Inaugural Lecture of Prof Fiona Moolla | Arts and Humanities скачать в хорошем качестве

Inaugural Lecture of Prof Fiona Moolla | Arts and Humanities

Topic: Emotions in African Literature: An Invitation to Study Abstract: I have been a reader and scholar of African literature for the greater part of my life. In recent years, it has struck me that emotions have not been foregrounded in the Anglophone writing that has come to represent African literature internationally from around the mid-twentieth century. Neither have emotions been identified as a serious and sustained focus in African literature scholarship. This inaugural lecture, through a reading of the work of a few icons of African literature, speculates about some of the complex gendered and racially inflected reasons why emotions have been elided. It uses the emotion of love, in particular, as it emerges in the work of Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo to interrogate the representation (and misrepresentation) of emotion in the novels of Nigerian writers Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. The concept of the emotion is socially and culturally constructed and is crucial to understanding the constitution of the self and theories of knowledge. It is hoped that this inaugural lecture will inaugurate a broader critical and reflective study of emotions in African literature. Speaker Biography: F. Fiona Moolla is a Professor in the English Department and has been the Deputy Dean of Research and Postgraduate Study in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities since 2023. She is an NRF C2-Rated researcher, and the author of Reading Nuruddin Farah: The Individual, the Novel & the Idea of Home (James Currey, 2014), and the editor of Natures of Africa: Ecocriticism and Animal Studies in Contemporary Cultural Forms (WITS UP, 2016), among numerous other academic and non-academic publications. Emotions in African literature and culture is her current field of interest, where she is co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge History of Love in World Literature and Culture. Prof Moolla has won many research and creative writing awards, and is on the editorial boards of prestigious national and international journals. #IAmUWC #UWCInauguralLecture