Leverhulme Trust Funding Success for OU and Warwick University collaboration

Professor Dennis Walder of the Arts Faculty has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Project Grant of £140, 826 for a three-year joint project with Dr Yvette Hutchison of the University of Warwick, entitled ‘Performing Memory: theatricalising identity in contemporary South Africa’ . The grant is to fund two full-time PhD students, as well as travel and archival work.

Professor Walder is Director of the Ferguson Centre for African & Asian Studies, where one of the students will be based, and a South African theatre archive established; the other will be supervised by Dr Hutchison, an Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at Warwick.

Both Walder and Hutchison have wide experience of research and publication in the South African theatre context – Walder’s work on playwright Athol Fugard is well known - and they recently co-edited a special Africa Issue of Contemporary Theatre Review. The Ferguson Centre is engaged in a number of projects related to memory, identity and nation, and is building up an archive of research materials.

The aim of the new project is to explore how formal processes of remembering and recording the contested histories of South Africa – such as the Truth and Reconciliation hearings – are related to popular performative representations including plays, installations, memorials, film and TV. The outcomes of the project will include a book and several articles.

New Writing Prize for poetry, fiction and life writing

As part of their 25th anniversary celebrations, Wasafiri has launched a New Writing Prize for poetry, fiction and life writing. The competition closes for entries on 30 June, and the winner will be announced on 31 October at a day-long programme of events for Wasafiri at the Southbank Centre in London. Judges for the prize include Margaret Busby, Mimi Khalvati, Susheila Nasta and Blake Morrison. The winner of each category will receive £300, and their work will be published in the first issue of Wasafiri in 2010.

Wasafiri, the literary magazine at the forefront of contemporary international writing, celebrates its 25th birthday in 2009. To mark the occasion, a variety of celebratory events is planned throughout the year.

Since the magazine was first published in 1984 it has continued to champion new writing, celebrating Britain’s diverse cultural heritage together with inspirational writing from around the world. ‘Wasafiri’, the Kiswahili word for ‘travellers’, echoes the magazine’s ethos of writing as a form of cultural travel and its aim to extend the established boundaries of literary culture.

Founded in 1984 by the writer, critic and academic, Susheila Nasta, the magazine has provided a platform for hundreds of writers. Many were struggling to be heard at the outset of their writing careers, and many have since gone on to become world-renowned, award winners.

For further information about the New Writing Prize and forthcoming events, visit the website – www.wasafiri.org

Wasafiri is supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, the Open University and Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

The Books that Made Me

Boyd Tonkin chairs literary panel at The British Library, in association with Wasafiri magazine and Arts Council England.

Monday 18 May: 6.30-8.00pm

Conference Centre, British Library, 96 Euston Road, London, W1

£6 / £4 concessions

2009 marks the 25th anniversary of Wasafiri magazine, the literary magazine at the forefront of contemporary international writing. To celebrate, the magazine is hosting a literary debate at The British Library, to discuss how literature impacts on some of the leading writers of today.

The panel, chaired by The Independent’s Literary Editor Boyd Tonkin, includes distinguished authors Helen Cross, Diana Evans, Aamer Hussein, Caryl Phillips and Marina Warner. Reflecting on the books that have inspired them, the panel will discuss why some books impact so forcefully on our reading and writing lives, as well as looking at the ways in which we encounter them and in which they return to us.

Wasafiri magazine was founded in 1984 by the writer, critic and academic, Susheila Nasta. Celebrating Britain’s diverse cultural heritage together with inspirational writing from around the world, the magazine champions new writing and has provided a platform for hundreds of writers. The magazine championed early works by Vikram Seth and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and has featured interviews, reviews and new writing by Hari Kunzru, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, Anita Desai, Linda Grant, Maggie Gee, Michael Horowitz and Catherine O'Flynn. Prestigious contributors to the magazine include V S Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje, Ben Okri and Chinua Achebe.

Tickets for ‘The Books that Made Me’ are now on sale at http://boxoffice.bl.uk, by telephone on 01937 546546 (Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm) or in person at The British Library Information Desk.

For more information on this event and for a full list of anniversary activity throughout 2009, go to www.wasafiri.org.

Wasafiri is supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, the Open University and Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Profiles of chair and speakers:

• The Chair, Boyd Tonkin, studied English and French literature at Cambridge University. He taught literature in higher and adult education before becoming an award-winning magazine journalist, a feature writer and features editor of the weekly magazine for social services professionals, Community Care. Already a freelance writer and interviewer for The Observer, he became social policy editor of the New Statesman, and then Literary Editor, before moving to The Independent as Literary Editor. In addition to working as organiser and judge on the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize since 2000, he has judged the Booker Prize, the Whitbread biography award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize and (in 2007) the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in literature. He has reported on literary and artistic issues from more than 20 countries on four continents, and his cultural essays have been published widely; most recently, in the British Council anthology New Writing 15 (Granta).
• Helen Cross is the author of The Secrets She Keeps and My Summer of Love, which won a Betty Trask Prize and was made into an award-winning film. Helen's second novel, The Secrets She Keeps is now available in paperback, and her third novel, Spilt Milk, Black Coffee is published by Bloomsbury in May 2009. She lives in Birmingham.
• Diana Evans was a dancer before she became a writer and critic. Her first novel, 26a, received a Betty Trask award, a nomination for the Guardian First Book Award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel of the Year Award. It was also the inaugural winner of the Orange Award for New Writers. She lives in London.
• Aamer Hussein is the author of the short story collections, This Other Salt, Turquoise and Insomnia. His first novel, Another Gulmohar Tree, will be published by Telegram on 7 May 2009.
• Caryl Phillips has written for television, radio, theatre and cinema and is the author of twelve works of fiction and non-fiction. Crossing the River was shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize and Caryl Phillips has won the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, as well as being named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 1992 and one of the Best of Young British Writers 1993. A Distant Shore won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 2004 and Dancing in the Dark was shortlisted in 2006. His next book, In the Falling Snow, will be published in June 2009.
• Marina Warner has an international reputation as a critic, historian and a novelist. Her recent non-fiction works include The Beast to the Blonde, No Go the Bogeyman and Fantastic Metamorphoses, while her fiction includes the novels The Lost Father (shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Indigo and The Leto Bundle, and most recently a short-story collection, Murderers I Have Known.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Re-imagining postcolonial futures: knowledge transactions and contests of culture in the African present.

The Centre for Humanities Research of the University of the Western Cape and The Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies of the Open University are calling for papers for their conference:

Re-imagining postcolonial futures:
knowledge transactions and contests
of culture in the African present.
9-11 July 2009
at Centre for Humanities Research,
University of the Western Cape

Call for Papers:
At a time of intensified political shifts and realignments, and renewed appeals to culture and indigenous knowledge, the re-imagining of the nation and society in South Africa poses challenges to the scripts of postcolonial studies. These contests and issues in debate are being felt at every level in public culture. They are also part of an emergent sense of uncertainty in many societies around the world that at the same time hold out new possibilities for redefinition and reconstitution. What are the new scripts for daily life? How might the postcolony be rendered liveable? What are the boundaries of the new nation? What are the markers of time in the African present and how is expertise being reconstituted in the humanities? Is it possible to imagine different ethical relations between knowledge projects and lived experience? And how might knowledge unravel the histories of violence in the postcolony?

This conference seeks to create a platform for ideas, engagements and analyses that are alert to the new complexities and nuances that underlie the seemingly banal expressions of politics in public life. South African scholarship needs to be placed in a critical relation to other postcolonial projects because of the danger of South African exceptionalism.

The challenges of rethinking knowledge have given rise to a substantial rearrangement of academic inquiry. Museum studies, heritage, indigenous knowledge and archival platforms are emerging as critical sites for new engagements in the humanities. The very organisation of research is being called into question as universities worldwide strive to establish research centres alongside discipline-based knowledge processes. At the same time the scripts of expertise and service to the community are increasingly called into question.

This conference will take place at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape with support from the office of the Dean of Arts. It is made possible through a partnership with and generous funding from the Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies at the Open University in UK. The conference heralds a new partnership between the CHR and the Ferguson Centre in promoting cutting-edge research in the humanities. This is an initiative in research development. We wish to bring together senior and junior scholars as well as promising graduate students. Papers are invited on the following themes:

• War and the everyday
• Heritage politics, cultural production and aesthetics
• Postcolonial memorial complexes
• Pitfalls of indigenous reworkings
• New networks and mobilities in the postcolonial city
• Forced migrations and the biopolitics of statehood
• Spirituality and the religious idiom
• Nationalism and its neo-liberal moulds

Abstracts of 150 – 200 words are due on 15 May 2009 and should be sent to Ms Lameez Lalkhen at llalkhen@uwc.ac.za, the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape. Enquiries to Premesh Lalu, plalu@uwc.ac.za or Dennis Walder, d.j.walder@open.ac.uk

Edited from email from Heather Scott, Research Centre Secretary, The Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies, Faculty of Arts, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA

Please visit the Ferguson Centre website at: www.open.ac.uk/arts/ferguson-centre