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), Research and Innovation Associates Simon Stanton-Sharma (Salford) and Maire Tracey (Salford), and team members and project affiliates Dr Hannah Helm (Salford), Dr Emma Barnes (Salford), and Dr Sanja Nivesjö (Uppsala University, Sweden). The project examines South African literary modernism and its international connections from 1880 to 2020. The project began in January 2021 and has since received AHRC Follow-on-Funding to enhance and develop the impacts of the research under the project title South African Modernism: Decolonising Literary Studies In and Beyond the Classroom. This strand of work is funded until August 2025. 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.
