Creative Writing as Literary Activism: Decolonial Perspectives on the Writing Workshop

Mwesigire, Bwesigye Bwa; Krishnan, Madhu

doi:10.1080/23277408.2020.1818494

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…While South African students were protesting under the famous #RhodesMustFall campaign and quoting 'Mamdani the Scholar' as their intellectual guide, students and staff at the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) were protesting against 'Mamdani the Director' under the #MamdaniMustWalkHisTalk banner. Mamdani, the champion of academic freedom, became its worst assaulter as he unilaterally banned a radical student union, and was accused of victimising his rebelling staff and students with expulsions, disciplinary cases and failure in examinations (Prempeh 2016, Naimasiah 2016, Bwa Mwesigire 2017. 1 The 2008 crisis: where was the Left?…”

Section: The Socialist Experience In Tanzaniamentioning

confidence: 99%

Connections 2: Roape Workshop in Dar es Salaam, 16–17 April 2018

Bujra

Mgumia²,

Zeilig³

et al. 2018

Review of African Political Economy

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This is the second of our Debate Special Issue reports on the three linked workshops which the Review of African Political Economy held in Africa in 2017-18. We have called the series 'Connections' to emphasise its distinctiveness from the more usual academic conferences. We also wanted to widen our networks across Africa and create new ones, in particular to bring together activists and scholars to reconsider the potential for radical socioeconomic transformation and engagement in the continent. This report tries to avoid academicism and to speak in an accessible way to the 'moment of Dar'. It includes contributions from the presenters at the workshop as well as accounts from two active participants -Njuki Githethwa, a scholar activist and writer from Kenya, and Tamás Gerőcs, a political economist working as a research fellow at the Institute of World Economics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences.ROAPE was founded in 1973 in the context of liberation struggles and committed itself to anti-imperialism and socialist development in Africa, as well as to broadly materialist analysis; it aims to continue in that spirit. We dedicate this project to Samir Amin, who had hoped to come to the workshop but whose illness prevented this and whose death sadly occurred as we were preparing for publication.The second of our workshops was held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on 16-17 April 2018. 1 The first was held in Accra, Ghana in November 2017 to coincide with the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the 60th anniversary of Ghana's independence. The workshop in Dar coincided with the 50th anniversary of the Arusha Declaration, which heralded a bold socialist experiment. Our final workshop in this series was in

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Section: The Socialist Experience In Tanzaniamentioning

confidence: 99%

Connections 2: Roape Workshop in Dar es Salaam, 16–17 April 2018

Bujra

Mgumia²,

Zeilig³

et al. 2018

Review of African Political Economy

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“….] are critical to booksellers as access points to a considerable market" (Mwesigire 2015) and Kate Wallis observes that while Kachifo has sought to generate revenue by "creating a successful new social studies school textbook", Cassava Republic "has not only invested in visiting university lecturers across Nigeria to make them aware of their publications and share sample copies, they have also developed a system of employing student representatives to sell copies directly to other students" (Wallis 2016, pp. 43-44).…”

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confidence: 99%

In Pursuit of the “Real” Nigeria/n through the Archives of Heinemann’s African Writers Series

Walsh

2023

Humanities

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This paper will depart from the premise that with the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe as its flagship author, exemplar and editorial adviser, Heinemann Educational Books, which aimed to represent Africa and Africans through its African Writers Series (AWS) had a tendency to privilege and prioritise realist literary expressions coming out of Africa. This, combined with the fact that the series was published by an educational company looking for a way to market its product in an environment that did not yet have a place for African writers when it was first launched, might also be regarded as having fostered a tendency within the publishing house to treat the works submitted to it more as socio-historical documents than as works of literary fiction and to lead to their framing in anthropological terms. The paper will investigate the precise terms in which this takes place in two case studies of some of the archival material relating to Heinemann’s interest in representing Northern Nigeria and Nigerians in the early years of the series, and it will investigate the consequences and implications of a drive towards producing a series that could be marketed as representative.

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Translation Imperatives

Bush

2022

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This Element explores the politics of literary translation via case studies from the Heinemann African Writers Series and the work of twenty-first-century literary translators in Cameroon. It intervenes in debates concerning multilingualism, race and decolonization, as well as methodological discussion in African literary studies, world literature, comparative literature and translation studies. The task of translating African literary texts has developed according to political and socio-economic contexts. It has contributed to the consecration of a canon of African classics and fuelled polemics around African languages. Yet retranslation remains rare and early translations are frequently criticised. This Element's primary focus on the labour rather than craft or art of translation emphasises the material basis that underpins who gets to translate and how that embodied labour occurs within the process of book production and reception. The arguments draw on close readings, fresh archival material, interviews, and co-production and observation of literary translation workshops.

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Creative Writing as Literary Activism: Decolonial Perspectives on the Writing Workshop

Cited by 5 publications

References 27 publications

Connections 2: Roape Workshop in Dar es Salaam, 16–17 April 2018

Connections 2: Roape Workshop in Dar es Salaam, 16–17 April 2018

In Pursuit of the “Real” Nigeria/n through the Archives of Heinemann’s African Writers Series

Translation Imperatives

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