Madhu Krishnan is Professor of African, World and Comparative Literatures at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Writing Spatiality in West Africa: Colonial Legacies in the Anglophone/Francophone Novel (2018), Contingent Canons: African Literature and the Politics of Location (2018), and Contemporary African Literature in English: Global Locations, Postcolonial Identifications (2014). She is part of several research networks, including Ugandan Youth and Creative Writing and Small Magazines, Literary Networks and Self-Fashioning in Africa and its Diasporas.

Professor Madhu Krishnan, University of Bristol

Literary Activism, Ecologies of Production and Networks of Practice in Contemporary Africa

Organised in partnership with Kings College London.

In this talk, chaired by Dr Sara Marzagora (Kings College London) Professor Madhu Krishnan (University of Bristol) traces the ways in which the concept of literary activism functions on the African continent in the 21st century.

While there are a number of definitions for literary activism, Krishnan refers to the inherently activist act of opening platforms and spaces for literary creation outside of the dominant models of the so-called global literary field. She discusses how grassroots, localised and continentally-centred efforts at literary activism have produced ecologies of literary production which, while less visible than the forms of writing which circulate in the world literary field, nonetheless constitute one important vector for its understanding.

Krishnan uses case studies from Cameroon, Uganda, Kenya and elsewhere to consider the ways in which networks of practice have evolved over the first two decades of the millennium which leverage intra-Africa connections and exchanges, multilingual and translation practices and digital media to create more expansive reading publics and commons.