11:00 - 12:30
Room: Arts – Lecture Room 7
Stream: African Literature: Communities, Collaborations, Crafts & Crossings
Chair/s:
Asha Rogers
Positioning Anglophone African Poetry: The Case of Saraba Magazine
Nathan Suhr-Sytsma
Emory University, Atlanta

Existing scholarship on anglophone African poetry tends to treat poems primarily as politics by other means: critiquing colonialism, reclaiming indigenous identities, protesting authoritarian governments. What other kinds of cultural, ethical, and subjective work might twenty-first-century anglophone Africa poetry be doing? In this paper, I am particularly interested in how African-based poets affiliate with face-to-face and digital communities at local, intra-African, and intercontinental scales simultaneously. I approach this question through the prism of Saraba magazine. A Nigerian-based collective that engages writers across the continent and the diaspora, Saraba is a primarily digital platform nonetheless attentive to print aesthetics; it publishes poetry alongside other literary, critical, and visual modes. I suggest that approaching contemporary African poetry scenes via Saraba offers a way not so much to posit a specifically African literary field (à la Pierre Bourdieu) as to work through the applicability of post-Bourdieusian concepts (Bernard Lahire’s plural actor, Jerôme Meizoz’s literary postures) for literary positioning beyond Europe. I intend this literary sociology of African poetry to contribute both a distinct approach and a new textual archive to the vigorous rethinking of poetics by US-based scholars who variously identify their perspectives as transnational (Jahan Ramazani), global (Omaar Hena; Walt Hunter), or diasporic (Carrie Noland; Sonya Posmentier).


Reference:
We-A08 African Literature 2-P-001
Presenter/s:
Nathan Suhr-Sytsma
Presentation type:
Panel
Room:
Arts – Lecture Room 7
Chair/s:
Asha Rogers
Date:
Wednesday, 12 September
Time:
11:00 - 11:15
Session times:
11:00 - 12:30