Welcome to the School of Literature and Language Studies (SLLS) at Wits University.
The School is situated in Johannesburg, Africa’s ‘elusive metropolis’ in which global, continental and national crosscurrents converge in surprising and fascinating shapes and turns – and in ways that remain, always, on the brink of exploration and description.
In Joburg, one’s work is never done. In literary-cultural studies, this is one of the key spots in Africa to be if you are interested in the surges and flows, the forces and factors running across a territory deeply marked by history and crucially defined by difference. If you are curious about the dance of forms and the play of expressive vitality in one of Africa’s heartbeat cities, now, Johannesburg is the place to be.
In 2008, SLLS launched a research focus under the title ‘Transnational Legacies’ as a way of coordinating cross-disciplinary research into cultural and literary conditions now that the country has been in the thick of transnational currents for roughly two decades.
An exciting series of events kicked off in 2009, including workshops on working concepts in transnationalism run by top international scholars. These included Ania Loomba (University of Pennsylvania) and Lakshmi Subramaniam (Jama Millia University, New Delhi), both of whom visited SLLS as Mellon Distinguished Fellows. Other notable scholars who participated in various Transnational Legacies events in 2009 include Dr Sunil Amrith (University of London), Prof Mrinalini Sinha
(Pennsylvania State University); Prof Antoinette Burton (University of Illinois); Prof Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie (University of the Western Cape); Profs Shireen Hassim and Isabel Hofmeyr (Wits), and Prof Dilip Menon (see more on Prof Menon below).
In 2010, the School will host Prof Rita Barnard, also of the University of Pennsylvania, as a Mellon Distinguished Fellow. Prof Barnard, an expatriate South African scholar of high distinction, is currently Professor of English and director of the Women's Studies Program and the Alice Paul Center for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is author, most recently, of Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place (OUP, 2007).
The School is home to several leading international scholars, including one of the relatively few A-rated academics in literature studies (Professor Isabel Hofmeyr), and several other notable figures in fields as far apart as African literature, postcolonial studies, the Renaissance, American literature, literary theory, South African literature, German, French, Italian and other modern European languages, linguistics, translating and interpreting, gender studies, media and creative writing (see People of SLLS for features on some of these scholars). Prof Hofmeyr, for many years now affiliated with the discipline of African Literature in SLLS, has been made a Research Professor in the field of Southern Transnationalisms, and she will be leading blue-sky research in this area.
As a result of Prof Hofmeyr’s tireless work over the past few years, the pioneering Centre for Indian Studies (CISA) was launched from within SLLS – it is now a Wits Humanities centre which continues to probe into South-South global interconnections. CISA has brought an entirely new sense of cross-connectedness (beyond merely a ‘Black Atlantic’) to conceptions of resistance and transformation in various ‘postcolonies’ in the South in the wake of globalization. SLLS, in addition, feels privileged to play host to distinguished historian Prof Dilip Menon, now Professor of History and Mellon Chair in Indian Studies at Wits/SLLS. Under CISA and Professor Menon’s leadership, SLLS will be coordinating the Wits/CISA International Graduate workshop series over the next five years. The purpose of these workshops is to build a vibrant postgraduate and postdoctoral community through, first, the establishment of an MA programme in Histories of the South, looking at the shared histories of South Asia, South East Asia and Africa and second, attracting top-flight PhD and post-doctoral scholars from the South. A series of international conferences will be run over five years dealing with issues such as post-nationalism, cosmopolitanism, the Bandung spirit of south-south collaboration, and the histories of caste, race and apartheid.
Three major Wits/CISA International Research Workshops are envisaged, aimed at mentoring a new generation of graduate students from the global south, and consolidating the intellectual footprint of Wits in a worldwide arena.
SLLS academics in other disciplines, too, are engaged in vigorous new research projects, such as ‘Myth and Modernity in African Literature’ (led by Head of French and celebrated Francophone African writer Veronique Tadjo, see People of SLLS for profile); ‘Entangled Desires: Language and Libidinal Economy in a South African Internet Community’ (Linguistics senior lecturer Dr Tommaso Milani); ‘Eastern African Literary and Intellectual Landscapes’ (Professor in African Literature James Ogude); the Transnational City (Head of English, Associate Professor Gerald Gaylard); and many more.
SLLS also hosts Wits Journalism, the premier graduate school of journalism in Africa. Under the leadership of Prof Anton Harber, doyen of South African journalism in its regenerative and alternative mode, Wits Journalism has pioneered several groundbreaking projects, such as the Investigative Journalism Workshop, HIV/Aids and the Media Project, and the Kagiso Radio Academy, under its new director, Prof Franz Kruger, who is one of the country’s most experienced radio and broadcast journalists.
Apart from SLLS’s undergraduate programmes of study in African Literature, English, Media Studies, Journalism, African Languages, modern European languages, South African Sign Language and Linguistics, the School has a vigorous postgraduate programme which includes coursework Masters degrees as well as MA and PhD degrees by dissertation. The Creative Writing programme is running at full pace to cater for a real depth of talent in the Johannesburg writing community. Several new novels and works of creative nonfiction developed within the MA Creative Writing programme over the past few years have recently been published by reputable publishers, and several more are due to come out. One of the works arising from the MA Creative Writing programme published in 2009, Kevin Bloom’s Ways of Staying, has attracted widespread national and international attention, including an international publishing contract for Bloom.
SLLS also provides a suite of vocationally oriented courses and programmes that prepare students for careers in the language professions and the media industry.
Over the past two years the School has launched a series of public events, including a major poetry event in 2008 at which renowned poets Antjie Krog and Gabeba Baderoon (then Wits Writer in residence) shared the stage with performance poets Comrade Fatso and Bianca Williams, performing to a packed Senate Room on the Wits main campus. In 2009, SLLS hosted the first Wits Poetry Slam, at the Wits Downstairs Theatre, showcasing the poets Veronique Tadjo, Ike Mboneni Muila, Lesego Rampolokeng, Johannes van Jerusalem, Gail Dendy, and Comrade Fatso in an uproariously interactive event hosted by Leon de Kock and Demos ‘Mal Kafeegriek’ Takoulas. These landmark happenings and many other public events in the past two years have established SLLS as a space of keen performative interest to the Johannesburg community.
It is my intention to maintain and expand the public-events culture, so that the actual practice of literature on the one hand, and its various forms of analysis, on the other, do not diverge too far from each other. SLLS is a place where writers of all kinds, researchers and scholars in the literary-cultural field should feel at completely at home, and where pushing the frontiers is our daily work.
Leon de Kock
Head of School