We are very pleased to report a flurry of recent activities:
Film Funding
In January we were awarded a University of Salford ‘Reignite Your Research’ grant to create a short film about contemporary creative engagements with South African modernist literature. Filmmakers Simon Stanton-Sharma and Maire Tracey will work with project researchers Emma Barnes, Jade Munslow Ong and Sanja Nivesjö, and colleague Matthew Whittle (Kent), to film on location in South Africa in July.
Book Contract
In February we were delighted to sign a contract with Edinburgh University Press for the edited collection, Olive Schreiner: Writing Networks and Global Contexts. For more information about the collection and other project publications see here.
Article
In April, Jade published her article ‘“Too uncompromising a figure to be so disposed of”: Virginia Woolf and/on Olive Schreiner’ in English Studies in Africa 65.1. The article is part of a special issue on A Century of Modernism in South African Literature and Literary Culture, edited by Rick de Villiers.
The issue also includes essays on the modernisms of H.I.E. Dhlomo, Edward Wolfe and William Plomer, Virginia Woolf and Fiona Melrose, J.M. Coetzee, and Chinua Achebe, by contributors Rick de Villiers, Arthur Rose, Michelle Adler, Sofia Kostelac and Russell West-Pavlov.
Collaborations
PAC@75:
We continue to be involved in a cross-institutional project to commemorate and celebrate the Fifth-Pan African Congress (1945) and its legacies. A recording of an October event combining a student-made film about the Congress and panel discussion with the filmmakers can now be found here.
The film was made by University of Salford MA Drama Production and Post-Production students in collaboration with MMU and the organisers of the 75th Anniversary of the Fifth Pan-African Congress (PAC@75). Focusing on the stories of Kwame Nkrumah, Len Johnson and Amy Ashwood Garvey, the film interweaves archival materials, narrative and original imagery. The film explores the broader global political, cultural and social impacts of Pan-Africanism, Black Liberation and Equal Rights movements, then and now.
Filmmakers: Adam Douglas, Danny Haywood, Tsvetozar Clint Ivanov, Sam Wells
Event Chairs: Dr Kai Syng Tan (MMU), Prof Ola Uduku (Liverpool, then MMU) and Dr Jade Munslow Ong (Salford)
Organisers and Collaborators: Adrian Castronovo (MMU), Dr Stefanie El Madawi (MMU), Becky Swain (Poetry Library), Simon Stanton-Sharma (Salford), Maire Tracey (Salford)
National College Radio:
We have recently linked up with Jimmy Ewing and the team behind National College Radio, and are busy working with local colleges to plan literature-based radio programmes. We’re really looking forward to taking SA Modernism on tour in the pop-up radio station!