Co-producing a sustainable future for African literary production
Researchers from the University of Bristol’s multidisciplinary Centre for Black Humanities have collaborated with non-profit, grassroots organisations in Africa to develop sustainable literary infrastructures, innovative forms of literary production, and new networks and cross-cultural partnerships between the UK and five countries across Africa.
Capacity building through collaboration with African-based partners
Professor Madhu Krishnan and Professor Ruth Bush have extensive experience of working across the African continent and have developed strong relationships with Africa-based literary groups as part of their research. In collaboration with these literary groups, and joined by, Dr Kate Wallis (from the University of Exeter) and Dr Georgina Collins (freelance translator and researcher), they have developed ways in which to grow capacity for independent literary activity in Africa. Their collaboration considers specifically how infrastructure and training can grow capacity for independent and sustainable literary production. They have also investigated, preserved, and promoted histories of print heritage across the continent. A key aspect of their research explores the possibilities of co-production with creative and literary producers.
Professor Krishnan (Department of English) has drawn upon her research on how liberal worldviews and global hierarchies shaped a specific notion of "African literature" over the latter half of the twentieth century and contributed to its continued marginalisation as a literary category.
Professor Bush (Department of French) has drawn upon her archival research and analysis of African literature and literary translation. This research explores the destabilising impacts of decolonisation on literary form; how African literature shaped the metropolitan publishing scene of post-war France; and the political and aesthetic imperatives of African literary translators.
New literary infrastructures and mentorship
The team (Krishnan, Bush and Wallis) worked with the founder of the pan-African Writivism literary initiative, Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire, to develop the annual Arts Managers and Literary Activists (AMLA) workshops. These workshops have brought together 60 literary activists, writers, editors and translators over 15 countries across the continent of Africa.
As a result of the AMLA workshops, five new literary initiatives across East, West and Southern Africa have received mentorship by established African literary activists, including: the Abidjan Lit literary collective (Côte d’Ivoire) and the Mawazo Africa Writing Institute (Uganda).
“Based on our work with Professor Krishnan, over the next five years we intend to leverage the networks and partnerships we have made to increase independent literary production, empower female Cameroonian writers by publishing more of their work as well as translating their work, and ensuring a wider readership and distribution of Cameroonian and African writing on the continent and beyond”
Engaging school pupils in literature
New literary materials emerging from the researchers’ workshops, including Odokonyero: A Writivism Anthology of Short Fiction by Emerging Ugandan Writers, are currently in use at six secondary schools in Uganda. Teachers note that the relevance of the stories to their students’ lives has enhanced their engagement with literature as a social form.
“I have been longing for a closer to home piece of work and Odokonyero is timely - it is what we have been waiting for”
Source : New Beacon Books
Source : New Beacon Books
Image source: Jigéén Bu Bé Fenkna (Dawn of Woman)
Image source: Jigéén Bu Bé Fenkna (Dawn of Woman)
Image source: AWA Magazine
Image source: AWA Magazine
Preserving print heritage
For two years Professor Krishnan and Dr Christopher Ouma (University of Cape Town) ran a network within the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded Small Magazines project. Working with Writivism and the Cape Town-based Chimurenga collective, the network explored the role played by small magazines historically into the contemporary period. Blog posts on Africa in Words provide more details on these sessions:
- Finding Affiliations: Reading Communities, Literary Institutions & Small Magazines
- ‘A secret history of the nation’: Small Magazines at Writivism 2017
- Flexible Forms and Publics: Moradewun Adejunmobi and Stacy Hardy on Small Magazines
Meanwhile, Professor Bush collaborated with partners in the UK, France and Senegal to digitise and restore the complete archive of one of the earliest francophone African women’s magazines, Awa: la revue de la femme noire.
Professor Bush's AHRC-funded project identified Awa as a long over-looked source for tracing debates on the (un)translatability of feminist thought between the global North and global South, post-independence nationalism, and representations of the female body in African and diasporic cultural production. The research led to a website archive and multimedia exhibition at museums in Dakar, Montpelier and Bordeaux.
“This exhibition plunged me back into a mirror, a world, a familiar and distant dimension […] a period anchored within me.”
Professor Bush also used archival material and oral histories of London-based ‘print activists’ to write the history of the UK’s first radical Black bookshop and publishing house, New Beacon Books.
Literature as activism: contributing to a cultural shift
The research by Professors Bush and Krishnan has influenced a cultural shift on the African continent, moving from a primarily economic model of literary entrepreneurship, to a politically motivated notion of literary activism.
“It was while in South Africa [during the #MustFall protests] that I read Ruth Bush's work on New Beacon Books, and given closer interactions with Ntone Edjabe at Chimurenga, it became clearer to me that the work the countless literary initiatives are doing is more political than professional. To borrow Fanon's words, they are creating new humans”.
Based on this work, both Professor Krishnan and Professor Bush are engaged in large-scale research projects on literary activism (Krishnan) and the creative lives of African universities (Bush), in each case funded by ERC Starting Grants.
Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire founder of Writivism Festival. Source : Writism Festival
Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire founder of Writivism Festival. Source : Writism Festival
Madhu Krishnan is Professor of African, World and Comparative Literature in the Department of English, and Academic Director of the Centre for Black Humanities. Ruth Bush is Professor in African and French Cultural Studies in the Department of French. She currently holds an ERC starting grant for a collaborative project on the contested cultural spaces of universities in four African cities (Dakar, Abidjan, Abomey-Calavi and Yaoundé).
Their research has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council and the European Research Council...
Cite this
Full article: Introduction: Literary Activism in 21st Century Africa (tandfonline.com)
Ruth A L Bush, Madhu Krishnan, Kate Wallis*
*Corresponding author for this work
Creative Writing as Literary Activism: Decolonial Perspectives on the Writing Workshop
Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire & Madhu Krishnan
Contingent Canons: African Literature and the Politics of Location
Built with Shorthand