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，赞比亚作家南瓦里·塞佩尔和英格丽德·纳亚姆站在一起，对着镜头微笑。这张图片突出了他们的相似之处：两人都是有成就的作家，都有新小说要宣传。然而，这些小说参与了截然不同的图书生产和发行流程。《毒蛇》由企鹅兰登书屋出版，后殖民世界文学大师萨尔曼·拉什迪对其进行了评论。纳亚姆是一位自我出版的作家，在Facebook上宣传她的作品。然而，她也得到了国际上的认可：她曾在南非罗兹大学(Rhodes University)担任过享有盛誉的写作常驻研究员，这是一个关于非洲小学生城市想象的研究项目的一部分。这两位作家作为赞比亚女作家，彼此坚定地团结在一起，对性别和社会正义情有独钟。并不是说东南部非洲的大多数读者会喜欢塞佩尔的作品而不是纳亚姆的作品，尽管他们在全球范围内的知名度和声望有所不同。有没有可能在不考虑纳亚姆的情况下理解塞佩尔作品的文学和文化价值，反之亦然？可以说，这个问题和相关问题值得重新进行学术思考。关于东南部非洲的其他文本和地点也可以提出类似的问题--这是一个以政治、社会和文化不平衡为标志的区域，在非洲文学经典中的表现也不均衡。东南部非洲文本世界网络汇集了设在英国和该地区的一个核心学者团队，以便根据最近的学术研究重新考虑和重新主张当地文化形式和习俗的价值。我们建议就如何将两个通常独立的领域--‘世界’和‘后殖民’文学‘和’非洲流行文化‘近年来，世界文学的新定义使其与全球化的绝对认同成为问题(沃里克研究集团2015年，Cheah 2016年)。与此同时，非洲文化研究的“流行转向”暴露了“非洲流行”这一有影响力的定义中的空白和模糊之处(Newell和Okome 2014，Barber 2018)。该网络问：对东南部非洲当地和非全球流通的文本和形式的形式性质、意义和社会功能之间的重叠(通常被忽视)和差异(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顿大学的Ranka Primorac博士领导，合作伙伴包括南非威特沃特斯兰德大学的Grace Musila教授、英国利兹大学的Brendon Nicholls博士和南非罗兹大学的Lynda Spencer博士。我们将在两年内举行两次研讨会：一次在罗兹，另一次在南安普敦。该网络规定每一次活动都有文学和文化从业者(在非洲大陆和非洲以外的地方)和博士生(来自东南部非洲和联合王国)以及学者参加。我们的目标是为更深入地研究文本生产和传播系统、体裁、阅读模式和品味形成之间的联系铺平道路，这些联系跨越非洲东南部地区内外选定的文化生产节点。我们意识到，在根据最近的理论辩论重新思考关于非洲‘流行的’和规范的文本和背景的学术正统时，我们正在重新思考‘非洲文学’本身的含义。

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.