Decolonisation and the Literary Field
Virtual Session
Description
From the current moment in which calls to decolonize literary studies prevail, we look back to the eras of political decolonization, and the changes they catalysed in literary cultures and communities around the world. We invite papers that consider how sociological approaches to literature, especially those approaches informed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu, have and can continue to contribute to our understanding of such changes, however incomplete and ongoing. How, we also ask, might such scholarship contribute to a decolonial literary studies, and what do calls to decolonize literary studies mean for sociological approaches to the subject?
The dynamics of the literary field described by Bourdieu emerged from his analysis of the French literary field, thus establishing the national as the frame for a literary sociology. But sociological approaches to postcolonial and world literature inspired by Bourdieu have moved beyond the nation as frame, and sharpened our ability to analyse the worldliness of the literary system (Casanova 2004, Boschetti 2012, Sapiro 2016). Such scholarship sheds light on the global circuits of transmission and translation and scales of value that exert force on national literary fields, especially those peripheral fields that were subject to colonial power and then complex forms of decolonization (Huggan 2001, Helgesson 2009, Ducournau 2015, Helgesson and Vermeulen 2015, Bush 2016, Dalleo 2016, Sievers and Levitt 2020). But analysis at the level of world literature also runs the risk of reinscribing global hierarchies of value, obscuring the varied dynamics of national and regional fields (and other sub- or supra-national conceptions of the field), or under-estimating the force that local decolonizing dynamics and debates have exerted globally.
Our seminar aims to create a discussion around sociological approaches to literature and decolonization specifically. Papers should focus on national or regional literary fields, or other sub- or supra-national conceptions of the field, and might consider their local and/or transnational dynamics. This is not a retreat into the national or the local, but an effort to better calibrate our methodologies to different scales in relation to debates around decolonization. We especially encourage papers from those working on the cultural shifts wrought by political decolonization, and its effects on the aesthetic, linguistic, institutional, educational, infrastructural or state-driven composition of the literary field; scholarship at the fringes of the literary field, e.g. the intersection between print and other media, including oral forms; and reflections on the archives that inspire, sustain and frustrate such scholarship. But we also welcome papers that bring such approaches to bear on the current demand to decolonize literary studies, a demand that is similarly articulated from and addressed to interwoven transnational and local spaces.
Schedule
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Kate Wallis is Senior Lecturer in World Literatures in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Exeter where she established and co-directs an MA Publishing programme. She is currently working on a monograph exploring pan-African publishing networks post-2000 building on her doctoral research on Kwani Trust, Farafina, and Cassava Republic Press. Her work has been published in Wasafiri, Research in African Literatures, Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies and the Routledge Handbook of African Literature. She is a Director for Kigali-based publishing company Huza Press and co-producer of the Africa Writes – Exeter literary festival.
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‘Gbenga Adeoba is a doctoral student in the Department of Comparative Literature and Thought at Washington University in St. Louis.
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Tingting Lyu is a graduate student in Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests encompass Luso-African literature and its connections to Indian Ocean studies. She has published an article providing an overview of the literary career of Mozambican writer Pauline Chiziane and has translated three Portuguese novels into Chinese.
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Kwabena Opoku-Agyemang is a senior lecturer at the English Department of the University of Ghana and is the academic director for SIT Ghana. His scholarship has appeared in several edited volumes and journals and revolves around African digital literature.
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Michelle Kelly a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the UKRI-funded project Decolonization, Appropriation and the Materials of Literature in Africa and its Diaspora (LITAID), based at King's College London. She is drawn to material approaches to literature, working with archives, literary institutions, and other art forms and media. She co-edited (with Claire Westall) Prison Writing and the Literary World (Routledge 2020), published several articles on J.M. Coetzee, and is completing a monograph on Coetzee.
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Rebecca Roach is Associate Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Birmingham where she works on Anglophone literary cultures and media history. Her first book (Literature and the Rise of the Interview) focused on the interview form and she is currently finishing two books: one on authors' thinking with computers (Programming Literature) and one on an alternative history of AI (Thinking Machines). She is also digital lead of the Stuart Hall Archive Project and interested in decolonial approaches to digital archiving practices.
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Madeline Bedecarré is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Davidson College. She has a master’s from Columbia University in French and a PhD in Literature from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. A specialist of francophone African literature, contemporary French literature, and the sociology of literature, she has published in the Journal of World Literature (2020), Etudes littéraires africaines (2022) CFC Intersections (2024) and contributed to the collective volumes Diversity and Decolonization in French Studies (Palgrave Macmillan 2022) and Profession ? Écrivain (CNRS éditions 2017). Her English translation of Gisèle Sapiro’s La sociologie de la literature came out this past fall with Stanford University Press (2023). Her first book, African Authors & The Politics of Literary Recognition, is under contract with Edinburg University Press.
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Ashleigh Harris is Professor of Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden. She is the author of Afropolitanism and the Novel: De-Realizing Africa (Routledge, 2019) and is currently completing on a monograph entitled ‘Literary Form Beyond the Book in Southern Africa’. Her recent research has been focused on literary forms circulating outside of the formal book and publishing industry in Sub-Saharan Africa. Harris is the recipient of a European Research Commission Advanced grant for a project entitled African Literary Metadata. The project creates, links and makes accessible and searchable multilingual metadata on informal and non-book African literatures, such as spoken word, newspaper and pamphlet literatures, online literatures, community theatre and small magazines.
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Dr Hayley G. Toth is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University. She is currently working on a three-year project titled COLLECTIVE FORM: Cultural Collaboration in Black Liberation Struggles, 1978-82. Her first book, Reading Postcolonial Literature: From Professional to Non-Professional Practices will be published by Liverpool University Press in March 2025.
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Asha Rogers is an Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham and author of State Sponsored Literature: Britain and Cultural Diversity after 1945 (OUP, 2020).
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Jarad Zimbler is Reader in English and Global Cultures at King’s College London. He is author of J. M. Coetzee and the Politics of Style, editor of The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Coetzee and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to World Literature. He is also Principal Investigator of LITAID: Decolonization, Appropriation and the Materials of Literature in Africa and its Diaspora, a five-year project of research selected by the European Research Council and funded by UKRI.