We are delighted to announce the latest English Research Seminar, taking place in person and online on Wednesday 8th November between 2:30 and 3:30 on the University of Salford campus.
If you wish to attend as a member of the public, please contact Scott Thurston on S.Thurston@salford.ac.uk. The seminar is also available to online participants.
Abstract and bio of our speaker:
‘After The Burning Years: Freedom, Fugitivity and Manoeuvring Through Cemeteries Of Abandoned Futures’
I will begin with a short reading from my forthcoming experimental manuscript, titled And, In Those Honeyed Regions of Darkness. This is a story stalked by the crisis of Black histories and futurities within current South Africancultural imaginaries. Black futurities become a core theme precisely because we live, at least in my opinion, in a time where, “we are haunted by futures that failed to happen”, as Mark Fisher writes (2014). I want to meditate on and explore the idea of haunted futurities, or what theorist, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, once described as “cemeteries of abandoned futures,” and “futures murdered at birth, or even still-born futures” (2017). As a creative writer and literary scholar, artistic and creative inquiries are always undertaken as forms of research, linking theory and practice.
Sindiswa Busuku is a creative writer and a lecturer in the Department of English Literary Studies at the University of Cape Town. She grew up in Durban. She has published various poems in local and international poetry journals. In 2016, she published her debut collection titled Loud and Yellow Laughter (Botsotso) – a cross-genre assemblage of photographs, prose and poetry experimenting with imagination, memory and documentation. She was awarded second prize for the 2015 Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Award. Her work was shortlisted for the 2016 Gerald Kraak Award for African Writers and Artists, the 2016 University of Johannesburg Prize for South African Writing in English, and longlisted for the 2018 Humanities and Social Sciences Award. In addition, Loud and Yellow Laughter is the winner of the 2018 Ingrid Jonker Prize for poetry. Having been awarded a doctoral scholarship by The National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, she is currently reading for a Creative Writing PhD at the University of Witwatersrand. Her doctoral dissertation, And, In Those Honeyed Regions of Darkness, is an experimental work of poetic fiction stalked by the crisis of Black histories and futurities.
