Literary Activism, Ecologies of Production and Networks of Practice in Contemporary Africa

Organised by MULOSIGE and King's College London, chaired by Dr. Sara Marzagora.

Speaker: Madhu Krishnan (Bristol)

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In this talk, I trace the ways in which the concept of literary activism functions on the African continent in the 21st century. While there exist a number of definitions for literary activism, here, I use the term to refer to inherently activist act of opening platforms and spaces for literary creation outside of the dominant models of the so-called global literary field. My interest in this paper is to explore the ways in which grassroots, localised and continentally-centred efforts at literary activism have produced ecologies of literary production which, while less visible than the forms of writing which circulate in the world literary field, nonetheless constitute one important vector for its understanding. I look at case studies from Cameroon, Uganda, Kenya and elsewhere to consider the ways in which networks of practice have evolved over the first two decades of the millennium which leverage intra-Africa connections and exchanges, multilingual and translation practices and digital media to create more expansive reading publics and commons.

Madhu Krishnan is Professor of African, World and Comparative Literatures at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Writing Spatiality in West Africa: Colonial Legacies in the Anglophone/Francophone Novel (2018), Contingent Canons: African Literature and the Politics of Location (2018), and Contemporary African Literature in English: Global Locations, Postcolonial Identifications (2014). She is part of several research networks, including Ugandan Youth and Creative Writing and Small Magazines, Literary Networks and Self-Fashioning in Africa and its Diasporas .