African Literary Cities: Hubs, Maps and Literary Urban Ecologies is a collaborative project between the Department of English Literary Studies and the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town. The project addresses the “absenting” of African literary cities –a complex engagement with cityness and literariness – in both globally authoritative cultural policy discourses and the emerging scholarly field of Literary Urban Studies.
Funded by the National Research Foundation, this project is co-led by Dr. Polo Moji (Department of English Literary Studies) and Dr. Laura Nkula-Wenz (African Centre for Cities).
As a form of urbanity, the literary city can be considered a narrative that (re)produces itself in both material and imaginative forms and can thus not be read solely with one single disciplinary lens. This project therefore motivates for a transdisciplinary, multimodal mapping of the literary urban ecologies of African cities, centring the intersection of literariness and cityness through a dual focus on materiality and the imaginary. We are not concerned with creating an authoritative definition of the African Literary City. We are interested rather to map how literary cityness is locally produced in the contexts of dynamic African cities that are constantly “cast out into the world” (Simone, 2001), making connections of all kinds through their literary (re)presentation.
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