The State of South African Literary and Cultural Studies
8 to 9 May 2025
26 Degrees South, Muldersdrift, Gauteng, South Africa
The Literature Association of South Africa (LASA) invites literary scholars and postgraduate students to submit abstracts for its 2025 conference, to be hosted at 26 Degrees South, Muldersdrift, Gauteng, South Africa, from 8 to 9 May 2025.
Looming large in South African literature and culture are elements of a deeply painful and divisive past. Centuries of colonisation were followed by a long struggle against apartheid, which ended with the first democratic elections in 1994. While the initial sense of hopefulness surrounding this event has faded over time - especially in relation to the many failures and faultlines of the post-apartheid nation-state - 1994 remains a watershed in the South African collective consciousness and imaginary. This moment has become a central point around which historical, literary, and cultural meaning/s have become perpetually anchored. There have been important attempts to refine our view beyond the bifurcated thinking that often characterised the logic of apartheid itself. Binary mappings along ideological lines (resistance/apartheid) and temporal ones (apartheid/post-apartheid) have been powerfully problematised by notions of the ordinary (Ndebele, 1986), the seam (De Kock, 2001), complicity (Sanders, 2002), entanglement (Nuttall, 2009), nostalgia (Dlamini 2009) and the post-transitional (Frenkel and MacKenzie, 2010), to mention just a few. Nonetheless, despite these important analytical interventions, South African literature is still strongly shaped by its cultural and political memory of apartheid.
Within scholarship and university curricula, our history has generally taken shape in an increased research and teaching focus concerned with South African literature and culture, and this has also expanded into forays into African literature and culture. The 2025 LASA conference seeks to explore the status quo of South African literary and cultural studies on two planes:
To this end, we invite papers on both broader and more focused topics, all within the area of South African literary and cultural studies:
Abstracts of between 250 and 300 words can be submitted by 15 February 2025 to [email protected]. (Acceptance to be confirmed soon after submission.) 30 minutes will be set aside for each paper: 20 minutes for reading and 10 minutes for questions. Conference fee and payment details to be announced later.
Presenters at the conference will have the opportunity to rework their papers into full length articles (approx. 6000 words) for submission to a special conference issue of Journal of Literary Studies. The journal is peer reviewed and indexed in the following: Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) of Web of Science, Index to South African Periodicals, British Humanities Index, Humanities International Index, Scopus (Q1, as of November 2024), and MLA International Bibliography. It is also listed on the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).