The Textual Worlds of South-Eastern Africa

在社交媒体上流传的一张引人注目的照片中，赞比亚作家Namwali serell和Ingrid Nayame站在一起，对着镜头微笑。这幅图突出了他们的相似之处：两人都是有成就的作家，都有新小说要推广。然而，这些小说参与了截然不同的图书生产和流通回路。《塞贝尔》由企鹅兰登书屋出版，并由后殖民世界文学的大佬萨尔曼·拉什迪（Salman Rushdie）评论。Nayame是一位自费出版的作家，她在Facebook上宣传自己的作品。然而，她也得到了国际上的认可：她在南非罗德大学（Rhodes University）获得了颇有声望的写作驻留资格，这是一个关于非洲流行城市想象的研究项目的一部分。作为关注性别和社会正义的赞比亚女作家，这两位作家团结一致。东南非洲的大多数读者会更喜欢塞贝尔的作品，而不是纳伊姆的作品，尽管他们在英国的知名度和声望有所不同。有没有可能在不考虑Nayame作品的情况下理解serell作品的文学和文化价值，反之亦然？这个和相关的问题值得重新进行学术研究。关于其他文本和地点，也可以提出类似的问题，东南非洲是一个政治、社会和文化不平衡的地区，在非洲文学经典中表现不均衡。“东南非文本世界网络”组织了一个由英国和该地区的学者组成的核心团队，目的是根据最近的学术成果，重新考虑和重申当地文化形式和实践的价值。我们建议就如何将“世界”和“后殖民”文学与“非洲流行文化”这两个通常不同的领域引入对话展开持续的对话。近年来，世界文学的新定义对其对全球化的毫无疑问的认同提出了质疑（Warwick Research Collective 2015, Cheah 2016）。与此同时，非洲文化研究中的“流行转向”暴露了“非洲流行”的有影响力定义的差距和不精确（Newell和Okome 2014， Barber 2018）。网络提出了这样一个问题：对东南非本地和全球流传的文本和形式的形式属性、意义和社会功能之间的重叠（通常被忽视）和分歧（通常被认为是理所当然的）进行系统研究，可能会得到什么？该网络由英国南安普敦大学的Ranka Primorac博士领导，Grace Musila教授（南非威特沃特斯兰德大学）、Brendon Nicholls博士（英国利兹大学）和Lynda Spencer博士（南非罗德大学）为合作伙伴。我们将在两年内举行两次专题讨论会：一次在罗兹，另一次在南安普顿。该网络为每次活动提供了文学和文化从业者（在非洲大陆和非洲大陆以外）、博士生（来自东南非和英国）以及学者参加的条件。我们的目标是为更深入地研究文本生产和传播系统之间的联系铺平道路，体裁，阅读模式和品味形成跨越非洲东南部地区内外文化生产的选择节点。我们意识到，根据最近的理论辩论，在重新考虑关于非洲“流行”和规范文本和背景的学术正统时，我们正在重新思考“非洲文学”本身的意义。

In an arresting photograph circulating on social media, Zambian writers Namwali Serpell and Ingrid Nayame stand together, smiling at the camera. The picture underlines their similarities: both are accomplished authors with new novels to promote. Those novels, however, participate in very different circuits of book production and circulation. Serpell is published by Penguin Random House and has been reviewed by Salman Rushdie, the grand old man of postcolonial world literature. Nayame is a self-published author who publicises her work on Facebook. Yet she, too, has had international recognition: she has held a prestigious writing residency at the Rhodes University in South Africa, as part of a research project into Africa's pupular urban imaginaries. The two authors are in firm solidarity with each other as Zambian women writers insterested in gender and social justice. It is not at all a given that most readers in South-Eastern Africa would favour Serpell's work over Nayame's, despite the difference in their Anglobal visibility and prestige. Is it possible to apprehend the literary and cultural value of Serpell's work without taking Nayame's into account, and vice versa? This and related questions arguably merit renewed scholarly consideration. Similar questions could be asked in relation to other texts and locations South-Eastern Africa - a region marked by political, social and cultural unevenness, unevenly represented in the African literary canon. The Textual Worlds of South-Eastern Africa Network assembles a core team of academics based in the UK and in the region itself, in order to reconsider and re-assert the value of local cultural forms and practices in the light of recent scholarship. We propose to initiate a sustained conversation on how to bring into dialogue two usually separate fields: 'world' and 'postcolonial' literature' on the one hand, and 'African popular culture' on the other. In recent years, new definitions of world literature have problematized its unquestioning identification with globalization (Warwick Research Collective 2015, Cheah 2016). At the same time, the 'popular turn' in African cultural studies has exposed gaps and imprecisions in influential definitions of 'the African popular' (Newell and Okome 2014, Barber 2018). The Network asks: what might be gained from a systematic study of overlaps (usually overlooked) as well as divergences (usually taken for granted) between the formal properties, meanings and social functioning of locally and Anglobally circulating texts and forms from South-Eastern Africa? The Network is led by Dr Ranka Primorac at the University of Southampton, UK, with Prof. Grace Musila (University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa), Dr Brendon Nicholls (University of Leeds, UK) and Dr Lynda Spencer (Rhodes University, South Africa) as partners. We will hold two symposia within two years: one at Rhodes, the other at Southampton. The Network makes provision for each event to be attended by literary and cultural practitioners (based both on and away from the African continent) and PhD students (from South-Eastern Africa and UK), as well as scholars. We aim to pave the way for a more in-depth study of the links between systems of textual production and dissemination, genres, modes of reading and taste formation across select nodes of cultural production in and beyond Africa's South-Eastern region. We are aware that, in reconsidering the scholarly orthodoxy on Africa's 'popular' and canonical texts and contexts in the light of recent theoretical debates, we are rethinking the meanings of 'African literature' itself.