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Forms of Mobility: Genre, Language and Media in African Literary Cultures
March 6 @ 2:30 pm - 4:00 pm
Waiting on Forever by Franco The Creator Mbilizi. Image courtesy of Stephanie Bosch Santana.
Friday, March 6, 2026
2:30pm
Kaplan Hall Room #348 (third floor)
In person
About the Talk
In this talk, Stephanie Bosch Santana discusses her first monograph, Forms of Mobility: Genre, Language, and Media in African Literary Cultures, published by Northwestern University Press in 2025. Based on an unstudied archive of texts in English and Chichewa/Nyanja from Malawi, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Zambia, Forms of Mobility proposes alternate categories of fiction—migrant forms, township tales, weekend stories, pan African time machines, and digital diaries—through which to examine how writers envisaged the region’s changing literary and political terrains. By reading these forms “in motion,” as they travel across space, time, genre, language, and between publications and platforms, this study limns multiple centers of literary influence and relation across the southern African and Black diasporas and reveals forms of literary mobility and space-making that are occluded by current models of world literature.
About the Author
Stephanie Bosch Santana is the co-editor of Digital Africas, a special issue of Postcolonial Text (2020), and has contributed essays on digital and print literatures and reading cultures to the Routledge Handbook of African Literature (2019) and A Companion to African Literatures (Wiley-Blackwell, 2021). From 2006-2008, she assisted with South Africa’s BTA/Anglo Platinum short story competition and is co-founder of the Malawian Girls’ Literary Competition, which celebrates young women’s writing in English and Chichewa.