviews with Writers of the Postcolonial World and of Conversations with V.S. Naipaul and also of a collection of poems, Chiffon Saris. 6 �Ken Junior Lipenga University of Malawi - English The (un)making of a man: fathers and sons in the African novel The subject of masculinities is among the relatively unexamined topics in African literature. There have been many discussions of the portrayal of women, but few surrounding the portrayal of men and boys. A look at the literature reveals that African literature has been influential in the forming of masculinities, but also in the critiquing of certain models of masculinity. One of the ways in which this is done is through the portrayal of the process in which fathers teach their sons the performance of masculinity. In this paper, I explore these processes through examining nature of relationships between fathers and sons in the African novel. My argument is specifically based on four novels: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), Zakes Mda’s The Sculptors of Mapumbugwe (2013), Leila Aboulela’s Lyrics Alley (2012) and Jennifer Makumbi’s Kintu (2014). In my reading, I draw from Judith Butler’s notion of gender performativity, but also engage with scholarship on masculinities in Africa. This perspective enables me to read the texts as not merely depicting masculinity as a social topic, but also as a means in which the authors create tension, establish character development, and entrench, challenge but also suggest new masculinities. Biography of Presenting Author Ken Junior Lipenga is a lecturer in the English department at Chancellor College, University of Malawi. He has published articles in several journals, including the African Journal of Disability, Journal of African Cultural Studies and Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity. Alan Muller University of KwaZulu-Natal - English Are South Africans (Still) Afraid of Tokoloshes?: the Tokoloshe in contemporary South African fiction and culture In a 2008 article, “Why are South African’s Afraid of Tokoloshes”, Molly Brown considers “why so little fantasy for older children makes use of South Africa’s rich mythological heritage and speculate[s] about whether the situation may be about to change”. While the focus of this paper is not specifically on literature directed at older children, it argues that the situation observed by Brown has changed. The maleficent monster of Zulu folklore has, in years following the article, managed to steal its way into both dark and more illuminated corners popular imagination and beguile consumers across various media formats. This paper suggests that, due to the largely white demographic of speculative authors, the genre of speculative fiction in its current incarnations serves as a genre of (re-)negotiation where white writers are able to write across boundaries of race and politics in order to (re-)negotiate their ‘whiteness’ and legitimacy of belonging and identity in a still fractured postcolonial and postaparheid South Africa. This paper will examine appearances of Brown’s elusive Tokoloshe in various cultural texts such as the novel, the short story, visual arts and music. Biography of Presenting Author 1 �Alan Muller is a PhD candidate at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. His focuses on the genre of speculative fiction in a South African context. His fields of interest include South African literature and theory, postcolonial theory, theories of space and place, and speculative fiction. Kasia Juno van Schaik McGill University - English Translating the Periphery in Mavis Gallant The fiction of Mavis Gallant, a self-exiled Canadian writing in Europe and publishing in the US, has been described as nomadic, slippery, and resistant to overtly political or nationalistic categorization. Framing Gallant as a writer of the “periphery”, my essay seeks to outline the ways in which Gallant’s short stories “In the Tunnel” (1971) and “In Italy” (1956) articulate national margins as neocolonial contact zones. I analyze Gallant’s critique of expatriate and exile culture by foregrounding the spatial politics of the rented villa and hotel room as sites of discontinuity, disorientation, perversion, and transition. The intersecting affects of vulnerability, dislocation, and hostility that take place within the hotel/villa frame the ways in which Gallant’s expatriates, and particularly her female expatriates, come to question their identity formation and function as domestic subjects of empire. I argue that the hotel/villa offers both a space of home and homelessness, destabilizing notions of foreign and familiar, self and other, and prompting the reader to re-think the relationship between what has traditionally been conceptualized as the cultural headquarters of the privileged north and its “peripheral” landscapes. Biography of Presenting Author Kasia Juno van Schaik is a PhD student at McGill University under the supervision of Prof Monica Popescu. Kasia’s research focuses on contemporary postcolonial literature, women’s writing, and graphic novels. Kasia’s writing and comics can be found in the Best Canadian Poetry Anthology 2015, The Rumpus, Maisonneuve Magazine, GUTS: Canadian Feminist Magazine, and The Puritan, among others. Lizelle Smit Stellenbosch University - English Depictions of the Other through King’s I/Eye Marina King (1856 to ±1940), a South-African-born British colonial subject, is one of many women who wrote about life in nineteenth century South Africa but whose work has consequently been neglected in life writing scholarship. King not only made a valuable autobiographical contribution to the literary archive but through her physical labours, she excelled as a shrewd businesswoman. Her autobiography, Sunrise to Evening Star: My Seventy Years in South Africa (1935), is a chronicle of a life narrative wherein the author documents novel information regarding gender, class and race issues of the time, critically revealing the constrained position of (white) women in colonial society while also penning her ambivalent attitude (ideologically ‘coloured’ by racial superiority) towards other South African ethnicities. The focus of the discussion will centre on King’s appropriation of a game settler children played – “fearsome mock battles between Zulus and whites” (34) – as a writing strategy and means of critiquing gender relationships in colonial and 2 �Victorian society through employing the black mobile body as a symbol of freedom. This paper examines King’s remarkable depiction of the position of Zulu men in particular, as being more desirable a position than that of white women in the colonies. Biography of Presenting Author Lizelle Smit's research focuses on South African women's life writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. She is currently pursuing her PhD degree with a specific focus on female subjectivity and women's life writing. Jhordan Layne Queen's University Obeah Revisited: Re-Evaluating Religion and Superstition in Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women and William Earle Jr.’s Obi, or The History of Three-Fingered Jack This paper draws a transhistorical comparison between the representations of obeah in Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women (2009) and William Earle’s Jr.’s Obi, or The History of ThreeFingered Jack (1800). James’s Night Women signals a new post-secular moment in Caribbean literary representations of religion. Night Women erodes the divisions between religion and superstition by opening up Christian theology to secular critique. By assessing Christian theology with the same critical process that excluded obeah from the category of “true religion”, Night Women disengages Christianity from its superior position and puts it into dialogue with obeah. In contrast, Earle’s Obi, reinforces Christianity’s superiority and challenges the legitimacy of obeah rituals by staging the victory of the baptised slave hunter over the obeah-supported escaped slave. Yet, Obi keeps obeah’s power to protect its practitioners ambiguous to question scientific rationalism. In short, Earle mobilizes religion in order to challenge the roots of secularism whereas James uses secular reasoning to erase the divide between religion and superstition. By comparing obeah in these texts, I reveal a genealogy that connects the Enlightenment era debate on superstition to today’s post-secular imagination that re-evaluates the role of religion and the authority of secularism. Biography of Presenting Author Please contact Jhordan Layne for this Beverley Jane Cornelius University of KwaZulu-Natal - English Studies Postcolonial Nostalgia and Meaning: Rayda Jacobs's The Slave Book Much of South African literature deals with the past and postcolonial themes predominate. Furthermore, many authors write nostalgically about the past, either fondly or with a sense of yearning, even though the past that is examined might have been turbulent and traumatic. However, this does not necessarily mean that their presentations of the past are superficial or sentimental. On the contrary, nostalgic writers grapple with the paradoxical emotions associated with longed-for times and places. Rayda Jacobs's historical novel, The Slave Book, is an examination of the last years of slavery at the Cape Colony. The author's evocative depiction 3 �points to the author's nostalgia for that period. A return to conditions of slavery could never be countenanced and it is, therefore, a paradoxical situation when there is a hankering for a time when such conditions were experienced. There is a profound conflict between the longing to return and the abhorrence of the conditions of the time longed for. This paper will focus on how The Slave Books' protagonist and narrator, Sangora Salamah, reclaims and retains his sense of identity by nostalgically and imaginatively revisiting Zoetewater farm, the farm on which he was kept as a slave. Biography of Presenting Author I am a PhD candidate at the English Studies Department of the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Rodney Jonathan Likaku Chancellor College, University of Malawi - Department of English Literature The “E” in English is for Exclusion: Interrogating Fictional Languages that Dislocate the Postcolonial Home in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and George R. Martins Game of Thrones The paper asserts that to guard against the triumphalism of English, writers of speculative fiction have turned to the invention of new languages in order to generate an inclusive space for multilingual, multicultural, multi-religious, hybrid and queer identities to construct home regardless of difference. The paradox is that the invented or fictional languages perpetuate stereotypes of indigenous and African communities that exclude the postcolonial subject from the grand narrative and reinforce the psychopathology of colonialism. The point of departure is Sadrine Sorlin who contends that standard English would not have been up to the task. Closely interrogating the fictional language Dothraki in George R. Martins A Game of Thrones and the Iron Age English after a nuclear explosion in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas—including the concepts of linguistics and afro-futurism that inform their creation—this endeavour begins to expose the same perverted philosophy in the construction of fictional languages that perpetuates the triumphalism of English today, and branded Africa as the “heart of darkness” in the past. The argument is that if fictional languages are not constructed with caution, they dislocate the postcolonial subject’s conception of ‘home’ by the silences they keep and the stereotypes that they perpetuate. Biography of Presenting Author Rodney Likaku is with the English Department at Chancellor College, University of Malawi. His academic interests intersect language in post-apocalyptic fiction and how this informs postcolonial communities by interrogating the blind spots and assumptions of language. He is furthering his research at Malmö University in Sweden. 4 �Edgar Nabutanyi Makerere - Literature Autocratic Fatherhood, Violent Sexuality, and Critique in Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples Contemporary fictional discourses in the post-apartheid moment in South African have repeatedly focused on the analysis of sexual violence that is often attributed to apartheid’s legacy of dominant and discriminative patriarchy. This is accentuated by the topicality and recurrence of this theme in recent South African fiction by writers such as J. M. Coetzee (1996), Mark Behr (1995), K. Sello Duiker (2001) and Deon Meyer (2007). While many of these texts and their analyses treat the recurrence of sexual violation as an allegory for patriarchal control and racial domination, I read Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples as a South African text that delves into the other side of the Afrikaner/Black dichotomy to script the often-unreported inequities that apartheid inflicted on those it claimed to protect. Focusing on an incident of homosexual rape in the depicted apartheid-era family, I argue that sexual violence portrays how Afrikaner powerful patriarchy is precariously inscribed on children’s bodies. I explore how fiction crafts for a cowered child a register to disclose pederasty of a father whose secret and shame he cannot expose given that the father as a general in South African Defence Forces is positioned at the core of apartheid’s power structure. Biography of Presenting Author Edgar Fred Nabutanyi holds a PhD from the English Department of Stellenbosch University and is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Literature at Makerere University, Kampala. His PhD project entitled: “Representations of Troubled Childhoods in Selected Post-1990 African Fiction in English” explores not only how fiction performs a social critique of postcolonial Africa’s treatment of its children but also archives, without reducing such troubled African childhoods — with specific reference to war-affected children, child prostitutes, child victims of domestic violence and sexual violation — to mere statistical footnotes of this particularly horrific era in Africa. His research and teaching interests are in children’s literature, critical theory, practical criticism, media studies, sexuality studies and minority studies. Johan Jacobs University of KwaZulu-Natal - English Studies The Migrant Subject in J. M. Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus This paper will draw on Italo Calvino's self-reflexive trope of fiction as the construction of a bridge over a void (in If on a Winter's Night a Traveller) as well as J. M. Coetzee's similar trope (in Elizabeth Costello) of fictional narrative as a process of building a bridge from the as yet undescribed world ("the territory in which we were") on this side of a chasm, or void, to the as yet unrealized other side ("the far territory, where we want to be"). The paper will examine the migrant/diasporic subject in Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus (2013), where the narrative both describes and constitutes a passage from an unspecified past to an indeterminate future, from an earlier life to an afterlife. The migrant subject, it will be argued, is formed in the act of launching him/herself, through storytelling, over the void between epistemologically different worlds, from nowhere to somewhere. 1 �Biography of Presenting Author Johan Jacobs is Emeritus Professor, Senior Research Associate and Fellow of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban. He has published extensively on South African and postcolonial fiction and autobiography. His book, Diaspora and Identity in South African Fiction (2016), has just been published by the University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. He is also a co-editor of the journal Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa. Dr. John Masterson University of Sussex - School of English Black Lives Shatter: Postcolonial ReVisions of Life Writing in Obama’s End Times Seen in the context of Donald Trump’s remarks about Mexican migrants and Muslim travellers, the image of Johari Idusuyi reading Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2015) at one of his rallies offers a defiant counterpoint. In this paper, I consider Citizen alongside Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me (2015). I suggest both provide penetrating insights into a U.S. haunted by taxonomical discourses and practices of internal colonialism, racial violence and suffering. While Citizen and Between the World and Me are embedded in specific AfricanAmerican contexts, I argue they also invite contrapuntal readings with some founding postcolonial studies texts. I therefore put Coates’ and Rankine’s work in conversation with Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks, as well as Césaire’s Cahier d’un Retour Au Pays Natal, amongst others. By suggesting some of the formal, as well as conceptual overlaps between contemporary African-American life writing and these seminal texts, I offer hermeneutic alternatives to what Rob Nixon calls the U.S.’s ‘superpower parochialism’. My paper resonates with the ACLALS 2016 conference theme by exploring a host of postcolonial inclusions/exclusions, be these in the form of bodies of texts, experience, geography, genre and/or the materiality of invariably violated bodies themselves. Biography of Presenting Author John Masterson is a Lecturer in World Literatures in English at the University of Sussex and an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of English at the University of the Witwatersrand. He published his first book, The Disorder of Things: A Foucauldian Approach to the Work of Nuruddin Farah, with Wits University Press in 2013. He has written journal articles and book chapters on a range of writers including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, J. M. Coetzee and Dave Eggers. He is currently working on a second monograph, exploring contemporary African diaspora fiction in relation to Barack Obama’s presidency. Francine Simon Stellenbosch University - English Studies In/between the “Affidamento”: a South African perspective on ‘Experimentalisms’ and Female Poetics in Intercontinental Poetry Writing Using the Italian term of “affidamento” (“a relationship of trust between two women… the younger asks the elder to help her obtain something she desires”), the paper comprises of two 2 �concerns. Unable to find an “affidamento” in South Africa, the first concern is to explore possibilities for young female poets to obtain mentors from across the world. As a young South African Indian female poet, I will turn to three female poets to seek “affidamento” figures who could enable me to give explanation to my poetry. The poets and their work could begin to show ‘experimentalisms” as an “innovative necessity” in poetry. Secondly, I will ask: why must the baggy term ‘experimental’ be variously conceived in the contexts of writing, belief and artistic practice? I propose the concept of “non-place” as a term used provisionally to situate and yet repeatedly to re-locate the writing of female experimental poets in their prolific and varied exploration of boundaries such as language and lyric. I will suggest their poetry demonstrates Rosi Braidotti’s “nomadic consciousness” and voice its implications for and on a young South African Indian poet. Biography of Presenting Author Francine Simon is a doctoral candidate at Stellenbosch University. She is researching experimental woman’s poetry as part of her doctoral studies. She completed her Master of Arts in Creative Writing in 2014. Her poems have been published in various literary journals. Her research fields include contemporary Feminism and ‘experimental’ poetry. Josephine Muganiwa University of Zimbabwe - English Representations of religion and spirituality in Chidavaenzi’s Ties that Bind (2015) and Marangwanda’s Shards (2014) The paper is a literary analysis of how the chosen texts represent religion and spirituality as experienced by their characters. Christianity and African traditional religion are represented and both authors seem bent on debunking stereotypes while acknowledging the efficacy of their faith. The characters are juxtaposed to contemporary realities with challenges of HIV and AIDS as well as the economic decline in Zimbabwe. Discourse of inclusion and exclusion is natural in discussions of religion as it entails initiates and nonbelievers. Perceptions are thus diverse depending on which side of the divide one stands. Butler’s theory of identity performance becomes relevant and informs this paper. Sometimes characters waver between faiths. At times a character begins by rejecting an idea, accommodates it, then finally becomes converted and an ardent follower. The inclusion and exclusion becomes both an internal and external process. Biography of Presenting Author Muganiwa is a lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe, Department of English and a PhD candidate with UNISA. Research Areas are culture, language and gender in Literature. 3 �Rosanna Masiola University for Foreigners of Perugia - Human and Social Sciences Flower-scapes, Phytonymy and Lexicography in the Outer Circle This paper addresses the topic of plant and flower-scapes in Commonwealth literature by examining a corpus of flower literature in English and Anglophone based Creoles. Flower-scapes and botanical descriptions constitute a vital link in the main trends of Commonwealth literature and conceptualization of space, as from Richard Hakluyt’s Western Discourse. Recent studies on landscape and the plantation compound (Bohls, Delle, etc.) suggest interesting frames of reference between the imagined place and the description of ‘real’ space (Barnes, Duncan, Dunn, etc.), in terms of inclusion and exclusion, and of descriptive symmetry or asymmetry. Areas covered are Australia, New Zealand, India, the Caribbean and South Africa. The trend seems to indicate a progressive loss of vernacular plant names, especially in the Caribbean area. The selected corpus features descriptions of plants as they have been perceived and represented by colonial and postcolonial authors. The descriptive passages move between the binary opposites of identity and alterity, showing how the conceptualization of space represents one of the main themes in Anglophone world literature. Biography of Presenting Author Rosanna Masiola is full professor of English Language and Translation at the University for Foreigners of Perugia, Italy. She has published twenty books: West of Eden: Botanical Discourse Contact Languages and Translation (2009), Law Language and Translation (2015), Description, Translation and the Caribbean (2016). Renato Tomei University for Foreigners of Perugia - Human and Social Sciences The poetics and the mysticism of John R. Bradburne The present paper aims to shed light on the poetics of John R. Bradburne (1921-1978) and contextualize his activity as a poet and Franciscan martyr in his Leprosary of Mutwemwa (Zimbabwe). John R. Bradburne is recognized as the most prolific poet writing in English (Crystal). He exported to the ‘expanding circle’ his message of Love in all its literary, linguistic and spiritual load of meaning. The paper provides a brief introduction illustrating the context of Bradburne’s spiritual journey and pilgrimage, from the centre of the empire to the periphery of outcasts in the midst of warfare (Europe, India, Israel, Malaya, Rhodesia) and it describes Bradburne’s poetic production and major themes as heard in his own voice (with the support of original recordings of Bradburne and of people’s voices during pilgrimage). His was a prophetic vision of a common wealth based on inclusion and shared love, in the midst of bloodshed and revolution. The universalistic Franciscan message empowered by linguistic reference to the English literary tradition can only be understood in his affiliation with his space and place of election and belongingness. He chose Africa, and Africa chose him. Europe has not given recognition as yet. Biography of Presenting Author 1 �Renato Tomei is adjunct professor of English Language and Translation at the University for Foreigners of Perugia, Italy. He holds a PhD in linguistics from the University of Addis Ababa. His recent publications include Jamaican Speech Forms in Ethioipia (2015). He is the founder of Youths of the World (NGO) and is committed to cultural exchanges with Africa and the Caribbean. Madhumita Chakraborty Zakir Husain Delhi College [Evening], University of Delhi - English A journey to empowerment: Autobiography in Bessie Head’s The Collector of Treasures The struggle for identity, evident in most postcolonial writers, as they “write back” to the Empire, finds greater resonance in the likes of writers such as Bessie Head, emanating as it does of their lived experiences of multiple marginalisations. Born as an illegitimate child of a white mother and a black stable hand father, Bessie Emory Head struggled with questions of identity and empowerment throughout her short life, and remained for the major part of her life therefore, in her own words, as the “archetypal outsider”, with “no frame of reference beyond myself”. This paper will look at Bessie Head’s short story collection The Collector of Treasures through various prisms – the journey from the pre-colonial to the post-colonial world, containing within it, the individual journeys of the characters, in particular, the women, in this rapidly changing world. It will also examine how both these journeys ultimately mirror the journey of Head’s life as reflected in her collected autobiographical writings, A Woman Alone, from the “archetypal outsider” to the woman who finds her moral utopia – her identity, voice and space in a small unknown Botswanian village. Biography of Presenting Author Dr. Madhumita Chakraborty teaches at the Department of English, Zakir Husain Delhi College (Evening), University of Delhi, India. She has over 15 years of teaching experience, and has written and published extensively on postcolonial literatures, with Bessie Head being one of her writers of specialisation. Jacolien Volschenk University of the Western Cape - English Postcolonialism and Marginalised Voices in Science Fiction: Temporal Entanglement in Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber This presentation will explore how Nalo Hopkinson’s novel Midnight Robber (2000), demonstrates why it is crucial for women of colour to engage with science fiction and the contribution the genre can make to postcolonial studies. The value of science fiction in relation to postcolonialism is often overlooked despite commonalities such as a preoccupation with the Other and an engagement with colonial enterprise. Science fiction’s focus on the future brings an important dimension to a field of study dominated by a gaze drawn to the past. The future offers a space in which to contest the reverberating after-effects of colonialism, reimagine current inequalities, and work through and depict the slow violence (to use Rob Nixon’s term) of colonialism. Hopkinson does all of these things in Midnight Robber through her use of temporal entanglement in her depiction of the twin planets of Toussaint and New Half-Way Tree. Despite 2 �its potential value to postcolonial studies, science fiction remains a predominantly white androcentric genre, closely associated with technology as a tool of empire, in which the voices of women of colour are muted or rendered invisible, thus making writers like Hopkinson doubly important to both postcolonialism and the study of science fiction. Biography of Presenting Author Jacolien Volschenk is a lecturer at the University of the Western Cape and is currently completing her doctoral thesis on the work of Caribbean science fiction author Nalo Hopkinson. Marie Herbillon University of Liège (ULg) - Modern Languages and Literatures Men Without a Past: Exile and the Erasure of History in J.M. Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus A year before being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, the contemporary writer J. M. Coetzee chose exile: born and long based in South Africa, he relocated to Australia in 2002, acquiring Australian citizenship in 2006. As a possible result, his Australian-phase works seem particularly concerned with the themes of exile and displacement. Arguably, his latest novel can be regarded as an allegory of migration; in The Childhood of Jesus (2013), a motherless boy and a middle-aged man arrive in a strange land, where they are expected to start a new life. The protagonists’ inclusion in their new society thus depends on the exclusion of their past and cultural differences – a form of forced amnesia which leads the author to wonder “whether the price [they have to] pay for this new life, the price of forgetting, may not be too high” (72). In this paper, I will focus on Coetzee’s critique of contemporary Western societies’ (not least Australia’s) treatment of their migrants. Relying on trauma studies, I will also examine how the obliteration of history and cultural specificity hampers the process of identity (re)construction and, ultimately, how ‘otherness’ could be accommodated into alternative, i.e. more culturally hybrid, paradigms. Biography of Presenting Author Marie Herbillon holds a ‘licence’ in Germanic languages and literatures from the University of Liège (ULg), Belgium, where she also gained a master’s degree in translation (English-French) and another one in English Studies. She recently completed a Ph.D. entitled “Beyond the Line: Murray Bail’s Spatial Poetics”. Sabrina Vetter Goethe University Frankfurt - NELK Indigenous Modernities: Native American Poetry and Modes of Autonomy Indigenous people within and outside of Commonwealth countries live in manifold states of exclusion, also when it comes to literary (re)presentations. Either not heard or seen, they struggle for inclusion in the English language literary canon, while also trying to transport their own stories onto interactions with former settler cultures, e.g. tradition, language, experiences of racism, violence and implementation. In order to not only be heard and seen, to regain voices and represent themselves, but also to gain back what was taken, Native American authors of 3 �North America deploy modes of Erotics of Sovereignty in poetic writings. Their poetry is marked by writing against exclusion, towards a wholeness of language, land and bodies. These writings are marked by representations of sexuality and erotica, but also by Native American culture facing modern-day colonial hegemonic powers. This talk will look at writings by authors Qwo-Li Driskill and Joy Harjo and how they make use of modes of Erotics of Sovereignty, in order to face Native American struggles with themes like sexuality, erotica by means of bodily, sensual and human imagery. Furthermore, this talk will seek to examine how these modes are applied by Indigenous authors within other Commonwealth countries, e.g. Aboriginal Australians. Biography of Presenting Author Sabrina Vetter studied English and American Studies at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. She graduated with a Master’s degree in early 2011. Since April 2013, she is working on her PhD thesis currently titled “Australian Romance and Indigenous Love: Indigenous Sexualities, Erotica and Australian identity”. Her project is focused on how Indigenous sexualities and erotica in literature and film figure within Australian nation and identity formation. Martina Vitackova University of Pretoria - Department of Afrikaans The tales of hybridity in post-1994 women’s writing in Afrikaans My research strives to explore female subjectivity as it is being represented in the work of post1994 women’s writing in Afrikaans. The cultural hybridity that can be found in the works of these authors produces a subversive discourse that undermines patriarchy and colonialism, and at the same time provides new cultural meanings for the majority discourse. They manage to find vocabulary to describe a subjectivity, that is complementary and reflects various socio-cultural backgrounds and influences, and render a hybrid, fluid and multilayered identity. One of the most prominent examples of this shift towards hybrid characters in post-1994 Afrikaans fiction is Marlene van Niekerk’s novel Agaat featuring two strong female characters. While Milla strives most of her life to assume the role of ideal Afrikaner woman, Agaat, even though subjected to strict “Afrikaner-isation” process by Milla, queers the restrictive performative acts of ‘volksmoeder’ in order to create a subjectivity of her own. Her subversive interpretation of traditional Afrikaner values and descriptive Afrikaner femininity represents a new uniquely SouthAfrican female subjectivity located in the liminal space of ‘within’. Agaat as character uses aspects of multiple cultural backgrounds, representing the new postcolonial hybrid South African. Biography of Presenting Author Martina Vitackova is post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, working on representation of female subjectivity in women’s writing in Afrikaans from 1994 onwards. She received a PhD. degree in Theory of Literature for her thesis “Back to the Roots? Forming New Concepts of Women´s Identity in Contemporary Postcolonial Literature Written by Women in Dutch and Afrikaans”, which came out as a book under the same title. Furthermore she coauthored the History of Dutch Literature in Czech language (2015). Martina publishes on the topics of postcolonial theory, feminist literary theory, women’s writing, and Dutch and Afrikaans 4 �literature and society. She is also the co-founder of Gender Studies research group – GR@UP – at the University of Pretoria. Olushola Bamidele Are Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba-Akoko - English Studies Towards an indigenous language literary culture in Nigeria: challenges and prospects Arguments have been advanced in favour of an indigenous language based literary culture in Africa. Scholars and writers like Ngugi Wa Thiong'o and Abiola Irele have argued that the use of indigenous languages is the only way of establishing authentic identities for African writings. Although this view has been countered strongly by notable writers such as Chinua Achebe, who argue that European languages tailored to suit African sensibilities could also be authentic, there is no doubt about the fact that the use of indigenous languages can enhance better intellectual, social, and psychological connection between writers and the people. In any case, linguistic imperialism has several inimical implications for society; and one of the fronts in the war against it is the choice of the language of literature. In view of this, there is a need to continually study the linguistic and cultural dynamics of modern African societies with a view to assessing the prospect of establishing a reading culture that is based on (or at least considerably dominated by) indigenous languages. This paper presents an overview of emergent realities militating against this lofty goal in Nigeria with practical suggestions for the future. Biography of Presenting Author Olushola Are teaches English Language and Applied Linguistics in the Department of English studies, Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba-Akoko, Nigeria. He also writes poetry. Alan Muller University of KwaZulu-Natal - English Sindiswa Busuku-Mathese Stellenbosch University - English Dark Matter: Exploring the Phenomenon of the Black South African Void in South African Speculative Fiction In 1983, Alice Walker asked: “What is my literary tradition? Who are the black ... artists who preceded me? Do I have a ground to stand on?” (233). Three decades later, such questions continue to surface across South Africa’s literary landscape. This paper engages with two concerns rooted in the rise of South African Speculative Fiction. A genre-melding category of writing, concerned with bridging styles and ideas marked by radical heterogeneity and allegorical narratives. As Speculative Fiction continues to participate in processes of reimagining ontologies of ‘South Africanness’, I ask: “Where is the black South African voice in this reimagining?”. Additionally, the boundaries between orality and writing must be questioned, as oral-storytelling traditions form part of cultural heritage. A heritage embedded in magical, cosmological, mythological and technological themes, reflective of the imaginative entanglements found within Speculative Fiction, thus: “Why is she/he absent from the creative deconstruction and 5 �reconstruction of histories, futures, identities, and selves?”. As Speculative Fiction attempts to forge new vocabularies of reconciliation, can we reconcile with the phenomenon of the black South African void within a literary space endeavouring to come to terms with the past as a precursor to understanding the present and imagining the future? Biography of Presenting Author Sindiswa Busuku-Mathese was born in Durban. She has completed her Master of Arts at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. She is currently a Doctoral candidate at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She is currently researching the concept and application of what could loosely be termed ‘neo-Gothic’ artistic modalities in selected examples of contemporary South African written, visual and sculptural ‘texts’. Joshua Isaac Kumwenda University of the Witwatersrand – African Literature The role of the surreal in postcolonial African novel: the case of Legson Kayira’s writing While appealing for the adoption of Negritude as an aesthetic and ideological tool for instilling confidence in the African in the wake of colonialism, Leopold Sedar Senghor sets a clear binary between the African and the western personality. Although critics have accused Senghor of advancing a mistaken belief that reason rules and defines the Western personality while emotions and surrealism rule and define the African, postcolonial African writing continues to be characterized by surrealism which authors manipulate to achieve their goals. This paper seeks to interrogate the role of ‘the extraordinary’ in Legson Kayira’s selected works. It digs out the hidden logic behind the extraordinary phenomena and explores their aesthetic and ideological significance. I argue that the surreal as an embodiment of traditional African thought processes is one of the main tools postcolonial African writers employ to articulate their concerns about contemporary social reality. The study draws on Partha mwang’s concept of ‘the domain of the inside’ as the main defining element of African culture and its world view in the past, present and future, and therefore as an important consideration in understanding Africans and their art. Biography of Presenting Author Joshua Isaac Kumwenda is a Lecturer in African Literature at Mzuzu University in Malawi. He did his undergraduate studies in Malawi and his initial postgraduate studies at the University of Botswana. He is currently pursuing doctoral studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Dr. Allison Mackey University of the Free State - English Speculative Renegotiations of Relationality: Guilt and Animality in Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City and Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death I explore how relationality is reconfigured through the interplay between the human and the animal in examples of speculative fiction by contemporary African women writers. Zoo City and Who Fears Death (2010) re-contextualize the apocalypse by imagining future topographies of 6 �post-crisis African futures in order to challenge ongoing (post)colonial histories of violence and environmental and economic exploitation. They engage with the notion of human-animal relationality in order to posit “plurality and alterity not merely as a possible future but also as the means of struggle against current dystopian realities” (Bould). They attempt to move beyond anthropocentric/anthropomorphic relations to the animal as “other” and toward an ethics of connection, in order to imagine alternative relationalities that are complex, multiple, and not limited to models of domination. Whether as an external manifestation of crime or through the trope of “becoming-animal,” guilt is central to both novels. To be distinguished from shame as a “politics of bad feeling” (Ahmed), guilt is mobilised in these texts as a “public feeling” (Cvetovich). Instead of being figured as either a negative emotion or a recuperative mechanism, this re-visioning of guilt becomes a means of re-making the world and re-visioning the future of a post-crisis African continent. Biography of Presenting Author Dr. Mackey received her PhD from the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada, and is currently Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English at the University of the Free State, in South Africa. She has published articles in peer-reviewed journals such as College Literature, ESC: English Studies in Canada and Research in African Literatures, and is currently completing revisions on a book-length manuscript, provisionally entitled Relational Rereadings of the Coming-of-Age Narrative: Storytelling and Ethics in Contemporary Stories about Growing Up. Keenan Dale Collett Rhodes University - English Taking out the Trash: Discussing Triomf and its Film Adaptation Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf functions as a powerful satire of Afrikaner identity and allows for the voice of a marginalised community to be heard. Michael Raeburn’s 2008 film adaptation provides an intriguing interpretation and rendering of van Niekerk’s original work, but a crucial question to ask is why Raeburn adapted the novel at all. This paper will explore the transition of the Benade’s dysfunctional story from text to screen, and questions whether Raeburn’s interpretation of Triomf maintains van Niekerk’s satirical project. Altering the satirical project would constitute a violation of what Kamilla Elliott terms “the spirit of the text”. This argument will begin with a highly unusual application of the concept of hospitality – along with Jacques Derrida’s accompanying thoughts – to explain the relationship between literary works and their film adaptations. Focus will then shift to exploring the ways in which content and form are altered in Triomf’s transition and the subsequent impact on the novel’s social critique by examining the same three intertwined aspects in the two mediums: abusive, familial tension, trauma, and transgressive content. Finally, Raeburn’s handling of van Niekerk’s content and style will be compared and contrasted with the alleged aims of South African ‘post-apartheid’ cinema. Biography of Presenting Author Masters of Arts student at Rhodes University and investigating contemporary South African transgressive fiction and its relation to the testimonial form of the TRC. 7 �Dr. Anurag Kumar Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University - Department of Languages and Literature Critical Humanism: Cultural Reading of Ambedkar’s Bhimayana and Om Prakash Valmiki’s Joothan as Dalit Life Narratives Contemporary scholarship on Dalit writings has offered “something new to our way of seeing” through critical interrogation of cultural discourses that has privileged the structurally powerful upper caste Hindu worldview (Hooks). Dalit writing, ipso facto, locates alternate cultural spaces that subverts and disrupts dominant structures of repression. Viewed from critical humanism framework, this kind of writing, poses question about the relation between the logos and anthropos and the possibility of any epistemic space where they co-exist, and if they co-exist, then what are the ways through which they negotiate their identities. To understand this comprehensively, the article will critically interrogate Ambedkar’s Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability and Valmiki’s Joothan as a cultural text where the image of ‘other’ has been denied the basic human right. Further, the article explores how spatial reality offers Dalit narrators an opportunity to develop a critical insight and to produce what Collins calls “oppositional consciousness” (3). Thus, because of their social locatedness, Ambedkar and Valmiki “transform a source of oppression into a source of knowledge and liberation” (10). Hence, the article concludes that Dalit life narratives may be viewed in terms of a “culture of opposition” which is their “critical response to dominance” (Hooks 148). Biography of Presenting Author Dr. Anurag Kumar teaches English at Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University Jammu, India. Before joining this university, he taught at many universities in India such as the University of Delhi, University of Lucknow and Royal University of Bhutan. He has a Ph.D. from Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee. He has written a book titled African American Literature: Politics of marginal space in the fiction of Gloria Naylor. Dr Selina Tusitala Marsh University of Auckland, New Zealand - English, Drama, Writing Studies The Unfaithful and Un/Ethical Blacking Out of Albert Wendt’s Pouliuli: Avant-Garde or Appropriation? The collapsing of the concepts of translation, artistic license and appropriation has becoming increasingly common. As an Oceanic poet-scholar, this begs certain questions: Are imperialist domination tactics masking as avante-garde? Is this another vehicle for the colonial ego to dip into others’ cultural texts without responsibility or accountability? What are the ethics involved in such ‘vampiric’ forms of poetry? Can acts of homage, play, and creative freedom also be, at the same time, imperialist? In this paper I consider these questions through a poetry experiment that takes the avant-garde technique of black out poetry and ‘pasificizes’ it. By taking first edition copies of Albert Wendt’s 1977 novel Pouliuli (Wendt is considered the forefather of Pacific Literature) I apply this black out technique. Pouliuli is the Samoan word for ‘blackness’, 'darkness', and used to refer to a metaphysical 'void'. As new lines surface and old lines are buried, they offer different perspectives on the Samoan existentialism, the canonical novel itself, 1 �and provide a commentary on avant-garde poetics from an indigenous poetics perspective. Is this ‘unfaithful’ literary translation ethical? What does this poetry experiment and its palimpsestic underside, say about me as a postcolonial Oceanic poet-scholar? Biography of Presenting Author Selina Tusitala Marsh teaches Postcolonial, New Zealand and Pacific Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Auckland. Tusitala means 'teller of tales', a legacy into which she has grown. Selina's critical and creative work focuses on giving voice to Pacific communities. She has two award-winning poetry collections and is completing a book on 16 First Wave Oceanic Women poets. She is Chair of SPACLALS. Noélle Koeries University of Cape Town - English Language and Literature Chinua Achebe: A case for reading his non-fiction in contemporary Africa This paper preoccupies itself with Achebe’s non-fiction. Achebe argues that his essay collection, “The Education of a British-Protected Child”, is “personal and eclectic” (“Preface” xii), yet it is clear that he is writing to the African continent and mediating on critical aspects. In his essays, he deviates from grand narratives and moves to the personal, lived experience of being an African. I explore the ways he addresses key African issues and grapple with ways to read Achebe in contemporary Africa. The paper has two sections: the first argues for the relevance of reading Achebe’s non-fiction as a crucial and under-researched part of his literary legacy, the second section brings to light the value for in-depth analysis of his non-fiction writing. Non-fiction can be read as a direct engagement with issues rather than taking a metaphorical stance and it mitigates certain misinterpretations as the writer has the space to develop ideas and concepts more distinctly. This paper is not exhaustive and absolute in its discussion; rather it is an exploration, opening a new way to read Achebe in light of his non-fiction. Biography of Presenting Author Noélle is completing her MA (English Literature and Language) at UCT. Her research focus is radical black African feminisms and looks at how women are written out of national liberation narratives. She has a deep passion for children’s literacy and literature, particularly in mother tongue languages. Ileana Dimitriu UKZN Durban - English Studies Gordimer’s Passing: From Novel to Document? Gordimer has always been a creator of visions for the future. In her pre-1990 novels, she created utopias of the ‘high mimetic’, suggesting the hopes and fears of a beleaguered country. The Conservationist (1974), for example, envisioned the return of the oppressed through the symbolic mode of floods unearthing the victims of past atrocities. A Sport of Nature (1987) created a utopia of celebration as the imaginary new political order triumphs amidst inter-racial and sexual euphoria. After apartheid, Gordimer began to experiment with utopian possibilities in the ‘low 2 �mimetic’; None to Accompany Me (1994) explores a white protagonist’s ‘unremarkable’ shedding of suburban material privilege, while Get A Life (2005) focuses on ecological projections. In her last novel, No Time Like the Present (2012) – which has confounded many a critic – she aims vitriol at current confusion, corruption, and turmoil in her home country. With No Time as my focus, I seek to answer the following question: Did the urgency of the time relegate her last novel ‘to the outer reaches of art, in the vicinity of document’? Could these words of Theodor Adorno be a key to our understanding, even our appreciation, of her ‘passing on’ voice? Biography of Presenting Author Ileana Dimitriu is a professor of English at UKZN, Durban, South Africa. She has published widely on South African, postcolonial and comparative literature, as well as on intercultural studies. Her publications include novels in translation, numerous articles and chapters, edited volumes and the monograph, Art of Conscience: Rereading Nadine Gordimer after Apartheid. Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo Independent Scholar 'Stream of My Blood': The Fragility of Chenjerai Hove's Poetry In 'Small People, Big Wars', the Zimbabwean writer Chenjerai Hove, writing of his war experience, suggests that the pain and violence he witnessed may not be suitable subjects for poetry, since the words poets use may be too fragile to convey the extent of the suffering. Despite this disclaimer, suffering is the subject of much of Hove's poetry. However, the ways in which he 'speaks' of suffering, violence and dispossession change from his first collection Up in Arms to his last Blind Moon. In Up in Arms (1982) Hove employs the language of the liberation war including an iconography of suffering; in Red Hills of Home (1985) he represents displaced people and a natural environment contaminated by blood, violence and human perversity. In his later works, Rainbows in the Dust (1998) and Blind Moon (2003) he continues to convey mental and physical pain, dispossession, death and blood but, increasingly, in sparser, more minimalist 'fragile' images, drawing attention to the ambiguity and ambivalence of language. It is this later poetry that I intend to analyse in order to explore whether the idea that poetry cannot express extreme suffering becomes in Slavoj Zizek's words 'an enabling impossibility' (2009: 4). Biography of Presenting Author Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo was formerly Head of English at Newman University and Dean of the School of Arts at Anglia Ruskin University. Her research interests are in African literature, particularly Zimbabwean and Somali, and contemporary women's writing. She is co-editor of Emerging Perspectives on Yvonne Vera (with Helen Cousins, 2012). 3 �Ifeyinwa Juliet Anwadike Rural Women Rights and Advancement Initiative - 1 Akuruno Close, Mike Ejeagha Crescent, Abakpa Nike Enugu, Nigeria Migration, Racism and Diasporic experiences in Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah The paper is an exploration into the thematic concerns of the author. Migration, race and their attendant experiences and consequences have become a great global concern. Before now, people migrate in order to escape the ugly economic realities in their various countries. But the emergence of terrorism, war, and economic recession scourges have led many people to opt for migration. Europe and America are currently facing a great challenge of coping with migrants issues. This paper therefore takes a cursory look at this emerging global issue and situates it within the context of Adichie’s Americanah. The paper examines the relevance and contradictions that attend the migrants' conditions in Western countries and how disillusioned they become on arriving at their destinations. In the context of the analysis, conclusion is made that racist issues are one of the biggest destroyers of hopes and aspirations of Third World countries, given the experiences that attend the characters in the novel. Biography of Presenting Author Ifeyinwa Anwadike is a budding writer who has taken deep interest in the lives and experiences of rural women in Nigeria. She believes that their lives could be positively affected through writing. She is the Executive Director, Rural Women Rights and Advancement Initiative, an NGO dedicated to the improvement of the living conditions of rural women in Nigeria. She is a lawyer by training. William Ellis UWC - Anthropology and Sociology What does it mean to be a Bushmen today? Bushmen postcoloniality, technics, recognition and the neo-Khoisan revival This paper asks what it may mean to write the Bushmen into the present as a postcolonial subject. Here the intention is not a simple re-reading of the San as belonging to a particular temporal present, that is after (post-colonial), but rather as subjects that live within a milieu that forces them to deal with the spatial, ideological, political and structural after-effects and conditions of colonialism. After addressing the postcolonial I consider Bushmen memories as technics a la Steigler. The Bushmen postcolonial is then addressed through three questions of “recognition”. The first is deployment of Bushmen by the state, secondly the use of pop ontologies by citizens other than the San. Lastly, the question of the terms the San themselves set out for participation in state and society? The final section examines a neo- Khoi-San revivalism as an issue of authenticities, traditional leadership, and the growth of a pan-Khoisan identities. Biography of Presenting Author 4 �I am a member of the Department of Anthropology Sociology & Andrew Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape. My interests include Bushman studies and select topics in this field. Additional research interests include critical plant studies, the ethnography of the "other than human" and transdisciplinarity in the Anthropocene. Melanie Susan Steyn Cornerstone Institution - Education Reading in a Different Cultural Paradigm This paper explores the difficulty for native English speakers reading an English novella translated from Korean. The aim is to demonstrate the difficulty of grasping irony, innuendo, and of generally reading between the lines when the cultural framework is alien. The specific text is Three Days in That Autumn by Pak Wanseo, although a prior reading of the text is not necessary. A gynaecologist who was a victim of rape in the Korean War dedicates her life to helping women end unwanted pregnancies, but there are ironic repercussions. Looking at feminism in a Confucian society leads to an examination of the universal issues. Also, the parallel applications to second-language speakers of English from various cultures should stimulate fruitful discussion. Biography of Presenting Author Melanie Steyn has an MA in English from UCT and has taught English to speakers of other languages for decades, including one decade in the education department of a South Korean University. She was the first foreigner to publish fiction with Korean characters and has also published a South African novella. She currently lectures in English at Cornerstone Institute. Timothy Wright University of the Witwatersrand – WISER Ecologies of Blood: Transfusion, Haemopoetics, and the African Vampire The imaginative wing of the colonial enterprise in Africa has always been suffused by what J. M. Coetzee has called a 'poetics of blood', a vertical poetics in which 'bloodlines' serve as a metaphor for race and genealogy. This essay locates a different, horizontal imagining of blood in the figure of the African vampire. Reading this vampire against the history of blood transfusion and Western biomedicine in Africa moves us to a conception of blood as a way of imagining networks and transactions and of ecologies rather than identities. To illustrate the potential within this 'haemopoetics', I focus on a recent graphic novel, Daniel Browde and Joshua Ryba's Rebirth; a text that places European-style vampires in contemporary Johannesburg. By infecting its vampires with HIV / AIDS, Rebirth binds these vampires together with radically other forms of life and illuminates the disavowed networks within which the static Apollonian vampire of the European imagination is embedded. I explore the ways in which the novel can be read as a philosophical interrogation of not only illness and health but of identity as such, as the anthropocentric focus on both human and vampire subjects gives way, at crucial moments, to a more purely biological imagination. Biography of Presenting Author 5 �Timothy Wright is a postdoctoral research fellow at WiSER, U of the Witwatersrand. He has published on J. M. Coetzee and Kazuo Ishiguro, and is currently working on a series of projects on recent science fiction and fantasy set in Johannesburg. Chantal Katherine d'Offay University of Cape Town - English Language and Literature “where the turban'd Moslem, bearded Jew, and woolly Afric, met the brown Hindu”: Multiculturalism and Postcolonial Diasporas in Anna Barbauld Since William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft published the first modern edition of Anna Barbauld's poems in 1994, scholars have sought to claim her as a key figure of the metropolitan engagement with “empire” in eighteenth-century literature. Among other things, Tim Fulford and Peter Kitson contend that her poetry is an 'enthusiastic anticipation of a British cultural imperialism', and that it uncomfortably 'pre-empts the arguments of Homi K. Bhabha and [Gauri] Viswanathan'. Taking this assertion as a starting point, I shall examine Barbauld's principal poems about slavery and empire, “Epistle to William Wilberforce” and “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven”. In these poems, I argue, her use of the prophetic mode is an attempt to envision the 'end point' of empire, what we now call 'postcolonial'. Furthermore, this space is one defined by simultaneous displacement and inclusion; for Barbauld, London (the former centre of imperial power) not only becomes a ruinous wasteland, but a meeting place for a multicultural diaspora. Interestingly, British identity also becomes diasporic, as she predicts its transplantation to America. In this way, I shall argue, Barbauld's vision of the postcolonial empire is something akin to what Stuart Hall defines as a multicultural diaspora. Biography of Presenting Author Chantal d'Offay recently completed her M.Phil. in English Studies at the University of Cambridge. She is currently working as a tutor and research officer in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Cape Town. Chantal's work is centred in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Studies with a long-standing investment in postcolonial theory. Her research interests include Edmund Burke, Anna Barbauld, gender and sexuality, feminist theory, and colonialism and imperialism. Annel Pieterse University of the Western Cape - English On the spoor of a 'dwaalstorie' My current research project is concerned with the occulting effect that the representation of the supernatural has on language in South African literature. One of my earliest experiences of this effect was as a child, listening to a recorded reading of the tale 'Klein-Riet-alleen-in-die-roerkuil', written up by Eugène Marais in his short collection of 'bushman' tales, 'Dwaalstories'. Reading the story now, I am struck by the fact that this is essentially a tale of failed communication – the action hinges on the protagonist's mission to deliver an important message. Thwarted by a powerful sorceress, his failure leads to his demise. The recording as I first encountered it was framed by its place in the 'Storieman' treasury, an Afrikaans collection of folk-tales from around 6 �the world, published in the 1980s by a leading Afrikaans press. In my paper, I wish to track this tale and its various appropriations, from its (contested) oral origins, to its inclusion in an apartheid era collection of children's stories, and, more recently, in English translation. This exploration forms part of my greater project, as I seek to map out the literary function of the supernatural in South African literature. Biography of Presenting Author Annel Pieterse is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of the Western Cape. Her current project, "Texts Bewitched: Reading the Supernatural in South Africa", examines the distortion and opacity of the sign around issues of the occult in textual representations in South Africa. Her recent articles include “‘The Danger Inside’: Witchcraft and Community in South African Literature”. Vusilizwe Thebe University of Pretoria - Anthropology and Archaeology Ethnicity, Language and Enculturation, and the Politics of Exclusion in Postcolonial Zimbabwe A culture of political intolerance, of violence, of exclusion, and that of deprivation, has characterised postcolonial Africa. The practice of violence, exclusionary and identity politics are often deployed as a tool to discipline certain citizen groups – ethnic minorities and political opponents – that are considered a threat to postcolonial nation building. The postcolonial African state, it has been reported, has failed to blend together different ethnicities into a single nation, instead, it has manufactured ‘strangers’ from within, and discriminated against those considered to be the ‘toxic other’. It is this culture, along with the resultant effects, that this article seeks to highlight through the case of postcolonial Zimbabwe. The article seek to demonstrate how the postcolonial state in Zimbabwe used its hegemonic power to persecute and deny resources to certain groups and regions of the country because of ethnic, political and regional differences. In examining state action in Matabeleland and parts of the Midlands, it shows how ethnic politics played out, how, in fact, ethnicity became a reason for violence, exclusion and disenfranchisement by denying certain populations the much needed development, and how enculturation has become a tool to champion the hegemony certain population groups. Biography of Presenting Author Vusilizwe Thebe lectures Development Studies at the University of South Africa. His research interests are in ethnic minorities, and how these minorities interact with the hegemonic state. He has written articles on the postcolonial state and ethnic politics in Zimbabwe. 7 �Alexandra Negri University of Stuttgart - Amerikanistik I Gendered inclusions and exclusions in Zoë Wicomb's David's Story It is against the backdrop of the sexual exploitation and torture of the female body that Wicomb's David's Story develops into a “herstoric” drama at the race-gender interface. Through its double-emplotment, it pertinently illustrates the interconnections between South Africa's remote colonial era and the more recent apartheid past. Wicomb courageously strays from the TRC's implicit assumption that healing and reconciliation ultimately serve the higher goal of forgetting and moving on. Neither does she succumb to the temptation of disremembering shame-laden deeds carried out in the name of nation building. On the contrary, she “lifts the shroud of silence obscuring women's history as participants in and victims of nation building” (Baiada 33) David's Story pertinently brings to the fore the way in which the female body was (ab)used and the female voice silenced in the name of a phallocentric nation building project – both in the early 19th and the late 20th centuries. The novel's two male protagonists, David and Le Fleur, both adhere to a definition of citizenship which draws exclusively on the concept of race and which therefore invisibilises gender. Article cited: Baiada, Christa “On Women, Bodies, and Nation” African Studies 67.1 (April 2008): 33-47. Biography of Presenting Author Since 2014: Doctoral Student (South African Coloured and Indian Narratives) (Scholarship of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation) under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Walter Göbel and Lecturer at the Institute of American Studies, University of Stuttgart. Focus on African-American Literature; South African Indian Literature; South African Coloured Literature and Essay Writing. 2007-2013: English and French Literature and Linguistics, University of Stuttgart, grade: 1,5, degree: 1. state exam (Staatsexamen) 2012: Exchange student at the École Normale Supérieure, Lyon, France, Erasmus scholarship 2010: Exchange student at the University of Cape Town, DAAD scholarship. Esther K. Mbithi Kenyatta University - Literature Inclusions and Exclusions: a reading of Unbowed: One Woman's Story This paper is a reading of Unbowed: One Woman's Story, the memoir of Prof. Wangari Maathai. Born only two years after Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Maathai was a humble scientist who went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Postcolonial writing, and reading, covers a multitude of areas, issues and themes. Rarely does it include the memoir of a woman. Indeed, not many African women have had their stories captured in writing, much less in their own hand. A reading of Maathai's story is, effectively, a reading of the Kenyan story, through a perspective that is totally different from that of writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong'o, for example. Biography of Presenting Author 1 �Specialising in language use, stylistics and literary presentation, Esther Mbithi reads literature in five languages: English, French, German, Kiswahili and Kikamba. She is currently learning Chinese. Areas of interest, which she teaches at the post-graduate level, include literary language and scholarly presentation, postcolonial discourses, East African literature, European literature and North-American literature. She also has an interest in journalistic writing and runs a blog. Jana Fedtke American University of Sharjah - English Transnational Experiences in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah This paper presents an analysis of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2013 novel, Americanah. It pays particular attention to the representation of the intersections of race, class, and gender in the transnational setting that spans Nigeria, the United States, and the United Kingdom in a post-9/11 world. I argue that the transnational experiences in the novel shape the characters in ways that move beyond the postcolonial experience. The protagonist, Ifemelu, encounters a world full of racial prejudice during her time in the US, which she tries to come to terms with in her anonymous blog titled, “Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black”. Among other issues, she focuses on hair, pan-Africanism, and gender in her meditations and explorations that take on a political overtone. Americanah is thus an inquiry into our understanding of home, diasporic and transnational experiences, ethical responsibilities, racial stereotyping, gender issues, and class consciousness. Biography of Presenting Author Dr. Jana Fedtke is Assistant Professor of English at the American University of Sharjah. Her research and teaching interests include contemporary transnational literatures, postcolonial studies with a focus on South Asia, gender studies, and the theory and practice of world literature. She is currently working on a book manuscript on representations of asexuality in literature, film, and new media. Maria Olaussen University of Gothenburg - English The Re-enchantment of the World: Animal voices in African novels In his essay Explorations in Animist Materialism, Harry Garuba introduces the concept reenchantment of the world in order to discuss the utilization of traditional cultural forms in the context of modern life in African societies. This presentation will approach a number of presentday African novels with animal narrators in order to explore how this phenomenon of reenchantment works in various cultural contexts and how the modern novel form relates to a traditional fable or legend. Garuba’s essay argues for an approach that stresses the practice of continually re-enchanting the world in order to avoid an essentialist and binary understanding of current uses of animism in African societies. This presentation will focus mainly on Patrice Nganang’s Dog Days: An Animal Chronicle (2006), first published as Temps de chien in 2001, but also refer to José Eduardo Agualusa’s The Book of Chameleons (2006), first published as O 2 �vendedor de passados in 2004 and Alan Mabackou’s Memoirs of a Porcupine (2011), first published as Mémoires de porc-épic in 2006 as well as Ian Holding’s Of Beasts and Beings (2010). Biography of Presenting Author Maria Olaussen is Professor of English at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and Professor Extraordinary at Stellenbosch University. Her teaching and research interests are in postcolonial studies, African literature, gender studies and human-animal studies. She is currently working on a project entitled “Narrating the Animal Subject: Concurrences as Narrative Strategy”. Tim Cribb Churchill College, Cambridge - English Postcolonial Yeats ‘Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man: Ireland shall get her freedom, and you still break stone’. The Irish were the first people colonised by the English and, after the Americans, the first to rebel, and, eventually, to gain independence. If Ireland is the prototype for postcoloniality then Yeats is its poet. Early poems espouse Irish tradition, though suppressed by centuries of violent occupation. To recreate it from the Old Irish epics in the space of his selfproclaimed National Theatre, Yeats conjured up the warrior culture-hero, Cuchulain. He also joined the IRB (later the IRA). So when the IRB occupied Dublin Post Office in the Easter Rising, Yeats saw an invisible Cuchulain fighting alongside his friends. Art and politics combined in the terrible beauty of revolutionary violence – but at a terrible price: the rising failed, his friends were executed. Worse, after independence, Yeats found himself a Senator in a republic so reactionary that some artists preferred exile. In Yeats’s last work, the Blind Beggar, from his first Cuchulain play, returns and cuts the hero’s throat for forty pennies. The democratic mercenary state cannot see anything that might stay its hand. Biography of Presenting Author Tutor for Advanced Students and Director of Studies in English (retired), Churchill College, Cambridge; Convenor of Subject Group Committee for Commonwealth & International Literatures in English for Faculty of English, Cambridge; Visiting Professor Kwara State University, Nigeria (2013), Visiting Senior Lecturer, University of Ife, Nigeria (1977-78). Editor, Imagined Commonwealths (Macmillan 2000). Alan Muller University of KwaZulu-Natal - English Do We All Write What We Like?: Biko’s ‘Lie’ and the Genre of Speculative Fiction In South Africa “If you’re white you can write what you like. If you’re black, you can’t write what you like. Steve Biko lied to us”. This is Eusebius McKaiser’s assertion regarding the existence of what he and a number of authors and critics have referred to as ‘literary apartheid’” (24). He continues by suggesting that “it is far more likely that black writing will be about identity and, in particular, our lived racial realities” (25). Using these assertions as a starting point, this paper considers how Biko’s ‘lie’ as explained by McKaiser can be helpful in understanding the absence of black South 3 �African writers (both male and female) in the genre of speculative fiction. While the rest of the African continent has seen black writers of science fiction become quite successful, it may be worth pointing out that most of these individuals self-identify as hyphenated identities (NigerianAmerican as in the case of Nnedi Okorafor). What follows here is a pair of questions that I find pressing: does this hyphen contribute to a certain creative liberation, and is this why the genre of speculative fiction in a South African media market is produced almost exclusively by white writers? Biography of Presenting Author Alan Muller is a PhD candidate at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. His research focuses on speculative fiction in a South African context, with a selection of texts by local authors since 2010. His fields of interest include South African literature and theory, theories of space and place, and speculative fiction. Cheela H. K. Chilala University of Zambia - Literature and Languages Gendered spaces in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: text, context and pretext This paper focuses on how the utilisation of textual, physical and socio-cultural space in Things Fall Apart relates to gender divisions or, in particular, how it affects the position of both male and female characters in the narrative. This paper argues that the socio-cultural context of the narrative provides the male characters with the pretext to marginalise the female characters, and that femininity, in the patriarchal Igbo society as portrayed in the novel, is a disadvantage when it comes to distribution of spaces. Additionally, the paper argues that the placing of women in peripheral spaces is not just a problem of the cultural context, which exalts the male paradigm and degrades the feminine principle, but also the textual choices of the author. The men make the decisions in the socio-political space, the women merely follow the instructions they are given. In the physical sense, the exclusion-inclusion dichotomy is symbolically reflected by the Evil Forest. This is the space reserved for the outcasts and those who are deemed abominable in the sight of the gods. Finally, in terms of textual spaces, the paper argues that the author’s choices of names, and characterisation reflect the subservient place of women in the story. Biography of Presenting Author I am a lecturer in Literature and Drama in the Department of Literature and Languages, University of Zambia, Lusaka. I possess a BA degree, MA and PhD in Literature, all from the University of Zambia. My areas of interest include literary onomastics, narratology, comparative literature, semiotics and drama. I have published a number of academic and non-academic works. 4 �Mark Espin University of the Western Cape - Department of English Black or Blues: Arthur Nortje and a black aesthetic In the Introduction to their Voices From Within: Black Poetry from southern Africa, Michael Chapman and Achmat Dangor stake a claim for the existence of a specifically black aesthetic approach and assert that, “(F)undamental to a black aesthetic is the inextricable relationship which has traditionally existed in African poetry between artistic and social functions” (Chapman & Dangor: 11). In this paper I intend exploring the idea of a black aesthetic approach in poetry from South Africa by discussing the work of Arthur Nortje. In defining “Black British Poetry” for an anthology, Fred D’Aguiar states that, apart from the “black identity” of the poets themselves, the poems contain “a strong sense of being ‘other’ than what is lauded as indigenous and capitally British” (D’Aguiar: 3). In both of these instances the substance of a specifically black aesthetic appears as rather tenuous. In Nortje’s poetry it is possible to discern a broadly Modernist approach. What is more difficult to discern, however, is the presence of a black aesthetic in any distinct form and it seems to me that his work invites a critical re-evaluation of the concept of a black aesthetic at work in poetry, especially that written in South Africa. Biography of Presenting Author Mark Espin teaches in the English Department at the University of the Western Cape. His first volume of poems, Falling from Sleep, was published in 2007. He holds a PhD from the University of the Western Cape. Dr Seema Jena United Nations - Education Nation, narration and cinema, inclusions and exclusions with special reference to films on the Indian partition, 1947 Earth and Train to Pakistan Contemporary theory visualizes nations as narrated, in the sense that beliefs about the origins and evolutions of nations crystallize in the form of stories. Cinema, as the world's storyteller par excellence, was from the outset ideally suited to relay the projected narratives of nations and empires. Just as nationalist literary fictions inscribe into a multitude of events, the notion of a linear, comprehensible destiny, so also films arrange events and actions in a temporal narrative that moves towards fulfilment and thus shape our thinking about historical time and national history. Narrative models in films are not simply reflective microcosms of historical processes, they are also experimental grids or templates through which history can be written and national identity created. Films can convey what Bakhtin calls "chronotopes", materializing time in space, meditating between the historical and discursive, providing fictional environments where historically specific constellations of power are made visible. My attempt will be to explore the issue of the national in cinema and open new areas and questions about national identity and representation. How is history replotted on the screen? How is the past imagined, constructed and narrated in conflicting sites? To what extent has this representation been critical or subversive? 5 �Biography of Presenting Author Founder/Editor of DASKHAT, the first South Asian literature journal in the UK and winner of Jonathan Cape prize for the most promising Black British writer in 1993. Author of three books: Voice and Vision of Anita Desai, Narrative Framework in Indian Women's Writing, and Power, Resistance, Identity, Women Writing in India. Award winning playwright (No Place In Paradise) and documentary films (Nautch Gilrs of Lucknow). Nwabisa Bangeni Stellenbosch University - English The Affect of Reading: The Fragments of Bonnie Henna's Eyebags & Dimples Bonnie Henna’s autobiography Eyebags & Dimples (2012) documents her journey to acceptance of and living with clinical depression, the myriad ways in which this condition impacted on her life, most of it lived quite publicly due to her work in television. The text was welcomed for contributing to breaking the silences around depression amongst Black people. In understanding autobiographical telling to be performative, Henna’s narrative style captures the unstable and fragmented self that is both enacted and constituted by the act. Reflecting Henna’s own feelings of alienation resulting from her initially undiagnosed condition, the reader traverses what seems like snapshots of Henna’s life, initially curtailing affective engagement with the subject. This paper argues that Henna’s stylistic choices render her elusive and detached, the very characterisation she seeks to dispel in her book. It also argues that character coherence as well as narrative coherence only emerge through the examination of the patterns of characterisation, thus producing meaning within the bounds of the text’s narrative style and techniques, and allowing for a productive engagement with questions around autobiography as embodied, ways in which the body becomes visible in the narrative, and cultural meanings attached to the narrator outside of the text. Biography of Presenting Author Nwabisa Bangeni is a lecturer in the English Department at Stellenbosch University. Research interests include Text Reception and Response, Language in Literature, and Narratology. Dawid W. de Villiers Stellenbosch University - English Oceanic Ectopia: Metaphoric Tensions in the Field of Oceanic Studies If the fields of Atlantic Studies and its cognates have burgeoned over the past decades, several assumptions subtending oceanic schemata have become subject to criticism. One example is historian Perry Miller’s objection that “the scale of the oceanic is inevitably dissociative” (9), posing an essentially insurmountable challenge to the centripetal energies of critical labour. While Miller is making the case for a more bounded focus on “seas” – for thalassography – his point also encourages the retrieval of what one might call “oceanic ectopia”: the ocean perceived as a privileged instance of that kind of topos which in some sense falls outside the category of “place”. Such a representation is characteristic of marine-themed literature of the 6 �nineteenth and twentieth centuries (and remains operative in contemporary social and theoretical discourse), but has been suppressed in recent historical, cultural and literary studies taking the maritime as organisational node. With reference to literary texts spanning the period from Romanticism to Modernism, and drawing on Jeff Malpas’s “philosophical topology”, my paper will tentatively elucidate “oceanic ectopia” as a problematic that cannot be excluded from the field of oceanic studies – that is in fact evoked by the metaphorics of the field as such. Biography of Presenting Author I am currently a senior lecturer in the English Department at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. The emphasis of my research in recent years has been on marine-themed literature, my most recent publications in the field being “Okeanos contra Oikoumenè: The Nineteenth-Century Resurgence of an Adversarial Paradigm” (Atlantic Studies 2015) and “‘Shadow of All Things’: Oceanic Alterity in the Poetry of D. H. Lawrence” (forthcoming in the DH Lawrence Review). At present I’m also in the process of refining a conference paper titled “The Ectopian Ocean in Modern(ist) Poetry” for publication. 7 �Jessica FitzPatrick University of Pittsburgh - English Reconsidering the Space(s) of Global Science Fiction Science Fiction (SF) has always been accepted as a worlds literature, but only in recent decades has SF been adamantly debated as world literature. After positing the subgenre self-identifies its parameters, I contend postcolonial SF’s self-constructed goals are achieved by utilizing space. Using a framework drawn from Westphal’s geocriticism, Soja’s thirdspace, and Bhabha’s idea of liminality, I propose postcolonial SF authors challenge the traditional generic construct of “future spaces” by preserving and emphasizing postcolonial lived spaces in their fictional texts. I support my argument of the importance of spatiality in postcolonial SF through two non-traditional-SF narratives of encountering the “Other”: Nnedi Okorafor’s alien-encounter novel Lagoon (2014) and Anil Menon’s near-future-India novel The Beast With Nine Billion Feet (2009). I demonstrate how Okorafor and Menon reinscribe the space of cultural tradition (coming of age rituals, religious rites) and spaces of contemporary society (libraries, rap concerts, revival churches) through the “un-locatable” “alien” (biogenetic dehumanized activist, alien-molecular technology) to simultaneously complicate and maintain connections to the current-Earth locations of Nigeria and India. In these texts the “future” becomes obtainable through specific combinations of spaces, which enable readers to revise current social environments and resist becoming subsumed into a humanist (and erasure prone) future. Biography of Presenting Author Jessica FitzPatrick is a doctoral candidate in the English department of the University of Pittsburgh (USA). Her research focuses on Postcolonial Science Fiction, examining texts that gesture toward possible futures, even as they frustrate the use of “the future” as an excuse to erase politically explosive histories. Idowu Omoyele University of Cape Town - Graduate School in Humanities Marshalling the Disciplinary Forces: Africa and the Caribbean in the Formation of English Literature The claim is sometimes made that the so-called 'culture wars' that raged between the forces of conservatism and liberalism in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s inaugurated the crises of disciplinary knowledge production and canon formation in the academy. Even as distinguished a scholar as John Guillory in his otherwise magisterial work Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993) could declare, apparently without irony: "While the explicitly political ends of canonical revision are obvious, it has not been sufficiently acknowledged how much the language of revision owes to a political culture which is specifically American" (4). The object of this paper is to interrogate this sort of essentializing, generalizing tendency in critique; and to properly historicize and contextualize the crises and politics of disciplines/canons as they relate to the institutionalization of English literature in Africa and the Caribbean, both of which can look back to longer, more illustrious periods of canonical and curricular revision. This paper aims to draw on two such major 1 �acts of revision, both of which audaciously interrogate the entrenched dogmatism and rigidity of the canon of English literature. Biography of Presenting Author Idowu Omoyele is a doctoral student of the Graduate School in Humanities at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He graduated with a B.A. honours degree in English from what was Ogun State University (later Olabisi Onabanjo University), Ago-Iwoye, Nigeria and gained an M.A. in English literature at the University of Leeds, England. Danie Stander Stellenbosch University - English Reza de Wet's Gothic Performances of South Africa's Colonial Past In 2004, ten years after South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy, Reza de Wet, South Africa’s most awarded playwright, was commissioned to write a play to be performed at the Box Theatre in Grahamstown as part of Rhodes University’s centenary celebrations. She wrote and directed Concealment, a play in which she recovers an often overlooked dimension of South African colonial history: the traumas of settler women. As with all her plays, De Wet employs the Gothic as a trope which, simultaneously, concerns itself with the staging of repressed histories, and with the dramatisation of patriarchal oppression. I will consider Concealment as a culmination of De Wet’s explorations in two plays preceding it, A Worm in the Bud and Fever, in which she similarly presents her audience with a gothicised portrayal of the colonial power invested in the patriarch. The three plays form a cluster in which De Wet recovers, by means of the neo-Victorian Gothic, a unique aspect of South African history pertinent to current debates around white subjectivity in relation to the decolonization of South Africa. I will reflect, in particular, on De Wet’s use of historical theatre as a powerfully subversive medium in this discourse. Biography of Presenting Author Danie Stander receives a MA Cum Laude in English Studies in March 2016 at Stellenbosch University. His thesis focuses on Reza de Wet’s intertextual engagement with Russian and Victorian literature and history in her dramatic oeuvre after 1994. He is currently preparing for a PhD in Life Writing. Kate Highman University of the Western Cape Scenes of Education and Seduction in Zoe Wicomb's You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town and J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace Seeking to reconsider the place of English Literature as a university discipline in South Africa, this paper explores two fictional scenes of instruction in English Literature in South African fiction, those in Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town and Coetzee’s Disgrace. Coetzee’s English academic protagonist, David Lurie, famously pronounces that the English language is ‘an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa’, and feels that he and his subject are out of place in the 2 �post-apartheid university. In Wicomb’s text, the student protagonist, Frieda, struggles to complete an essay on Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’urbervilles, and we are again invited to think about the place of English Literature in the South African university. Wicomb’s story, this paper argues, sets up disturbing parallels between Tess’s so-called ‘seduction’ (as Frieda is taught to read it)/rape and the education on offer to Frieda. Here Wicomb follows Hardy, who repeatedly figures Tess’s experience as a ‘lesson’. Disgrace too overlays a scene of rape/ ‘seduction’ with one of education, and Hardy is alluded to. Tracing these intertexts, the paper seeks to reconsider questions of pedagogy and canonicity that are increasingly topical given the current movement to ‘decolonise’ the university. Biography of Presenting Author Kate Highman is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, working on the history, politics and place of English Literature as a university discipline in South Africa. Prior to this she held a NRF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in the UWC English Department, for a project on 'Plagiarism, Copyright and Cultural Ownership in South African Letters'. Her PhD (York, UK) was on debates about plagiarism and cultural ownership in South Africa. Michelle Kelly University of Oxford - Faculty of English Language and Literature University Discipline(s) and the TRC in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Niq Mhlongo’s Dog Eat Dog In Niq Mhlongo’s Dog Eat Dog (2004) the protagonist Dingz is brought in front of a university disciplinary committee headed by ‘the Priest’, charged with taking a ‘young lady’, a fellow student, to his room. With echoes of the university disciplinary committee in Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), Dog Eat Dog nonetheless represents a subtle reworking of the terms of Coetzee’s novel, reframing its preoccupation with transformation, desire, discipline – and the university as the locus of these concerns – around the interests of young, black students. But behind both scenes, of course, lies the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, re-located in both novels within the institution of the university. The university, much like the TRC itself, is an agent of transition, though in Mhlongo’s account, one ill-equipped to deliver on its promise of social mobility for those coming of age in the immediate aftermath of the first democratic elections. This paper will take as its point of departure both novels’ re-location of the structures of the TRC to this alternative institution of transition, opening up questions about discipline, and the discipline of English in particular, within post-apartheid South Africa. Biography of Presenting Author Michelle Kelly is Departmental Lecturer in World Literature in the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford. Her research is on postcolonial literature, especially South African literature, and literature and law. 3 �Soofia Siddique St. Stephen's College, University of Delhi - English The 'Habit of Writing History': Gandhi's reading and negotiation of Kaye's and Malleson's History of the Indian Mutiny of 1857-58 In 1891, 22 year old Mohandas Gandhi, having completed his legal training in London approached the jurist and orientalist Frederick Pincott for advice. Pincott recommended a curious reading list: two books on Physiognomy and one on the Indian Mutiny—Kaye's and Malleson's magisterial six volume History of the Indian Mutiny of 1857-58. Gandhi mentions that he 'could not read Kaye's and Malleson's volumes in England, but [he] did so in South Africa as [he] had made a point of reading them at the first opportunity’ (Autobiography). This fact, and its potential reverberations into the later thought and discourse of Gandhi forms an unexplored area of enquiry: the role and impact of the centrepiece event of nineteenth century colonial violence, the rebellion of 1857 in conjunction with its dominant literary form, the Mutiny history on the imbricated space of Gandhi's political thought and his discursive practices. Focussing on a 1905 biographical article titled “Sir Henry Lawrence” in his South African journal Indian Opinion, I explore questions of Gandhi's nodal position as both a reader and invoker of mutiny discourse. I consider how a transformatory process in writing practice and generic choice gets constitutively involved with crafting a political method and vision. Biography of Presenting Author Dr Soofia Siddique teaches courses in Indian Literature and Postcolonial Studies at the Department of English, St. Stephen's College (Delhi) and is currently in Berlin on a research fellowship. Her PhD work was on the topic 'Remembering the Revolt of 1857: Contrapuntal Formations in Indian Literature and History' (London 2012), and she has recently contributed an article on Gandhi in the Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies (Wiley-Blackwell 2016). Her childhood was spent in Nigeria, and her engagement with Africa continues through her teaching on Achebe, Gordimer and Bessie Head. Dr. Thandava Gowda T.N Karnataka State Higher Education Council - Higher Education Department Critiquing Postcolonial Eco-criticism in Get a Life by Nadine Gordimer To me, Nadine Gordimer’s humanist vision belittles all ideological friction-factions from which her writings have been approached. Everything in society results from human activity, interaction and interests. The fact that she is a prolific writer must not make us forget the severe challenges she had to face when she started to write ‘protest’ literature. The challenge was to uphold the relevance of non-Eurocentric models against the Eurocentric as Nadine Gordimer so pertinently points out in her Introduction to South African Writing Today. The novel for the way it maps and reflects critically on environmentalism’s place in a globalized world, considering how the insights developed through its novel form might feed the rich theorizing these times require of anyone caring about people and planet. Having moved her subjects from apartheid, she has made her successful attempts to unveil the 21st century social and ecological demise. This reveals a lot about the 'soul' of Nadine Gordimer and South African’s writing. It is illuminated and depicted 1 �uniquely with the realism of a critical approach of “Nadine Gordimer’s Literature” critiquing the morbid symptoms of crime, violence and disease. Thus she becomes a writer “beyond” any acclimatized writers of colonial and post-apartheid writing. Biography of Presenting Author Assistant Professor of English (M.A., Ph.D) presently working as Administrative Officer of Karnataka State Higher Education Council, India. My area of research is South African Literature, pertaining to Nadine Gardimer’s writings. I have visited South Africa two times on various academic assignments. I have 8.5 years of teaching experience. I have published papers in national and international journals on various topics. I am also inclined to take up international assignments in future. Anita Rosenblithe Raritan Valley Community College - English Playing in the Light and October: Feminism and the Construction of Colouredness in Zoe Wicomb In Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light (2006) and October (2014), the female protagonist – Marion Campbell and Mercia Murray, respectively – each, through intensely traumatic discoveries, comes to a fuller awareness, albeit subliminally, of the patriarchal hegemony undergirding apartheid. This paper argues that both novels enact the inextricable relationship historically between patriarchy—white and black – to the discourse and ideology embodied in the construction of South Africa’s “coloured” identity in the 21st century. In October, Mercia is forced to acknowledge the harrowing fact that her father, whom she viewed as a bastion of coloured morality, has had sex with a poverty-stricken, pre-adolescent farm girl. Likewise, in Playing in the Light, Marion learns that not only did her parents never tell her that they were “play whites”, but that Brenda, the lower-class young coloured woman to whom she has shared her most intimate feelings, has been betraying her by secretly meeting with Marion’s aging father in order to record his biography. Then, when Marion demands why Brenda doesn’t write her own story, Brenda responds: “Now your father, there’s a story—with his pale skin as capital, ripe for investment”. In each novel, such unexpected reversals explode received ideas on subalternity and feminism. Biography of Presenting Author Professor, English, Raritan Valley Community College (Somerville, New Jersey, U.S.); Ph.D., Comparative Literature, University of Illinois. Current research focus: Contemporary Caribbean and African women writers; Women’s and Gender Studies. Mbongeni Zikhethele Malaba University of KwaZulu-Natal - English Studies Vocational Challenges in Marguerite Poland's Shades This paper analyses the manner in which principal characters in Marguerite Poland's Shades handle or try to come to terms with their vocations. The study evaluates Father Charles Farborough's career as the founder of St Matthias Mission and compares his achievements with those of his assistant, Walter Brownley. Both are prepared to accommodate the beliefs of the 2 �locals as they establish their missions. Charles' wife, Emily would have preferred that the mission focuses on spiritual purity rather than the economic emancipation of the black communities, which her husband foregrounds. Emily's ally, Mzantsi, strives to eradicate traditional practices, while Charles is more pragmatic, as he realises that people do not change their cultural practices overnight. The success on Brownley's mission station in Mbokothwe is based on his willingness to respect and incorporate local beliefs. Crispin Farborough's stifled vocation is also analysed. When Frances is banished to Grahamstown, she comes to realise that her vocation is to teach at St Matthias, which paves the way for her resolve to go to Mbokothwe as the novel ends. Benedict Matiwane's punishment by Emily and Mzantsi acts as a catalyst for his questioning of Emily's wish that he becomes a priest. Biography of Presenting Author Mbongeni Malaba is a Professor of English Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg. His has published on Shakan, Zimbabwean, South African and Namibian literature. He has lectured at the University of Zimbabwe and the University of Namibia. Oluwole Coker Obafemi Awolowo University, Ie-Ife - English The Folklore Factor in Childhood Education: An African Model Indigenous knowledge production and dissemination are channelled through the agency of folk art in African societies. This paper studies children programmes created by an African folk artist, Jimi Solanke. The paper relates their relevance to early childhood education theorizing. Two children programmes, “Fun Space” and “African Stories”, developed by Solanke and aired on Galaxy TV and AIT TV, respectively in Nigeria, are purposively selected. The study reveals that Solanke uses songs, folktales and friendly audience participatory mechanism to endear himself to the children. This confirms the efficacy of culture education, folk narrative and the use of songs, rhymes and other accompaniments in evolving a cultural model of early childhood education for Africa. Solanke is thus shown as an exemplar of how folk art can serve in developing a platform for an effective early childhood education strategy. The study confirms that African indigenous societies parade an array of local wits and respected storytellers with enduring brilliance. Hence, African story telling tradition instantiates a visible indigenous paradigm of knowledge production, dissemination, transmission and utilization even across modern media. Through this, effective engagement with children becomes a foregone conclusion as folk artistes tend to understand the psychology of the children. Biography of Presenting Author Oluwole Coker holds a Ph.D in English specializing in African Fiction from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. He is a Lecturer at the English Department, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria where his teaching and research interests span postcolonial African fiction, cultural and interdisciplinary studies. An ACLS/AHP Postdoctoral Award Fellow, 2014 2015 CODESRIA Child and Youth Institute Laureate, he is also a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, USA. 3 �Marzia Milazzo Vanderbilt University & Rhodes University - English “Playing the race card” while “even God is white:” Niq Mhlongo’s Dog Eat Dog, Post-Apartheid Black Fiction, and the Paradoxes of Nonracialism Offering a reading of Niq Mhlongo’s debut novel Dog Eat Dog (2004) alongside other recent novels by Black South African writers, this paper shows that post-apartheid literature is not only racially marked, but also continues to produce knowledge on racial inequality, racial ideology, and resistance. Much twenty-first century Black South African fiction displays a tension between the role played by personal responsibility and the societal constraints that limit the main characters' chances for survival, mobility or simply self-fulfilment. Novels such as Dog Eat Dog, Kgebetli Moele’s Room 207 (2006), Mongane Serote’s Rumours (2013) or Zukiswa Wanner’s London, Cape Town, Joburg (2014) continue to direct our attention towards the multifarious legacies of apartheid. Yet, they concurrently underplay the impact of institutional racism in the present. Although racism and Black dispossession are central themes in Dog Eat Dog, the novel emphasizes ethical conduct and hard work as determinant factors for Black mobility. In doing so, it reveals the paradoxical workings of nonracialism within and beyond the realm of fiction. Biography of Presenting Author Marzia Milazzo is Assistant Professor of English at Vanderbilt University and an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Rhodes University (2016). She is currently completing a book entitled Colorblind Tools: Narrating Racial Power in the Americas and South Africa, which examines the impact of colorblindness on literary imaginaries, antiracist politics, and the production of knowledge in Panama, South Africa, and the USA. Olivier Moreillon University of Basel - Department of English Dr Danyela Demir University of KwaZulu Natal, Durban - Department of English “I flew too close to the sun […] and fell very hard”: Representations of Psychoses in Anglophone South African Literature after 2000 from a world-literary perspective Numerous new authors have entered South Africa’s literary landscape since 2000. With their works, they have crucially broadened the understanding of ‘South Africanness’ by addressing formerly tabooed topics, as Margaret Lenta shows in her discussion of a whole range of debut novels along the following six overarching themes: sex and gender, multilingualism, ‘writing back’, previously silenced communities, the roman à thèse, and ‚fusion’ (2011). This paper suggests psychosis and the psychotic breakdown as an addition to Lenta’s list. Through a ‘distant reading’, as famously suggested by Franco Moretti (2000), this paper looks at a selection of novels. Among these are K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001), Johan van Wyk’s Man Bitch (2001), Perfect Hlongwane’s Jozi: A Novel (2013), Songeziwe Mahlangu’s Penumbra (2013), Niq Mhlongo’s Way Back Home (2013), Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive (2014), and Nakhane Turé’s Piggy Boy’s Blues (2015). The importance of psychoses and psychotic breakdowns in these novels points to the protagonists’ precarious subject positions that can be read as a 1 �sense of disillusionment with what Derek Hook has pointedly called “(post)apartheid conditions” (2013). This sense of disenchantment, furthermore, suggests a growing feeling of a deeply ingrained stagnation, hopelessness, and foreclosure of a (better) future. Biography of Presenting Author Olivier Moreillon studied History as well as English Literature and Linguistics at the University of Zurich. His PhD-project is titled “Cities in Flux: Capetonian and Durbanite Literary Topographies”. Danyela Demir studied Spanish and English literature, and Spanish linguistics at the University of Augsburg, Germany. Her PhD is titled “Reading Loss: Post-Apartheid Melancholia in Contemporary South African Novels”. Ryan Topper University of Leeds - School of English Towards an Animist Ontology, or What Comes After Sovereignty? What unites deconstruction and postcolonial theory is the desire to move beyond the Eurocentric myth of the sovereign subject. While deconstruction is set against the Western fantasy of the autonomous self-presence of each individual, postcolonial theory is set against the ways in which this fantasy has been historically and politically enacted to produce unjust power relations across the world. Recent debates within new materialism and the Anthropocene can thus be viewed as the next step within the dialogue between deconstruction and postcolonial theory. The subject of new materialism and the Anthropocene is a subject who is no longer sovereign, but radically relational. Building on the work of scholars such as Caroline Rooney and Harry Garuba, I argue that recent attempts to reconfigure the relation between the subject and the world within new materialism and the Anthropocene are long prefigured by animist ontologies found within African literary forms. Animism is a relational ontology in which instead of a sovereign subject there is a planet existing in infinitely mutual animation. In this position paper, I place the epistemic and ontological framing of the ‘world’ within African animist texts in critical dialogue with recent turns toward the ‘world’ in critical theory. Biography of Presenting Author Ryan Topper is a PhD candidate in the School of English at the University of Leeds, where he is writing a thesis on the relations between trauma and spirit possession in African literature. James Hodapp American University of Beirut - English Afropolitanism and Ready-Made African World Literature In her 2005 “Bye-Bye Babar”, Taiye Selasi popularized the term Afropolitanism, defining Afropolitans as “people working and living in cities around the globe, they belong to no single geography, but feel at home in many … not as citizens, but Africans of the world … redefining what it means to be African”. The concept has since been used to argue for a worldly African subjectivity that eschews the nation, in favor of the world, as a useful unit for Africans. Bavinanya 2 �Wainaina and others have pointed out that an understanding of African subjectivity as worldly is classed and in fact separates itself from the continent by eliding the realities of most Africans who are still often defined by the nation, especially concerning movement. In critiquing Afropolitanism, this paper mobilizes Timothy Brenan and David Damrosch’s “ready-made” world literature that preforms “collective lesson[s] for American readers of a global pluralism” to make “globally directed works … all too easy to understand”. Despite being skeptical of Afropolitanism’s triumphalism, this paper reconciles the “placelessness” of Afropolitan novels such as We Need New Names and Ghana Must Go with Afropolitanism’s valuable rejection of victimhood, impetus to consider non-national subjectivities, and stress on the intrinsic worldliness of Africans. Biography of Presenting Author James Hodapp is an assistant professor of English literature at the American University Beirut where he teaches African, world, and postcolonial literature. He has published articles in ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, English in Africa, The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, and African Studies Review. Chelsea Haith Rhodes University - English Department (Un)belonging: Exploring systems of inclusion and exclusion in the use of Nigerian, American and British English dialects in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah This paper focuses on investigating processes of assimilation and identity-formation through language and linguistic choices in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah. British and American English is used alongside Nigerian English and Igbo in the dialogue of the characters while the novel itself is written in what would be considered prescriptively ‘good’ English. Complicating the work Adichie is doing in allowing her characters to code switch, she keeps to ‘the rules’ herself by using codes that might be considered exclusionary; the novel form written in ‘good’ English. Perhaps she does so to force into the mainstream stories that float from afar: the reality of educated illegal immigrants, the experiences of Nigerian middle-class women. Gesturing to the contemporary cultural production at work in a post-colonial society, language is used in the novel to highlight how people are included and excluded in social and institutional contexts. I will raise the following questions in this paper: How does Adichie’s disruption of the hegemony of English valorise cultural and linguistic hybridity? How do the characters’ experiences gesture to the imperialism of prescriptive accents and language use? How do conceptions of home and identity tie into Adichie’s concerns of language and dialect? Biography of Presenting Author Chelsea Haith is completing her Honours in English Literature at the university currently known as Rhodes. Her interests include gender studies and post-colonial literature. She is the Media Officer of the Gender Action Project and works as a freelance journalist published by ‘Africa Is A Country’ and ‘The Journalist’. 3 �Michael Chapman Durban University of Technology - Fine Arts and Design 'Our story is different, it does not run in a straight line': André Brink, Mevrou Sadie and Me Part tribute, part assessment of André Brink’s achievement, the paper takes its cue from the fact its author was introduced to South African literature through Brink’s early novel, Lobola vir die Lewe/ Bride Price for Life (1962). Responding to contributions to the collection of articles on Brink, Contrary (2013), the paper considers Brink as a “compelling storyteller”, whose character, Kristien (Imaginings of Sand/Sandkastele, 1996), realises that, given the ‘hybrid’ language, race and faith inheritances that constitute South Africans, “our story is different, it does not run in a straight line”. A question (posed by Peter Horn) is permitted to linger: Will Brink’s stories travel to a new literary history (indeed, a new history) still waiting to be written? Biography of Presenting Author Michael Chapman is affiliated to the Durban University of Technology. He is also an emeritus professor and fellow, University of KwaZulu-Natal. His numerous publications include the 550page history, Southern African Literatures (1996; 2003) and the collection of essays, Art Talk, Politics Talk (2006). Dr Sam Durrant Leeds University - English Creaturely transitions in South African literature and visual culture The creaturely (re)turn in critical theory is now well underway (Agamben 2002; Santner 2006; Pick 2011). However this conversation has yet to extend itself beyond its Euro-American and Judaeo-Christian purview, despite widespread interest from postcolonialists in the larger field of the biopolitical (Mbembe 2001). In this provocation I will suggest how Africanist animist thinking radically alters the conversation in its figuration of the creature not as the alienated sign of a humanity stripped bare of spiritual life but rather as the sign of spiritual plenitude, transhuman kinship and planetary relationality. Given the marginality of animism within the dissociative world of global modernity, the task becomes how to plot the dialectical role of the creature, as both the residual trace of lost connections and the redemptive intimation of post-sovereign community. I will attempt to do this via snapshots of what I term ‘creaturely transition’ in recent South African literature (from Disgrace through to Zoo City) and the visual arts (District Nine, the work of Alexander, Bester, Kentridge and the Handspring Puppet Company). In all these works the creature emerges from the shadow of the beast, as the sign of a racist history of projection insistently reaching beyond itself. Biography of Presenting Author Sam Durrant is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature at the University of Leeds. He is currently co-editing a volume of essays on Refugee Writing and working towards a monograph provisionally entitled: Transitional Subjects: Mimesis in Contemporary African Literature. 1 �Snežana Vuletić The International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) – Germany and Univ. of Stockholm – Sweden - English department Narrating Exclusion and Inclusion in Fiction: A cultural reading of the forms of deformity in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) The aim of this paper is to investigate the forms and functions of deformity in Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel Things Fall Apart. The paper argues that various forms of deformity featured in the novel function as literary devices, or more specifically metaphors, which tell compelling stories of (social) exclusion and inclusion in a concise and creative manner. By means of metaphorically narrating exclusion and inclusion, the forms of deformity in Things Fall Apart, I suggest, not only reflect the workings of the Igbo community as constructed in the novel but also demonstrate how the dialectics between exclusion and inclusion serves to challenge established social norms. How does deformity as a metaphor narrate forms of exclusion and inclusion in Achebe’s novel in a condense manner? How do forms of deformity and, by implication, the politics of exclusion and inclusion communicate (with) the Igbo culture portrayed in the novel? How is deformity used to interrogate the established social norms in Achebe’s Igbo culture? By answering these questions the paper seeks to demonstrate how fiction narrates social phenomena such as exclusion and inclusion and how metaphors can be used to challenge established social norms, i.e. the ‘cultural narratives’ a community lives by. Biography of Presenting Author Snežana Vuletić is a doctoral candidate and a research assistant at the Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture in Germany (supervision of Prof. Dr. Ansgar Nünning) and the Univ. of Stockholm in Sweden (supervision of Prof. Dr. Stefan Helgesson). She is a member of the IGHERT program (topic: indigeneity). Ashma Shamail University of Dammam, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia - Dept. of English Language & Literature Stories from the Sea Islands of South Carolina: History, Cultural Survival, and Identity in Praisesong for the Widow The Sea Islands off the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina function as a vital bridge between African-Americans and their ancestry, retaining a unique Gullah/Geeche culture that had been forgotten in the mainland communities. Illuminating the geographical segment as an emerging site of memory, black women literary and visual artists like Paule Marshall, and Julie Dash have highlighted the place for reconfiguring forgotten histories and myths. The paper focuses upon the mythical landscape of the Sea Islands of South Carolina, with reference to Paule Marshall’s novel Praisesong for the Widow (1983) and a brief outline of Julie Dash’s film Daughters of the Dust (1991). The Gullah legend of the Ibo Landing (on the Sea Islands of South Carolina) and Ibos return to the waters of the Atlantic in Praisesong is a spiritual touchstone. Marshall’s protagonist is guided by a West African griot in recovering kinship ties of African heritage. Dash revises the story of Ibo Landing through her film. By mapping the stories of the old Sea Islands culture, and history, as a healing ground and by remembering their heroic tales, through cultural practices, 1 �the Sea Islands establish links among the scattered African communities dispersed from homeland (imagined or real). Biography of Presenting Author Dr. Ashma Shamail is an Assistant Professor at the University of Dammam, KSA. Her published research in African-Caribbean, African-American, Indo-Caribbean and Pakistani women writers in books and eminent journals internationally display an overarching focus in the fields of postcolonial theory, cultural studies, post-modern literary criticism and critical race studies. Chukwunwike Anolue University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg - African Literature Issues in Lola Shoneyin's The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives The paper attempts a thematic and structural analysis of Lola Shoneyin's debut novel The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives. It puts in perspective the significance of the work among prominent Nigerian novels of the 21st century. This relates to polygamy as the central thematic thrust of the work. In the exploration of that theme, a claim is made that Shoneyin has expanded the frontiers of radical feminism in Nigerian literature. Other themes are raised and it is illustrated how they advance the central theme. In relation to how the thematic issues are constructed, the scatological and earthy aspects of the novel are discussed and the paper takes a position that the work is diminished by them. But that does not imply that the novel is categorisable as a stylistic failure. Humour is seen as a device which prevents the novel from being depressing, despite all the human suffering projected into it. In connection with the novel's sensual content, the essay also interrogates the uninhibited projection of sensuality in the contemporary Nigerian novel. Biography of Presenting Author Chukwunwike Anolue is with the Department of English, Bauchi State University, Gadau, Nigeria. He is at present a PhD student in the Department of African Literature, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Roger Michael Field UWC - English Keeping Cavafy in mind I take the title of my paper from the poem ‘Ithaka’, in which the speaker calls on Odysseus to keep Ithaka always ‘in mind’. This phrase about a the journeys of post- or anti-heroic Odysseus aptly sums up the presence of Constantin Cavafy’s poetry in the South African writer Achmat Dangor’s prose and poetry. Beginning with Waiting for Leila (1979), through Bulldozer (1983), Bitter Fruit (2000) to Strange Pilgrimages (2013), Dangor repeatedly turns to the idea of Cavafy and his poetry, in particular ‘Ithaka’, ‘Since nine o’ clock’, and all four of his ‘Days of…’ poems. He does so to meditate on several notions, including memories of desires fulfilled, unfulfilled and impossible; repetition and return; creating a new or false past for oneself; cosmopolitan and national identities. Cavafy’s poetry is prose-like, but neither Dangor’s poetry or his prose try to imitate Cavafy’s poetry. Cavafy’s poetry is often a reference point that Dangor initially 2 �acknowledges and praises, and then contradicts or discards in order to reach a conclusion at odds with Cavafy’s manner or style, sometimes by drawing in and on several other poets including Yeats, T. S. Eliot, David Dabydeen, and James Matthews. Biography of Presenting Author Roger Field teaches in the UWC English Dept. His biography of Alex la Guma appeared in 2010. He has written on Cavafy, Seferis, postcolonial receptions of the Odyssey, and how Freud and Said read the classics. He is exploring the influence of Nizami’s story of Layla and Majnum on Dangor. Ademola Adesola Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Department of English The Nigerian War Novel and the Female Perspective in Chimamanda Adichie’s Half Of A Yellow Sun and Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo’s Roses And Bullets No one single event since the political independence of Nigeria has richly impacted its creative enterprise like its thirty-month Civil War (1967-70). While critics have noted the horrendous effects of the war largely from the prism of men, there exist ringing distortions and silences on the roles women played during the war. It is against this backdrop that the proposed paper will examine Chimamanda Adichie novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, and Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo’s novel, Roses and Bullets, as alternative imaginative history of the Nigerian Civil War. The paper will discuss the social relevance of the Nigerian war novels with special emphasis on the peculiarity of the writings by women on the Nigerian Civil War experience. The choice of the two novels is informed by their clear invalidation of the negative portrayal of women as evident in some Nigerian Civil War novels written by men. The paper will work on the assumption that the fresh perspective offered by the selected novels will expose the absences, distortions, gaps and silences in novels written by men on the war, and will further balance the imaginative accounts of the war. Biography of Presenting Author Ademola Adesola is a graduate student in the Department of English, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria, where he got both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and currently pursuing his doctoral research. His doctoral research is on literary representations of child soldier in Africa. Madhu Krishnan University of Bristol - English African Literatures, Extraversion and the World This paper considers African literary production through the overlapping frameworks of locality, globality, planetarity and extraversion. In recent years, the position of African literatures within a world-literary system has become increasingly commonplace as a critical assertion. In this paper, I argue against this view from the premise that such a perspective fails to take effect of the specific distinctiveness of the literary within African writing and fails to account for the diversity of its forms (for instance, the simultaneous circulation of material through multinational and 3 �independent publishers; emerging digital platforms; alternative and ephemeral conduits for literary writing). In particular, I argue that the patterns of production, circulation and consumption of African literatures, when set against the aesthetic renderings layered within texts, belies a dynamic which more aptly reflects and revises the processes of extraversion (c.f. Bayart) in a multifocal complex of synchronous and multiple networks which cannot be easily defined as peripheral, central, local, global or otherwise. Considering African literatures as a limit case for world literatures more broadly, this paper intervenes in questions of artistic and aesthetic autonomy; literary and cultural production; and the dynamics of dependency, exchange and conviviality which underwrite the landscape of African literatures today. Biography of Presenting Author Madhu Krishnan is a Lecturer in 20th and 21st Century Postcolonial Writing at the University of Bristol. She is author of Contemporary African Literature in English: Global Locations, Postcolonial Identifications (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Stefan Helgesson Stockholm University - Department of English (Literary) Theory from the South In their book, Theory from the South, John and Jean Comaroff claim that the North is evolving towards Africa, with fiscal meltdown, precarity and state privatization reflecting developments which the “Global South” has experienced for much longer. As the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) argue in their recent book Combined and Uneven Development, however, this is hardly anything new. The critic who reads fiction for its encoding of global unevenness, will find some of the strongest instances of “world-literature” emerging from (formerly) colonised regions: Multaltuli’s Java, Machado de Assis’s Brazil, Olive Schreiner’s Cape Colony. Taking this as a point of departure, the present paper will look at some twentieth-century instances of how literature has been theorised in the South. The assumption here is that, on closer inspection, earlier phases of literary study in the South produce implicit (and explicit) theories of world literature that prefigure contemporary debates. The paper draws on a Brazilian and South African archive – notably work by Antonio Candido, Roberto Schwarz, Tim Couzens, Chabani Manganyi and Stephen Gray – and will look at how critics have negotiated the dialectic of the local and the cosmopolitan under conditions of (post)coloniality in the 1960s and 1970s. Biography of Presenting Author Stefan Helgesson is professor of English at Stockholm University. His research interests include southern African literature in English and Portuguese, Brazilian literature, postcolonial theory, translation theory and theories of world literature. He is the author of Writing in Crisis (2004) and Transnationalism in Southern African Literature (2009), has edited volume four of Literary History: Towards a Global Perspective (2006) and is co-editor (with Pieter Vermeulen) of Institutions of World Literature (2015). 4 �Mathew Blatchford University of Fort Hare - English Language and Comparative Literature Complicity or Resistance? Recent South African Literature and Academia as Political Agents South Africa has a long history of literature written for overtly political purpose. The most conspicuous example of this was "struggle literature", often categorised alongside African anticolonial literature. Meanwhile, in South African academia there has been a struggle both over the cultural dominance of languages, and (largely within English) between a traditionalist liberal literary analysis and a superficially radical leftist or africanist literary analysis challenging some elements of the traditionalist analysis (although arguably accepting the paradigms which that analysis employed). Hence much South African literature and literary academia may be seen a form of political agency of resistance to prevailing dogmas and authorities. Is this the case in the second decade of the twenty-first century? Have unquestioned inequality and neoliberalism come to completely dominate the tropes within which literary value and production function, making resistance futile even where it exists? Anthony O'Brien and others contend that resistance is desirable and attempt to continue the uneven work on "struggle literature" as performed during the late apartheid era. This paper will attempt to assess whether this is a practicable stance, and whether it is being effectually performed under contemporary South African conditions. Biography of Presenting Author Mathew Blatchford is currently HoD of English at the University of Fort Hare. His research interests are political discourse and alternative systems of power (including fantastic literature). (Fatima) Fiona Moolla University of the Western Cape - English Niger Delta Literature: A Post-postcolonial Case for the Constitution of a Planetary Literature? The category of world-literature has zeroed in on the spatial differentiation of the nation-state. The globalisation of literature has been shaped by Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, dominated by centre-periphery dynamics. In this theoretical frame, the postcolonial novel, emerges as an anxious genre, aware of its peripheral status and tragic compromise in filling foreign form with local content. The Niger-Delta region has produced a wealth of culture. Many well-known authors come from the Niger-Delta Region, but were/are not defined by the region, deriving their access to the system of world-literature instead through national identity. By contrast, the novels of a new generation appear to be integrated into a process of literary constitution of place, namely, the Niger-Delta as a bioregion. This is a regionalism which, unlike earlier cultural regionalisms, underscores ecosystems, glocal networks, and projects environmental planetary rather than world-systems relations. This literature is read as environmental rather than postcolonial. The paper will consider the genre of the Niger-Delta novel with international circulation–Habila’s Oil on Water, Agary’s Yellow-Yellow, Okpewho’s Tides and Watson’s Tiny Sunbirds. It asks the question, amid debates about Africa’s inclusion in world literature, whether, in fact, a planetary literature is in the process of creation through Niger-Delta environmental literature. Biography of Presenting Author 1 �Fiona Moolla is a lecturer at the University of the Western Cape. She is the author of the monograph, Reading Nuruddin Farah: The Individual, the Novel and the Idea of Home, as well as journal articles, short fiction and children's non-fiction books on literary topics. Gail Fincham UCT - Department of English Constructing Memory through Narrative: Shaun Johnson’s The Native Commissioner (2006) and Anne Landsman’s The Rowing Lesson (2007) ‘Isn’t it that there is something inherently reflective about memory, as there is about narrative?’ asks Njabulo Ndebele. This paper investigates two recent South African novels which construct memory through narrative. Both texts foreground the political contexts of culture and history, both see memory as belonging as much to the present and future as to the past, and both dramatise the role of imagination in addressing the trauma of loss. In both novels, place is crucially important, not as a simple geographical construct but as a reflection of biographical and cultural positioning. As Cresswell has remarked, ‘place is not just a thing in the world but a way of understanding the world’. So in Johnson’s text the narrator’s construction of his father’s story is vividly coloured by George Jameson’s empathetic identification with an Africa which apartheid will erase, and in Landsman’s text Betsy Klein’s imaginative projections of the Touws River in Wilderness are as much about her own childhood as about her domineering father. Memory, Johnson and Landsman show, cannot be confined to passive nostalgia for the past. It is centrally about the dynamics of knowing and learning from the past. Biography of Presenting Author HOD of the Department of English, UCT, from 2007 to 2010, Gail Fincham retired in 2013. She has co-edited and contributed to several collections of essays on Joseph Conrad (1996, 2001 and 2002). A contributor to Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History (Ohio, 2008), in 2015 she coedited, with Jeremy Hawthorn and Jakob Lothe, Outposts of Progress: Joseph Conrad: Modernism and Post-Colonialism (UCT Press). Previously, she co-edited and contributed to Literary Landscapes from Modernism to Postcolonialism (Palgrave, 2008), wrote Dance of Life: the Novels of Zakes Mda in Post-Apartheid South Africa (UCT Press, 2011), contributed chapters to Border Crossings: Narrative and Demarcation in Postcolonial Literatures and Media (Heidelberg, 2012) and to Each Other’s Yarns: Essays on Narrative and Critical Method for Jeremy Hawthorn (Novus, 2012). In 2014/2015 she published articles on Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat in Tydskrif vir Letterkunde and on Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists in The English Academy Review. In 2016 her ‘Empire, Patriarchy and The Secret Agent’ will be included in The Norton Critical Edition of Conrad’s The Secret Agent, to be edited by Richard Niland. Naomi Nkealah University of South Africa - English Studies Critical issues in African feminisms: learning from oral narratives Feminisms across the world are marked by contradictions, controversies, tensions, ambiguities, and ambivalences. African women’s response to the inequities of white western and African2 �American feminisms has been to theorize their own feminisms in deferment to their historical and cultural trajectories. These theories take cognizance of the different contexts of African women’s lived experiences. However, underlying intra-theoretical and inter-theoretical tensions point to a need for continuous engagement with African feminisms, especially at the present time when imperialism and neo-imperialism are packaged and distributed in Africa as globalization. This article explores two challenges facing African feminisms. One is an internal challenge on the issue of location and positionality (who speaks for whom and from where?) and the other is an external challenge addressing western imperialism with respect to knowledge production (who owns what and by what means?). The second part of the paper examines women’s oral narratives as they offer possibilities for the re-theorization of African feminisms to resolve some of the tensions and contradictions that characterize ideological viewpoints as well as the resistance of imperialist practices that threaten the legitimacy of African epistemologies. Biography of Presenting Author Naomi Nkealah is a senior lecturer in the Department of English Studies at the University of South Africa. Her research specializes in feminist theory and African women’s writing. She has published widely in South African journals, international journals, as well as edited books. Jarrett Brown Howard University, Wash, DC - English Writing Ravings: Investigating ‘Madness Theory’ in Caribbean Culture Culture Caribbean culture could be a paradox that defies any simple clinical or cultural conclusions about the meaning of madness, especially because there are rational variables inherent in the autonomous nature of those we call “mad” in Caribbean societies. These variables ultimately showcase madness to be a peculiar paradigm where it is not simply mental deficiency or psychological lack, but a cultural register documenting the philosophical complexity of Caribbean life. Given that such complexity is expressed in what I call “irrational relationality”, it is not surprising that the critical conceptions about Caribbean life and culture have been engaged with ‘instabilities’, or ‘irrationalities’ or indeed ‘altered states’ whether from Kamua Brathwaite’s “tidalectics” or Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s “chaos theory” to Edouard Glissant’s notion of “rhizomes”. While critics have provided valuable insights into this sophisticated cultural signifier and have generally treated madness as a recurring trope in Caribbean literary fictions, my own main aim is to move beyond examining the literary representations and discuss madness as a theoretical frame for reading Caribbean cultural landscape. This theoretical intervention will broaden the philosophical content for understanding the altered states inherent in shaping the politics of migration, diaspora and creolization. Biography of Presenting Author Name: Jarrett Hugh Brown BA University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica MA Clark University PhD. College of William and Mary, Williamsburg VA 3 �Current Position: Assistant Professor, Howard University Dr. Jarrett H. Brown is currently an Assistant Professor in English at Howard University where he teaches courses on Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Culture. In his current book project he explores representations and iterations of black masculinities in Claude McKay's works of fiction and correspondences by using marronage as a trope to frame the theoretical conclusions of the texts. The book is entitled, Maroon Masculinities: Truants, Vagabonds, and Mad Men in Metropolitan Spaces. He has also published in the journals, Caribbean Quarterly, the Journal of West Indian Literature (JWIL) and also two edited collections. Louise Green Stellenbosch University - English Everyday Catastrophes: Ecology and Ideology in Africa This paper considers how forms of narration facilitate or limit what can be said about climate change, environmental crisis, and nature and their relation to the experience of the everyday. Through an arrangement of fragments, I discuss the particular form, complexity and history of nature in the postcolony. Drawing on an enigmatic animal fable from Malawi, ‘Men, Women, and Dogs’, I argue for the possibility of short forms of knowledge, that can interrupt the universalizing impulse of narratives of the anthropocene. In short, the paper reflects on what has emerged as distinctive about nature in the postcolony and explores the possibility of new forms through which a different relationship with nature might be expressed. Biography of Presenting Author Louise Green is an associate professor in the English department at Stellenbosch University and editor of the interdisciplinary journal of African Studies, Social Dynamics. Her current book project draws on the critical insights of Theodor Adorno to investigate the place of nature in contemporary global culture. Susan Andrade University of Pittsburgh Feminism, the Cold War, and Southern African anti-colonialism: too many categories to fit in one novel? The Golden Notebook (1962) by Doris Lessing was a literary and intellectual touchstone for the European and American women’s movements with its two-women plot organized around conversations about love, sex, and women’s bodies. In the mid-1960s and 1970s it became a major work for feminism. One of the book’s great representational advances lies in rendering ordinary feminine events – such the extruding of a tampon. It breaks taboos in ways that resemble Ulysses’s toilet scene a few decades earlier. Ann Snitow considers it comparable to Lady Chatterly’s Lover in its breakthrough politics, and Lessing produced an introduction to a Penguin edition of that novel. Some feminist critics recognized the links between the novel’s searching questions about the Communist Party, the Soviet Union and left politics generally, but over the 50 years in which this has been a major novel, formally and in its importance to the women’s 4 �movement, no one appears to have been able to hold three of Lessing’s broad sets of politics together (Marxism/Soviet disillusionment, feminism, anti-racism/anti-imperialism). What is the relation between the macropolitical disillusionment of 1957, the anti-imperialism of 1957, and other African intellectual and artistic representations of disillusionment? Biography of Presenting Author Susan Z. Andrade is associate professor at the University of English. She has published The Nation Writ Small: African Fictions and Feminisms, 1958-1988 (2011), edited a special issue of the journal, NOVEL, on comparative African novels (2008), and co-edited Atlantic Cross-Currents (2001). Charne Lavery Wits - WISER New dark places The oceans have historically been conceived as the ideal location for the disposal of waste, including plastic islands and the scuttling of defunct nuclear submarines. That idea rests on a surprisingly radical ignorance about the deep ocean, at least eighty percent of which has not yet been mapped or seen at all. Such empirical ignorance is exacerbated by imaginative invisibility, the rhetorical establishment of the deep ocean as out of sight, out of mind. These operations of invisibilization are analogous to those more well-established in the context of the colony and postcolony, through familiar processes of epistemic and representational erasure. What happens, however, when these come together? In the alleged links between deep sea fishing and Somali insurgency, or the repeated mistaking of floating trash for the wreck of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, for instance. This paper will examine ways of imagining the postcolonial and planetary together, through a reading of J. M. Ledgard’s Submergence, a novel which sets alongside each other two stories, of Somali jihadism on the one hand and marine biology on the other—ongoing, rife and yet ignorable Islamic and African poverty-driven insurgencies, as against predominating but invisible deep oceanic microbial life. Biography of Presenting Author Charne Lavery is a URC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at WISER, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Her research focuses on oceanic imaginaries in colonial and postcolonial fiction. She is currently working on a monograph on Indian Ocean literature, as well as a new research project on the deep ocean. Jane Wangari Wakarindi University Of The Witwatersrand - African Literature It Does Matter How Intelligent The Writer Is: Character Portrayal In Young Adult Fiction In one of Kenya’s dailies in 2013, an article read: “Kenya Minister Seeks School Book Ban over Gay Link” he argues that the country is not ready for such a curriculum, yet in my view, writers do not always write for curriculum especially when they target young adults (YA). The education minister added, “I don’t care how intelligent the writer is, I will get it removed since Kenya is not 5 �ready for such a curriculum, at least not under my watch” (Africa Review Wed, April 1 2015). The statement will act as my springing board on which to anchor my argument on character portrayal in Ngumi Kibera’s The Devil’s Hill. Today we are confronted with the challenge of availing books that have engaging characters grappling with issues in a world YA can identify with. Moreover, writers do not write in a vacuum. They write, regardless of their audience, within certain presence of mind. I argue that readers should realize that writers are not only intelligent, but also deliberate and organized in what they write as will be made manifest of character sculpturing in the title under analysis. We interrogate how the characters in The Devil’s Hill reflect YA experience. Biography of Presenting Author My name is Jane Wangari Wakarindi from Kenya. I am currently pursuing a PhD degree at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. My area of interest is the broader genre of Young Adult Literature, researching on Young Adult Fiction in Kenya. I am now working on data collection and analysis. Dr Brendon Nicholls University of Leeds - School of English African Vernacular Theories, Psychoanalysis, Environmentalism Postcolonial critiques of psychoanalysis neglect a suppressed alternative that is freighted with transformative possibilities. Analysis of Freud’s metaphors, dreams and jests reveals a persona secretly fascinated by Africa and by human-animal transformations. In these extra-rational moments, psychoanalysis strongly resembles West African and Southern African spirit medicines, with their "more-than-human" ideas of illness and selfhood. Refusing the conceptual primacy of psychoanalysis, my paper asks whether there is a therapeutic method and an ecological yield in African vernacular theories of water guardianship. In paper delivered via puppetry, I offer the playful provocation that West African mami wata narratives (Ogunyemi, Drewal) and Southern African mamlambo narratives (Niehaus) approximate a psychoanalytic model of the subject, but also help to disturb Freud’s insular human focus. The porous categories of human and animal in such African narratives allow us to contemplate a failure of transference. In turn, this failure of transference enables an “auto-psychoanalysis” whose therapeutic method is environmentally obliged. Thus, a key theory of mind (psychoanalysis) may be repurposed to encompass broader environmental aims. The larger, strategic potential of my argument is a revolutionary, multicultural model of mental health directed towards land and water ecologies. Biography of Presenting Author Brendon Nicholls lectures in the School of English, University of Leeds. He is the author of Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Gender, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Reading (Ashgate, 2010) and the editor of Nadine Gordimer's July's People (Routledge, 2011). Nicholls is currently completing a second monograph: Africas of the Mind: Environmental Psychoanalysis and Black Spirit Medicines. 6 �Raquel Lisette Baker Rhodes College - English Undoing Whiteness: Postcolonial African Literatures and the Unfinished Project of Decolonization Here I explore the freedoms and tyrannies of whiteness as a form of desire that undergirds the racialization of identification. Specifically, I examine post-apartheid generation South African writer Siphiwo Mahala’s short story cycle White Encounters in African Delights (2011) to query how the pervasive significance of whiteness as a desire that animates postcolonial identification both enables and undermines anticolonial consciousness. Through my examination of Mahala’s work, I explore the issue of identification constituted through desire and aspirational notions in which whiteness works as a moving signifier of cultural and social capital. As a productive desire, whiteness becomes intimately tied up with practices of resistance and liberatory identification. Through the discursive modes of conflation and metonymic slippage, whiteness comes to stand in for liberation and becomes the preferred mode of constituting identity in modernity. Therefore, whiteness functions as an ambivalent desire that works productively in discourses of self-making while also undermining modes of black subjectivity by reinforcing conceptions of black inferiority. An analysis of Mahala’s short story cycle suggests that the intimate spheres of the self and modes of identification, affiliation, and desire are important foci of decolonization in order to begin to challenge the hold of ideologies of racialized belonging. Biography of Presenting Author Raquel Lisette Baker holds a PhD in English Literary Studies from the University of Iowa, where she specialized in Postcolonial Studies and African literatures in English. She is currently a William Randolph Hearst Teaching Fellow at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, where she teaches creative writing and postcolonial literature courses. Thomas Jay Lynn Penn State Berks - Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences Beyond Black and White: British Identity in Chinua Achebe’s Fiction Vital to Chinua Achebe’s fictional project is the deconstruction of Western narratives of African culture and European colonialism. That deconstruction may have been an end in itself for Achebe, but it was also an inevitable effect of the author’s attempts to depict from an African viewpoint the traditional lives of his people, their encounter with empire, and the changes they experienced both before and after the colonial period. Under the circumstances one might expect to find in Achebe’s fiction a series of unflattering portrayals of English characters in Africa. And, indeed, a glance at the author’s early novels might lead one to surmise that Achebe approaches the English missionaries and colonial administrators as bigoted and arrogant interlopers who deceive and coerce Africans into submission. However, not only doe Achebe’s 1972 short story, “Sugar Baby” and his novel, Anthills of the Savannah, clearly counteract such an impression, but also careful analysis of the earlier works indicates that the English characters are not mere straw men to disparage for legitimate African grievances; rather Achebe’s 1 �representations of these characters, as with African ones, are nuanced and humane. The paper explores the author’s portrayal of English characters and their relationships with Africans. Biography of Presenting Author Dr. Thomas Jay Lynn is Associate Professor of English at Penn State Berks. His scholarly and teaching interests include literature of Africa and the Diaspora, postcolonial literature, ancient literature, and folklore. In addition to his teaching responsibilities, Tom is the Coordinator of the Associate Degree in Letters, Arts, and Sciences. Ricarda de Haas University of Bayreuth - BIGSAS Spoken Word goes online: Poetic Blogs and Videopoetry by South African Artists Digital technologies seem to have a great influence on contemporary African poetry, especially when it is performed by the younger generation of urban poets. Recently designed forms of literature are emerging, such as poetic blogs or video recordings of spoken-word performances. The presentation introduces the Spoken Word platform “Word n Sound Series” based in Johannesburg and explores how poetic performances are transformed when shaped by media technology. In contrast to written poems presented on the Internet, video clips seem to capture all aspects of the poetic performance: body, voice and text. Furthermore, social media allow for a close contact between the people involved, no matter if they are physically present or not. The "Word n Sound Series" indeed created a virtual landscape that goes beyond representation but functions as a virtual forum for artist, and as an archive of contemporary Spoken Word poetry. By using Russell Kaschula's concept of technauriture (2011) and Philip Auslanders work on liveness and remediation (2008) the presentation discusses if and how young South African poets influence contemporary (digital) poetry, be it on the continent or worldwide. Thus the talk adds to the ongoing debate about the intersection of orality, the written word and digital technology. Biography of Presenting Author Ricarda de Haas was a PhD candidate at Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies (BIGSAS) at University of Bayreuth. In 2015 she completed her doctoral thesis “Spoken Word goes digital. Performance Poetry und Social Media in Harare (SIMBABWE) und Johannesburg (SÜDAFRIKA). Eine gendersensible Analyse”. She holds an M.A. in Gender Studies from the Humboldt University Berlin and Neuere deutsche Literatur from the Free University in Berlin. In 2012 she published “Spoken Word goes digital. New forms of literary expression in Southern Africa”, IN: Julius Heinicke, Hilmar Heister, Tobias Klein (Hg): "Kuvaka Ukama - Building Bridges: A Tribute to Flora Veit-Wild". Kalliope Verlag, Berlin 2012. Feroza Jussawalla University of New Mexico - English Seaming Sisterhood: Creating Home in Diaspora South Asian women in diasporic homes in Britain, the U.S., Australia and particularly in South Africa have been forced to create community with other diasporic women from the Caribbean or 2 �elsewhere. “Unhomely” conditions, often just from the foreignness of the place and space or from political or societal barriers, force women to come together to create spaces for existence. South Africa has a particularly long history of South Asian migration but one marked by a double displacement caused also by apartheid. My paper will compare how community and belonging are created in South Africa by looking at the work of writers like Farida Karodia, as compared to that of the S. Asian diaspora as depicted in Black- British writer Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. Is “transnationalism” or hybridity really possible under diasporic conditions? Or, are diasporic peoples forced to live in ghetto communities marked by identities that are really non- negotiable. Zadie Smith writes of the “original wound.” Gayatri Spivak writes of a nostalgia for lost origins. Is this also true of women of South Asian descent? What is the role and the legacy of Gandhi in the shaping of this particular diaspora? Biography of Presenting Author Feroza Jussawalla is Professor of English at the University of New Mexico, in the U.S. She has taught Commonwealth/ Postcolonial literatures for the past 30 years and published widely in the field. Her newest co-edited book is Emerging South Asian Women Writers: Essays and Interviews (NY; Peter Lang, 2016). Heike Harting Université de Montreal - Departement de litteratures et de langues du monde The Rise of Afropolitan Fiction: Emmanuel Dongala’s Little Boys Come from the Stars and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow This paper examines the role of Afropolitan storytelling in the making of new African communities. Afropolitan storytelling, I argue, draws from local and cosmopolitan aesthetics and involves self-reflexive narrative strategies that advance democratic forms of citizenship that are globally and communally rooted and work against the atrocities of civil war and state violence. They are inclusive and move beyond nationalist and racist discourses of belonging and against European narratives of Africa as a continent in perpetual crisis. Although Dongala’s novel is set in the DRC and Mpe’s in Johannesburg, both engage the reader in a planetary discourse of subject and community formation organized around different modalities of transgression. Dongala’s novel constitutes a historical narrative that tracks French colonialism to the historical present of war and survival. Mpe’s novel provides an Afropolitan narrative of the failure of South Africa’s democracy after apartheid, the country’s racism against African migrants, its homophobia, superstition, and racialized violence against its own citizens. Against these failures the novel positions the power of storytelling, hospitality, and communal survival in a planetary context. My readings will suggest that Afropolitanism functions as an emerging category of literary critique in the field of contemporary African writing. Biography of Presenting Author Heike Harting is Associate Professor in English Studies at the Université de Montréal. She specializes and publishes in postcolonial and globalization studies, as well as in Canadian literary studies. Her recent research project focuses on contemporary anglophone and francophone African fiction, literary representations of global violence, cosmopolitanism, and Afropolitan cultural studies. 3 �Chow Shun Man Emily The Chinese University of Hong Kong - English Department The Seeds of Limitlessness: Dambudzo Marechera’s Utopian Thinking While writing during a traumatic transitional period in Zimbabwe’s history, Dambudzo Marechera witnessed an age of upheavals in which different parties battled for power over Zimbabwe. Being aware of the fact that all institutionalized narratives, be they originated from the governance of the UK, Ian Smith’s white minority regime or Zimbabwe’s revolutionary parties, appealed to building a utopian society yet revealed themselves to be fiction, Marechera envisions a unique vision of utopia. As such, this paper concerns Black Sunlight and Mindblast of Marechera. For Marechera, utopia is not a static entity but a moment of perpetual change. He rethinks utopia in the sense that he phrases it as an event that ceaselessly contests institutionalized narratives of a post-colonial self and its relationship to society. Marechera writes towards a vision of an alternative future of the country. Yet, it is a vision that does not constitute a fully rounded sense of utopia. Being cautious about the world and the operation of power upon the people, rather than imposing his own utopian ideals, Marechera chooses to instead destabilize the narrative constitution of the self in relation to society in order to turn towards a truly radical utopian thinking that empowers the individual. Biography of Presenting Author CHOW Shun Man Emily is a PhD candidate of English (Literary Studies) at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her doctoral thesis explores the utopian visions projected in the works of the Zimbabwean writer, Dambudzo Marechera. Her main research interests are African literature, post-colonial literature and theory, and utopian studies. Esthie Hugo University of Cape Town - Department of English Language and Literature Looking Forwards, Looking Back: animating Magic, Modernity and the African City-Future in Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon Lagos has recently become the focus of much scholarly interest, with a strong focus placed on the city as a crucible of global innovation. Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, for example, memorably theorised Lagos in 2002 as an African megalopolis ‘at the forefront of globalizing modernity’. In recent years, African creatives have similarly begun to place Africa at the forefront of planetary discourse, producing a new wave of cultural output that signals the continent as a site from which to imagine the emergence of future worlds. Particularly salient to this growing opus of work are the writings of American-Nigerian author Nnedi Okorafor, who writes in the register of African Science Fiction. This article takes Lagos as its focus by considering its futuristic representation in Okorafor’s African Sci-Fi novel Lagoon (2014). Drawing on theories of the city as ‘a future lab to be learned from’, I suggest that it is from Okorafor’s account of Lagos, dizzying as it is with a patchworks of connections between global and local, human and non human, magic and modern, city and sea, that Lagoon looks to realise the potential birthing of a new world order. I conclude by venturing that so vital is the re-imagining of the human-nature binary to Lagoon that it merits consideration within the growing canon of Anthropocenic Studies. 1 �Biography of Presenting Author Esthie Hugo completed her Masters in English Literature at the University of Cape Town in 2016. Her current research interests include African literature, Urban Studies, Critical Animal Studies, Petrocultures, as well as studies on the Anthropocene. Britta Olinder Gothenburg University - Dept. of Languages and Literatures Stories that float from different parts of the world in Mavis Gallant's fiction Mavis Gallant's numerous stories, set in different countries, show up a large gallery of characters and the often destructive relations between them, notably within the family. It is against her Canadian background of two solitudes that she wrote her stories from her self-willed exile in Paris and we may ask to what extent placing her characters among strangers would also mean exclusion, or do they feel comfortably included in their foreign contexts? In Mavis Gallant's world of women, her female characters are often trapped and childhood described as a prison. This satirist can, however, also show her sympathy for the exploited and oppressed. Her narratives are permeated by her flair for historical, political and social conditions and, thus, lend themselves to the exploration of several of the conference themes. Biography of Presenting Author Britta Olinder, Ass. Prof. of Gothenburg University, Sweden, has written widely on African, Australian, Canadian, Indian and Irish literature, recently focusing on transculturality and cosmopolitanism. She is the editor of books on Canada and Ireland and co-editor of Criss-Cross Tales: Short Stories from English-Speaking Cultures. Craig A Smith The College of The Bahamas - School of English Studies Making Something out of Nothing: Reading Erna Brodber’s Nothing’s Mat as maping of the Diasporic Experience In her collected work of essays The Continent of Black Consciousness, novelist, and sociologist Erna Brodber posits that the continent of black consciousness “is a Pan-African construct based on the shared historical experience arising from the transatlantic slave trade, plantation slavery, slave revolts and post-emancipation construction” (CBC Vii). In Brodber’s most recent novel, Nothing’s Mat, she explores a story of a young British born Jamaican woman travels back to Jamaica in order to trace her family tree. In this paper I argue that Nothing’s Mat reflects the work that Brodber has undertaken over the course of her academic career. It is in an analysis of this latest novel that we can find the key to Brodber’s larger body of work; through her corpus, Brodber insists that in order to reconnect with an essential sense of self and community, people of the African Diaspora must augment Western conventions of knowledge production and acquisition with other ways of knowing, ways of remembering and ways of telling our own stories. It is only in the relying on these sometimes more esoteric modalities that the people of 2 �the African Diasporic experience can uncover the stories of their own experiences that remained undiscovered. Biography of Presenting Author Craig A. Smith earned his Ph.D. from The University of Florida. He is an Assistant Professor of English at the College of The Bahamas. His areas of scholarship are 20th-Century African American and Anglophone Caribbean Studies, Cultural Studies and Gender Studies. Smith is cofounder of the annual Critical Caribbean Symposium Series. Eve Nabulya Stellenbosch University - English Explorations in ecocriticism and rhetoric Literary environmentalism or ecocriticism has always been interested in the different ways in which literary works underscore contemporary environmental issues, with an implicit hope that literature may contribute meaningfully to the campaign against environmental degradation. In recent studies, scholars such as Rob Nixon, Patrick D. Murphy, Simon Estock and Ogaga Okuyade have called attention to the activist facet of the field. Yet the persuasive motive which pervades the respective literary works in those studies, and is manifest in their form, remains undertheorized. This paper therefore suggests an alliance between ecocriticism and rhetoric (the theory concerned with the art of persuasion). It argues that ecocriticism can fully embrace her activist agenda through Kenneth Burke’s concept of persuasion-to-attitude, and incorporate rhetorical analysis into her methodological purview. The discussion proceeds under full recognition of the implications of the aesthetic commitment of literature and the constraints surrounding its extra-textual claims. Accordingly, it anchors on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism and Roger D. Sell’s thought on literary communication to validate the relationship between the two related but otherwise would be discordant fields. Biography of Presenting Author Eve Nabulya is an Assistant Lecturer at Makerere University, Uganda. Currently, she is enrolled in a PhD programme at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She researches in literature and the environment, but also has interest in Shakespearean drama and has partnered with The World Shakespeare Project to facilitate pedagogical communication. Oluchi Joyce Igili Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba-Akoko, Ondo State, Nigeria - English Studies Cultural Emasculation and Creative Emancipation in Amasiri Women Satirical Songs In Amasiri, a patriarchal society South East of Nigeria, there exists an age long popular culture of rendition of satirical songs by the womenfolk. The oral performance is cast in the Juvenalian acerbic satiric mode and has for ages served as the only window open to the emasculated women through which to ventilate their disapproval of perceived injustices meted out on them by the society and to lend their voices against all forms of misdemeanour in the community. This 3 �practice held sway when the western justice system was either not in existence at all or yet to take a firm root. With the institutionalization of the western justice system in what used to be purely rural communities, this practice has lost much of its glory as offenders who are made satirical butts can easily institute police action against the performers. The women’s lived realities which gave stimulus to the satirical songs may have been ameliorated and may soon become “stories that float from afar”, yet it is critically vital to capture for posterity the rich literary output birthed by the socio-culturally sanctioned gendered inclusions and exclusions which prevailed in the old Amasiri society. That is the focus of this paper. Biography of Presenting Author Oluchi J. IGILI is a trained theatre practitioner. She is currently on the faculty of Department of English Studies, Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba Akoko, Ondo State, Nigeria, where she teaches courses in the three genres and other aspects of literature. Ashleigh Harris Uppsala University - English Decelerating fiction: slow violence in four African novels Contemporary African fiction has an important role to play in critically describing the consequences of the new global scramble for African land and natural resources on contemporary African lives, communities, and ecologies. The material consequences of resourcecolonialism of African oil, water, and biofuels on African bodies and ecologies involve the unidirectional flow of resources out of, and waste into, African spaces. Yet this pattern is extremely difficult to make visible, as the protracted temporality of environmental violence resists the forms of the spectacular, as Rob Nixon has argued. The paper will discuss four ecointerventionist African novels – Lauren Beukes’s Moxyland (2008), Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2011), Karen Jayes’ For the Mercy of Water (2012), and Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2013). The focus will be on the ways that bearing witness to the sluggish temporalities of environmental violence impacts on the literary form of the novel. Biography of Presenting Author Ashleigh Harris is Associate Professor of English Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden. She is a participant of the Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literature research project. She is currently completing a monograph on the contemporary African novel and is beginning a new project on literary form in sub-Saharan African cities. Ruby Magosvongwe University of Zimbabwe - English Black African female migrations: Space allocations and space claims for and about women in selected Southern African fictional narratives of the new millennium The present paper examines what migration means and entails for the black Zimbabwean Shona woman within the myriad contexts and circumstances that authors writing on Zimbabwean experiences in the new millennium strive to reconstruct and convey, with intended audiences in 4 �mind. Using their understanding of cultural, social, political, economic, religious, spiritual and intellectual ‘spaces’ that the black women ‘occupy’, the writers ascribe identities to their female subjects, while at the same time legitimising and circumscribing the ‘spaces’ deemed ‘appropriate’ and ‘acceptable’ for the same female subjects to occupy. How these depictions affirm “unhu”/identity of these female protagonists, within the depicted socio-cultural milieus, give insights into conceptualisations of migration that are worth exploring. How their respective “unhu” as a phenomenon distinguishes them individually and collectively in their everyday interactions with others and themselves within the ascribed and appropriated spaces that they occupy offer insights about forced migration worth examining. The paper explores exclusions and inclusions in narratives that deal with the migration phenomenon within Southern Africa in order to interrogate the lengths to which fiction narratives go to dis/empower migrating female subjects. Biography of Presenting Author Ruby Magosvongwe lectures in the Department of English, University of Zimbabwe. She has published on Literature and Land Issues, Literature and Gender Issues, Youth, Un/employment and some experiences of the Diaspora as depicted in some African-authored fiction narratives. Ruby also has a passion for Comparative Literature, and English Literature. Alexander Fyfe The Pennsylvania State University - Comparative Literature The Archival Politics of the Postcolonial Special Collection: A Case Study in Cultural Capital, Value, and Amos Tutuola This paper takes as its starting point the problem posed by the increasing number of literary archives of the papers of “postcolonial writers” that have been acquired by American and European academic institutions. After registering the ethical problems posed by this trend, I argue that the existence of such archives represents an opportunity for postcolonial studies to interrogate its own archival politics in the context of the archive’s existence as ‘cultural capital’. Taking the Amos Tutuola Collection (located at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin) as a case study, I demonstrate that whilst this archive’s form makes certain claims for its value (derived from the literary-critical sphere), a study of the author’s letters, manuscripts, and documents contained therein suggests that alternative values are latent within it. I discuss how these values differ from those typically sought by much postcolonial criticism, and conclude by considering how a hypothetical digitized Tutuola collection might allow for the realization of new values. Inquiry into forms of value — and not simply the identification of existing ‘literary’ ones — is, I suggest, important for the continued relevance of postcolonial literary studies. Biography of Presenting Author I am a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Penn State. My research focuses on the relationship between African literary production and Structural Adjustments Programs. 5 �Kizito Z. Muchemwa Great Zimbabwe University - English and Media Studies Of murals, granite rock paintings, sculptures and (dis-)connected worlds in Dambubzo Marechera, Yvonne Vera and Zakes Mda In the Black Insider, The Stone Virgins and The Stone Sculptors of Mapungugwe, Dambudzo Marechera, Yvonne Vera and Zakes Mda establish a conversation between non-literary and literary codes to evoke a sense of local and (dis-)connected worlds. Their literary positions question the aesthetic, genre, epistemic temporal and territorial boundaries that feature so prominently in traditional postcolonial theory as they also contest ebullient narratives of globalization. Texts by the three writers re-imagine pasts that connect with contemporary temporalities to re-configure the role played by art and artist in shaping politics, subjectivities and the individual’s place in the world. Marechera uses images of violence and world annihilation to create cosmic dread that permeates unequal worlds as presents an African worldview. Vera uses images that are more to do with connections within a world. Vera deploys Khoisan rock art and Zakes Mda’s celebrates the power and vulnerability of art to foreground an unapologetic African cultural position to explore the possibilities of human potential across many divides. To further the project to decolonialise African literature, Zakes Mda’s novel moves in the direction of Indian Ocean narratives to de-Atlanticise modernity and re- inscribe the place of Africa in re-imagining the Indian Ocean and the world. Biography of Presenting Author Currently associate professor teaching Oriental and African literature, also teaching courses on the literature-gender connection. Research interests are mainly African literature, city literatures and cultures, the African Diaspora. Rosemary Alice Gray University of Pretoria and Unisa - English (UP) and Institute for African Renaissance Studies (Unisa) Beyond culture and below consciousness: Ben Okri's ‘Heraclitus' Golden River’ (Wild 2009) Consideration of Okri’s ‘Heraclitus’ Golden River’ occurs within an epistemic ecology in which Nature and the poetic consciousness conjoin as dialectically twinned tropes beyond culture and below consciousness. Heraclitus’s ‘One thunderbolt strikes root through everything’, cited as the epigraph to Okri’s Wild (2012) intimates an African epistemology of holism, while ‘The poet turns the earth into mother, the sky becomes a shelter, the sun the inscrutable god …’ (A Way of being free [1997:2) foregrounds the cosmic relation between eco-phenomenology and fluidity of creativity. My interpretation of Okri’s poem from his third anthology entitled Wild, rests on his own conception of ‘wild’ as energy meeting freedom, art meeting the elemental, chaos honed. This poem celebrates mystical unrest viewed from an eco-phenomenological appreciation of the sublime. I attempt to show that, for this Nigerian poet, ‘wild’ is perceived from an ontopoeitic or heightened consciousness perspective; it is ‘our link with the stars’ (Okri 2012). This cosmic aspect accords with what the American poet Robert Frost called ‘wildness’, that ‘wild place’ or ‘the 1 �unconsidered land’ where life itself ‘… sways perilously at the confluence of opposing forces’ and to which the poet must go to ignite his/her creative process. Biography of Presenting Author Dr/Professor Rosemary Gray is Emeritus Professor at the University of Pretoria. She is a nationally rated research scholar, whose current primary research interest is the works of the Nigerian born Ben Okri. She is a past President of the English Academy of Southern Africa and winner of their Gold Medal for distinguished service to English over a lifetime. She is an Honorary Life member of the Graduate Women’s Association and an Honorary Life Vice President of the English Academy. After her mythical retirement in 2005, she was appointed as an Independent Contractor to the Council on Higher Education and external examiner to two local and two across border tertiary institutions. She is currently an Independent Contractor at Unisa and Umalusi and is external examiner for three South African tertiary institutions. Bibi Burger Stellenbosch University - Afrikaans and Dutch Khoisan culture and a decolonising apocalypse in Thirteen cents (2000) by K. Sello Duiker According to Woodward (2014:208) the relationships between the human and non-human in South African literature is often read in terms of post-structural theory, even when referring to precolonial traditions. The shamanistic rituals in K. Sello Duiker’s Thirteen cents could, for example, be read as instances of Deleuzian “becoming-animal”, although they are explicitly related to the mythology of the region’s precolonial Khoisan inhabitants. Thirteen cents is the story of Azure, a thirteen year old living on the streets of Cape Town and exposed to dangerous environmental conditions and abusive adults. Far from representing a romantic picture of a nomadic life outside of disciplinary places and discourses, the depiction of Azure’s homeless life is harrowing. Azure craves a home and roots. On Table Mountain he finds momentary respite from the city’s threats and manages to forge connections with the region’s historical inhabitants. He channels the energy he derives from these connections to engulf the city in flames. I argue that Thirteen cent’s apocalyptic ending should be read as an attempt to revive pre-colonial ways of living and knowing. Azure’s lack of prospects, however, serve as an acknowledgement of the limited nature of the power the disenfranchised can derive from this revival. Biography of Presenting Author Bibi Burger is currently completing her PhD in Comparative Literature on contemporary Afrikaans and English novels set in Johannesburg in Cape Town. She focuses on the ways a comparative approach can enrich current debates on urban South African subjectivities. Nonye Chinyere Ahumibe Imo State University, Owerri, Nigeria - English and Literary Studies 2 �The Odysseus Metaphor: A Reading of Amma Darko's Beyond the Horizon Since the publication of Beyond the Horizon, the text has provoked a lot of thought in the areas of exile and diaspora, etc. This paper attempts to extend the angles from which exile and diaspora have been approached in the works of other critics by looking at exile as a kind of death, a crucible that one is compelled to go through. It is filled with uncertainties especially for the young women who get trapped in such situations. Through this crucible, new identities are formed, and the anticipated dream of exile is never matched with the harsh realities that are seen. The search for a new life, a new horizon, culminates into a terminus that raises the questions: what is beyond the horizon? Is what is beyond the horizon worth the sacrifices and efforts put in by the characters in exile situations? These and many more questions assail them as they contemplate their situation. This paper will lean on postcolonial theoretical framework for its analysis. Biography of Presenting Author Ahumibe, Nonye Chinyere is a lecturer at the Department of English and Literary Studies, Imo State University, Owerri, Nigeria. She has a Master's degree in Literature (English) from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. She is currently pursuing her PhD programme in literature at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Her research interests are in the areas of feminism and postcolonial studies. David Wafula Yenjela Stellenbosch University, South Africa - English studies Nation and Human Destiny: Reading Contestations of Mau Mau histories in Kenya in Yvonne Owuor’s Dust (2013) This paper focuses on Yvonne Owuor’s contestations of Mau Mau histories in the Kenyan postcolony in her debut novel, Dust. The paper shows how the novel problematizes the Mau Mau freedom movement, which has so far been glorified and even portrayed as representing all the Kenyan communities’ quest for liberation from the grip of colonialism, showing the underbelly of its misappropriations by post-independence state actors in their quest to consolidate and exercise absolute power. Mau Mau is hereby exposed as an othering ghost in Kenya's state histories. Owuor uses the novel as a platform to rewrite Mau Mau histories by showing how such histories have contributed in inclusions and exclusions of communities, as well as offering cause for a silent genocide during Jomo Kenyatta's reign. In a critical engagement with the novel and the histories that it re-presents, I attempt to voice intimate interlacings between nation and human destiny. Biography of Presenting Author Wafula Yenjela is a PhD candidate in the English Department at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. His research interests are mainly race and gender activism, the Kenyan novel’s literary histories, documentaries, and life writing. His publications include “Young Women’s Pathways to Prison: a Critique of Kenyan Prison Documentaries” in the 2015 Agenda journal; “Rethinking Memory in Valerie Cuthbert’s The Great Siege of Fort Jesus” in the 2014 Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies journal; and “Invoking Memories of Legendary African Women: a Reading of Siri Sirini Trilogy” in Pathways to African Feminism and Development journal. 3 �Nick Mdika Tembo Stellenbosch University - English Divided, Yet United: Writing Female Solidarity and Survival in Nadifa Mohamed’s The Orchard of Lost Souls Nadifa Mohamed’s The Orchard of Lost Souls picks up on the tail end of Mohamed Siyad Barre’s military junta. Its historical setting is 1987-88, a time during which Somalia slid into civil war. This paper examines the narrative possibilities offered by Mohamed’s novel for exploring women’s lives in a nation at war. I read The Orchard of Lost Souls as reflecting a gendered discourse of war, one that reinforces the notion that women face many more risks than men in violent conflicts. I suggest that through the images of the three female protagonists in the novel – a fairly rich but childless widow in her late 50s called Kawsar, an Internal Security officer in her late twenties called Filsan and Deqo, a nine-year old orphan born and raised in the Saba’ad refugee camp – Mohamed is able to weave a narrative that suggests that female solidarity is key to survival for women in environments where their humanity is often trampled upon at will. I further read Mohamed’s novel as challenging pervasive stereotypes concerning both men and women during violent conflicts, that there is nothing innately good about men or bad about women. Biography of Presenting Author Nick Mdika Tembo is currently pursuing a PhD in English Studies at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. Tembo teaches courses in African and European literatures in English at Chancellor College, the University of Malawi. He has previously tutored at the Catholic University of Malawi, and at Domasi College of Education. Nick Mdika Tembo Stellenbosch University - English Decidedly Katabatic: Adult Betrayal in China Keitetsi’s Child Soldier In Child Soldier China Keitetsi recounts her experiences as a child and a soldier in the 1980s when Yoweri Museveni waged a guerrilla war against then Ugandan president, Milton Obote. Drawing on key debates on literary representations of katabasis, this paper examines Keitetsi’s portrait of adult betrayal and parental abuse in pre-war and private or domestic spaces. I appropriate Falconer’s concept of the survivor of atrocity as a ‘descent narrator’ and argue that Keitetsi is a descent writer who frames her experiences as a child and a soldier ‘within the narrative structure of a descent into Hell and return’ (2005: 7). In her memoir, Keitetsi describes a world where tenderness and (parental) love have long given way to cruelty and cynicism, and where madness and violence and despair are the order of the day. Subconsciously, then, examining Keitetsi’s memoir under the katabatic trope allows us to view her life as floating in-between the child she wishes she should have been and the used, abused and rejected young person she becomes at the hands of cruel and insensitive elders. It also allows us to trace her life’s journey from innocence to the unpleasant things she is known to do. Biography of Presenting Author 1 �Nick Mdika Tembo is currently pursuing a PhD in English Studies at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. Tembo teaches courses in African and European literatures in English at Chancellor College, the University of Malawi. He has previously tutored at the Catholic University of Malawi, and at Domasi College of Education. Irikidzayi Manase University of the Free State - English Book launch – White Narratives: The depiction of post-2000 land invasions in Zimbabwe The book examines selected memoirs, fictional and non-fictional texts that were written by white Zimbabweans and other white narrators with regard to the post-2000 Zimbabwe land invasions, which were later termed by the Zimbabwe government as the fast track land reform programme. The book acknowledges the significance of the post-2000 period in the fervent production of diverse narratives and perceptions about land, belonging and the way in which the Zimbabwe government influenced the politics of identities through a revision of identification and race categories during the period 2000 to 2008. It considers questions such as: why was there a flurry of white Zimbabwean narratives about land? How are the land invasions represented in these white narratives? How are perceptions about belonging treated in these texts? What are the solutions offered to the contestations for land and belonging in these white narratives? As a result, the book examines past and present historical, ideological, social and spatial divisions in the definition of the experiences, conflicts and ambiguities arising from the land invasions, as depicted in selected fictional, non-fictional and memoirs written by the white farmers and white writers with connections either to the land or some of the displaced farmers. Biography of Presenting Author Irikidzayi Manase teaches in the Department of English at the University of the Free State. His research focuses on how space is defined, impacts on the everyday, and assist in the constitution of identities and cultures in literary and cultural studies of Southern Africa, the diasporic world and speculative fiction. Nadia Sanger Stellenbosch University - English Post-colonial voices in speculative fiction: imagining Africa differently There is a small (but growing) number of black African and African diasporic writers and directors producing speculative fiction about the African continent. Through post-apocalyptic narratives, these contemporary stories depict (and unsettle) narratives of colonialism, slavery, race, ethnicity, place, gender, sexuality, and environmental politics in ways relevant to the continent's social and political past and future. These texts imagine Africa through perspectives that have not (yet) been produced elsewhere, providing a possibility to engage both local and global social and political phenomena in ways that other forms of fiction are less positioned to do. What becomes possible in a post-apocalyptic Africa when the old norms no longer apply? Or when the old norms continue to be reinforced through patriarchal systems and structures? How are the norms of the past remembered and unsettled, and norms of the future reconfigured? In 2 �considering through the possibilities of speculative fiction by African and African diasporic writers to re-imagine the social and political, I will reflect on some contemporary pieces of work: the 2009 short film Pumzi written and directed by Wanuri Kahiu, and Nnedi Okorafor’s fantasy works, most notably the 2010 novel titled Who fears death. Biography of Presenting Author Dr. Nadia Sanger is a lecturer in the English Department at Stellenbosch University. She is interested in how we think about gender, race, animality, class, place and sexuality, and how narratives and stories can help us think about subjectivity differently. One of her research interests includes the potential of speculative fiction about Africa to think through and imagine the social and political differently, both locally and globally. Nedine Moonsamy University of Pretoria - English Landlocked and littoral: African women in Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon and Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City Feminist interventions in science fiction have grown the genre into an exciting space where marginality and technology serve to challenge the representational and ideological politics of gender and my paper will question how this translates in African science fiction where the intersectional politics of postcolonialism, race and ethnicity produces a different set of challenges for feminist thought. Looking at the work of Nnedi Okorafor and Lauren Beukes, I will explore how their female protagonists are not merely examples of “the increasing infiltration of transnational consumerism” (Coetzee ‘Afro Superheroes’, 241) but instead engage with the everyday practices and understanding of ‘the animist unconscious’ of their respective contexts. In a recent publication on African Superheroes, Carli Coetzee draws inspiration from Harry Garuba’s notion of the animist unconscious (Garuba ‘Public Culture’) to suggest that reenchantment is a means by which many African nations and literatures articulate the present. Similarly, I will explore how the female bodies and identities in the work of Okorafor and Beukes diverge from what are otherwise popular interpretations of the cyborg (usually inspired by Donna Haraway) and places us in the ambit of animism instead. Biography of Presenting Author Nedine Moonsamy is a Senior Lecturer in the English Literature department at the University of Pretoria and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She is currently writing a monograph entitled A Country Out of Time: an examination of nostalgia and nationalism in contemporary South African Fiction and launching a research project on Science Fiction in Africa. 3 �Meg Samuelson University of Cape Town After the water wars: speculations from Africa on the Anthropocene This paper will discuss two speculative works that enable us to think at the interface of the postcolonial and anthropocenic present and its emerging future: Karen Jayes’s novel For the Mercy of Water and Wanuri Kahui’s short film Pumzi. Both entangle environmental concerns with critiques of corporate privatization and totalitarian resource management. Both are produced across more than one location in the global south and create settings that are simultaneously situated and generalizable. Both are planetary in reach and implication while freighted with the historical content of particular places. Focusing on the use of water as metaphor, matter and actant, my comparative reading will tease out the ways in which these narratives craft localglobal forms of the Anthropocene. Biography of Presenting Author Meg Samuelson is an associate professor at the University of Cape Town with research interests in South African and African literary and cultural studies, Indian Ocean studies, world literary debates, coastal cultures and maritime literatures. 1 �Rachel Rubin University of Massachusetts Boston - American Studies Reading, Writers, & Lovers: Authorship and Audience in Anthills of the Savannah & Our Sister Killjoy In a 1990 interview, Chinua Achebe responds to the question, “What do Nigerians consider the writer to be?” as follows: “Art…is something ordinary people can not only understand, but even take part in making. So these are ideas I don’t find very much in the West, you see”. Achebe’s formulation emphasizes the active role of the reader in the creative process as significantly African. Similar questions regarding the shifting sands that the reader, writer, and text occupy in the post-colonial African context frame Achebe’s novel, Anthills of the Savannah, as well as the first novel of his female Ghanaian contemporary Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy. It is not surprising that Achebe and Aidoo, in whose work conflict between old and new lifestyles commands central position, are concerned with charting their own dynamic roles as writers in a changing world. However, Achebe and Aidoo choose a striking medium for self-conscious consideration of their artistic endeavors: the love letter. This paper focuses on Ikem’s “strange love letter” in Anthills and Sissie’s chapter-long “love letter” in Killjoy in order to consider how the roles of writer and reader inform Achebe and Aidoo’s narrative strategies and shape their visions of Africa’s future. Biography of Presenting Author Rubin is Professor of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston and Director of the Center for the Study of Humanities, Culture, and Society. She has published widely in a variety of fields, with a particular interest in the relationship of left politics and internationalism in cultural production. Joseph McLaren Hofstra University - English Diran Adebayo and Afro-British Inclusive Literary Style in Some Kind of Black and My Once Upon a Time Diran Adebayo, author of Some Kind of Black (1997) and My Once Upon a Time (2001,) demonstrates an innovative literary style in the creation of language. Of Yoruba-Nigerian descent, Adebayo represents the contemporary Black British or, more precisely, the Afro-British author. His initial novel shows the origins of his language usage, the creation of narrative styles and dialogue that are not based on conventional vernacular usage, but on the author’s own imaginative word stylings. Furthermore, his novels thus far show two trajectories, the mining of the autobiographical self, evoking experiences of a Nigerian descended university student, whose familial relationships and contact with British educational institutions help define a particular variety of inclusive Black British experience. Because Black British perspectives have traditionally been linked to Caribbean cultural and historical realities, the work of Adebayo is informative because it shows the unique elements of African ancestry in its association with British social conditions. The other branch of Adebayo’s writing is shown in My Once Upon a Time, 1 �where Adebayo not only uses the detective fiction model, but infuses it with linguistic innovations. Finally, Adebayo, as a critical figure, co-edited New Writing 12 (2004), which helped to codify writing in the new millennium. Biography of Presenting Author Joseph McLaren is Professor Emeritus of English, Hofstra University, where he taught African American and African literature. His publications include Langston Hughes: Folk Dramatist in the Protest Tradition, 1921-1943 (1997) and co-edited Pan-Africanism Updated (1999) and African Visions (2000). He co-authored I Walked with Giants (2010), jazz saxophonist Jimmy Heath’s autobiography. 2 �Kristian Van Haesendonck University of Antwerp - Literature The Poetics of Disorder in Contemporary Caribbean and Lusophone African Fiction The paper aims to explore literary links between two postcolonial contexts which are rarely brought into comparison: the Caribbean and (Lusophone) Africa. While the Caribbean has progressively overcome the cultural and literary insularism associated with its geography and colonial history, the study of Lusophone Africa has long been excluded by Africanists from the rest of the continent, due to its supposed singularity. The avatars of lusotropicalist discourse are, until today, visible in literary texts, through such tropes as madness, the (creole) family as a dysfunctional entity, or the apocalypse. In my paper I will mainly focus on novels by Angola’s Pepetela (O quase fim do mundo) and Mozambican author Mia Couto (Jesusalém), and offer comparative links to writers from Martinique: Fabienne Kanor (Humus) and Raphael Confiant (L’Hôtel du Bon Plaisir). Caribbean writers, I will argue, while showcasing an apparently more optimistic sense of conviviality compared to their African peers, deal with similar strategies of survival and social inclusion. The poetics of chaos and disorder in these literary texts strongly underscores the complexity of their respective political contexts and embedding in divergent (post-)modernities, as opposed to Western conceptions of (Post-)Modernity. Biography of Presenting Author Kristian Van Haesendonck is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Antwerp and a member of the Postcolonial Literatures Research Group. His interest lays with Caribbean and Lusophone Africa literatures and Latino-American studies. He graduated in Romance Languages from the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium) and obtained his PhD in Latin American Literature from Leiden University (The Netherlands). He taught Spanish literatures and LatinAmerican Literature and Culture in the United States (Princeton, Villanova) and Portugal (University of Lisbon). He is the author of ¿Encanto o espanto? Identidad y nación en la novela puertorriqueña actual (Frankfurt-Madrid: Vervuert-Iberoamericana, 2008) and editor of Going Caribbean! New Perspectives on Caribbean Literature and Art (Lisbon: Humus, 2012), and, with Theo D’haen, of Caribbeing: Comparing Caribbean Literatures and Cultures (Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi 2014). Sandra Boerngen Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-University, Frankfurt, Germany - Department of New English Literatures Floating memories: South African Visual Artists and the Indian Ocean Coming from the field of the cultural studies, with a background of South African art history and inspired by the research project “Africa’s Asian options” at Goethe University, Frankfurt, my paper focuses on a research perspective that first started to play a role in Geography and has gained vast attention in various disciplines over the last decade: the Indian Ocean Studies. Within my paper I raise the question if the study of the Indian Ocean can be a fruitful concept to challenge power structures inherent to the art field in general, or the South African Visual Arts field specifically. As other disciplines also the Visual Arts are striving for alternative perspectives, 1 �for concepts that can challenge the dominant mainstream historiography with its own inclusions and exclusions. My paper maps the Indian Ocean as a contact zone, a transcultural memory space and exemplifies by doing so how a shift in focus, away from nation state approaches to the transregional concept of the Indian Ocean, turns ones attention to yet invisible or neglected parts in art historiography. It gives a voice to artists working on the fringes of the mainstream art field, who tell us their yet unheard stories. Biography of Presenting Author Sandra Börngen is Ph.D. Candidate at Goethe University Frankfurt. She studied Culture Studies and Communication and Media Studies in Leipzig and Stellenbosch and graduated from Leipzig University with a M.A. thesis on South African artists in 2006. Her thesis focuses on the South African art field in the beginning of the 20th century, applying Bourdieu’s Habitus-Field Theory. Ryan Topper University of Leeds - School of English Life Beyond the Archive: Yvonne Vera's The Stone Virgins It is estimated that the Gukurahundi Massacres of 1980s Zimbabwe left somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 people dead. Considering the fact that victims were often burned, buried in mass graves, or dropped in abandon mine shafts, however, a numeric count of the dead remains impossible. Consequently, when, in The Stone Virgins, Yvonne Vera narrates the Gukurahundi while explicitly leaving out dates, names, or overall historical precision, she is responding to a historiographic problem: how does one write of that which cannot be archived? Using the historiographic questions raised by Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever as a point of departure, I read The Stone Virgins as a latent burial rite for the victims of the Gukurahundi, Vera's attempt to write an ancestral history beyond the parameters of archival history. Although the archive—through a violent process of inclusion and exclusion—structures the history of the nation state, for Vera, there is always life beyond this archival violence. For Vera, this beyond is articulated, I suggest, through the language of ancestral spirit possession. Biography of Presenting Author Ryan Topper is a PhD candidate in the School of English at the University of Leeds, where he studies postcolonial literature and critical theory. He is especially interested in the relations between post-deconstructive psychoanalysis and the animist ontologies found within African literary forms. He is currently writing a thesis on trauma and spirit possession in African literature. Ludmila Volná ERIAC Université de Normandie - English "Stories and Totalitarianism” (Havel): Voices Unheard Before - and Now? Stories of those who had lost their lives or had been subject to different kinds of damage for political reasons during the Soviet-style and Soviet-governed communist rule in Czechoslovakia (1948-1989), a system not unlike colonization, had long been unheard. As Václav Havel argues in 2 �his essay "Stories and Totalitarianism", due to the institutionalized 'rationale of history' the social scene had experienced the absence of story, indeed a destruction of "the story" altogether. The paper will focus on oral narratives of the so-called ‘Daughters of the Enemy’, children of longimprisoned or executed parents. What are these individuals' views of the trauma of the whole culture and do these formerly persecuted people nowadays perceive their experiences as a meaningful achievement? Does the society provide them with a feeling of satisfaction and/or fulfillment as hearing and/or responding to their voices while successfully coping with the trauma of the culture as a whole, as was e.g. the case of South Africa vis-à-vis its former political prisoners? Or is there (still) one kind or other of a (power-motivated) perpetuation of the absence of "the story"? The paper will address these and similar issues and discuss them against the backdrop of Havel's aforementioned essay. Biography of Presenting Author Ludmila Volná teaches at Charles University, Prague conducts her research at Université Paris-Est and Université de Rouen. She has two (co-)edited volumes to her credit as well as an extensive number of papers and lectures. She is a member of several academic associations and the nonIndia membership representative at IACLALS (Delhi) and of editorial boards of academic journals. Kanika Batra Texas Tech University - English Archiving Violence and Imprinting Gender Justice under apartheid in Durban, South Africa This paper examines two South African women’s magazines, Agenda and Speak, published in the 1980s and 1990s. Writing on women’s organizations in South Africa, Shireen Hassim mentions that “new terrains of political struggle at the local level” provided a “political opportunity for women to be mobilized as a group separately from black people or the nation in general” (250). However, “autonomy was undermined by the mid-1980s” because of the formation of a national front of democratic organizations against the apartheid regime (Hassim 250). Contrary to Hassim's assertion, I propose that some autonomy was preserved in print which documented and challenged the prescriptive national agenda. Agenda and Speak foregrounded women’s reproductive and sexual vulnerability, issues which did not easily find a place in the nationalist challenge to the apartheid state. The magazines archived violence through reports, articles, lifenarratives, interviews, and creative writing to articulate a vision of gender justice. Here patriarchal social structures, biased legislation, and the inadequate urban and suburban infrastructure were held responsible for gendered violence. My feminist urban studies approach aims to provoke discussion on the conjunction of archives and memory, violence and justice, and the local and national, in Durban women’s magazines of the 1980s and 1990s. Biography of Presenting Author Kanika Batra is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at the Department of English, Texas Tech University where she teaches and researches Postcolonial Feminism, Postcolonial Queer Studies, Globalization, and Urban Studies. She is the author of Feminist Visions and Queer Futures in Postcolonial Drama (Routledge: New York, 2011). She is currently working on a new project titled “Postcolonial Counterpublics: Genders and Sexualities in Print”. 3 �John Njenga Karugia Goethe Frankfurt University - Department of English and American Studies Multidirectional Afrasian mnemoeconomics The Afrasian Ocean world connects competitive memories across multiethnic communities that are negotiating identities and histories of suffering tied to colonialism and post-independence politics where inclusions and exclusions define contemporary dialogues. In East and South Africa, various heritage discourses and memory projects have emerged in order to address the heritage of Asian-Africans. In South Africa, various families are seeking knowledge about their Afrasian connections and memories of the life and suffering of South African-Asians are kept alive. Despite attempts at inclusivity in East and South Africa, exclusions persist. Rothberg (2009) has proposed that new forms of solidarity and new visions of justice might arise "when the productive, intercultural dynamic of multidirectional memory is explicity claimed." I propose moving beyond Rothberg’s multidirectional memory towards actionable social justice in Afrasian societies. Rigney argues that societies that demand public apologies expect actions demonstrating respect. I propose that multidirectional mnemoeconomics could address deep issues encoded in competing memories in Afrasian spaces. Multidirectional mnemoeconomics ties ethical multidirectional memory to ethical economics. It expands on Rothberg’s multidirectional memory discourses to a discourses-to-practice paradigm. Multidirectional mnemoeconomics involves addressing memory injustices and economic injustices simultaneously. Probably such an approach might contribute an insight towards contemporary social justice discourses. Biography of Presenting Author John Njenga Karugia has a PhD African Studies, is a lecturer at Goethe University Frankfurt (Institute for English and American Studies) within the AFRASO project and a member of Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform. He works on the ‘Indian Ocean as Memory Space’ and ‘Indian Ocean Imaginaries in East African Literature’. Marie Kruger University of Iowa - English Trauma on Display: Commemorating Apartheid on Constitution Hill Committed to educating the public on experiences of mass suffering while providing a moral framework for the narration of past events, contemporary memorial museums often function as a catalyst for social reform. In their attempt to educate the visitor, memorial museums are implicated in debates as to how we should remember the past. The political capital of recovered memory is even more significant in the context of the representational shift from “authentic objects” to autobiographical storytelling. Often these witness accounts are embedded in multimedia displays and rely upon narrative strategies associated with literature and film. As visitors are encouraged to imaginatively identify with individuals and their personal stories, the act of witnessing carries “the educational potential for a morally transformative experience” (Arnold 92). It is this desirable commitment to pluralism and tolerance that defines the curatorial approach to commemorating apartheid on Constitution Hill. My paper will discuss the use of testimonials in the former Women’s Jail of the memorial complex: Which memories and media are privileged? How is the visitor positioned towards the testimonials? Most importantly, what 1 �are the ethical and political implications of relying on the visitor’s empathetic response to promote justice and social reform in contemporary South Africa? Biography of Presenting Author Marie Kruger is Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Iowa where she teaches courses in postcolonial and cultural studies. In her current project ('Therapeutic Commodities: Apartheid, Trauma and Visual Culture'), she studies the representation and commodification of traumatic memory in South African visual culture, including film and memorial sites. Marie Sairsingh The College of The Bahamas - School of English Studies History, Reclamation, and Identity in Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying (2008) is memoir, autobiography, and national biography. These, modalities, along with a host of others, represent, according to Lisa R. Brown, “points on the vast continuum of use through which Caribbean creative writers and ‘real people’ alike have made self-representation” (276). Using multiple forms of life writing, Danticat disrupts the “narrow range of Western narrative paradigms,” modifies their defining features to convey a decidedly Caribbean/Haitian story. To discuss Danticat’s project of historical retrieval, I use Wilson Harris’s mythopoetics wherein he contends the catastrophes of history are reconstructive and visionary, and signal renewal not despair, seeing conventional history as an inadequate basis for a truly emancipatory poetics. The excavation of this “inner space” makes “epic stratagems available to Caribbean man [and woman] in the dilemmas of history, which surrounds him [/her]” (Harris 156). Mythopoesis is critical in formulating an aesthetics that re-connects Africa and the Caribbean. As the residue of violent dismemberment engendered by conquest, the “phantom limb”, is the critical link between Caribbean historiography, myth, and imaginative writing of the region. By engaging inventive strategies in life-writing, Danticat invokes the ‘phantom limb’ to “un-silence” the past of national history, writing (‘righting’) the imbalances in Haitian historiography. Biography of Presenting Author Marie Sairsingh is Associate Professor of English at The College of The Bahamas. She has published articles in the International Journal of English and Literature, International Journal of Studies in English Language and Literature, The Journal of West Indian Literature, and the College Language Association (CLA) Journal. Her areas of scholarship include African American literature, Caribbean literature, and African Diaspora studies. Rhonda Cobham-Sander Amherst College - English and Black Studies 2 �Digital displacements: Negotiating place in the Transnational African Narrative Binyavanga Wainaina and Chimamanda Adichie both came of age in rapidly technologizing independent African nation states, whose emergent middle classes had been eviscerated by the depredations of structural adjustment. Distanced equally from the narratives of progress that propelled their parents’ generation into the nation state and from the claims of ethnic belonging that undergirded those nationalist narratives, both writers have had to negotiate psychic, political and cultural dislocations in articulating their understanding of place. My paper compares the structures these writers use in One Day I Will Write about This Place and Americanah, respectively, to argue that both writers negotiate their relationships to place through their recourse recourse to digital media and by their creative embrace of the simulacra such estrangement from place enables. Biography of Presenting Author Rhonda Cobham-Sander teaches Caribbean and African Literature at Amherst College, Massachusetts. The author of I and I: Epitaphs for the Self in the Works of V.S.Naipaul, Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott, her essays have appeared in RAL, Callaloo, Small Axe, and Transition as well as in numerous critical anthologies 3 �Matthew Shum UKZN - English “Housed only by the starry sky”: William Burchell’s Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa (1822) Unlike other British naturalists and explorers who ventured into the interior of Southern Africa in the eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries, Burchell chose to travel without any European companions. As a result he was obliged, for long stretches of his journey, to interact directly with indigenous people and to form relations, especially with the Khoisan who accompanied him, of sustainable reciprocity. This paper examines the strained dynamics of these relations and considers what they tell us about a certain type of “whiteness” in the colonial past. It also examines the associated question of Burchell’s relations with insects and animals, particularly dogs, and why he came into conflict with the gatekeepers of the imperial archive. Biography of Presenting Author Matthew Shum is a Senior Research Associate at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Rev. Fr. Prof. Christian Anieke Godfrey Okoye University, Enugu, Nigeria - Institute Of Chinua Achebe Studies The metaphorical contradictions of an aborted struggle: a reflection on Achebe's There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra The paper examines Achebe’s book, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra which is a fresh perspective to the discordant symphony of autobiographical voices that have greeted the political turbulent post-independent Nigeria. Achebe uses his life to re-enact the contradictions that attended the civil war. As a master storyteller, Achebe crafts a poetical captivating eyewitness’ account of his experience during the pogrom and in the process diagnoses Nigeria continued rancorous politics of fragmentation, instability and socioeconomic backwardness to colonial legacy, recurrent circle of post-Independent leadership failures, endemic corruption and aggravated insensitivity of political elite to the gravity of the gradual descent of the nation. It also underscores the usefulness of the autobiographical as a toll for historical re-entering into the past and a voice for engendering a re-conciliatory spirit, and for the articulation of national regeneration. The paper critically explores Achebe’s stream of thought in his quest for therapeutic self-repair, and underscores how the writer appreciates historical memory as powerful tool for national re-construction. The paper concludes that Nigeria quest for greatness has remained metaphorically aborted since independence occasioned by the attendant contradictions that have birthed its existence. Biography of Presenting Author Rev. Fr. Prof. Christian Anieke is the founder and Vice Chancellor of Godfrey Okoye University, Enugu, Nigeria. He is a Professor of Comparative Literature. He is also the Executive Director of the Institute Of Chinua Achebe Studies, Enugu. 1 �Serah Kasembeli Stellenbosch University - English Studies Language and Power in Yvette Christiansë’s Unconfessed and André Brink’s Philida This paper discusses language and power in Yvette Christiansë’s Unconfessed and André Brink’s Philida and its consequent function in the slave memory project. The paper will discourse the differences in understanding by the slave master on one side of the power divide and the slave on the other. I suggest in my argument that there is an imminent general lack of understanding between the two parties due to the different spaces that they exist in. I intend to deliberate that the slave speaks a different language in reference to their psyche, emotions and state of mind whilst the master operates on a different premise. I argue that Christianse and Brink theorize the concept of these differences in languages. I elaborate the forms of silence by the slave out of the perception that the master does not perceive the reason for his/her actions. There are thus instances of silence when the slave opts to be quiet rather than explain his/her actions. The discussion touches on legal justice, truth verses lies in the context of seeking for justice and narrows down on silences in slave memories. The discussions fit into the larger area of archive and slave memories across Indian Ocean Africa. Biography of Presenting Author I am a second year PhD student in the Department of English studies working on the memories of slavery across Indian Ocean Africa. This abstract emerges from my PhD research. Dr Idette Noomé University of Pretoria - English The Marula Tree on the Boundary: Inclusive translation? The Marula Tree in question refers to Muhlaba I (ca 1864-1944), whose inclusive leadership of the Vankuna led them into the 20th century, through wars and cultural change, negotiating traditional and new lifestyles. His story and the oral history of his people are recorded in Xitsonga (1957) and Afrikaans (1963). This paper explores questions surrounding translating this text into English: Who might translate it? Which version would be the source text? How would the translation be verified? Why translate it all, today, in the postcolonial context, since it covers a life in the colonial era and was written during the apartheid era? Should the story remain exclusive to speakers of Xitsonga (and/or Afrikaans)? How would a translator today negotiate the stance of the biographers 60 years ago? Is this merely an exercise in nostalgia, or could it rescue this story to include a new audience? Can wider access illuminate other histories and herstories, inside and beyond this text? This paper explores the possibility of an ethical translation that is respectful and aware of the implications/complications of translation on the boundary line between the old and the new, between South Africa’s many cultures, and in the context of its language debate. Biography of Presenting Author Idette Noomé has lectured Medieval and Renaissance literature, 19th and 20th century drama and novels, Children’s Literature, and Editing at the University of Pretoria since 1985. Her DLitt, 1 �entitled 'Widening readership – A case study of the translation of indigenous law', considered accountable translation of legal anthropology texts for divergent audiences. Deborah Seddon Rhodes University - English Department WordArc: An Online Archive of South African Oral and Performance Poetry: A Project to Promote Orature in the South African Literary Imaginary This paper will present the work achieved thus far on a two-year research project funded by the British Academy, designed to develop a digital archive: "WordArc: An Online Archive of South African Oral and Performance Poetry". The archive is conceived as a resource for local and international researchers, in order to revise conceptions of the national literary canon, to influence curriculum development, and to improve access to South African orature, performance poetry, and spoken word, by community groups, poets, schools, and university students, to promote recognition of its importance and facilitate its preservation. As well as the work towards the archive, the project involves a number of steps: developing a website to showcase the work of student and local poets within a community engagement project; and the publication of scholarly outputs, which seek to contribute to the revisioning of South African literary historiography by examining the transnational, reciprocal influences that occurred from the 1960s onwards between South African and African-American poets, and resulted in the production of new poetic registers and practices. A successful colloquium of archivists, academics, and poets, including South Africa’s Poet Laureate, Keorapetse Kgositsile, took place in September 2015. An international conference is planned for November 2016. Biography of Presenting Author Deborah Seddon is a Senior Lecturer at Rhodes University. She has published on South African and African American literature, and on pedagogy. Her current research is funded by the British Academy, and is focused on South African and African American poetry, and on developing an online archive of South African oral and performance poetry. Panel Convenor: M. Neelika Jayawardane Associate Professor, State University of New York-Oswego; Arts and Culture Editor, Africa is a Country. Omar Badsha Photographer. Co-founder and member of Afrapix; CEO of South African History Online (SAHO). Justin Davey Curator, artist and member of the collective, Burning Museum. Thulile Gamedze Master’s student, University of Cape Town. Artist and member of iQhiya art collective. Nomusa Makhubu Lecturer - Art History and Visual Culture, University of Cape Town. 2 �Cedric Nunn Photographer. Member of Afrapix. Lihlumelo Toyana Master’s student, University of Free State. Documentary photographer and visual activist. Greer Valley Master’s student in Visual Art at Stellenbosch University. “Comrades, Cameras, Canvases: Photography and Art in South African Political Activism” – A Conversation Between Generations of Artist-Activists “If intellectuals and creatives can’t admit to their complicity in systems that exclude, marginalise, and criminalise disruptive actions intended to highlight ongoing and pervasive structural violence, then perhaps the institutions they serve are dead projects.” The past year has seen South African artist-activists join students in protests and projects intended to decolonise academic institutions that control their futures. Artists have also returned to addressing political subjects, driven by the mood of general discontent, corruption scandals, and importantly, by their interest in structural-historical subjects such as economic redress, police violence and the need for land restitution. The current wave of protests, and the (re)engagement of artists as activists are reminiscent of the seminal role that artists played in the anti-apartheid movement, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s. In order to engage in a conversation between the generations, and to emphasise that declonising practices are ongoing projects, our panel brings together a current generation of artists from the #RhodesMustFall movement and other coterminous student groups with artist-activists from the 1970s and 1980s. Specifically, some of the seminal members of the Afrapix photographers’ agency will join the panel to discuss their experiences. Extra notes: Afrapix was formally established in 1982 by artist and former trade union leader Omar Badsha, photographers Paul Weinberg and Lesley Lawson, among others. Afrapix photographers were seminal to the development of socially informed documentary photography practices that also addressed the lack of access to resources and opportunity to exhibit to Black artists in South Africa. Afrapix left the traditional mandates of documentary photographers – to stand apart, and record impersonally; they argued that aesthetics could not be divorced from the political and social needs of disenfranchised people, and began their journeys by positioning themselves first as political subjects who were part of the resistance. By the late 1980s, the collective was home to close on 30 photographers, making it the largest independent photographic agency in the country; it was also the only anti-apartheid photographic agency in the country, playing an seminal role in popularisation of the struggle of the mass democratic movement inside the country and the international anti-apartheid movement abroad. Although dispossession—an exponential process “in which juridical and economic procedures have led to material [and non-material]…expropriation” forms the bedrock of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid—Achille Mbembe cautions us not to imagine that all Africans, regardless of nuances of history and socio-political geography, react solely from a position of 3 �estrangement (241-243). 1 The student protests of the second decade of the 2000s highlight the ways in which South Africans deeply affected by on-going structural violence and dispossession act with a strong understanding of their autonomy and agency. Just as Afrapix photographers documented violent inequalities in the 1980s, the #RhodesMustFall movement and other coterminous student groups also have their photographers. Together, they struggle to articulate the ways in which attempts to whitewash the structural legacies of apartheid and the negotiations that fashioned the so-called post-apartheid era continue to exclude them. They bring to attention to how many of South Africa’s public spaces are constructed to memorialise and valorise violent colonial erasures. Through the often contentious and contradictory actions of groups with divergent interests, we learned that public spaces continue to be constructed as locations of exclusion, using “art” as signifiers of who is welcome to enter and who is deemed an interloper. Even the definition of what constitutes “art” and why it is reified became part of the debate about how exclusions are legitimised. Biography of Representing Author Omar Badsha is the CEO of South African History Online. He is an artist, former trade union leader and anti-apartheid activist, and one of the founders of Afrapix. He has held numerous exhibitions and published a number of books. See his website for more details (www.omarbadsha.co.za) Justin Davey is a curator, artist and member of the collective Burning Museum. Based in Cape Town South Africa, his work deals with the themes of forced removal, gentrification, colonial archives and the history of protest. Thulile Gamedze is an artist, writer, and member of the iQhiya art collective based in Cape Town. Thuli is interested in an Afrofuturistic approach, in radical education strategies and in creative working methodologies that might transcend oppressive colonial structures. M. Neelika Jayawardane is associate professor of English at the State University of New YorkOswego, and an Honorary Research Associate at the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA), University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa). She is Culture and Arts Editor at Africa is a Country, a web magazine of African political and cultural affairs. Jayawardane was born in Sri Lanka, grew up in the Copperbelt Province in Zambia, and completed her university education in the United States. Her publications focus on the nexus between South African literature, photography, and the transnational/transhistorical implications of colonialism and apartheid on the body. She is working two book projects: one on the Afrapix Collective, “South Africa’s only anti-apartheid photography agency”, and another showcasing contemporary South African artists. Nomusa Makhubu is an art historian and artist. She is the recipient of the ABSA L’Atelier Gerard Sekoto Award (2006) and the Prix du Studio National des Arts Contemporain, Le Fresnoy (2014). She is the chairperson of Africa South Art Initiative (ASAI), an ACLS fellow, an Abe Bailey fellow, and was a research fellow of the Omooba Yemisi Adedoyin Shyllon Art Foundation (OYASAF) in Nigeria, Lagos where her doctoral research was based. Makhubu was appointed to the National Arts Festival committee in 2011-2015. She co-edited a Third Text Special Issue: The Art of Change (2013). She was a recipient of the CAA-Getty travel award in 2014. Her current research focuses on 1 Mbembe, Achille. “African Modes of Self-Writing”. Steven Rendall, Tr. Public Culture 14(1): 239– 273. 2002. 4 �African popular culture, photography, performance art and socially engaged art. She lectures Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Cedric Nunn is well known for his documentary work during the apartheid era, especially during the turbulent political unrest during the 1980s. latest project takes a long view of the long-term effects of the “One Hundred Year" or Frontier period in South African and Eastern Cape history, from a Xhosa perspective. While the wars against the Zulu, and the British army's takeover of vast swathes of land in the area now known as Kwa-Zulu Natal is well documented, the dispossession of the Xhosa from their ancestral lands is lesser known. The wars of colonisation instituted the first forced removals of the Xhosa, replacing their settlements, farms, and cattle grazing areas with towns and vast farms given to British settlers. Given this history, Nunn points out that land, and landscape in South Africa are imbued with its racial and apartheid history and with “conjectures of ownership, belonging and identity”. Lihlumelo Toyana: Originally from rural Eastern Cape town of Sterkspruit, Lihlumelo Toyana is a documentary photographer, storyteller and visual activist who documents social justice related issues in South Africa. Toyana is a Master’s student Cultural Studies under the English Department at the University of Free State (UFS). She has an undergraduate degree and a postgraduate diploma in Governance and Political Transformation from the UFS and in 2014 she completed her certificate in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography from the Market Photo Workshop, Johannesburg. In 2011 she co-authored a book titled The Great South African Teachers with Professor Jonathan Jansen and Nangamso Koza and in 2015 she was part Free State regional Barclays L’Atelier 2015 Art Competition. As an artist and visual activist, she believes that social documentary photography can be used as a tool and vehicle to channel change in our society and the world. Greer Valley studied Architecture at the University of Cape Town and Visual Studies and Visual Art at Stellenbosch University. She has worked in the Architecture, Art and Design industries in South Africa, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom. She is currently an MA Visual Art student at Stellenbosch University where her research and practice interests include curatorial interventions into cultural sites and exhibition spaces focused on remembering South Africa’s past. Dr Raphael d'Abdon University of South Africa (UNISA) - English Studies Promoting and Innovating Poetry Teaching Across Borders: The Experience of The Caribbean Poetry Project (CPP) and The South African Poetry Project (ZAPP) This paper presents the activity of two cross-cultural and trans-national educational projects, namely the Caribbean Poetry Project (CPP) and The South African Poetry Project (ZAPP), whose aim is to innovate the teaching and learning of Caribbean and South African poetry in British, Caribbean and South African classrooms. Operating between 2010 and 2012, the CPP was a collaboration between the Centre for Commonwealth Education of Cambridge University and The University of the West Indies, which brought together leading poets, teachers, educationalists, scholars, publishers and arts administrators. A joint research and teaching project, the CPP developed and extended the knowledge of Caribbean poetry among secondary 5 �school students aged 11–18, produced supporting programmes for teachers in understanding and teaching Caribbean poetry, organized an international conference, and published two poetry books. The paper also illustrates the ongoing activity of ZAPP, a joint-project of Cambridge University and the University of the Witwatersrand, and a sister project to the pioneering CPP. Launched in 2013, ZAPP aims at encouraging creative engagement with Southern African poetry in schools in South Africa and the UK. Biography of Presenting Author Dr Raphael d'Abdon is a lecturer at the English Studies Department of UNISA. He has published several articles on spoken word poetry and is a published poet. Dr G. A. Horrell University of Cambridge - Education Embodying the Word: Exploring the use of Performance Poetry in Transforming the Classroom The International Poetry Project is a collaborative, intercultural and international project which – amongst other poetical initiatives – considers ways of harnessing the power of ‘Spoken Word’ and the performance of poetry in the classroom. The project engages with both traditional and contemporary poetic practices in different parts of the world. Beginning with South Africa (ZAPP), the Caribbean (CPP) and the UK, and working closely with practicing poets, teachers, University educators and learners, the International Poetry Project’s conceptualisation of poetry goes beyond current curricula and pedagogic practice, taking account of current poetry practices both ‘on the page and on the stage’; both in formal education and in society. Through poetry, we consider pupil engagement in the secondary classroom as well as the inspiration and education of teachers – in order to transform the practice of teaching poetry and provide a pedagogic model for an informed and up-to-date approach to language and literacy learning. This paper will offer a critical account of research-in-progress and invite further collaboration from colleagues across the globe. Biography of Presenting Author Georgie Horrell lectures in literatures in English at the University of Cambridge. She has particular interests in children’s literature and postcolonial literatures. Georgie is the Director of the newly formed, collaborative International Poetry Project, an exciting initiative which works to inspire young people and their teachers through poetry. Thandeka Cochrane University of Cambridge - Anthropology Literacy and Intimacy: embodied practices of paired reading and respect in rural Malawi Reflecting on three months master’s fieldwork in the Bandawe area of rural Malawi, this paper will focus on the intimate bodily practices of paired reading and their problematic relationship with the embodied practices and performances of respect in the area. In Bandawe respect is integral to the maintenance of social cohesion and stability. A crucial aspect of upholding this 6 �respect structure is the way it is enacted through bodily practices such as kneeling. The physically intimate engagement with children propagated through paired reading practices in literacy development projects, such as sitting with the child, threatens to rupture the moral boundaries encoded in embodied practices of respect, such as kneeling, curtseying, sitting on the floor and so on. With my paper I unpack the role of respect in the region as a key factor of the social contract and of children’s expressions of love to the parent, and explore how the intimacy of literacy practices jeopardizes this structure and poses a challenge to the way in which adults and parents expect to relate to the child. Biography of Presenting Author Thandeka Cochrane is a first year PhD student in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Cape Town. She has an MPhil from Cambridge in Political Thought and Intellectual History and a Social Anthropology masters from the University of Amsterdam. 7 �Amitendu Bhattacharya Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, K.K. Birla Goa Campus - Humanities and Social Sciences Universities at the Crossroads and the Humanities at a Dead-End: What is the Way Forward? My paper reviews the history of the establishment of University education in India and examines its role in the present context of a globalized and postmodern world. I contend that the institutionalization of the teaching of the English language and the study of English literature in Modern India was an act of dispossession which propagated Western values and naturalized colonialism by alienating an entire nation from its collective cultural past, and has, instead of integrating the diverse interests of society, brought all divisions to the fore. Moreover, the commercial and exploitative tendencies of the science and technology disciplines have dealt a body blow to the philosophical foundations of the humanities. Following the leads offered by Leavis, de Man and Derrida, I suggest that a possible solution to the overwhelming “technologico-Benthamite climate” of our world, too, lies within the precincts of the University which must act as an ultimate site for critical resistance against “all the powers of dogmatic and unjust appropriation”. I further argue that by strengthening and remodelling the humanities in general and by reconfiguring the boundaries of pucca English literature in particular, inequities of wealth and gender and social segregation may be bridged to a certain extent. Biography of Presenting Author Amitendu Bhattacharya is Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS Pilani), K.K. Birla Goa Campus, India. Njweipi-Kongor Diana Benyuei St Jerome Catholic University Institute, Douala, Cameroon - English Evidence of appropriation of English Language in a post-colonial setting: the case of L1 features in doctor-patient HIV/AIDS consultations in ELF in some clinics in South Africa This study addresses a gap in medical research, especially in the field of HIV/AIDS, namely, a lack of sufficient data-driven investigation into the linguistic nature of doctor-patient communication in English as lingua franca (ELF) in a multilingual setting in South Africa. It is a qualitative study that investigates the features of ELF, when doctors and patients with different L1s in a postcolonial medical setting, are involved in HIV/AIDS consultations. The data consist of transcribed audio-recordings of consultations conducted in ELF in four clinics in the Western Cape Province. Discourse analysis was used to decipher the discursive features that demonstrate interractants’ appropriation of English as a socio-cultural tool, in the use of ELF. The results reveal ELF characteristic linguistic features like borrowing, transference from L1, use of analogy and local metaphors, code-switching, all resulting from indigenization and hybridization. They reveal linguistic and socio-cultural specificities of HIV/AIDS consultations that indicate that by using ELF, the consultation includes interactants who would otherwise be excluded or whose participation would be minimal. Biography of Presenting Author 1 �I am a Cameroonian, born in 1968. I am married with two children. I am a holder of GCE Ordinary and Advanced Levels, BA in English from the University of Yaounde 1 in Cameroon, MA in English from University of Ibadan in Nigeria and a PhD in English from the Stellenbosch University in South Africa. Currently lecturing and Head of English Division at St Jerome Catholic University Institute, Douala, Cameroon, where I train students to write both the TOEIC and TOEFL Tests. Russell McDougall University of New England - School of Arts Seasonal Calendar Representations of Indigenous Weather Knowledge in Australia For many years the Australian Book of Meteorology, which has responsibility for issuing the official weather forecast nationally, was apparently indifferent to the many and varied locally specific weather knowledges of Australia’s Indigenous peoples. But in 2002 it launched its Indigenous Weather Knowledge website, and since then the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation has also upgraded its site to incorporate a whole range of indigenous knowledge. Together these two government sites now link to seventeen seasonal calendars representing the wealth and diversity of Indigenous weather knowledge. The challenge of the emerging field of environmental history, Tom Griffiths says, is to connect “social history” with “deep time” (i.e. geologic time) – “to work audaciously across time as well as across space and species”. The production of the calendars marks a small step in that direction. They suggest a new kind of textuality, raising interesting questions about the poetics and politics of converging indigenous and non-indigenous epistemologies, and about the relation of art to science. Biography of Presenting Author Russell McDougall is Professor of English at the University of New England (Australia), where he heads the Posthuman Literary and Cultural Studies Research Group. He has published extensively on West African, Caribbean and Australian literatures in English and is Executive Editor of the "Postcolonial Lives" book series of biographies for Brill/Rodopi. His book publications include: Tracking the Literature of Tropical Weather: Typhoons, Cyclone and Hurricanes (ed. with Sue Thomas & Anne Collett, 2016); The Roth Family, Anthropology and Colonial Administration (ed. with Iain Davidson, 2009); Writing. Travel, Empire: Colonial Narratives of Other Cultures (ed. with Peter Hulme, 2007). Jaspal K Singh Northern Michigan University - English ‘Hope in the Time of Hopelessness’ in Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying and Phswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow Whereas “Corporate globalization sees the world only as something to be owned and the market only driven by profits” thereby creating “cultures of exclusion, dispossession, and scarcity” (Vandana Shiva 2005: 2), some communities view the earth “as family . . . consisting of all beings and humans of all colors, beliefs, classes, and countries” thereby practicing “earth democracy” (1). In South Africa, where racial segregation led to land divisions and exclusions, then “life forms have no intrinsic worth, no integrity, and no subjecthood” (4). I’ll examine Zakes Mda’s Ways of 2 �Dying and Phswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow and argue that exclusions lead to forms of terrorism (Shiva 3). Yet, whereas Mpe represents the anguish of the rural polity moving to the urban areas in abject terms, Mda’s representation of the move from the rural to the urban, although also representing disparity and disenfranchisement, ultimately rises above the despair and shows interconnections and community. Mda sees that “[Earth democracy] is hope in the time of hopelessness, it bring forth peace in a time of wars without end, and it encourages us to love life fiercely and passionately at a time when leaders and the media breed hatred and fear” (9). Biography of Presenting Author Jaspal Kaur Singh is a Professor of English Literature at Northern Michigan University, is the author of Representation and Resistance: Indian and African Women’s Texts at Home and in the Diaspora (2008); co-editor of Indian Writers: Transnationalisms and Diasporas (2010) and Trauma, Resistance, Reconciliation in Post-1994 South African Writing (2010). Maureen Enongene Enongene - English Language-based gender constructions: the case of Cameroon Pidgin English The intended end of this paper is to expose the manner in which speakers of Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE) use language to construct gender (masculinity and femininity). It rests on the premise that language is the vehicle through which ideologies and power relations are established and/or transmitted. The study uses Critical Discourse Analysis frameworks (Fairclough 1985, 1989, 2003) which view language as a space where relations of power are actually exercised and enacted. In this school of thought, language and society are seen to be internally and dialectically related; hence the ways in which people use language in their encounters betray ideologies, expose stereotypical constructions, and reflect general societal perceptions. CPE speakers’ interactions were examined so as to ascertain whether or not there are specific linguistic markings of terms to denote men or women, semantic derogation of gender roles, and lexical variations concealed in the speech of male and female speakers. The findings of this study clarify certain cultural inferences and interpretations that can be made concerning CPE speakers as a speech community. It also contributes to the relatively new and growing research field of Language and Gender in the Cameroonian context, as well as studies on CPE. Biography of Presenting Author I am a teacher of English as a Second Language and currently employed as an instructor in the Department of English, at the University of Buea, Cameroon. I am also a Ph.D. student in Applied Linguistics at the same university. I am passionate about language and gender in African contexts. 3 �Harry Sewlall University of Venda - English Cape Town, its Musical Spatiality and apartheid: Jonathan Butler, Richard Jon Smith and Zayn Adams Cape Town, apart from its famed New Year festive season jamboree once known by the moniker “Coon Carnival”, is arguably the most musical city in South Africa due in no small measure to its exposure to international cultural currents flowing from across the seas to its renowned harbour. Drawing on musical influences from Africa and the USA, the Mother City has given birth to some of South Africa’s most gifted musicians who emerged out of the grim shadow of apartheid to shine in the galaxy of music superstars. Reflecting on the careers of three sons of this city, Jonathan Butler, Richard Jon Smith and Zayn Adams, this paper endorses what Martin Stokes has said about music, namely as “the means by which this [social] space can be transformed” (Stokes, M. 1994. Ethnicity, Identity, and Music, p4.). In focussing on these three artistes, this paper spotlights a crucial moment in South Africa’s cultural production – its popular music of the 1970s and 1980s and how these cultural ambassadors transcended the barriers of their racial identities to make their mark in the world of popular entertainment. Biography of Presenting Author Harry Sewlall is an alumnus of Unisa and North-West University (Potchefstroom Campus) where he obtained his MA (cum laude) and PhD respectively. He has published in literature, ecocriticism and popular culture, with a bias towards Conrad, Mda and Elvis Presley. He is a Professor at the University of Venda. Geoffrey V. Davis Universtiy of Aachen - retired - English ‘Hard Truths and Real Facts’: Theatre for Development in India Founded in 1998 by members of the Chhara community, one of the so-called Denotified Tribes of India and named after Budhan Sabar who died in police custody, the Budhan Theatre at Chharanagar exists to work to heighten awareness of the injustices the Chhara community has suffered, to promote social justice and human rights, to further the education of deprived young people, and to foster dialogue with the wider society. The group has recently expanded its work into children’s theatre, theatre with disabled women and playback theatre, as well as into making short films and running training workshops. Their plays deal with issues like deaths in custody, the 2002 Gujarat riots, and the demolition of their homes. They have also performed adaptations of European plays such as Gorky’s The Lower Depths, Fo’s The Accidental Death of an Anarchist, and Genet’s The Balcony. The group view their theatre practice as an attempt to “perform hard truths and real facts, no matter how disturbing, because it is in this way we connect with our history”. This paper will analyse Budhan’s theatre practice, particularly with regard to the way they have adapted some European plays to the circumstances of their community. Biography of Presenting Author 1 �Formerly professor at University of Aachen (Germany); former international and European chair of ACLALS; co-editor of Cross/Cultures: Readings in the Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures and of Matatu. Most recent publications: co-ed. Knowing Differently: The Challenge of the Indigenous (2013) and Performing Identities: The Celebration of Indigeneity in the Arts (2015). Lorna Down The University of the West Indies, Mona - The School of Education On the Edge: The Politics of Place in Esther Figueroa's Limbo In Limbo, Esther Figueroa exposes contending representations of place. Such representations reflect the way place is acknowledged and the multiple relationships that people have with the physical environment. These relationships include the historical, economical, spiritual, emotional, ideological, mythical and symbolic. More so, Figueroa reveals how power relations are inscribed in place and as a result shape people's beliefs about, attitudes to and treatment of the environment. This paper analyses the representations of place, the interplay between levels of constructs, ‘the real’; ‘the imaginary’ and the power relations uncovered in this engagement. In effect, the paper explores the question of how place is represented, the power of such representations, and what ultimately determines the land’s ‘salvation’. Equally important the paper examines the power of the imaginary, of fiction, of art and of voices from the margins to disturb, trouble, challenge and provoke responses that can lead, at the very least, to the reimagining of place as environmentally, socially and economically sustainable. Biography of Presenting Author Dr. Lorna Down is a Senior Lecturer in Literature and Literature Education for Sustainable Development in the School of Education, the University of the West Indies, Mona. She has published widely in the areas of Literature and Education for Sustainable Development. Matthew Whittle University of Leeds - School of English Illustrate the brutes!: Reading and representing the imperial souvenir in Walton Ford’s ‘Pancha Tantra’ Addressing the conference theme of ‘Place, Environment and Identity’, I examine how the work of contemporary artist Walton Ford stages the paradoxical role of trophy hunting in both establishing and undermining the strict racial, biological, and ecological hierarchization of colonial environments. Ford features in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian, the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. Yet, his paintings have garnered little critical attention in the fields of visual and literary studies. 'American Flamingo' and 'Lost Trophy', from the 2009 collection 'Pancha Tantra', foreground how the tradition of C19th naturalist art, characterized by John James Audubon, and popular narratives of trophy hunting, such as Ernest Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa (1935), are complicit in colonialist domination. In doing so, Ford’s life-sized paintings of hunted animals, which adopt many of the tropes popularized by Audubon, point to the Spivakian notion of “epistemic violence” behind an ostensibly innocuous, 2 �taxonomic art form. At the same time, they recall Conrad and Orwell, investing animals with the power to unsettle the assumed superiority of the colonial hunter. My analysis adopts literary strategies for reading artistic works, unsettling the triumphalism of the English language and contributing to the growing field of postcolonial ecocriticism. Biography of Presenting Author Matthew Whittle is a Teaching Fellow in Contemporary and Postcolonial Literature at the University of Leeds. He has published journal articles and book chapters on post-war British literature, decolonization, postcolonial studies and contemporary art, and is the author of PostWar British Literature and the End of Empire (Palgrave, 2016). Marimer Gómez Claudio University of Granada Transculturation and Language: An Approach to Giannina Braschi and Puerto Rican Postcolonial Literature The following case study examines how the Spanish and English languages in Puerto Rico exhibit signs of transculturation through the work of Giannina Braschi. Since 1898, there was a clash between the Puerto Rican and the American cultures while new linguistic phenomena (such as Spanglish and code-switching) were triggered due to the imposition of English as the main language in Puerto Rico. In light of the above, it is necessary to discuss different definitions related to cultural processes and to interpret these definitions towards the current political circumstances of Puerto Rico in order to see which one best describes the actual situation of the Island. By applying theoretical concepts proposed by Fernando Ortiz, ángel Rama, Antonio Cornejo Polar among others, it is observable that Puerto Rican national identity is not necessarily fixed, but it could rather manifest as fluid between Puerto Rican, American, Latin American and Caribbean cultures. Although the relationship between the United States of America and Puerto Rico prevails as hegemonic, postcolonial literature and language respectively serve as a forum and an instrument to question and propose alternatives and change the status quo. Nevertheless, transculturation entails a deeper process that does not necessarily resemble the case of Puerto Rico. Biography of Presenting Author Marimer Gómez Claudio is an independent cultural agent and researcher, graduated from a MA in Latin American Studies: Culture and Management (University of Granada) and two BA's in Plastic Arts and Art Theory (University of Puerto Rico). Her research interests include socially engaged art, feminism and Latin American cultural studies. Aurore Bonardin-Cadet EA DIRE Université de La Réunion Performing citizenship and sharing identity in Cape Town South Africa defeated discrimination to become the Rainbow Nation democracy and to embrace a vision of a peaceful society. Unity ought to be a priority and leads to the search to fulfil an 3 �analogy between diversity and a shared identity. This process largely sets its first steps at a local scale. Thus, the City of Cape Town, which faces issues of poverty, violence and spatial segregation, is engaged to achieve social cohesion and a policy of unity for its multicultural population. Pledging for unity is a process that implies an interaction with every actor of the society. Some civil society organizations (CSO) aim to permit the population to have access and to participate in the shaping of this idea and then, to share a common sense of identity. We propose to take a look at an initiative for active citizenship, the Open Streets Events, which occurs everywhere in the city. This project encourages people to take part in the city’s life and to show off their talents. How could this kind of cultural entertaining action impact on a society? We’ll see in what extent performing citizenship could lead to the shaping of a shared identity and even improve social integration. Biography of Presenting Author I am a PhD student, affiliated to the research laboratory DIRE, at the University of Reunion Island. I am under the direction of Pr Alain Geoffroy and Mrs Vilasnee Tampoe-Hautin. I am interested in the interaction of cultural civil society organizations and the process of social integration in Cape Town. Margery Fee University of British Columbia - English Sustainable Epistemology: Indigenous Theory on Reading Oral Story Traditional oral story comprises the knowledge of particular Indigeous nations. Those who propose to teach oral story in university literature courses face difficulty that what is likely to be handled as a literary discussion in fact should be a much broader epistemological one. Most instructors are unfamiliar with the epistemologies that ground the stories they might teach. How then, should mainstream scholars teach oral story? Recently, Indigenous scholars have written extensively on oral story, for example, Shirley Sterling’s Grandmother Stories: Oral Stories and the Transmission of Culture (1997), Richard E. Atleo’s Tsawalk: A Nuu-chah-nulth Worldview (2004), Louis Bird’s The Spirit Lives in the Mind: Omushkego Stories, Lives, and Dreams (2007), Jo-ann Archibald’s Indigenous Storywork: Educating the Mind, Heart, Body and Spirit (2008), Jeannette Armstrong’s Constructing Indigeneity: Syilx Okanagan Oraliture and tmixwcentrism (2009), and JoAnn Episkenew’s Taking Back our Spirits: Indigenous Literature, Public Policy and Healing (2009). The subtitles alone reveal their difference from mainstream approaches: they are talking about a worldview that transmits law, that educates the whole person, that promotes land stewardship, that heals and dreams. The paper will provide an overview of comments from these theoretical texts on how stories should (or should not) be read in mainstream contexts. Biography of Presenting Author Margery Fee holds the Brenda and David McLean Chair in Canadian Studies at the University of British Columbia. Recent publications are Literary Land Claims: The “Indian Land Question” from Pontiac’s War to Attawapiskat (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2015) and Tekahionwake: E. Pauline Johnson’s Writings on Native North America (Broadview, 2016), co-edited with Dory Nason. 4 �Carol Leon The University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia - Department of English Evening is the Whole Day: Stories of Inclusions and Exclusions Many Malaysian writers have delved into the subjects of race, identity and nationhood, given the postcolonial and mutlicultural contexts of the country. Often their writings dwell on the early evolution of a new nation trying to define itself and the various challenges that beset the diasporic communities living in Malaysia. One relatively new writer who has added her voice to the narrative of Malaysian identity and nationhood is Preeta Samarasan. Evening is the Whole Day is a riveting text by a diasporic author writing about the diasporic Indian community living in Malaysia. Naturally themes of home and homeland are dominant in the text. Indeed, the house occupied by a rich, middle-class family in the narrative, the Big House, becomes a reflection of the many issues faced by Indians living in a country rife with racial politics. Within this house too, however, are other divides, namely class and economic differences as the author yokes together the stories of two young women. Interestingly then, the Big House holds various stories of inclusion and exclusion, stories which represent the issues still facing modern-day Malaysia Biography of Presenting Author Carol Leon is Associate Professor of English at the Department of English, The University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Her research interests are travel writings and postcolonial literature. She has written and presented papers in these areas. Her book, Movement and Belonging deals with themes of travel and representations of place and space in the Indian Ocean region by selected travel writers. Michael Wessels University of the Western Cape - English David Donald’s Blood’s Mist: Imagining the Encounter between San and Settler in the Drakensberg David Donald’s historical novel, Blood’s Mist (2009) reimagines the encounter between San and settler in the foothills of the Drakensberg in the first half of the final quarter of the nineteenth century, which culminated in the disappearance of the San language and independent way of life in the area. The chapters alternate between the story of a San family and the story of a family of British immigrant farmers who occupy a farm in the foothills, far below the San family’s shelter. The book contains detailed notes, which match the imagined events with historical events or ethnographic information. The omniscient narrator presents the innermost thoughts and experiences of a range of San and settler individuals, using different registers to do so. This narrative voice, when used to articulate San experience, also contains echoes of psychoanalytic, historical, ethnographic and other scholarly and more popular discourses. This paper will examine the novel’s efforts to provide an indigenous subaltern voice and the ways in which the novel seeks to establish a worldview that is distinctly San and one which is essentially European. Critical to this distinction are notions of land ownership and relations to the land and its plants and animals. Biography of Presenting Author 1 �Michael Wessels teaches literature in the Department of English at the University of the Western Cape. His research interests include representations of indigeneity, spirituality and the environment, especially in South African literature and Indian literature. He is the author of Bushman Letters (2010) and co-editor of San Representation: Politics, Practice and Possibilities (2015). Vera Alexander University of Groningen - European Languages and Cultures Postcolonial Garden Stories: Enclosures and Exclosures Etymologically defined as enclosed spaces, gardens offer a paradigmatic exercise ground for postcolonial analysis. Historical and practical parallels between horticultural and agricultural activities and processes of colonisation are kept alive in terms such as colony, culture, hybridity and diaspora. Being liminal spaces of controlled otherness gardens are the subject of a heterogeneous corpus of writings, ranging from poetry to fiction and referential works. ‘Garden writing' is not an established category in literary criticism. But the living space of the garden is more than a mere motif or background setting. Gardens tell stories of otherness, race, colour, agency, resistance, displacement, globalisation and creativity. Garden writings give insight into a complex, dynamic and mutually formative relationship between human beings and places that problematise human hegemony and control. This paper will analyse representations of gardens in postcolonial writings, reading the garden as a relational site for the creative negotiation of boundaries, inclusions and exclusions. Garden stories (e.g. by Doris Lessing and J. M. Coetzee) locate postcolonial gardens in an artistic interstice where history, migration and space identity are reimagined in terms of resistance, innovation, reinterpretation and growth. Biography of Presenting Author Dr Vera Alexander is a lecturer in English at Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, having previously taught at various universities in Germany and Denmark. Her research ranges widely across English and Anglophone literatures and cultures, with particular focus on ecocriticism, travel and mobility, life writing, the bildungsroman, children’s writing, heterotopia, diaspora and transculturality. She is completing a monograph on Anglophone garden writings. Tyrone Russel August University of Stellenbosch - English No place like home: The life and poetry of Dennis Brutus The South African poet Dennis Brutus (1924-2009) lived outside the country for nearly four decades. However, he continued to write about South Africa throughout that period. My paper will examine his life-long concern with this country in both his poetry and public commentary, and explore why this endured even though he continually expanded his sense of identity after he left South Africa on a one-way exit permit and increasingly participated in various global political and economic campaigns. A key aspect of my argument is that Brutus redefined his sense of self during different periods of his life. My paper identifies three important changes: initially, while in South Africa, he exhibited the primary attributes of a patriot; then, in exile, he evolved into a 2 �rooted cosmopolitan (in which place, and more specifically South Africa, continued to occupy a central role); and, finally, he became a rootless cosmopolitan (in an attempt, with varying degrees of success, to minimise the role of South Africa in his sense of identity). I explore the reasons behind this evolution, and contend that these shifts were essentially attempts to respond to changes in his political environment and to retain agency over his life. Biography of Presenting Author I completed a PhD on the poetry of Dennis Brutus at the University of the Western Cape in 2014, and am currently doing research on the first half of his life in South Africa, with a view to publishing a biography. Previously I worked as a journalist for almost three decades. Sally-Ann Murray Stellenbosch University - English City imaginaries across Portrait with Keys and Broken Monsters The urban as material environment and as the material of a performative citiness is an established feature of South African post-apartheid literature. I explore citiness in Ivan Vladislavić’s Portrait with Keys (2006) and Lauren Beukes’ Broken Monsters (2014), negotiating a route between comfort and estrangement, testing the extent to which I am able to realign my own elective affinities. Despite wide praise for his engagement with the urban ‘nows’ of democracy, Vladislavić’s writing is sometimes associated with the impossibility of morphing into a contemporary urban diversity, dragging a parenthetical past which threatens to render him passé, past it, even already posthumous. Beukes, for her part, has quickly risen to prominence as an adept exponent of an urbane, trendy, hyper-mediatised brand of creativity, a mash up mobile across platforms, cultures, borders. I consider not only points of dissimilarity between Vladislavić’s lyrical dossier of Johannesburg and Beukes’ blend of Detroit gritty realism and phantasmagorical fabulation, but also of surprising intersection. My analysis reflects on the contingent claims of local/ity and the transnational; the spatial textures of nostalgia and futurity; individual and collective imagination, and various ‘vehicles’ through which citiness comes to be embodied. Biography of Presenting Author Sally-Ann Murray is professor and chair in the English Department at Stellenbosch University. She has published academic papers on literature and citiness, and is also an award-winning creative writer. Margriet van der Waal University of Groningen - Faculty of Arts/Euroculture Space, place and power: postcolonial ecocriticism and the representation of the South African environment My proposed contribution to this conference will focus on two texts: Etienne van Heerden’s short story “Poison Karoo” (2012) and the Dutch novel Tikkop (2011), translated as Betrayal, by Adriaan van Dis (2013). Although the texts are translations into English, both are about South 3 �African society in transition, while the South African landscape and environment play an important role in each text to establish a “sense of place” and identity. It is through the specific optic of postcolonial and environmental critical concerns that I will compare my reading of these two texts, both of which deal somehow with processes that imply a threat to the environment: fracking (in “Poison Karoo”) and abalone smuggling (in Betrayal). How do these texts provide knowledge to the (critical) reader about identities and identification in the context of South African postcolonial culture of inclusion and exclusion (and of whom or what)? Whose concern is the environment, and how is class, (the redistribution of) wealth, and participation in material economy written into these two narratives? Do these texts enable us to comprehend better the intertwining of economic, cultural and environmental concerns in the South African context? Biography of Presenting Author Although I'm originally from Johannesburg, I currently work as a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Arts/University College of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Here I teach in a European Studies programme, and mainly conduct research on postcolonial identity constructions and its aesthetic representation. Rangarirai A Musvoto University of South Africa - English Studies The individual versus the group: A critical interrogation of representations of individual and collective identities in two Zimbabwean novels Informed by Jean-Francois Lyotard's concept of the grand narrative, this paper traces and examines how individual and group identities are represented in two novels about the Rhodesian/Zimbabwean war of the 1970s. The discussion argues that often, in these narratives, how individuals define themselves in private identity sites, conflicts with the demands of the public and collective identity spaces that they are also part of. The paper contends that this tension results partly because group identities (in the selected accounts) are primarily constructs of contesting nationalisms' grand narratives and as such, individuals who are caught up in these collective identities, have to 'silence' and 'repress' other facets of the self that might not be convenient for the ideologies of the grand nationalist projects. Stanley Nyamfkudza's novel, The Non-Believer's Journey (1980) and Bruce Moore-King's White Man Black War (1988) will be analyzed. Biography of Presenting Author Alfred Musvoto lectures in the Department of English at the University of South Africa. Rachel Moseley-Wood University of the West Indies, Mona - Literatures in English Postcolonial Film in Jamaica: Trying to Bridge the Divide Jamaican postcolonial fictional films tend to privilege the perspective of the poor and are, to a large degree, concerned with constructing place as it is experienced by the marginalised. These films can be understood as participating in the postcolonial process of imagining the nation, 4 �functioning to destabilise formal definitions of this community by bringing to light stories normally elided from official representations. This project is not without its tensions, however. Lamming’s ironic insistence that it was through the eyes of the early West Indian novelists that the peasant became “a living existence”, resonates here, and provides a framework for interrogating filmmakers’ attempts to capture “stories that float from afar”, that is, from across Jamaica’s wide socioeconomic divide. As occurs in Lamming’s essay, a primary concern is the extent to which the work of what is essentially a middle class “elite” group of artists can be understood as speaking on behalf of the marginalised. What is left out in these filmmakers' accounts of place in Jamaica? What is brought to light? What structures of power are rendered invisible by their reluctance to turn the camera on the communities of relative wealth and privilege from which they emerge? Biography of Presenting Author Rachel Moseley-Wood is a lecturer in the Department of Literatures in English, University of the West Indies, Mona, where she teaches literature and film studies. She has published journal articles and book chapters on Jamaican film. Pauline E. Bullen Women's University in Africa - Women and Gender Studies Everyday Mothering: Activism and Womanist Ethics Patricia Hill Collins’ (2000) work entitled, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment tells us that many Black women write from a particular ‘standpoint’ – one which is situated in a context of domination. In her work, Collins writes of the “invisible dignity, quiet grace and unstated courage” of Black ‘womanist’ ethics. The Black woman is part of a legacy of struggle that may go unrecognized as we respond differently to various forms of oppression. Personal histories or stories, however, often highlight the fact that family structures have long been important and selective social locations for manufacturing and supporting the ideologies needed to maintain oppression” (Collins, 2000, p.284). For Black folk the trauma of subjugation – beatings, repression, invasion, occupation, dislocation, have not resulted in total destruction and despair. This work shares subjugated knowledge. It is reflection, from a Black feminist standpoint, that examines the concept of ‘home’ and resilience. It speaks to how we as Black folk, cope – to our beginnings and “begettings”. It is a look at my mother, a woman born out of slavery and colonization, in 1914, her teachings and the ways that her life nurtured mine. Biography of Presenting Author Born in Guyana, the only English speaking country in South America and one of Caribbean culture, Dr. Bullen grew up in Toronto, Canada, received her PhD in Sociology and Equity Studies from the University of Toronto, has taught with City University of New York and is currently teaching in the Women and Gender Studies program at the Women’s University in Africa. 5 �Kwashirai Zvokuomba Women's University in Africa - Gender Studies African indigenous knowledge systems in the Zambezi valley The study examined how the Doma people have managed to maintain the traditional knowledge systems in a changing global environment. The Doma people, a minority ethnic group, managed to, historically and socially, maintain a reclusive semi-nomadic culture around the Chewore forests in Mbire district along the Zambezi valley, and are unknown to the outside world. The study sought to make known by society the Doma narrative by unpacking the cultural dynamics of a society that continues to hold on to traditional civilization in an era of modernity. Through an ethnographic survey, findings revealed that the Doma culture is at cross roads with the global ecological and wildlife conservation practices, social and economic imperatives of the 21st century. Their indigenous knowledge systems of food processing, hunting, gathering, fire making, marriage processes and spiritual rites now face serious challenges in modern society, as exhibited by the coping strategies that are failing to sustainably provide livelihoods. The forest which was once their ‘supermarket’, has become the preserve of wildlife, creating a sense of marginalization on the part of the indigenes. Biography of Presenting Author Kwashirai Zvokuomba is a researcher with the Women's University and holds Bachelors and Masters Degrees in Sociology of Development and is currently a PhD candidate with the University of Johannesburg, Department of Sociology. His research interests are in feminist anthropology, sociology of land and agrarian studies as well cultural studies. Taryn Bernard Stellenbosch University - Department of General Linguistics Corporate stakeholder discourse as neo-colonial discourse: A critical analysis of linguistic constructions of “the stakeholder” in South African corporate sustainability reports Contemporary stakeholder models of the corporation have been praised by scholars for their social and economic benefits (see Jones 1995 and Pedersen 2006). However, Banerjee (2007) and Sharp (2006), working within a social-theoretical paradigm, highlight the flaws with the mechanisms used by organisations to prioritise the needs of diverse groups of people. Sharp (2006: 216) argues that, in the context of globalisation and the decline of the nation state, stakeholder discourses present new ways of constructing who is entitled to being “developed”. Rather than being entitled to development through citizenship, it is now offered to those who “have a stake in” the core business of the corporation. By incorporating methods of critical discourse analysis (CDA), this study contributes to an understanding of stakeholder discourse as it manifests in the sustainability reports of six South African companies. Such an analysis reveals how discursive features work to present the companies in positive and individualised ways, while at the same time allowing them to generalise and categorise people into groups whose function is highly dependent on that of the company’s. In conclusion, the study comments on the impact that corporate stakeholder discourses may have on future social and economic development in South Africa. 1 �Biography of Presenting Author Taryn Bernard is a lecturer in applied linguistics at Stellenbosch University. She is interested in the ways in which language is used by powerful individuals and institutions to construct themselves and the world around them, and in teaching novice writers to do the same. Christine Anthonissen Stellenbosch University - General Linguistics “These children, they will be angry” Concerning educational opportunities in a time of globalisation, much has been said about the difficulties of students with immigrant backgrounds in integrating into an educational system where the language-of-learning-and-teaching (LoLT) is not the same as the family language (see Genesee 1994, Martin-Rojo 2010, Farrales & Pratt 2012). This paper will specifically use the concept of ‘contact zone’ (Pratt 1991, 2008) – a liminal space where locals and foreigners meet – to reflect on the challenges faced by children whose home language does not coincide with any of the LoLTs of the community in which they are living. Schools are contact zones where not only learners from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds meet, but also parents and teachers from different educational contexts. The paper will refer to recent studies on integrating learners with immigrant backgrounds into foreign schooling systems. Data collected in 2014 and 2015 in the Western Cape region will be presented to disclose how responsive education policies are to the cultural and linguistic backgrounds of learners from families of refugees and asylum seekers. Finally the paper will reflect on how schools as ‘contact zones’ become spaces of developing new identities and of speaking (back) to power. Biography of Presenting Author Christine Anthonissen is professor emeritus in General Linguistics, Stellenbosch University. Her research focuses on Discourse Studies, Critical Discourse Analysis and social aspects of Bilingualism and Multilingualism. Recent work refers to neoliberal and postcolonial theories for understanding processes of language maintenance and shift observed in educational settings in local multilingual communities. Hermann Wittenberg UWC - English Animated Animals: Allegories of Transformation in Khumba Anthony Silverston’s 3D computer animated children’s film Khumba (2013), featuring the star voices of among others Richard E. Grant and Liam Neeson, was one of South African’s more successful films to date. Set in the Karoo, and featuring a cast of African animals, the film traces the adventures of a young zebra who is born with aberrant stripe colouration, and is rejected by his herd. The film draws much narrative material from Disney’s Lion King, but also references the Quagga Breeding Project which attempted to re-create the extinct Quagga. This paper will advance a critical reading of the film and its iconic character, suggesting that many of the 2 �questions that trouble post-transition South Africa concerning transformation, belonging and racial identity, are allegorised in the film’s feel-good storyline. Biography of Presenting Author Hermann Wittenberg teaches English at the University of the Western Cape. He has worked extensively on theories of spatiality, the sublime and landscape in colonial and postcolonial travel writing (the subject of his doctoral thesis) and was joint editor of the interdisciplinary collection of essays, Rwenzori: Histories and Cultures of an African Mountain (Kampala: Fountain Press 2007). His current research focuses on South African literary studies within a broadly book-historical theoretical framework and he has published several archival studies of the writings of J. M. Coetzee and Alan Paton, including a travelogue titled Lost City of the Kalahari (UKZN Press, 2005) and Coetzee’s Two Screenplays (UCT Press, 2014). He also has strong interests in eco-critical writing, convened the 2011 ‘Literature and Ecology’ colloquium in Kleinmond, and edited a special issue of Alternation focusing on oceanic and coastal themes in South African literature. Frances Hemsley University of Leeds - School of English “Feeling like a fish”: Ecologies of skin and water resources management in Dambudzo Marechera This paper reads figurations of the psychical skin in Dambudzo Marechera’s short story “Protista” and his essay “Fear and Dread out of Harare”. I adapt Didier Anzieu’s psychoanalytic theory of the skin ego to the eco-contextual contouring of skin and psychical containment in both narratives. The ego, in Anzieu’s theory, constitutes itself first and foremost on a tactile foundation: the notion of a skin ego provides a plausible link between the psyche and the sensate, the self and its tactile environments. Marechera’s eco-contextual contouring of skin, I suggest, implicates histories of colonial water annexation and empirical realities of drought in psychical trauma while opening onto the question of possible future environmental depletion. I show that Marechera’s autobiographical allusions to environmental trauma in “Protista” and “Fear and Dread” have their coordinates in the construction of the Lesapi dam and in the ecology of Lake Chivero – a man-made reservoir and municipal water supply outside of Harare – respectively. I read these autobiographical allusions as an imminent, psychoanalyticallyconstructed critique of colonial and postcolonial water-resources management. In short, I argue that with Marechera we can read for an ecology of skin that synthesises biophysical and psychohistorical processes relevant to postcolonial environmentalisms in Zimbabwe. Biography of Presenting Author Frances Hemsley is an AHRC funded PhD student at the University of Leeds in her third year of study. Her research interests are in Postcolonial literatures and environmentalisms and psychoanalytic theory, including the work of Didier Anzieu and Jean Laplanche. Her article, ‘NonMourning and Eco-critical Ethics in Véronique Tadjo’s Shadow of Imana’, is forthcoming in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature. 3 �Dirk Klopper Rhodes University - English Becoming Country, Becoming Peasant in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace Empson argues that the relationship between the metropolitan and the rural in the pastoral narrative involves a relationship of the complex to the simple, where the simple man can say things “more fundamentally true” as he is in contact not only with external nature but also with the “mysterious forces” of human nature. According to Eagleton, Empson draws attention to the pastoral recognition that the intellectual is “in one way better” than the rustic (common person) and “in another way not as good”, and claims that the intellectual is taught a simple truth by the common person, namely, that the mind is a “part” of nature and not just its “other”. The common person, says Eagleton, is innately suspicious of the ideological formalism favoured by the intellectual, and the pastoral incorporates a certain ambiguity (“looseness”) as the “structural mark” of a dialogical relationship between the intellectual and the people, the complex and the simple, mind and nature, idea and thing. This paper considers what such an understanding of country may contribute to the notion of becoming peasant in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. Biography of Presenting Author Dirk Klopper teaches in the English Department at Rhodes University, and has published largely on South African literature, with a current focus on country narratives. Dusty Ross University of North Carolina at Greensboro - English Brave Ones: Gender, Violence, and Poverty on the Margins Green, ankle deep grass monopolizes the bottom of Zwelethu Mthethwa’s ‘Untitled’ from his Brave Ones (2010) series of photographs taken at a Nazareth Baptist Church (NBC) Festival. A tangled tree bows out, framing a young man standing in the centre of the image. He wears a pink and white gingham kilt and a white button-up. He gazes at the viewer with a stern look. His brow is slightly furrowed. Atop his head he wears a white pompom headpiece. He is an iScotch, a participant of the NBC Festivals that are a blend of traditional Zulu beliefs and evangelical Christianity. Brave Ones (2010), developed out of a complicated history of photography in South Africa and challenges traditional Zulu masculinity, comments on violence and poverty of those living on the margins, and redefines gender by blurring the lines of “traditional” religious uniform. I use theoretical approaches on identity such as Homi Bhabha’s concepts on hybridity, Raymond William’s work on everyday culture, and Judith Butler’s exploration of performativity to better understand the amaScotch and the culture in which they exist. Biography of Presenting Author Dusty Ross is a PhD student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She has written extensively on South African photography and blends elements of art and literary theory and criticism into her work. 1 �Victor Chikaipa Stellenbosch University - General Linguistics Identity construction of a Malawian community in media reporting after recent catastrophic flooding This paper will refer to media reports published in early 2015 after catastrophic floods in southern Malawi following exceptionally heavy rainfall. It will show how human actors and the environment where the flooding was experienced were discursively constructed variously by local Malawian and foreign media, using publications with relatively large readerships. The paper will present data from an under-researched region in an African country, identifying and critically analysing selected news items that form part of an Environmental Discourse. This will be done with a view to disclosing how arguments are articulated in the different kinds of media, which discursive strategies are typically used to present the selected content, and what the overt and covert meanings are that each medium puts out to their respective implied audiences. Specifically work-in-progress towards a PhD will be used to consider the ideological stance of journalists and media corporations which is embedded in the selected reports, as it becomes clear in the authors’ identity construction of the affected population. Biography of Presenting Author Victor Chikaipa is a PhD student in the Department of General Linguistics. His research interests include critical discourse analysis, media and politics and environmental communication. Andrea Susan Thorpe Queen Mary University of London - School of English and Drama Between Gutted Warehouses and Pleasure Streets: Arthur Nortje’s poems set in London South African poet Arthur Nortje studied in Oxford from 1965 to 1967, and for a short period in 1970, before his early death. His most famous poems from this period are, however, set in London. Nortje is often regarded as a poet of exile: critics link his physical exile in the United Kingdom and then to Canada, with an abstract sense of alienation, particularly related to his background as a “coloured” South African. Nortje’s London poems, however, cannot be read through the sole paradigm of “exile”. Drawing on Sarah Nuttall’s suggestion that his London poems “reveal a familiarity with and even an embeddedness in the city”, I perceive in them a shifting dialectic between a sense of loss and anxiety over his coloured identity and his status as a “nominal” exile, and productive gestures towards a subversive reconfiguration of both his colouredness and his relationship with Britain. Nortje’s London-based poetry presents his attempts to work out his identity via his engagement with the city through his body, and I argue that one can read his later London poems as an exploration of queer sexualities. Studying Nortje’s London poems expands our understanding of his oeuvre, beyond the tragic mode of marginality. Biography of Presenting Author 1 �Andrea Thorpe is a PhD candidate in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London. The subject of her dissertation is South Africans writing about London from 1948 onwards. She obtained her MA in English Studies from Stellenbosch University. Irikidzayi Manase University of the Free State - English Memory-making and the land in Graham Lang’s Place of Birth The paper examines representations of the effects of the land invasions on the Bourke siblings as depicted in Graham Lang’s Place of Birth. It analyses Vaughn Bourke (a Rhodesian born migrant then resident permanently in Australia) and his siblings’ experiences during the period of the invasions. The major events here are the family reunification in Bulawayo and their travel back to their besieged farm, outside Bulawayo, to exhume their ancestors’ remains so that they could rebury them at a nearby farming town’s church cemetery. The paper therefore considers postcolonial notions on place and dislocation (Mcgregor 2006; Ashcroft et. al 1995) with regard to the Bourke’s experiences in relation to family history, personal memories and ties to the family farm that had passed from one generation to the other since the 1890s. The role of the landscape and space in the constitution of identities and in imprinting personal histories is considered and juxtaposed to the Zimbabwean state’s grand narrative about the land that over shadowed all personal histories and narratives about the land. Biography of Presenting Author Irikidzayi Manase teaches in the Department of English at the University of the Free State. His research focuses on how space is defined, impacts on the everyday, and assist in the constitution of identities and cultures in literary studies of Southern Africa, the diasporic world and speculative fiction. Gabriele Dau Stellenbosch University - Department of English Sheherazade writing loneliness: Emily Ruete/Princess Salmé’s Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar "I had left my home a complete Arab and a good Muslim, and what am I now? A bad Christian, and somewhat more than half a German": Emily Ruete, born a princess of Zanzibar, wrote these lines when she started to realise that her homeland Zanzibar was no longer available to her. Her conversion to Christian belief, her scandalous marriage to German merchant Rudolph Heinrich Ruete and the resulting political turmoil, rendered it impossible for the princess to return to the island on a permanent basis later in her life. The restlessness that characterised the second half of Emily Ruete's life was driven by both homesickness for Zanzibar, her deep doubts about her new religion and her sense of alienation from her own self. Emily Ruete's memoirs are a unique source coming from within 19th century Zanzibar as a place that intersects Africa and the Orient. The princess's portrayal of her childhood at the Sultan's court at times resembles the enchanting 2 �stories of One Thousand and One Nights. While the memoirs seek to introduce the customs of her homeland to the reader on the one hand, they express nostalgia and self-reflection on the other. Biography of Presenting Author Gabriele Dau, living in Salzburg/Austria 1982 BA in Library Sciences, Stuttgart (Fachhochschule für Bibliothekswesen) 2013 MA in English and American studies, University of Salzburg Publication: "Illness as Metaphor": HIV/AIDS between Politics and Aesthetics in South African Literature (2014). Currently PhD programme at Stellenbosch University. Working title of dissertation: “Narrating Enchantment and its Limits in Literary Representations of Zanzibar”. Donette Francis University of Miami - English Department Discrepant intellectuals: Stuart Hall and Rex Nettleford Jamaican intellectuals Stuart Hall and Rex Nettleford were born on February 3, 1932 and 1933 respectively, and are shaping figures in the field of British and Jamaican cultural studies. Both receive an Oxford education as recipients of the Rhodes Scholarship (Hall 1951-Merton College, Nettleford 1957-Oriel College). Despite these biographic convergences, these figures have yet to be brought together in our scholarly imagination. This conference paper comparatively situates Hall’s and Nettleford’s version of cultural studies, the differing geopolitical contexts from which they worked, the audiences they reached and served, and their overall intellectual legacies. I consider their practice of being public intellectuals as a commitment to think cultural questions in a variety of social forms: Hall’s appearances on television from the 1950s and Nettleford’s 1962 founding of The National Dance Theatre of Jamaica. I take into account their shared imperative to democratize educational systems of prestige through extramural education: Hall through the Open University and Nettleford through the University of the West Indies. I argue that a similar sense of unbelonging in the spaces they made their home served as a catalyst to their intellectual and political orientation and reveals the generative work race and color perform in different diasporic contexts. Biography of Presenting Author Donette Francis is Director of the University of Miami’s American Studies Program and Associate Professor of English. The author of Fictions of Feminine Citizenship: Sexuality and the Nation in Contemporary Caribbean Literature, she is also editor of a special issue on “Intellectual Formations” in Anthurium, and co-editor of “American Studies—The Caribbean Edition” in the Journal of Transnational American Studies. 3 �Wamuwi Mbao University of Stellenbosch - English A House Where Nobody Lives: Reading South African Unsettledness within a Realm of Distance Tracking backwards from current events on campuses across South Africa, this paper asks what might be said about claims of spatial belonging and the cultivating of place-ness that occurs in this country. Who is excluded? Who is left uneasy? And what uses might there be for that uneasiness? Via a reading of episodes from Mark Gevisser’s Lost and Found in Johannesburg and other texts, the paper aims to draw into proximity the ceaselessly contradictory elements that make up belonging and inhabitation of place in South Africa. Gevisser’s work is a restless meditation on the state of complexities and discontinuities of belonging, and I engage the text in order to think-in-and-through what the often uneasy state of flux captured by the text says about South Africa at this time. Biography of Presenting Author Wamuwi Mbao is an essayist and cultural critic. He lectures in English Literature at Stellenbosch University, where he specializes in South African post-transitional writing and South African popular culture. Julia Martin University of the Western Cape - English Something Growing What’s left of a person at the end of a life when she’s forgotten nearly everything? Sometimes a particular place may help us to imagine who we are. For my mother in old age, when the lifetime of stories that made up a self had almost disappeared, what remained was early childhood and the present moment. In the gathering dark of the nursing home bed where she lay on her back, watching squirrels and pigeons in the Syringa tree outside, she remembered the life of another house and garden, and that first place gleamed like a lighted window. Amid the fog of forgetting called dementia, she seemed to find a tenuous identity in the memories of that particular environment. Ninety years later, what she recollected of the place came to infuse the present moment with a child's immediacy of awareness, while filling her with an unquenchable longing for home. In this presentation I’ll read the opening of an extended essay in the genre of creative nonfiction in which I reflect on my attempt to respond to this impossible condition of exile and displacement by setting off without a map to find the actual location of her childhood. Biography of Presenting Author Julia Martin teaches in the English Department at the University of the Western Cape. She has a particular interest in environmental literacy and creative non-fiction. Her publications include A Millimetre of Dust: Visiting Ancestral Sites (2008), and (in collaboration with Gary Snyder), Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Places (2014). 1 �Dorothy Driver University of Adelaide, and Emeritus Professor at University of Cape Town Zoë Wicomb: The Translocal, The Ordinary, And The New Grounds Of Writing And ‘Self’ In Derek Attridge’s pathbreaking essay on Zoë Wicomb’s fiction, he identifies its “troubling of location” (“Home Truths” 158) as Wicomb’s characteristic writerly gesture. Engaging also with Wicomb’s expressed discomfort in dealing as a writer with her displacement from South Africa to Scotland, Attridge further suggests that her writing turns to its own advantage the difficulties of her translocation, and that it does so by fusing “familiarity” and “strangeness” (158). Attridge does not explicitly draw Wicomb into his more general literary interest in alterity, which he explores in his book The Singularity of Literature as fundamental to the acts of writing and reading. However, he sees Wicomb’s “troubling of location”, sometimes combined with a “troubling of chronology”, as an entry into what he calls the “ethics of alterity”, the ethics that makes literature what it is. Most other Wicomb critics now see her writing in such terms. Virginia Richter and Carli Coetzee, notably, argue that Wicomb’s writing is strongly grounded in both place and displacement, Coetzee speaking of how her texts “perform, and require the reader to perform, an instability related to situatedness” (569); and Richter defining her characteristic writerly movement as a set of “uncanny translocations” (374). Minesh Dass, too, notes that Wicomb’s characters cannot conceive of “home” without at the same time feeling “un-homed” (137). These and other analyses suggest, then, that Wicomb’s writing is not only characterised by its movements between geographical spaces — typically, in the later fiction, Scotland and South Africa, Glasgow and the Cape — as well as by her persistent and increasing interest in their uncanny relation, but also that a double displacement is the very locus or ground of her literary identity. This is the space from which she writes — troubled, uncanny, unsettled. Such terms are usefully placed in the context of Wicomb’s essay “Setting, Intertextuality and the Resurrection of the Author”, for this essay not only offers a theoretical paradigm for her own treatment of setting but also allows us to extend what may otherwise seem to be only an interest in a transnational uncanny specifically located in Scotland and South Africa, Glasgow and the Cape, Wicomb’s two half-homes. My paper argues that Wicomb’s writing further develops a translocal uncanny whose interest in the local pursues an ethics of the ordinary that intertwines with the ethics of alterity. In this ethics of the ordinary, the uncanny is incorporated into the self. Setting becomes a means, for Wicomb, of inscribing new forms of social interaction into the South African imaginary, and new understandings of ‘self’; one may even speculate that Wicomb is positing writing and reading as a site for new social interactions in which the familiar and the strange crisscross as dizzily as David Dirkse’s “to-ing and fro-ing” in David’s Story. Biography of Presenting Author Dorothy Driver is Professor of English at University of Adelaide, and Emeritus Professor at University of Cape Town, where she taught for twenty years. She has also held visiting positions at University of Chicago and Stanford University. Her major research interests are in the constructions and representations of gender and race both under apartheid and after apartheid, and in writing by women. Her most recent publication is a new edition of Olive Schreiner’s From Man to Man or Perhaps Only. 2 �Dr Aparna Srinivas Independent Scholar, Chennai, India Hybrid Ali: Ecology and Identity An interesting premise that Sanjeev Sanyal puts forth in his book, The Land of the Seven Rivers, is that the history and culture of India was influenced by its distinctive geography. Uniquely situated at the confluence of two seas and an ocean besides the Himalayas in the north - India is at the same time not too distant, yet far enough from Europe. This reflects in its ecology too. Within India, its diverse landscapes play home to several species of birds which are endemic to particular ecosystems – the plant and avian life is not to be found anywhere else within India or the rest of the world. Thus the landscape determines the identity of bird species. In his autobiography The Fall of the Sparrow, Salim Ali, the Birdman of India, chronicles these identities and landscapes. He recounts how he learnt everything he knew about birds from the then British birders, turning him into a hybrid ornithologist. For Ali, ecology quite rightly framed the personal and professional choices he made. This ecological identity prompted him to take on the work of cataloguing the avifauna of India. Thus for Ali, ecology shaped his identity. Biography of Presenting Author Dr Aparna Srinivas worked on the Booker Prize for her PhD, which she received from the University of Madras. She has worked for two years as Assistant Professor at Stella Maris College, Chennai, India. Bettina Pahlen University of Duisburg-Essen - Urban Culture, Society and Space Revisiting the Grey Street Writers Trail in Durban, South Africa This paper emerges from joint research by scholars in South Africa and Germany on a literary trail devised in 2006 by the research project ‘KZN Literary Tourism’. This urban trail, set in a section of Durban historically occupied by families and traders of Indian descent, highlights the writers who both lived in this densely inhabited and vibrant quarter and wrote about its inhabitants in a variety of genres. In the 10 years since its construction, numerous tour groups have been on the trail, interacting with the people and places it features. In 2015, the trail was the focus of an MA dissertation by Bettina Pahlen. The results of her fieldwork together with the 10th anniversary of the Grey Street Writers trail have occasioned a re-think around this example of urban cultural heritage and its potential for urban renewal. Using the work of urban cultural theorists such as Michel de Certeau and his classic piece on walking the city; Zapf and his insights into literature as cultural ecology; and Throgmorton on the role of storytelling in urban planning, this paper looks at the linkages between writers and place, and the literal next step of discovering the city through walking its streets. Biography of Presenting Author 3 �Bettina Pahlen graduated MA cum laude in 2015 from the University of Duisburg-Essen. Her field is Urban Culture, Society and Space. 4 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 17th Triennial Conference Abstracts Subject The topic of the resource Triennial Conference Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource June 23 2016 https://aclals.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/386e14f8318f5e05bbea8b540299292d.pdf 56bb36ac3f19781dd61b0c7d6b6fc95d PDF Text Text ACLALS 2016 Programme See also www.aclals2016.co.za for programme overview Monday 11 July – Friday 15 July Conference Opening Event Sunday 10 July 18.30-20.00 1 �SITE STELLENBOSCH UNIVERSITY (SU) Monday 11 July MONDAY 09.30-11.00 PANELS No Date, & Venue Function Name SU Theme Literatures of the World and for the Planet Panel Title: Chair: Meg Samuelson Mon 09.3011.00 1: Looking Backwards, Looking Forwards... Speaker 1 Kizito Z. Muchemwa (University of Great Zimbabwe) Speaker 2 Speaker 3 Speaker 4 Bibi Burger (Stellenbosch University) Esthie Hugo (University of Cape Town) Eve Nabulya (Stellenbosch University) Title of paper Of murals, granite rock paintings, sculptures and (dis-) connected worlds in Dambudzo Marechera, Yvonne Vera and Zakes Mda Khoisan culture and a decolonizing apocalypse in Thirteen Cents (2000) by K. Sello Duiker Looking Forwards, Looking Back: Animating Magic, Modernity and the African City-Future in Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon Explorations in ecocriticism and rhetoric Venue coordinator 2 �No Date, & Venue Mon 09.3011.00 Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: Poetry: Space and Time Speaker 1 Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo (Independent Scholar) ‘Stream of My Blood’: The Fragility of Chenjerai Hove’s Poetry Speaker 2 Rosemary Alice Gray (University of Pretoria); (University of South Africa) “Beyond Culture and Below Consciousness”: Ben Okri’s Heraclitus’ Golden River (Wild 2009) Speaker 3 Uhuru Portia Phalafala (University of Cape Town) Time is NOW: Space-time conceptions in Keorapetse Kgositsile’s Poetry Speaker 4 Riacarda de Haas (University of Bayreuth) Check spelling Spoken Word Goes Online: Poetic Blogs and Videopoetry by South African Artists Venue coordinator 3 �Mon 09.3011.00 Panel Title: Chair: Achebe 1 Speaker 1 Noélle Koeries (University of Cape Town) Chinua Achebe: A Case for Reading his Non-fiction in Contemporary Africa Speaker 2 Christian Anieke (Godfrey Okoye University) Speaker 3 Neil ten Kortenaar (University of Toronto) The Metaphorical Contradictions of an Aborted Struggle: A Reflection on Achebe’s There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra Can the Suborned Speak?: The Meaning of Bribes in Achebe’s No Longer at Ease Speaker 4 Snežana Vuletić (GCSC); (University of Stockholm) Narrating Exclusion and Inclusion in Fiction: A Cultural Reading of the Forms of Deformity in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) Venue coordinator 4 �No Date, & Venue Mon 09.3011.00 Theme Function Name Panel Title: Chair: Gender and Space Speaker 1 Ruby Magosvongwe (University of Zimbabwe) Speaker 2 Sanja Nivesjö (Stockholm University) ; (Stellenbosch University) Speaker 3 Britta Olinder (Gothenburg University) Title of paper Black African Female Migrations: Space Allocations and Space Claims For and About Women in Selected Southern African Fictional Narratives of the New Millenium Sexual Entanglements of Spatial Belonging – Olive Schreiner’s From Man to Man Stories That Float From Different Prats of the World in Mavis Gallant’s Fiction Speaker 4 Venue coordinator 5 �No Date, & Venue Mon 09.3011.00 Theme Function Name Panel Title: Chair: Race, Caste, Violence Speaker 1 Bidisha Banerjee (The Hong Kong Institute of Education) Speaker 2 Asha Varadharajan (Queens’s University) Title of paper “No breasts. Two dry scars…”: The Metaphor of Rape and Postcolonial Trauma in Mahasweta Devi’s “Behind the Bodice” “Something else and something other”: Race, Caste, Biopolitics Speaker 3 Speaker 4 Raita Merivrta (University of Turku) Slum Clearances and Forced Sterilizations: Remembering the Emergency (1975-77) in Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Kothandaramannce Venue coordinator 6 �No Date, & Venue Mon 09.3011.00 Theme Function Panel Title: Chair: Connected/Excluded Spaces Speaker 1 Name Shashikantha Koudur (National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal); Title of paper Religion, Gender, Exclusion: Islam, Hindutva and the Case of Sarah Aboobakar in Contemporary Karnataka Ambika G. Mallya (Srinivas Institute of Technology) Speaker 2 Neelofer Qadir (University of Massachusetts Amherst) Connected Histories of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy Speaker 3 Jennifer MacGregor (Unviersity of California, Los Angeles) Formal Hybridity: Regenerating Sierra Leone in Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love Speaker 4 Kristian Van Haesendonck (University of Antwerp) The Poetics of Disorder in Contemporary Caribbean and Lusophone African Fiction Venue coordinator 7 �No Date, & Venue Mon 09.3011.00 Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: Other Stories Speaker 1 Veronica Austen (St. Jerome’s University at the University of Waterloo) The Art of Loss in Goodison’s “So Who Was the Mother of Jamaican Art”? and D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts Speaker 2 Danson Sylvester Kahyana (Makerere University) Diasporic Identities and Authorial Perspectives in Noni Jabavu’s Drawn in Colour (1960) Speaker 3 Annie Gagiano (Stellenbosch University) Ironies of Fame, Appropriation & Neglect Regarding Indigenous South African ‘Ecological’ Narratives Speaker 4 Thandava Gowda T.N (Karnataka State Higher Education Council) Critiquing Postcolonial Eco-Criticism in Get A Life by Nadine Gordimer Venue coordinator 8 �No Date, & Venue Mon 09.3011.00 *Skype Presentation Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: Postcolonial Questions Speaker 1 Clare Barker (University of Leeds) Genetics and Biocolonialism *Speaker 2 *Marimer Gómez-Claudio (University of Granada) Transculturation and Language: An Approach to Giannina Braschi and Puerto Rican Postcolonial Literature Laura Zander (LudwigMaximilians-University) Postimperial Emancipation – Can the Empire Write Forward? Speaker 3 Speaker 4 Venue coordinator 9 �MONDAY 4.00-5.30 PANELS No Date, & Venue SU Mon 4.005.30 Theme Literatures of the World and for the Planet Panel Title: 2: African Subjects and the World Function Name Title of paper Chair: Speaker 1 Kizito Z. Muchemwa Ryan Topper (University of Leeds) Towards an Animist Ontology, or What Comes After Sovereignty? Speaker 2 Olivier Moreillon (University of Basel) and Danyela Demir (University of KwaZulu-Natal) Heike Harting (University of Montreal) Speaker 3 Speaker 4 James Hodapp (American University of Beirut) ‘I flew too close to the sun...and fell very hard’: Representations of Psychoses in Anglophone South African Literature after 2000 from a world-literary perspective The Rise of Afropolitan Fiction: Emmanuel Dongala’s Little Boys Comes from the Stars and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to our Hillbrow Afropolitanism and Ready-Made African World Literature Venue coordinator 10 �No Date, & Venue Mon 4.005.30 Theme Function Panel Title: Chair: Music and Art Speaker 1 Harry Sewlall (University of Venda) Speaker 2 Anne Loeber (Goethe University, Frankfurt) Khondlo Mtshali (University of Kwazulu-Natal); Gugu Hlongwane (Saint Mary’s University) Matthew Whittle (University of Leeds) Speaker 3 Speaker 4 Name Title of paper `Cape Town, its Musical Spatiality and Apartheid: Jonathan Butler, Richard Jon Smith and Zayn Adam Layers of Postcolonial States of Mind in Rap-Music Journey’s, Paths and Healing in Simphiwe Dana’s Music Illustrate the Brutes!: Reading and Representing the Imperial Souvenir in Walton Ford’s “Pancha Tantra” Venue coordinator 11 �No Date, & Venue Mon 4.005.30 Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: Crime and Power Speaker 1 Sabine Binder (University of Zürich) Speaker 2 Kerry Vincent (Acadia University) Whose Story is Written on her Dead Body? The gender Politics of the Stories Female Victims are Made to Tell in Some Selected South African Crime Novels Censorship and the Banality of Power in Swaziland Crime Fiction Speaker 3 Tina Steiner (Stellenbosch University) Defamiliarizing the Local: Reading Hawa J. Golaki’s The Lazarus Effect (2011) and The Score (2015) Speaker 4 Jochen Petzold (University of Regensburg) Popular and Political: ‘Crime Writing’as Commentary on South African Society Venue coordinator 12 �No Date, & Venue Mon 4.005.30 Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: Decolonisation and Race Speaker 1 Marzia Milazzo (Vanderbilt University); (Rhodes University) “Playing the race card” while “even God is white”: Niq Mhlongo’s Dog Eat Dog, Post-Apartheid Black Fiction, and the Paradoxes of Nonracialism Speaker 2 Raquel Lisette Baker (Rhodes College) Undoing Wihteness: Postcolonial African Literatures and the Unfinished Project of Decoloniazation Speaker 3 Karsten Levihn-Kutzler (Goethe University, Frankfurt) Race, Risk, and the Politics of Pre-Emption in Janette Turner Hospital’s Orpheus Lost and Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows Speaker 4 Shelley Hulan (University of Waterloo) Why No One (in the West) Talks about Race in Alice Munro Venue coordinator 13 �No Date, & Venue Mon 4.005.30 Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: History, Spectre, Perspective Speaker 1 Neville Hoad (University of Texas at Austin) A Perverse Anglicanism in a History of Desire: A 21st Century Reading of John William Colenso Speaker 2 Lizelle Smit (Stellenbosch University) Depictions of the Other through King’s I/Eye Speaker 3 Michael (Cawood) Green (Northumbria University) Ghosting Through: Migrancy and Memorialisation Speaker 4 Venue coordinator 14 �No Date, & Venue Mon 4.005.30 Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: Marlene van Niekerk and Damon Galgut Speaker 1 Mathilde Rogez (Université de Toulouse) “Only connect”? Damon Galgut’s Arctic Summer and South African Rewritings of E.M. Foster’s A Passage to India Speaker 2 Mathilda Slabbert (Stellenbosch University) “Re-mark”: Damon Galgut’s Arctic Summer Speaker 3 Keenan Dale Collett (Rhodes University) Taking out the Trash: Discussing Triomf and its Film Adaptation Speaker 4 Venue coordinator 15 �No Date, & Venue Mon 4.005.30 Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: SciFi/Alternative Worlds Speaker 1 Rodney Jonathan Likaku (Chancellor College, University of Malawi) Speaker 2 Jessica FitzPatrick (University of Pittsburgh) Speaker 3 Timothy Wright (University of the Witwatersrand) Ecologies of Blood: Transfusion, Haemopoetics, and the African Vampire Speaker 4 Jacolien Volschenk (University of the Western Cape) Postcolonialsm and Marginalised Voices in Science Fiction: Temporal Entanglement in Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber The “E” in English for Exclusions: Interrogating Fictional Languages that Dislocate the Postcolonial Home in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and George R Martin’s Game of Thrones Reconsidering the Space(s) of Global Science Fiction Venue coordinator 16 �No Date, & Venue Mon 4.005.30 Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: Adichie Speaker 1 Chelsea Haith (Rhodes University) Speaker 2 Jana Fedtke (American University of Sharjah) (Un)belonging: Exploring Systems of Inclusions and Exclusions in the Use of Nigerian, American and British English Dialects in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah Transnational Experiences in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah Speaker 3 Rhonda Cobham-Sander (Amherst College) Digital Displacements: Negotiating Place in the Transnational African Narrative Speaker 4 Ademola Adesola (Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife) The Nigerian War Novel and the Female Perspective in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo’s Roses and Bullets Venue coordinator 17 �No Date, & Venue Mon 4.005.30 Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: Gender/Queer Speaker 1 Jyothirmai.Dakkumalla (Adikavi Nannaya University) Dalit Women’s Struggle for Education: Analysis ofSelect Short Stories of Subhadra, Shyamala and Vinodini Speaker 2 Martina Vitackova (University of Pretoria) The Tales of Hybridity in Post-1994 Women’s Writing in Afrikaans Speaker 3 Eddie Ombagi (University of Witwatersrand) Becoming Queer: Rethinking an African Queer Theoretical Framework Speaker 4 Rosamond S. King (Brooklyn College, City University of New York) Does not seem to be in the Abstracts Queer Africa, in its Own Words Venue coordinator 18 �SITE STELLENBOSCH UNIVERSITY (SU) Tuesday 12 July TUESDAY 09.00-10.30 PANELS No Date, & Venue Tues 9.0010.30 Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: Cities Speaker 1 Magdalena Pfalzgraf (Goethe University, Frankfurt) Mobile City Worlds in Zimbabwean Fiction Post-2000: Valerie Tagwira’s The Uncertainty of Hope and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names Speaker 2 Wamuwi Mbao (Stellenbosch University) A House Where Nobody Lives: Reading South African Unsettledness Within A Realm of Distance Aurore Bonardin-Cadet (EA DIRE Université de La Réunion) Performing Citizenship and Sharing Identity in Cape Town Speaker 3 Speaker 4 Venue coordinator 19 �No Date, & Venue Tues 9.0010.30 Theme Function Panel Title: Chair: Autobiography 2 Speaker 1 Name Title of paper Nwabisa Bangeni (Stellenbosch University) The Affect of Reading: The Fragments of Bonnie Henna’s Eyebags & Dimples Speaker 3 Angelie Multani (Indian Institute of Technology Delhi) Does not appear in the Abstracts Re-Membering and (Re)Writing: Autobiography in Two Plays by Mahesh Dattani Speaker 4 Marciana Nafula Were (Stellenbosch University) Exploring Orality in the Contemporary African Female Political Autobiography Speaker 2 Venue coordinator 20 �No Date, & Venue Tues 9.0010.30 Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: Achebe 2 Speaker 1 Cheela H K Chilala (University of Zambia) Gendered Spaces in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: Text, Context and Pretext Speaker 2 Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba (University of Manitoba) The Dangers of Tradition in Achebe’s Novels Speaker 3 Thomas Jay Lynn (Penn State Berks) Beyond Black and White: British Identity in Chinua Achebe’s Fiction Speaker 4 Rachel Rubin (University of Massachusetts Boston) Reading, Writers, & Lovers: Authorship and Audience in Anthills of the Savannah & Our Sister Killjoy Venue coordinator 21 �No Date, & Venue Tues 9.0010.30 Theme Function Panel Title: Chair: Film 1 Speaker 1 Name Title of paper Rosemary Chikafa-Chipiro (University of Zimbabwe) Inclusion or Exclusion: An African(a) Womanist Reading of Sembene’s Faat Kine Speaker 3 Seema Jena (United Nations – Education) Speaker 4 Martina Kopf (University of Vienna) Nation, Narration and Cinema, Inclusion and Exclusions with Special Reference to Films on the Indian Partition, 1947 Earth and Train to Pakistan Who is Giving, Who is Taking? Stories of Aid Floating Between Africa and Europe Speaker 2 Venue coordinator 22 �No Date, & Venue Tues 9.0010.30 Theme Function Panel Title: Chair: Narratives of Global Conflict Speaker 1 Name Title of paper Senath Walter Perera (University of Peradeniya) Feroza Jussawalla (University of New Mexico) Coming to Terms With (Post) Conflict, Violence, Trauma and More in Noontide Toll (Mis)Interpreting Jihad: Literary Representations Speaker 3 Vedita Cowaloosur (Stellenbosch University) Portraying Conflict, Vioelnce, Trauma: Joe Sacco’s Palestine and Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s This Side, That Side Speaker 4 Lallmahomed-Aumeerally Naseem (University of Mauritius) Formulating Dissent post 9/11 in Ishtiyak Shukri’s Silent Minaret and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist Speaker 2 Venue coordinator 23 �No Date, & Venue Tues 9.0010.30 Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: Recovering Lives Speaker 1 Nazia Akhtar (Unviersity of Hyderabad) Does not appear in the abstracts Witnessing Hyderabad: Testimony, Identity, Language, and Narration in Huma R. Kidwai’s Hussaini Alam House (2012) Speaker 2 Anurag Kumar (Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University) Critical Humanism: Cultural Reading of Ambedkar’s Bhimayana and Om Prakash Valmiki’s Joothan as Dalit Life Narratives Esther K. Mbithi (Kenyatta University) Inclusions and Exclusions: a reading of Unbowed: One Woman’s Story Speaker 3 Speaker 4 Venue coordinator 24 �No Date, & Venue Tues 9.0010.30 Theme Function Panel Title: Chair: Poetry: Aesthetic Activist Speaker 1 Ben Etherington (Western Sydney University) Does not appear in the abstracts Scanning Claude McKay’s Creole Poetry in Context Speaker 2 Roger Michael Field (University of the Western Cape) Keeping Cavafy in Mind *Speaker 3 Jogamaya Bayer (Independent Scholar) Read by Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo Sabrina Vetter (Goethe University Frankfurt - NELK) Mafika Gwala: Writer as a Cultural Worker Speaker 4 Name Title of paper Indigenous Modernities: Native American Poetry and Modes of Autonomy Venue coordinator 25 �No Date, & Venue Tues 9.0010.30 Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: Migration/Diaspora 1 Speaker 1 Gibson Ncube (Stellenbosch University) (Re)framing Home, and Belonging in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names Speaker 2 Annalisa Oboe (University of Padua) From the European South: Relocating Italy Through Postcolonial Representations Speaker 3 Murari Prasad (D.S College, Katihar) Indian Diasporic Formations in Guyana: Reading Coolie Woman Speaker 4 Craig A Smith (The College of The Bahamas) Making Something out of Nothing: Reading Erna Brodger’s Nothing Mat as mapping of the Diasporic Experience Venue coordinator 26 �No Date, & Venue Tues 9.0010.30 Theme Function Panel Title: Writing Lives in Cold War Landscapes Chair: Speaker 1 Name Title of paper Monica Popescu (McGill University) Cold War Aesthetics: Es’kia Mpahlele and the Establishment of African Literary Studies Speaker 2 Susan Andrade (University of Pitssburgh) Feminism, the Cold War, and Southern African Anticolonialism: Too Many Categories To Fit In One Novel? Speaker 3 Tal Zalmanovich (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Embodying Dissent: Pauline Podbrey, H.A. Naidoo, and the Communist Party, 1942-1956 Speaker 4 Louise Bethlehem (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Miriam Makeba in Conakry: Between Apartheid and Authenticité Venue coordinator 27 �TUESDAY 2.00-3.30 PANELS No Date, & Venue Tues 2.003.30 Theme Function Panel Title: Chair: Literary Apartheid and the Literary Imagination: Getting Under the Skin of South African Speculative Fiction Speaker 1 Name Title of paper Nadia Sanger (Stellenbosch University) Postcolonial Voices in Speculative Fiction: Imagining Africa Differently Speaker 2 Nedine Moonsamy (University of Pretoria) Landlocked and littoral: African women in Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon and Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City Sindiswa Busuku-Matheese (Stellenbosch University) Monsters, Machines and Mayhem: The Indigenous Visions Bleeding through the Looking Glass of South African Speculative Fiction Alan Muller (University of Do we All Write What We Like?: Biko’s ‘Lie’ and the Genre Speaker 3 Speaker 4 28 �Kwazulu-Natal) of Speculative Fiction in South Africa Venue coordinator No Date, & Venue Tues 2.003.30 Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: Postcolonial Positions Speaker 1 Joshua Isaac Kumwenda (University of the Witwatersrand) The Role of the Surreal in Postcolonial African Novels: the Cause of Legson Kayira’s Writing Speaker 2 Alexander Fyfe (The Pennsylvania State University) The Archival Politics of the Postcolonial Special Collection: A Case Study in Cultural Capital, Value, and Amos Tutuola Beverley Jane Cornelius (University of KwazuluNatal) Postcolonial Nostalgia and Meaning: Rayda Jacobs’s The Slave Book Speaker 3 Speaker 4 Venue coordinator 29 �No Date, & Venue Tues 2.003.30 Theme Function Panel Title: Chair: Theatre; Humour Speaker 1 Name Title of paper Silvia Anastasijevic (Goethe University, Frankfurt) Inside/Outside the Joke: Forms of Exclusion and Inclusion in Transcultural Humor Speaker 3 Marcia Blumberg (York University) Performing Outsider Art: Athol Fugard’s The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek Speaker 4 *Israel Meriomame Wekpe (University of Leeds); Owens Patricia Eromosele (Univeristy of Benin) Ad/Dressing Narratives of (Dis)Connections in Nigerian Theatre Speaker 2 * Skype Venue coordinator 30 �No Date, & Venue Tues 2.003.30 Theme Function Panel Title: Chair: The Natural and the Supernatural Speaker 1 Name Speaker 2 Jhordan Layne (Queen’s University) Speaker 3 Aparna Srinivas (Independent scholar) Annel Pieterse (University of the Western Cape) Speaker 4 Title of paper Obeah Revisited: Re-Evaluating Religion and Superstition in Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women and William Earle Jr.’s Obi, or The History of Three-Fingered Jack Hybrid Ali: Ecology and Identity On the Spoor of a ‘Dwaalstorie’ Venue coordinator 31 �Tues 2.003.30 Panel Title: Chair: Wicomb Speaker 1 Anita Rosenblithe (Raritan Valley Community College) Playing in the Light and October: Feminism and the Construction of Colouredness in Zoë Wicomb Speaker 2 Alexander Negri (University of Stuttgart) Gendered inclusions and exclusion in Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story Speaker 3 Liani Lochner (Université Laval) Zoë Wicomb: Writing, the Body, and the Nation Speaker 4 Dorothy Driver (University of Adelaide; University of Cape Town) Zoë Wicomb: The Translocal, the Ordinary, and the New Grounds of Writing and ‘Self’ Venue coordinator 32 �No Date, & Venue Tues 2.003.30 Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: War, Trauma Speaker 1 Frank Schulze-Engler (Goethe University, Frankfurt) Afrasia at War: Transregional Imaginaries Beyond the Indian Ocean Speaker 2 David Wafula Yenjela (Stellenbosch University) Nation and Human Destiny: Reading Contestations of Mau Mau Histories in Kenya in Yvonne Owuor’s Dust (2013) Speaker 3 Ludmila Volná (ERIAC Université de Normandie) “Stories and Totalitarianism” (Havel): Voices Unheard Before – and Now? Speaker 4 Nick Mdika Tembo (Stellenbosch University) Decidedly Katabatic: Adult betrayal in China Keitetsi’s Child Soldier Venue coordinator 33 �No Date, & Venue Tues 2.003.30 Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: Zim Literature Speaker 1 Chow Shun Man Emily (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) The Seeds of Limitlessness: Dambudzo Marechera’s Utopian Thinking Speaker 2 Rachael Gilmour (Queen Mary University of London) ‘Them asylym-seeker eyes’: Brian Chikwava’s Harare North and the Limits of English Hospitality Speaker 3 Vusilizwe Thebe (University of Pretoria) Ethnicity, Language and Enculturation, and the Politics of Exclusion in Postcolonial Zimbabwe Speaker 4 Venue coordinator 34 �No Date, & Venue Tues 2.003.30 Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: Representation and Reception Speaker 1 Marlen Eckl (LEER/ Universidade São Paulo) Between Two Worlds – Memory, History and Identity in Contemporary South African Jewish Literature Speaker 2 Lucy Graham (University of the Western Cape) Representing Marikana Speaker 3 Peter Blair (University of Chester) A Case of Marginalization: Daphne Rooke’s The Greyling Speaker 4 Manav Ratti (Salisbury University) Alan Paton and the Idea of Justice in South Africa Venue coordinator 35 �No Date, & Venue Tues 2.003.30 Theme Function Panel Title: Chair: Places, Spaces Speaker 1 Name Rosanna Masiola (University for Foreigners of Perugia) Title of paper Flower-scapes, Phytonymy and Lexicography in the Outer Circle Speaker 2 Hiya Chatterjee (Scottish Church College, Calcutta University) Does not appear in abstracts Space, Environment and Identity in Bandopadhyay’s The Boatman of the River Padma and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide Speaker 3 Lorna Down (The University of the West Indies, Mona) On the Edge: The Politics of Place in Esther Figueroa’s Limbo Speaker 4 Christine Prentice (University of Otago) ‘Fractured Light’: From Globalisation’s Hyper-Illumination to Culture as Symbolic Exchange Venue co- 36 �ordinator TUESDAY 19.30: CONFERENCE DINNER SITE STELLENBOSCH UNIVERSITY (SU) Wednesday 13 July WEDNESDAY 09.00-10.30 PANELS No Date, & Venue Wed 09.0010.30 Theme Function Panel Title: The World, The Globe and The Postcolony Chair: Speaker 1 Name Title of paper Laura Moss (University of British Columbia) Kristine Kelly (Case Western Reserve University) “What Stories Float Afar? Disassembling Expectations in Global Literature” Virtual Wandering: A Postcolonial Approach to Global Networks Speaker 3 Doseline Wanjiru Kiguru (University of Cape Town) Language and Literary Awards: Expanding Cultural Boundaries Speaker 4 Caroline Kögler (Westfälische WilhelmsUniversität Münster) Critical Branding in Postcolonial Studies Speaker 2 37 �Venue coordinator No Date, & Venue Wed 09.0010.30 Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: Fluid Zones Speaker 1 Jarret Brown (Howard University, Wash, DC) Writing Ravings: Investigating Madness Theory in Caribbean Culture Speaker 2 Sandra Boergen (JohannWolfgang-GoetheUniversity, Frankfurt) Floating Memories: South African Visual Artists and the Indian Ocean Speaker 3 Dawid W. de Villiers (Stellenbosch University) Speaker 4 Maria Geustyn (University of Cape Town) Oceanic Ectopia: Metaphoric Tensions in the Field of Oceanic Studies “High Tide”: Reading the Littoral in Apartheid South African Fiction 38 �Venue coordinator No Date, & Venue Wed 09.0010.30 Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: Intellectuals, Justice and the Canon Speaker 1 Donette Francis (University of Miami) Discrepant Intellectuals: Stuart Hall and Rex Nettleford Speaker 2 John Njenga Karugia (Goethe University, Frankfurt) Multidirectional Afrasian Mnemoeconomics Speaker 3 Alex Nelungo Wanjala (University of Nairobi) Emerging from the Barriers Erected by the Canon; Contemporary Forms of Kenyan Literature Speaker 4 Matthew Blatchford (University of Fort Hare) Complicity or Resistance? Recent South African Literature and Academia as Political Agents Venue co- 39 �ordinator No Date, & Venue Wed 09.0010.30 Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: Coetzee Speaker 1 Johan Jacobs (University of KwaZulu-Natal) The Migrant Subject in JM Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus Speaker 2 Xioran Hu (Queen Mary, University of London) Does not appear in abstracts In the Cracks Between Worlds: Childjhood, Language and Body in JM Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus (2013) Speaker 3 Nedine Moonsamy (University of Pretoria) Lynda Gichanda Spencer (Rhodes University) “Not the Story You Wanted to Hear”: Reading Chick-Lit in JM Coetzee’s Summertime Speaker 4 Marie Herbillon (University of Liège) Men Without A Past: Exile and the Erasure of History in JM Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus 40 �Venue coordinator No Date, & Venue Wed 09.0010.30 Theme Function Panel Title: Chair: Migration/Diaspora 3 Speaker 1 Name Title of paper Speaker 2 Ifeyinwa Juliet Anwadike (Rural Women Rights and Advancement Initiative – Independent Scholar) Migration, Racism and Diasperic Experiences in Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah Speaker 3 Nonye Chinyere Ahumibe (Imo State University, Owerri, Nigeria) The Odysseus Metaphor: A Reading of Amma Darko’s Beyond The Horizon Speaker 4 Tomi Adeaga (University of Vienna) Locating African Diaspora Literatures within Global Literatures Venue coordinator 41 �No Date, & Venue Wed 09.0010.30 Theme Function Name Panel Title: Chair: Spirituality and Afterlife / Spirituality 2 Speaker 1 Josephine Muganiwa (University of Zimbabwe) Speaker 2 Ashma Shamail (University of Dammam, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) Speaker 3 Barbra Chiyedza Manyarara (University of Zimbabwe) Does not appear in abstracts Speaker 4 Anas Tabraiz (Zakir Husain Delhi College, Delhi University) Title of paper Representations of Religion and Spirituality in Chidavaenzi’s Ties That Bind (2015) and Marangwanda’s Shards (2014) Stories from the Sea Islands of South Carolina: History, Cultural Survival, and Identity in Praisesong for the Widow An Exploration of the Fictionalisation of Death and Afterlife in Selected Writings by the Colombian, Gabriel Garcia Marques (1927-2014) and the Zimbabwean, Charles Mungoshi (1947-) “Drawing the Divine Seed”: India, Alterity and the Real in the Works of JM Coetzee Venue coordinator 42 �No Date, & Venue Wed 09.0010.30 Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: Gender and Family Speaker 1 Pauline E. Bullen (Women’s University in Africa) Everyday Mothering: Activism and Womanist Ethics Speaker 2 Denise deCaires Narain (University of Sussex) Speaker 3 Emmanuel Ngwira (University of Malawi – Chancellor College) Intimate Proximities: Narrating the Ambiguous possibilities of Sisterly Solidarity-in-servitude in the Work of Rhys, Antoni, Wicomb and Van Niekerk “Daughterly Texts”?: Father-Daughter Relationships in Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun Speaker 4 Ken Junior Lipenga (University of Malawi) The (Un)making of a Man: Fathers and Sons in the African Novel Venue coordinator 43 �No Date, & Venue Wed 09.0010.30 Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: Novel Ideas Speaker 1 Joseph McLaren (Hofstra University) Diran Debayo and Afro-British Inclusive Literary Style in Some Kind of Black and My Once Upon A time Speaker 2 Jean Rossmann (University of KwaZulu-Natal) Endless Quest/ioning: Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf, Agaat and Memorandum Speaker 3 Elizabeth Jackson (University of the West Indies, St Augustine (Trinidad) Campus) Interrogating National/Cultural Affiliations in Postcolonial Literature: Inclusions and Exclusions in the Reception of Doris Lessing and VS Naipaul Speaker 4 Michael Chapman (Durban University of Technology) “Our story is different, it does not run in a straight line”: Andre Brink, Mevrou Sadie and Me Venue coordinator 44 �WEDNESDAY 2.00-3.30 PANELS No Date, & Venue Function Name SU Theme Literatures of the World and for the Planet Panel Title: Title of paper Chair: Philip Aghoghovwia Wed 2.003.30 3: Water, Oil and Slow Violence Speaker 1 Charne Lavery (University of Witwatersrand) New dark places Ashleigh Harris (Uppsala University) Meg Samuelson (University of Cape Town) Decelerating fiction: slow violence in four African novels Speaker 2 Speaker 3 Speaker 4 After the water wars: speculations from Africa on the Anthropocene Venue coordinator 45 �No Date, & Venue Wed 2.003.30 Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: Boundary-Crossing, Female Sexuality, and the Exclusions of Colonized Knowledge Speaker 1 Julia V. Emberley (Western University) Indigenous Knowledges and the Queering of Christianity in Louise Erdrich’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse Speaker 2 Nandi Bhatia (The University of Western Ontario) Actresses and the Nation: Qurratulain Hyder’s “The Missing Photograph” Speaker 3 Teresa Hubel (Huron University College) Begum Samru and the Nautch Girl as Ruler Speaker 4 Bernard Fortuin (Stellenbosch University) Indotas and Cross-dressing Men: Structuring Dissident Desire Venue coordinator 46 �No Date, & Venue Wed 2.003.30 Theme Function Panel Title: Dennis Brutus and Arthur Nortje Chair: Speaker 1 Name Title of paper Andrea Susan Thorpe (Queen Mary University of London) Between Gutted Warehouses and Pleasure Streets: Arthur Nortje’s Poems set in London Speaker 2 Bernth Lindfors (University of Texas at Austin) Dennis Brutus in the Dock Speaker 3 Tyrone Russel August (Stellenbosch University) No Place Like Home: The Life and Poetry of Dennis Brutus Speaker 4 Mark Espin (University of the Western Cape) Black or Blues: Arthur Nortje and a Black Aesthetic Venue coordinator 47 �No Date, & Venue Wed 2.003.30 Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: Gordimer – Pasts and Futures Speaker 1 Edward Powell (Independent Scholar) Where to Now? The Sue of Utopia After Apartheid in Nadine Gordimer’s No Time Like the Present Speaker 2 Ileana Dimitriu (University of KwaZulu-Natal) Gordimer’s Passing: From Novel to Document? Speaker 3 Geraldine Skeete (The University of the West Indies, St. Augistine) Refugees on “The Ultimate Safari” in Nadine Gordimer’s Crimes of Conscience Speaker 4 Venue coordinator 48 �No Date, & Venue Wed 2.003.30 Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: Zim/Gender Speaker 1 Pauline Kazembe (University of Zimbabwe) Zimbabwean Female Migrants and Sexuality: Discoursing the Poscolonial and Identity Speaker 2 John C. Ball (University of New Brunswick) Achebe’s Arrow of God and Vera’s Nehanda: Generic Exclusions and Gendered Inclusions Speaker 3 Sheunesa Mandizvidza (University of Zimbabwe); Tanaka Chidora (University of Zimbabwe) Voices From the Margins: An Analysis of the Ecological and Feminine in Bones Speaker 4 Venue coordinator 49 �No Date, & Venue Wed 2.003.30 Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: Autobiography 1 (Speaker)1 Reader: Madhumita Chakraborty (Zakir Husain Delhi College (Evening), University of Delhi) A Journey to Empowerment: Autobiography in Bessie Head’s The Collector of Treasures Speaker 2 Walter Goebel (University of Stuttgart) VS Naipaul’s Autobiographical Gestures and Fragments Speaker 3 Marie Sairsingh (The College of the Bahamas) History, Reclamation, and Identity in Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying Speaker 4 Katja Sarkowsky (Muenster Writing Lives, Writing Citizenship(s): Negotiating 50 �University) Indeginous Citizenship in Indigenous North American Autobiographies Venue coordinator No Date, & Venue Wed 2.003.30 Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: Migration/Diaspora 2 Speaker 1 Henrietta Nyamnjoh (University of Cape Town) Migrants’ Informal Economy and the Changing Dynamics: The Case of Cameroonian Migrants in Cape Town Speaker 2 Kasia Juno van Schaik (McGill University) Translating the Periphery in Mavis Gallant Speaker 3 Chantal Katherine d’Offay (University of Cape Town) “Where the turban’d Moslem, bearded Jew, and woolly Afric, met the brown Hindu”: Mutliculturalism and Postcolonial Diasporas in Anna Barbauld Speaker 4 Venue coordinator 51 �No Date, & Venue Wed 2.003.30 Theme Function Panel Title: Chair: Invoking History Speaker 1 Speaker 2 Speaker 3 Name Title of paper Veronica Thompson (Athabasca University) Danie Stander (Stellenbosch University) “I can speak freely now that I am dead”: Audrey Thomas’s Local Customs Reza de Wet’s Gothic Performances of South Africa’s Colonial Past Soofia Siddique (St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi) The ‘Habit of Writing History’: Gandhi’s reading and negotiation of Kaye’s and Mallesons’s History of the Indian Mutiny of 1857-58 Speaker 4 Venue coordinator 52 �No Date, & Venue Wed 2.003.30 Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: The Contemporary, The Future Speaker 1 Clelia Clini (John Cabot University) The Diaspora Experience in South Asian Diasporic Cinema: Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion Speaker 2 Catherine Makhumula (Stellenbosch University) Intermediality on 21st Century African Literature and Performance Speaker 3 Padmini Mongia (Franklin & Marshall College) Does not appear in abstracts Amish Tripathi’s Mythic Popular Speaker 4 John Masterson (University of Sussex) Black Lives Shatter: Postcolonial ReVisions of Life Writing in Obama’s End Times Venue coordinator WEDNESDAY 4.00-5.30: ACLALS EXECUTIVE MEETING WEDNESDAY 19.30: INZYNC PERFORMANCE AT AMAZINK UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN PANEL Thursday 14 July 53 �Venue: Lecture Theatre 3A & Room 116, AC Jordan Building, Upper Campus, University of Cape Town Hosted by the African Textualities Project, Programme for the Enhancement of Research Capacity, University of Cape Town SITE UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN (UCT) Thursday 14 July No Date, & Venue Thurs 10.2011.30 Theme Function Name Panel Title: Literatures of the World and for the Planet: Plenary Panel (Intro & Keynote) Chair: Opening address Philip Aghoghovwia Keynote Speaker Jennifer Wenzel (Columbia University) Venue coordinator Meg Samuelson Meg Samuelson Title of paper Introduction: Literatures of the world and for the planet Double check title in abstracts Reading for the Planet THEME: Literatures of the World and for the Planet: African Literary/Cultural Positions 54 �No 2 Date, & Venue UCT Thurs 11.3012.30 Theme Function Name Panel Title: Literatures of the World and for the Planet: Plenary Panel session 1 Chair: Speaker 1 Sandra Young Speaker 2 Title of paper Louise Green (Stellenbosch University) Everyday Catastrophes: Ecology and Ideology in Africa Fiona Moolla (University of the Western Cape) Niger Delta Literature: A Post-postcolonial Case for the Constitution of Planetary Literature? Venue coordinator LUNCH: 12.30-1.30 55 �No Date, & Venue UCT Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: Chris Ouma Thurs 1.302.30 Literatures of the World and for the Planet: Plenary Panel session 2 Speaker 1 Stefan Helgesson (Stockholm University) (Literary) Theory from the South Double check title in abstracts Speaker 2 Madhu Krishnan (University of Bristol) African Literatures, Extraversion and the World Venue coordinator 56 �No Date, & Venue UCT Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: Khwezi Mkhize Thurs 2.303.30 Literatures of the World and for the Planet: Plenary Panel session 3 Speaker 1 Sam Durrant (University of Leeds) Creaturely transitions in South African literature and visual culture Speaker 2 Brendon Nicholls (University of Leeds) African Vernacular Theories, Psychoanalysis, Environmentalism Venue coordinator Meg Samuelson 57 �TEA: 3.30-4.00 No Date, & Venue UCT Theme Function Name Panel Title: Chair: Meg Samuelson Thurs 4.005.45 Literatures of the World and For the Planet: Roundtable and Closing discussion Speaker 1 Roundtable speakers: Title of paper This does not appear in abstracts. Not sure if it is meant to be left out. Philip Aghoghovwia (University of the Free State), Harry Garuba (University of Cape Town) Khwezi Mkhize (University of Cape Town), Sarah Nuttall (University of the Witwatersrand), Chris Ouma (University of Cape Town), Daniel Roux (Stellenbosch University), Hedley Twidle (University of Cape Town) 58 �Venue coordinator Meg Samuelson SITE DISTRICT SIX MUSEUM Thursday 14 July THEME: Heritage, Memory, Archives TEA: 10.00-10.30 No Date, & Venue Homecoming Centre Theme Function Name Panel Title: Chair: Nadia Sanger Title of paper 59 �Thurs 10.3011.30 District Six Museum: Memory in a Time of Freedom GROUP A Speaker 1 Bonita Bennet (District Six Museum) Digging Wider: The Work of the District Six Museum Speaker 2 Tina Smith (District Six Museum) Shaun Viljoen (Stellenbosch University) Digging Deeper: The Huis Kombuis Project at the District Six Museum District Six Food Stories: The Work of Memory in a Time of Failed Freedom Speaker 3 Speaker 4 Venue coordinator No Date, & Venue Thurs 10.3011.30 GROUP B Theme Function Panel Title: Chair: Tour of the District Six Museum Guide 1 Guide 2 Name Title of paper Mandy Sanger (District Six Museum) Noor Ebrahim (District Six Museum) Venue coordinator 60 �No Date, & Venue Thurs 11.451.15 Theme Function Plenary Panel Title: Chair: “Comrades, Cameras, Canvases: Photography and Art in South African Political Activism”. A Conversation Between Generations of ArtistActivists. Convenor M. Neelika Jayawardane (State University of New York-Oswego) Panelist Omar Badsha (South African History Online, photographer) Cedric Nunn (Independent photographer) Greer Valley (Artist, Stellenbosch University) Justin Davey (Burning Panelist Panelist Panelist Name Title of paper 61 �Panelist Panelist Panelist Museum) Lihlumelo Toyana (Photographer, University of Free State) Thulile Gamedze (Artist, University of Cape Town) Nomusa Makhubu (University of Cape Town) WALKING THE CITY 1.00-3.00 No Date, & Venue Homecoming Centre Thurs 3.004.00 Theme Function Name Panel Title: Chair: Nadia Sanger District Six Museum: Memory in a Time of Freedom Speaker 1 Bonita Bennet (District Six Museum) Title of paper Digging Wider: The Work of the District Six Museum 62 �GROUP B Speaker 2 Speaker 3 Tina Smith (District Six Museum) Shaun Viljoen (Stellenbosch University) Digging Deeper: The Huis Kombuis Project at the District Six Museum District Six Food Stories: The Work of Memory in a Time of Failed Freedom Speaker 4 Venue coordinator No Date, & Venue Thurs 3.004.00 GROUP A Theme Function Panel Title: Chair: Tour of the District Six Museum Guide 1 Guide 2 Name Title of paper Mandy Sanger (District Six Museum) Noor Ebrahim (District Six 63 �Museum) No Date, & Venue Theme Function Name Title of paper Venue coordinator TEA & KOESISTERS: 4.00-4.30 64 �1 Thurs 4.306.00 Panel Title: Chair: Museums, Archives and The Urban Speaker 1 Speaker 2 Marie Kruger (University of Iowa) Trauma on Display: Commemorating Apartheid on Constitution Hill Speaker 3 Deborah Seddon (Rhodes University) Speaker 4 Suzanne Frasier (Morgan State University); WrdArc: An Online Archive of South African Oral and Performance Poetry: A Project to Promote Orature in the South African Literary Imaginary Urbanism, Consumer Culture, and Civic Engagement in Contemporary New Delhi Debayan Chatterjee (Morgan State University); Niyanta Muku (Morgan State University) Venue coordinator PARALLEL SESSIONS 65 �No 2 Date, & Venue Thurs 4.306.00 Theme Function Panel Title: Chair: Imperial Archive, Local Archive Speaker 1 Speaker 2 Speaker 3 Speaker 4 Name Matthew Shum (University of KwaZulu-Natal) Serah Kasembeli (Stellenbosch University) Kanika Batra (Texas Tech University) Title of paper “Housed only by the starry sky”: William Burchell’s Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa (1822) Launguage and Power in Yvette Christiansë’s Unconfessed and André Brink’s Philida Archiving Violence and Imprinting Gender justice Under Apartheid in Durban, South Africa Venue coordinator SITE CAPE PENINSULA UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY (CPUT) Waterfront Hotel School 66 �Thursday 14 July THEME: Education, Teaching, Language and Literacy No Date, & Venue CPUT Thurs 10.30 - Theme Function Name Chair: Keynote Speaker Rajendra Chetty Jaspal Singh (Northern Michigan University) Title of paper Critical Postcolonial and Environmental Intersections in South African Literature This title does not seem to be the matching one for the writer in the abstracts 11.45 67 �PARALLEL SESSIONS No 1 Date, & Venue CPUT Thurs 12.00 1.30 Theme Function Name Title of paper Orality & Translation Chair: Speaker 1 Rosemary Gray Idette Noomé (University of Pretoria) The Marula Tree on the Boundary: Inclusive Translation? Speaker 2 Samuel M. Obuchi (Moi University) Orality and Writing: The Inescapable Interdependence Speaker 3 Adrie le Roux (Stellenbosch University) Speaker 4 Melanie Susan Steyn (Cornerstone Institution) Wordless Picture Books: An Exploration of their Potential to Encourage Parent-Child Reading in the South African Context Reading in a Different Cultural Paradigm Venue coordinator Rajendra Chetty 68 �No 2 Date, & Venue Thurs 12.00 1.30 Theme Language, Culture and Identity Function Name Chair: Naomi Nkealah Title of paper Speaker 1 Olushola Bamidele Are (Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba-Akoko) Towards an Indigenous Language Literary Culture in Nigeria: Challenges and Prospects Speaker 2 Jaywant Mhetre (SBS College Karad, Maharashtra)Check surname in abstracts The Use of Politeness Principle in Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan Speaker 3 Victor Chikaipa (Stellenbosch University) Identity Construction of a Malawian Community in Media Reporting After Recent Catastrophic Flooding Speaker 4 Taryn Bernard (Stellenbosch University) Corporate Stakeholder Discourse as Neo-Colonial Discourse: A Critical Analysis of Linguistic Constructions of “The Stakeholder” in South African Corporate Sustainability Reports Venue coordinator 69 �No 3 Date, & Venue Thurs 12.00 1.30 Theme Function Name Panel Title: Language, Discourse, and Analysis Chair: Speaker 1 Renato Tomei Maureen Enongene Double check name in abstracts Laksmisree Banerjee (Kolhan University) Speaker 2 Speaker 3 Diana Benyuei NjweipiKongor (St Jerome Catholic University Insitute, Douala)Check order of name in abstract as it’s different Title of paper Language-based Gender Constructions: the Case of Cameroon Pidgin English Exclusion & Dissent for Impacting Reconfigurations, Inclusions and Reconstructions of New Human Bridges by Global Women Writers Evidence of Appropriation of English Language in a PostColonial Setting: the Case of L1 Features in Doctor-Patient HIV/AIDS Consultation in ELF in Some Clinics in South Africa Speaker 4 Venue coordinator LUNCH 1.30-2.30 70 �PARALLEL SESSIONS No 4 Date, & Venue CPUT Thurs 2.304.00 Theme Children, Learning and Literature Function Name Chair: Speaker 1 Idette Noomé Jane Wangari Wakarindi (University of the Witwatersrand) Oluwole Coker (Obafemi Awolowo University, Ie-Ife) Christine Anthonissen (Stellenbosch University) Shalini Nadaswaran (University Malaya) Speaker 2 Speaker 3 Speaker 4 Title of paper It Does Matter, How Intelligent the Writer is: Character Portrayal in Young Adult Fiction The Folklore Factor in Childhood Education: An African Model “These Children, They Will be Angry” Wayde Compton’s The Outer Harbour and “The Creaking of the Word”. Literary Inclusions, Exclusion and Contradictions: Troubling Subversions of the ‘Child’ in African Literature Titles don’t match Venue coordinator 71 �No 5 Date, & Venue CPUT Thurs 2.304.00 Theme Teaching, Reading, Adaptation Function Name Chair: Speaker 1 Adri le Roux Heather Snell (University of Winnipeg) Speaker 2 Speaker 3 Speaker 4 Thandeka Cochrane (Cambridge University) Raphael d’Abdon (University of South Africa) G A Horrell (Cambridge University) Title of paper “I Am Also Having Mother Once, and She Is Loving Me”: Postcolonialism, Affect, and the Child in Uzodinma Iweala’s and Cary Fukunaga’s Beasts of No Nation Literacy and Intimacy: Embodied Practices of Paired Reading and Respect in Rural Malawi Promoting and Innovating Poetry Teaching Across Borders: The Experience of The Caribbean Poetry Project (CPP) and The South African Poetry Project (ZAPP) Embodying the Word: Exploring the use of Performance Poetry in Transforming the Classroom Venue coordinator 72 �No 6 Date, & Venue Thurs 2.304.00 Theme Function Name Panel Title: Education, Decolonization, and Globalization Chair: Speaker 1 Jaspal K Singh Nard Choi (Cambridge University) Speaker 2 Speaker 3 Speaker 4 Thando Njovane (University of Leeds) does not appear in abstracts Maninder Sidhu (PG-GCG, Panjab University, Chandigarh) Amitendu Bhattacharya (Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, K.K. Birla Goa Campus) Title of paper Negotiating Subjectivity in Sade Adeniran’s Imagine This: Pushing Cultural and Genealogical Boundaries of Adult Normativity In the Name of the Other or the Perils of Writing in French: Ahmadou Kourouma’s Allah is Not Obliged Re-emergence of Logocentrism in Ethnocentric Postcolonial Language Theorizations Universities at the Crossroads and the Humanities at a Dead-End: What is the Way Forward? Venue coordinator 73 �No Date, & Venue Thurs 4.30 6.00 Event Function Name Chair: Rajendra Chetty English Academy Gold medal presentation Title of paper Rosemary Gray Venue coordinator Rajendra Chetty 74 �SITE UNIVERSITY OF THE WESTERN CAPE (UWC) Thursday 14 July THEME: Place, Environment and Identity No 1 Date, & Venue Thurs 10.00 – 11.00 Theme Place, Environment and Identity Function Plenary Name Panel Title: Reading and Performance Chair: Michael Wessels (University of Western Cape) Title of Paper 75 �Speaker 1 Selina Tusitala Marsh (University of Auckland) Poetry performance Speaker 2 Jolyn Phillips (University of Western Cape) Reading - Tjieng Tjang Tjerries & Other Stories Speaker 3 Julia Martin (University of Western Cape) Reading – 'Something Growing.' 76 �PARALLEL SESSIONS No Date, & Venue Theme Function Name Title of paper 1 Thurs 11.30 – 1.00 Panel Title: parallel session Chair: Hermann Wittenberg (University of Western Cape) South African Literature Speaker 1 Sally-Ann Murray (Stellenbosch University) City Imaginaries Across Portrait with Keys and Broken Monsters Speaker 2 Dirk Klopper (Rhodes University) Becoming Country, Becoming Peasant in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace 77 �Speaker 3 Margriet van der Waal (University of Groningen) Space, place and power: postcolonial ecocriticism and the representation of the South African environment 78 �No Date, & Venue Theme Function Name Title of paper 2 Thurs 11.30 – 1.00 Workshop Faciltators: Selina Tusitala Marsh (University of Auckland) Identity Chants, Poetry and Performance: an Interactive workshop Glen Arendse (University of Western Cape) LUNCH 1.00-2.00 79 �PARALLEL SESSIONS 2.00-3.30 No Date, & Venue Theme Function Name 3 Thurs 2.003.30 Panel Title: Chair: William Ellis (University of Western Cape) Orality Speaker 1 Margery Fee (University of British Columbia) Title of paper Sustainable Epistemology: Indigenous Theory on Reading Oral Story 80 �Speaker 2 Selina Tusitala Marsh (University of Auckland) The Unfaithful and Un/Ethical Blacking Out of Albert Wendt’s Pouliuli: Avant-Garde or Appropriation? Janet Neigh (Pennsylvania State University Digitizing Indigenous Oral Memory in Janet Marie Rogers’s Peace in Duress Speaker 3 Speaker 4 Venue coordinator 81 �No 4 Date, & Venue Thurs 2.003.30 Theme Function Name Panel Title: Chair: Geoffrey Davs Questions of Place, Environment and Identity Zimbabwean Literature Speaker 1 Irikidzayi Manase (University of the Free State) Speaker 2 Frances Hemsley (University of Leeds) Speaker 3 Rangarirai A Musvoto (University of South africa Title of paper Memory-making and the land in Graham Lang’s Place of Birth “Feeling like a fish”: Ecologies of skin and water resources management in Dambudzo Marechera The individual versus the group? A critical interrogation of representations of individual and collective identities in two Zimbabwean novels Speaker 4 82 �TEA 3.30 – 4.00 No 5 Parallel Sessions: 4.00-5.30 Date, & Theme Venue Thurs 4.00 – 5.30 Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: Margery Fee The Indigenous in Postcolonial Space Speaker 1 Russell McDougall (University of New England Seasonal Calendar Representations of Indigenous Weather Knowledge in Australia Speaker 2 Kwashirai Zvokuomba (Women's University in Africa) African indigenous knowledge systems in the Zambezi valley Speaker 3 William Ellis (University of Western Cape) What does it mean to be a Bushmen today? bushmen postcoloniality, technics, recognition and the neo-Khoisan revival. Speaker 4 Michael Wessels (University of the Western Cape) David Donald’s Blood’s Mist: Imagining the Encounter between San and Settler in the Drakensberg 83 �No 6 Date, & Venue Thurs 4.00 – 5.30 Theme Function Name Panel Title: Spaces of Performance Chair: Iri Manase (University of Free State) Rachel MoseleyWood (University of the West Indies) Speaker 1 Title of paper Postcolonial film in Jamaica: Trying to Bridge the Divide Speaker 2 Hermann Wittenberg (UWC Animated Animals: Allegories of Transformation in Khumba Speaker 3 Dusty Ross (University of North Carolina at Greensboro Brave Ones: Gender, Violence, and Poverty on the Margins Speaker 4 Geoffrey V. Davis (Universtiy of Aachen “Hard Truths and Real Facts”: Theatre for Development in India 84 �SITE STELLENBOSCH UNIVERSITY Friday 15 July FRIDAY 9.00-10.30 PANELS No Date, & Venue Fri 9.0010.30 Theme Function Name Panel Title: Chair: David Attwell Disciplinary Forces of English Literature Speaker 1 Kate Highman (University of the Western Cape) Scenes of Education and Seduction in Zoë Wicomb’s ‘You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town’ and JM Coetzee’s ‘Disgrace’ Speaker 2 Idowu Omoyele (University of Cape Town) Marshalling the Disciplinary Forces: Africa and the Caribbean in the Formation of English Literature Speaker 3 Carol Leon (The University of Malaya Speaker 4 Michelle Kelly (Oxford University) Title of paper Evening is the Whole Day: Stories of Inclusions and Exclusions University Discipline(s) and the TRC in JM Coetzee’s Disgrace and Niq Mhlongo’s Dog Eat Dog Venue coordinator 85 �No Date, & Venue Fri 9.0010.30 Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: Poetry Speaker 1 Isah Ibrahim (Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria) Mal Periodization and Nigerian Literature: the Intertextual dimension of Contemporary Nigerian Poetry titles don’t match Speaker 2 Renato Tomei (University for Foreigners of Perugia) The Poetics and the Mysticism of John R. Bradburne Speaker 3 Tim Cribb (Churchill College, Cambridge) Postcolonial Yeats Speaker 4 Francine Simon (Stellenbosch University) In/Between the Äffidamento”: a South African Perspective on Éxperimentalisms’and Female Poetics in Intercontinental Poetry Writing Venue coordinator 86 �No Date, & Venue Fri 9.0010.30 Theme Function Panel Title: Chair: Queer Stories Speaker 1 Barrington Marais (University of Zululand) Illuminating the Interstice: Masculinity, Mothering and the Moffie in Rayda Jacobs’s Confessions of a Gambler Speaker 2 Edgar Nabutanyi (Makarere University) Autocratic Fatherhood, Violent Sexuality, and Critique in Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples Speaker 3 Michael A. Bucknor (University of the West Indies, Mona Campus) Cheryl Stobie (University of KwaZulu-Natal) Horizons of Desire: Altered States in Caribbean Queer Speculative Fiction Speaker 4 Name Title of paper Re-Tailoring Can Themba’s “The Suit”: Queer Temporalities in Two Stories by Makhosazana Xaba Venue coordinator 87 �No Date, & Venue Fri 9.0010.30 Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: Feminism, Womanising. Performance in Africa Speaker 1 Naomi Nkealah (University of South Africa) Critical Issues in African Feminisms: Learning From Oral Narratives Speaker 2 Oluchi Joyce IGILI (Adekunle Ajasin University, AkungbaAkoko, Ondo State) Cultural Emasculation and Creative Emancipation in Amasiri Women Satirical Songs Asante Mtjene (Stellenbosch University) Negotiating Motherhood and Female Sexal Desire in Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives Speaker 3 Speaker 4 Venue coordinator 88 �No Date, & Venue Fri 9.0010.30 Theme Function Panel Title: Chair: Visual Culture Speaker 1 Name Title of paper Ralph Goodman (Stellenbosch University) Photography and the Limits of Certainty Speaker 3 Laura A. Pearson (University of Leeds) Transcultural Graphic Fiction and Unorthodox Manga Speaker 4 Sharlene Khan (Rhodes University) ‘Postcolonial Masquerading’ and ‘Bio-Mythography’ in Retelling the Postcolonial Lives of Our Mothers Speaker 2 Venue coordinator 89 �No Date, & Venue Fri 9.0010.30 Theme Function Panel Title: Chair: Migration/Diaspora 4 Speaker 1 Name Title of paper Speaker 2 Ganesh Vijaykumar Jadhav (D.P. Bhosale College, Koregaon, Satara Maharashtra India) Diasporic Consciousness in Sunetra Guptas’s So Good in Black Speaker 3 Feroza Jussawalla (University of New Mexico) Seaming Sisterhood: Creating Home in Diaspora Speaker 4 Anthea Margaret Morrison (University of the West Indies, Mona) ‘Stories from England’, Stories From Home: Competing Voices in Caryl Phillips’s In The Falling Snow Venue coordinator 90 �No Date, & Venue Fri 9.0010.30 Theme Function Panel Title: Chair: Forests, Animals, Insects Speaker 1 Name Title of paper Speaker 2 Joan-Mari Barendse (Stellenbosch University) The Representation of Insects in Willem Anker’s Siegfried (2007) and Samsa-masjien (2015) Speaker 3 Allison Mackey (University of the Free State) Speaker 4 Maria Olaussen (University of Gothenburg) Speculative Renegotiations of Relationality: Guilt and Animality in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City and Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death The Re-enchantment of the World: Animal Voices in African Novels Venue coordinator 91 �No Date, & Venue Fri 9.0010.30 Theme Function Panel Title: Chair: Telling Lives Speaker 1 Speaker 2 Speaker 3 Speaker 4 Name Emma Laubscher (Rhodes University) Gabriele Dau (Stellenbosch University) Anita Moraes (Fluminense Federal University) Does not appear in abstracts Gen’ichiro Itakura (Kansai University) Title of paper “Madness slunk in through a chink in History”: the Familiar and the Insensible in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things Sheherazade writing loneliness: Emily Ruete/Princess Salmé’s Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar Ruy Duarte de Carvalho, a Reader of Conrad: Intertextuality and Representation in Os Papéis Dos Inglês Screaming Horses and a Leopard Cub: Violence and Ethics in Nadeem Aslam’s The Blind Man’s Garden Venue coordinator 92 �No Date, & Venue Fri 9.0010.30 Theme Function Name Title of paper Panel Title: Chair: Memory,Testimony and Precarity Speaker 1 Felicity Hand (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) The Ethics of Remembering: Dr Goonam’s Coolie Doctor Speaker 2 Gail Fincham ( University of Cape Town) Speaker 3 Katherine Hallemeier (Oklahoma State University) Constructing Memory through Narrative: Shaun Johnson’s The Native Commissioner (2006) and Anne Landsman’s The Rowing Lesson (2007) Pan-African Precarity in A Squatter’s Tale and Graceland Speaker 4 Venue coordinator FRIDAY 4.30-5.30: CONFERENCE PLENARY FRIDAY 20.00: CONFERENCE PARTY 93 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 17th Triennial Conference Program Subject The topic of the resource Conference Program Triennial Conference Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 https://aclals.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/a25cf1418fc5ba5fe07b97ed25638be0.mp4 3fe7a826f3f4dc52a523dbae32d723b3 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reconciliation and Reckoning in TMU’s Faculty of Arts Part 8 Subject The topic of the resource Triennial Conference Lecture Description An account of the resource Discussed at the 19th Triennial Conference Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource July 15 2022 https://aclals.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/77ff11716bff36f92b88c490d4f5b9e4.mp4 01c1b028a1a339e75f66bb01dec6d6fd Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. 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Title A name given to the resource Keynote Address by Cajetan Iheka (Yale U), “Uncommon Ruptures” Part 3 Subject The topic of the resource Triennial Conference Lecture Description An account of the resource Presented at the 19th Triennial Conference Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Cajetan Iheka Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource July 14 2022 https://aclals.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/a58e875eb3cb58c2002e36aa2498c5b9.mp4 268b164ab72dd1815d8b0c105be84876 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. 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Title A name given to the resource Keynote Address by Susie O’Brien (McMaster U), “‘Somehow, a City'”: Unsettling Urban Resilience Narratives” Part 9 Subject The topic of the resource Triennial Conference Lecture Description An account of the resource Presented at the 19th Triennial Conference Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Susie O'Brien Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource July 13 2022 https://aclals.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/5ed67df32d01968312473b8b87d0fa2e.mp4 a2cfc7fc55eecee44bbb527be9729267 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. 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Title A name given to the resource Keynote Address by Ruth Vanita (U Montana), “Animals Today: Torn Apart in Life and in Death” Part 3 Subject The topic of the resource Lecture Triennial Conference Description An account of the resource Presented at the 19th Triennial Conference Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Ruth Vanita Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource July 12 2022 https://aclals.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/efacff165f433c6e5ccf95d5664dd2a5.mp4 4b40bfd870564837900293c9ca60e3ff Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Keynote Address by Ruth Vanita (U Montana), “Animals Today: Torn Apart in Life and in Death” Part 2 Subject The topic of the resource Triennial Conference Lecture Description An account of the resource Presented at the 19th Triennial Conference Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Ruth Vanita Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource July 12 2022 https://aclals.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/e2f5db66083c9f86de495d07e3bdf5d3.mp4 a11dec2ee060bc28fdd82f8523b74896 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Keynote Address by Ruth Vanita (U Montana), “Animals Today: Torn Apart in Life and in Death” Part 1 Subject The topic of the resource Lecture Triennial Conference Description An account of the resource Presented at the 19th Triennial Conference Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Ruth Vanita Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource July 12 2022 https://aclals.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/9f93cc8e40e1e71df928f6f22cc64425.mov 8febaf2f1f996db7f61d95a0fcd201c2 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Keynote by Lillian Allen (OCAD U), "Ah Soh Wi Sey: A people's poetics blazing through to the heart of what matters" Part 9 Subject The topic of the resource Lecture Triennial Conference Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Lillian Allen Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource July 11 2022 https://aclals.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/b136e9d3c7ef809f00b603ff8d6460e1.mov 6f6a4ef586e1127725edc8c4810e84b6 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Keynote by Lillian Allen (OCAD U), "Ah Soh Wi Sey: A people's poetics blazing through to the heart of what matters" Part 8 Subject The topic of the resource Triennial Conference Lecture Description An account of the resource Presented at 19th Triennial Conference Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Lillian Allen Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource July 11 2022 https://aclals.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/d470ea7af4dfa08d82ad8dc6cae121a6.mov 34294e2c0f06e9f6823fc2d9356743f1 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Keynote by Lillian Allen (OCAD U), "Ah Soh Wi Sey: A people's poetics blazing through to the heart of what matters" Part 7 Subject The topic of the resource Triennial Conference Lecture Description An account of the resource Presented at 19th Triennial Conference Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Lillian Allen Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource July 11 2022 https://aclals.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/580a7b3df10ef052b0e7c8520a2320f7.mov 3a272d71205a7586a4541591c5c7c34c Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Keynote by Lillian Allen (OCAD U), "Ah Soh Wi Sey: A people's poetics blazing through to the heart of what matters" Part 6 Subject The topic of the resource Triennial Conference Lecture Description An account of the resource Presented at 19th Triennial Conference Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Lillian Allen Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource July 11 2022 https://aclals.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/abe7f0db47aa088eb2b6d5b6eef0006e.mov 407d510d9067a8bed38e819c16559d9c Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Keynote by Lillian Allen (OCAD U), "Ah Soh Wi Sey: A people's poetics blazing through to the heart of what matters" Part 5 Subject The topic of the resource Triennial Conference Lecture Description An account of the resource Presented at 19th Triennial Conference Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Lillian Allen Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource July 11 2022 https://aclals.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/2229045cbc227ac6a49408ae0949db9f.mov 9954ca026d3bfe29c1ae2716e1078e83 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Keynote by Lillian Allen (OCAD U), "Ah Soh Wi Sey: A people's poetics blazing through to the heart of what matters" Part 4 Subject The topic of the resource Triennial Conference Lecture Description An account of the resource Presented at 19th Triennial Conference Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Lillian Allen Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource July 11 2022 https://aclals.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/724a3617a7616dd54452c70f6ad7125a.mov d0527ea5b2c671087d383bae3e143811 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Keynote by Lillian Allen (OCAD U), "Ah Soh Wi Sey: A people's poetics blazing through to the heart of what matters" Part 3 Subject The topic of the resource Lecture Triennial Conference Description An account of the resource Presented at 19th Triennial Conference Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Lillian Allen Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource July 11 2022 https://aclals.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/a5623680b7e60613100f90f009d55f9d.mov 9a69a05381b96bb6dc1dde5ab33f1bdf Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Keynote by Lillian Allen (OCAD U), "Ah Soh Wi Sey: A people's poetics blazing through to the heart of what matters" Part 2 Subject The topic of the resource Triennial Conference Lecture Description An account of the resource Presented at 19th Triennial Conference Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Lillian Allen Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource July 11 2022 https://aclals.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/8e2260f208c179fe62478e6e1e02d2a4.mov 2f3c1c219e6f8504fa0da539c01fa0b4 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Keynote by Lillian Allen (OCAD U), "Ah Soh Wi Sey: A people's poetics blazing through to the heart of what matters" Part 1 Subject The topic of the resource Triennial Conference Lecture Description An account of the resource Presented at 19th Triennial Conference Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Lillian Allen Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource July 11 2022 https://aclals.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/db4f29b4a422a13c9691bd6388ef1695.pdf 1238f756b1245c9b9efb5fee5cda25a2 PDF Text Text ACLALS Articles Of Association The revisions to gender references in the original Articles of Association will be voted on at the Triennial General Meeting in August 2007. Interpretation (I) In these articles, unless a contrary intention appears ‘financial year' means the year ending 30 June; 'member' means a member, however described, of the association; 'secretary' means the person holding office under these rules as secretary of the association or, where no such person holds that office, the public officer of the association (2) In these rules a reference to a function includes a reference to a power, authority and duty; and a reference to the exercise of a function includes, where the function is a power, authority or duty, a reference to the exercise of the power or authority or the performance of the duty. l. Name The name of the Association shall be the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, hereunder called the Association or ACLALS. 2. Operation The Association shall operate as a non-profit professional association, in which all moneys and funds raised or received shall be expended for furthering its objectives. The Association shall not be used for any purpose that is primarily political or commercial. Notwithstanding anything herein contained, it is hereby declared that the Association is established and exists for charitable purposes only and that in no circumstances shall any funds or assets of the Association be applied towards non-charitable purposes. 3. Objectives Subject always to Article 2, the objectives of the Association shall be to encourage and stimulate the writing and reading of Commonwealth, colonial and postcolonial literatures and study and research into Commonwealth literatures and languages and related fields including oral literatures, drama and film studies, or cultural studies more broadly. �The Association shall concern itself with (a) the publication of information relating to the study and teaching of Commonwealth literatures, languages and cultures; (b) the holding of conferences at appropriate intervals; (c) the facilitating of travel and exchange for members wishing to study and teach Commonwealth literatures, languages and cultures; (d) the promotion of visits by Commonwealth writers to other countries. 4. Affiliations (i) The Association shall be affiliated with the Fédération Internationale des Langues et Litteratures Modernes. (ii) Other organizations with aims similar to its own may be invited to affiliate with the Association on terms to be determined from time to time by the Executive Committee. 5. Structure The structure of the Association shall consist of: (a) the regional or national Associations; (b) Unaffiliated members; (c) The Executive Committee. 6. Regional or National Associations (i) A Regional or National Association shall consist of members in any or all of the categories defined in Article 7 who live in or are associated with a single geographic region of the world. (ii) Regional or National Associations shall operate under Articles of Association not inconsistent with those of ACLALS. (iii) The Chair or Interim Chair of an incipient Regional or National Association shall apply to the Chair of ACLALS for the admission of the association to Regional or National Association status, supplying details of Articles of Association, members, officers, and, if available, minutes, financial statement, and bank account. The Executive Committee of ACLALS shall be responsible for facilitating the affiliation with ACLALS of all Regional or National Associations. 7. Membership (i) Membership of the Association shall be open to all persons and institutions engaged in any of all of the articles described in Article 3 or who assists those activities in any way. (ii) Membership shall be divided into the following categories: �(a) Ordinary, i.e., for persons and institutions who are members by virtue of their membership of a Regional or National Association; (b) Unaffiliated, i.e., for persons and institutions who are not members of a Regional or National Association; (c) Corporate, i.e., for institutions, libraries, publishing houses, and societies, whether members of a Regional or National Association or unaffiliated; (d) Honorary, i.e., for persons and institutions elected to that honour by a majority of not less than two-thirds of members voting at a duly constituted General Meeting of the Association; (e) Such other categories as the Executive Committee may from time to time determine. 8. Termination of membership A person ceases to be a member of the association if the person (i) dies or, in the case of a body corporate, is wound up; (ii) resigns from membership of the association; (iii) fails to renew membership of the association. 9. Membership Fees (i) The annual membership fee shall be: (a) Ordinary members - set by, and paid directly to, their Regional Association (b) Unaffiliated members - set by, and paid directly to, the Executive (c) Corporate affiliated members - set by, and paid directly to, their Regional Association (d) Corporate unaffiliated members - set by, and paid directly to, the Executive (ii) If the appropriate fee has not been paid by 31 December each year, membership shall be deemed to have terminated. (iii) The liability of a member to contribute towards the payment of the debts and liabilities of the association or the costs, charges and expenses of the winding up of the association is limited to the amount, if any, unpaid by the member in respect of membership of the association. �10. Executive Committee and Officers (I) The management of the Association shall be vested in an Executive Committee consisting of (a) the officers of the Association, namely the Chair and two Vice- Chairs, elected by members at a General Meeting of the Association or by postal ballot; (b) the Past Chair, appointed by the other members of the Executive from among previous Chairs of the Association; (c) the elected Chairs of the Regional or National Associations; (d) not more than two other persons co-opted to the Executive Committee for the term of its tenure of office. (2) All positions on the Executive Committee are honorary. (3) The three Officers shall constitute the Headquarters Secretariat of the Association and shall normally be members of the same Regional or National Association. (4) The Elected Chair of a Regional or National Association may nominate another member of the same Regional or National Association to act as the Chair's representative when necessary. (5) The Executive Committee, subject to these rules, and to any resolution passed by the Association in general meeting (i) shall control and manage the affairs of the Association; (ii) may exercise all such functions as may be exercised by the Association other than those functions that are required by these rules to be exercised by the Association in general meeting; (iii) has power to perform all such acts and do all such things as appear to the committee to be necessary or desirable for the proper management of the affairs of the Association. 11. Duties of Officers (I) The duties of the Chair shall be: (a) to preside over meetings of the Executive Committee and of the members; (b) to authorize all payments of Association moneys with the cosignature of one of the Vice- Chairs in accordance with the budget approved by the Executive Committee; (c) to seek the opinion of members of the Executive Committee on all important matters of policy and to call meetings of the Executive Committee as decided by the Committee or on his or �her own authority; (d) to put into effect the policy and budget decisions of the Executive Committee; (e) to report on the carrying out of the policy and budget decisions of the Executive Committee at all meetings of the Committee and at all meetings of members; (f) to circulate promptly the annual balance sheet and record of associations of the Headquarters Secretariat to all Regional or National Associations and unaffiliated members; (g) to control the work of the Headquarters staff and such other activities as are determined by the Executive Committee; (h) to represent the Association in all matters outside the Association's jurisdiction as directed by the Executive Committee; (i) to call meetings of the members in accordance with the current Rules. 2) The duties of the Vice-Chairs shall be: (a) to assist or deputize for the Chair in any or all duties as required by the Chair or the Executive Committee; (b) to make all payments on the co-signature of the Chair of all moneys disbursed by the Association; (c) to keep the minutes of all meetings of the Association and its Officers and other records of the Association as directed by the current Rule or the Chair; (d) to receive from the previous Chair all records of the Association and to pass on all records at the expiration of the term of office to the succeeding Chair; (e) to prepare the annual balance sheet of the Association, arrange for its auditing, and present the audited balance sheet to the Chair, Executive Committee, and members; (f) to maintain the membership roll and report it to the Chair for publication to members. (3) The duties of the members of the Executive Committee shall be: (a) to attend meetings of the Committee; (b) to draw up and agree on the annual budget of the Association; (c) to approve the annual balance sheet of the Association and the annual report of the Chair; (d) to make all policy decisions of the Association and ensure that they are presented for approval at the next General Meeting �of members; (e) to admit new Regional or National Associations to ACLALS and to admit their chairs to the Executive Committee; (f) to set the annual membership fees; (g) to nominate honorary members for confirmation in a General Meeting of members; (h) to revoke membership in the Associations; (i) to co-opt members of the Executive Committee in accordance with Article 10 (1) (d); (j) to appoint the Past Chair, Returning Officer, Scrutineer, and other functionaries as may from time to time be required; (k) to call an election of Officers; (l) to establish sub-committees where necessary; (m) to direct the Chair to represent the Association in particular matters; (n) to authorize the affiliation of the Association with other organizations; (o) to carry out such other functions as are requested by the Chair and agreed to by the Executive Committee. 12. Executive meetings and quorum (i) The committee shall meet at least 3 times in each calendar year at such place and time as the committee may determine. (ii) Oral or written notice of a meeting of the committee shall be given by the secretary to each member of the committee at least 48 hours before the time appointed for the holding of the meeting. (iii) Notice of a meeting given under sub rule (ii) shall specify the general nature of the business to be transacted at the meeting and no business other than that business shall be transacted at the meeting, except business which the committee members present at the meeting unanimously agree to treat as urgent business. (iv) Any 3 members of the committee constitute a quorum for the transaction of the business of a meeting of the committee. (v) No business shall be transacted by the committee unless a quorum is present and if within half an hour after the time appointed for the meeting a quorum is not present the meeting stands adjourned to the same place and at the same hour of the same day in the following week. 13. General Meetings ( I) The members of the Association shall be called into General Meeting by the Chair at least once every five years. �(2) The Chair shall summon Special General Meetings of the members when directed to do so by the Executive Committee. (3) (i) The Chair shall preside at all General Meetings unless he or she has requested one of the Vice-Chairs to do so (ii) All motions other than those concerning alteration of these Articles or the dissolution of the Association or election to honorary membership shall be carried by simple majority of those voting. (iii) Members unable to attend a General Meeting may vote by post, provided that the vote is received by the time of counting. (iv) No proxy votes shall be admitted. (v) For the purpose of voting Corporate Members may nominate in writing a representative to attend and vote at meetings or to vote by post. (vi) No item of business shall be transacted at a general meeting unless a quorum of members is present during the time the meeting is considering that item. (vii) 5 members present in person constitute a quorum. (viii) If at the adjourned meeting a quorum is not present within half an hour after the time appointed for the commencement of the meeting, the members present (being not less than 3) shall constitute a quorum. 14. Elections (I) The election of Officers shall take place at a General Meeting of the Association or, if so determined by the Executive Committee, by a postal ballot of all members. (2) Officers shall hold office for the term set in the current Rule. (3) (a) All nominations must be proposed and seconded. (b) The Executive Committee shall ensure that nominations are made for every vacant office. (4) (a) All elections shall be by secret ballot and, unless otherwise determined by the General Meeting, shall be conducted on the first past-thepost system. (b) All ballots shall be prepared, distributed, collected, and counted by a Returning Officer and a Scrutineer shall appointed by the Executive Committee. (c) Both the Returning Officer and the Scrutineer shall sign the Election Return presented to the Chair. �(d) The Chair shall announce the result and then direct the Returning Officer and Scrutineer to destroy the ballot papers. (5) When the Executive Committee has ordered a postal ballot, the procedure prescribed in Section (4) of this Article shall be followed as closely as possible. (6) If an Officer resigns during his or her term of office the Executive Committee shall appoint a person to fill the vacancy. 15. Finance (I) The Executive Committee shall be empowered to raise finance in the following ways: (a) by membership fees and levies; (b) by direct appeal for community, including private, institutional, commercial, and foundation sponsorship; (c) by proceeds from any pursuits, festivals, productions, presentations, concerts, displays, exhibitions, functions, sales, or any other lawful fund-raising activity. (2) (a) All receipts of the Association shall be banked with the bank designated by the Executive Committee from time to time. (b) All payments over £20 shall be made by cheque, bank draft, or other commonly recognized and certifiable banking method. (c) Payments of amounts under £20 may be made in cash from a petty cash fund administered by one of the Vice-Chairs who shall keep a petty cash book and receipts. (d) Moneys received and paid by the Association for purposes not strictly related to the Objectives of the Association shall be kept in separate accounts and recorded separately from general funds. (3) Any assets remaining after the satisfaction of any proper debts and liabilities shall (subject to Article 2) be applied towards such objects as the Executive Committee may determine and as may be approved by the Director of The Commonwealth Foundation. 16. Trustees (I) The Executive Committee may, if it thinks it expedient, nominate not fewer than two or more Trustees in whom the property of the Association (other than cash, which shall be �under the control of the Officers) may be vested. (2) The terms of the trusteeship shall be stipulated by the Executive Committee. 17. Alteration of Articles of Association (I) The Articles of Association shall not be repealed, altered, or amended except by resolution passed by a majority of not less than two-thirds of members voting either at a General Meeting or, where so directed by the Executive Committee, by postal ballot. (2) Notice of Motion of any proposed repeal, alteration, or amendment must be given in writing to the Chair and signed by ten members. Such notice shall contain the exact nature of the proposed change. (3) The Chair shall ensure that all members are notified in writing of such Motions and of the convening of the General Meeting or postal ballot. 18. Dissolution of Association (I) If the Executive Committee decides at any time that it is advisable or expedient to dissolve the Association it shall call an Extraordinary General Meeting or make arrangements for a postal ballot of all members on the motion for dissolution. (2) If the motion for dissolution is carried by a majority of not less than two thirds of members voting the Executive Committee shall have power to dispose of any assets held by or in the name of the Association. 19. Power to Make Rules The Executive Committee may from time to time make Rules not inconsistent with these Articles for the carrying into effect of the several provisions, intentions, and objectives of the Articles, and generally for the management and good government of the Association, and may by Rule repeal, alter, or amend any Rule or part of a Rule. Rules 1. Financial year (I) The financial year of the Association shall be from I July to 30 June. (2) The financial year of the Regional or National Associations shall be from I June to 30 May. �2. Regional or National Association Obligations (I) Regional or National Associations shall submit by 30 June and 31 December each year a list of members to the Headquarters Secretariat. (2) Regional or National Associations shall pay the annual ACLALS membership fee for each of their members to the Headquarters Secretariat by 31 December each year. (3) Regional or National Associations shall submit to the Headquarters Secretariat an annual report and an audited financial statement no later than 30 June each year. (4) In years when a submission is being made to The Commonwealth Foundation, Regional or National Associations shall submit a report, an interim statement of accounts, and a budget no later than 28 February. 3. Membership fees The annual membership fee shall be: (i) Ordinary members - one pound sterling (ii) Unaffiliated members - five pounds sterling (iii) Corporate affiliated members - one pound sterling (iv) Corporate unaffiliated members - ten pounds sterling If the appropriate fee has not been paid by 31 December, membership shall be deemed to have terminated. 4. Limitations on disbursements (I) The Commonwealth Foundation grant to ACLALS shall not normally be used for the cost of transport of any member within his or her own country unless The Commonwealth Foundation has approved and then only for a proportion not exceeding half the total cost of such travel. (2) Financial assistance from the CF funds shall not be given to any member who is not a citizen of a Commonwealth country. 5. Terms of office The term of office of the Officers shall ensure that on all major policy proposals, all members of the association shall be notified of all relevant details and, where appropriate, be sent ballot papers by such a means that there is a reasonable expectation of the members receiving not less than twenty-one days' notice. We welcome suggestions and comments. To contact ACLALS please email: davis@anglistik.rwth-aachen.de,To contact the Webmaster please email:dtunca@ulg.ac.be �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource ACLALS Articles of Association