Sexta-feira, 29 de Março de 2024
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Internacional Lecture | Stefan Helgesson, "What is African literature and how do we study it?"

Início: Fim: Países: Portugal

Estudos Africanos, Literatura, Workshops

O projeto AFROLAB – "A Construção das Literaturas Africanas em Português. Instituições e consagração dentro e fora do Espaço de Língua Portuguesa 1960-2020", convida para a palestra do Prof. Stefan Helgesson, da Universidade do Estocolmo, com o título "What is African literature and how do we study it?". A palestra terá lugar no dia 14 de janeiro de 2022 no Anfiteatro III da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa,

A palestra será seguida de um workshop organizado pelos membros da equipa do projeto AFROLAB, subordinado ao tema: "Literatura africana: desafios metodológicos atuais".


January 14th, 2022 • 14h-19h
Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa
Anfiteatro III

International Lecture

Stefan Helgesson
University of Stockholm

What is African literature and how do we study it?

The definition of African literature is consonant with the emergence of “African literature” as an identifiable field of criticism and academic study in the 1960s and 70s. There is, in other words, little point in hypothesising an essential meaning to the term that lies beyond the critical practices that have institutionalised African literature. But to ask the question today is very different from asking it in the 60s. The anxiety among a small elite of staking out a literary terrain of their own in newly independent Africa has been replaced by today’s superabundance of academic research and multimodal textual production from and connected to Africa. In this lecture, I will argue that there are two contemporary rifts in African literature with far-reaching implications for scholars. One is the gap between globally successful African literature and the plethora of small-scale modes of publication, often online. Another is the parallelism of academic conversations in English, French and Portuguese – with English being dominant. This situation, I claim, requires a differentiated “world literary” analysis of African literature itself as an uneven transnational field.

The lecture will be followed by a workshop organised by the AFROLAB project's team members:

African literature: current methodological challenges

During this workshop, the team members will be eager discuss with the attending colleagues the topics of their ongoing research within the project AFROLAB.

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