Africa Seminar: Re-reading Africa through Speculative Fiction

The Centre of African Studies is hosting a public seminar with Joanna Woods, Department of English, Stockholm University, on her doctoral research. 

The main question steering Joanna Woods’ current doctoral research concerns the rhetorical function of contemporary speculative short fiction in southern Africa; in Malawi, Zimbabwe and South Africa in particular. She considers what the form of Anglophone speculative fiction in the context of Africa speaks about, and why it is important in our contemporary moment.

Among other things, the project aims to foreground the distinct contribution of southern Africa to the fields of Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism. African speculative fiction is certainly burgeoning across the continent and the world in this current 21st Century moment. For this seminar, Joanna Woods considers what speculative fiction in Africa might tell us about the continent in contemporary times, what it reveals about the ways the continent has been read in the past, and how it is configured today. How might we begin to re-read Africa through the lens of speculative fiction? And more broadly, how is the continent’s future being (re)cast by its writers?

Joanna Woods has an MA in African Studies from CAS at the University of Copenhagen, and currently is in the third year of her PhD in English Literature at the University of Stockholm. She has a broader interest in African literary and cultural studies, and is an editor with @Africa in Words. She has previously taught at the University of Malawi, Zomba, and has a specialised interest in Malawian and southern African literature.

Place: Room 8B.1.14, Karen Blixens Plads 16, South Campus, University of Copenhagen

Organizer: Centre of African Studies, University of Copenhagen