SOUTH AFRICAN MODERNISM
1880-2020
Image: Gerard Sekoto, Three Men at a Railway Station (1939-40)
Image used with permission from The Gerard Sekoto Foundation
South African Modernism 1880-2020 is an AHRC-funded research project led by Prof Jade Munslow Ong (University of Salford, UK), with Co-Investigator Prof Andrew van der Vlies (University of Adelaide, Australia). Current team members and project affiliates include Dr Hannah Helm (Salford), Dr Emma Barnes (Salford), Dr Sanja Nivesjö (Uppsala University, Sweden) and Simon Stanton-Sharma (Salford). The project examines South African literary modernism and its international connections across the period 1880-2020. It will run from January 2021 - April 2024, and details of events, publications, a blog, and other resources are hosted here.
The project team pursues three related research strands. First, we examine how South African personal and textual networks helped shape literary modernism from the nineteenth century to the present day. Second, we investigate how modernism provided, and continues to provide, a politically-charged mode of representation for South African writers responding to major historical events and changing political, economic, social, and cultural contexts. Finally, we explore how South African literature is related, and compares, to other global forms of modernist writing.
