The political history of late twentieth-century Southern Africa was dominated by violent liberation struggles against settler-colonial domination in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. All five countries experienced prolonged settler colonialism, followed by conflicts in which revolutionary national liberation movements (NLMs) sought to both end settler-colonial domination and build...
This dissertation examines the impact of sound on the African literary imagination since the 1970s. I posit the sonority of postcolonial African writing in order to draw out the relatively ignored but remarkably rich stylistic innovations and political interventions oriented around sound. While the orality–textuality debate in African literary studies...
Unmournable Void: Tending-Toward the Dead and Dying in Contemporary Black Performance and Visual Art, explores critical artistic practices that tend to the historical conditions of anti-black violence resulting from transatlantic slavery, colonialism, and apartheid. This triad of regimes produced the Black condition as the unmournable void lived in close proximity...
This dissertation elucidates the contemporary dance studio and stage in twenty-first century Senegal as privileged sites of knowledge production about gender and sexuality. Entangled within local and global dance lineages, funding structures, and modes of circulation, contemporary choreographers perform their bodies in ways that challenge predominant narratives, both those imagined...
Infidel(itie)s of Colour: Unruly Black Bodies, Modernity and Performance in Post-Apartheid South Africa focusses on the ways that queer and feminist artists of colour draw upon their traditional black cultural heritage and spiritual practises as a means of laying claim to cultural citizenship and belonging in post-apartheid South Africa. I...