Africa Initiative
ATLANTIC WORLDS WORKSHOP
Monday, November 17 | 11: 45 am
Classroom Building 229 (https://maps.duke.edu/?focus=160)
Speaker: Dr Adom Getachew, University of Chicago
Professor Adom Getachew
Adom Getachew is Professor of Political Science and Race, Diaspora & Indigeneity and Interim Chair of the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. She is a political theorist with research interests in the history of political thought, theories of race and empire, and postcolonial political theory. Her work focuses on the intellectual and political histories of Africa and the Caribbean. She is the author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (2019) and co-editor, with Jennifer Pitts, of W. E. B. Du Bois: International Thought (2022). She is currently working on a second book on the intellectual origins and political practices of Garveyism—the black nationalist/pan-African movement, which had its height in the 1920s. Her public writing has appeared in Dissent, Foreign Affairs, the London Review of Books, the Nation, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times.
TRANSLATING NGUGI WA THIONG’O’S LEGACY INTO THE FUTURE
Monday, November 17 | 3:00 pm -4:30 pm
Smith Warehouse, Bay 4, Ahmadieh Lecture Hall ( https://maps.duke.edu/?focus=1874)
Speakers: Professor James Ogude and Professor Wangui Wa Goro
Professor James Ogude
Professor Ogude is the Director at the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria, a position he assumed in 2017, having been with the Centre since May 2013. He is an “A2” rated researcher by the National Research Foundation (NRF). He has just concluded a five year project on the Southern African philosophical concept of Ubuntu funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation. He is currently leading a Mellon funded supra-national project involving the Universities of Ghana, Makerere, Cape Town and Pretoria. He is also the Director of the African Observatory for Environmental Humanities located at the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria.
Until his appointment to the Centre, he was a Professor of African Literature and Cultures in the School of Literature, Language and Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he worked since 1994, serving as the Head of African Literature and also Assistant Dean – Research, in the Faculty of Humanities.
His research interests include the broad area of African literature in English and Postcolonial theories, with a specific focus on issues of memory and reconstruction of African history and identities. More recently, his research focus has shifted to popular cultures and literature in Africa, in an attempt to understand how these cultures produced from below help us to understand issues of power and its uses on the continent. He is also working in the area of Black intellectual traditions.
He is the author of Ngugi’s Novels and African History: Narrating the Nation (1999). He has edited a total of eight books and one anthology of African stories. His most recent edited books are: Ubuntu and Personhood (2018); Ubuntu and the Everyday(co-edited with Uni Dyer, 2019); Ubuntu and the Reconstitution of Community (2019). In addition, he has edited a number of books in literature and related areas and these include: Chinua Achebe’s Legacy: Illuminations from Africa (2015);Rethinking Eastern African Literary and Intellectual Landscapes(2012), and Urban Legends, Colonial Myths: Popular Culture and Literature in East Africa (2007). Ogude has published numerous articles in peer reviewed journals in the area of African Literature and Popular Culture in East Africa.
Professor Wangu Wa Goro
She is a widely acclaimed translator, writer, poet, academic, cultural curator, editor with a great passion for languages, literature and intersectional freedom. She is best known for her scholarship as a translation theorist, critic, practitioner and promoter, including its practical applications. She has spent a large part of her adult life as an academic, working across cutting areas of education, sociology, translation, literature, teaching, criticism, curation, research and service in different parts of the world.
She works in an international Development Organisation and also runs the international intercultural dialogues Africa in Translation (AiT) through SIDENSI. She has served in many academic, literary organizations, and on academic journals, magazines and prizes and supported publishing houses as a reader/critic and as a media commentator and served on many academic boards and literary committees. For instance, she has served as the Co-Convenor of the Women’s Caucus of the African Studies Association and the Deputy President of the African Literature Association. She is also the founder member of TRACALA, the Translation Caucus of the ALA and she also serves on the executive committee of International Association of Translation Studies (IATIS).
She has been recognized for her contribution to literature, including with an Honorary Professorship of Practice in Translation at SOAS and with a Visiting Professorship at Kings College London for her work in Education and Leadership. She considers herself an ambassador and advocate for human, social, political and cultural rights and enjoys working with young people. Her friends consider her “the quintessential transnational global Pan African, feminist Afropolitan, which though she finds hilarious but which she relishes”.
Her recent fictional work has appeared in the highly acclaimed New Daughters of Africa edited by Margaret Busby, and she is well known for her translations of Ngugi’s wa Thiong’o’s earlier work and Veronique Tadjo’s work, As the Crow Flies from French among other translations through which she continues to break new ground for, in and across African literatures such as her works from French, Italian, Kiswahili and Gikuyu. Her own fiction work “Heaven and Earth” in A Half a day and other stories (MacMillan) edited by Ayebia Clarke was taught on the Kenyan curriculum for several years, and her story “Deep Sea Fishing” edited by Ama Ata Aidoo (Ayebia) appeared in the award-winning African Love Stories.
AFRICAN LITERATURE COLLOQUIUM
Friday, November 14.
Event details
The Concilium on Southern Africa invites you to “The Archives of African Literature Colloquium.” The colloquium will feature Keynote Speaker Jean-Marie Jackson and several presenting and responding scholars.
Join us on Friday, November 14th, 2025, 9 am – 3:15 pm in 314 Allen Building on Duke University’s West Campus.
Introduction
Neil ten Kortenaar – Volume editor
MORNING SESSION
“Nairobi as an Archive of Literary Imagination”
James Ogude (University of Pretoria) – Editor
Christopher Ouma (Duke University) – Respondent
“Algiers as a ‘Realm’ of Memory in Contemporary Algerian Postcolonial Literature of French Expression”
Valerie Orlando (University of Maryland)
Courtney Klashman (Duke University, PhD Candidate) – Respondent
“Imagining Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Works of African”
Cheryl Sterling (Penn State)
Ethan Barrett (Duke University, PhD Candidate) – Respondent
AFTERNOON SESSION
KEYNOTE
“On Gold Coast Jurisdictional Modernity: African Literature’s Archive of Distinction”
Jeanne-Marie Jackson (Johns Hopkins University) – Keynote
Tsitsi Jaji (Duke University) – Respondent
“The Archival Impulse in African Fictions of Civil Strife”
Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba (University of Winnipeg)
Sam Dennis Otieno (Penn State University) – Respondent
“The Colonial Archive”
Neil ten Kortenaar (University of Toronto) – Volume Editor
Alex Fyfe (University of Georgia) – Respondent
KEYNOTE SPEAKER:
Jean-Marie Jackson is a Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University, a scholar and critic of African and world literature with interests in theory of the novel, literature and philosophy, sub-Saharan African literature, Russian realism, and global regionalisms. Jackson is the author of South African Literature’s Russian Soul, The African Novel of Ideas, and The Letter of the Law in J.E. Casely Hayford’s West Africa.
“The Archives of African Literature Colloquium” is sponsored by the Black Archival Imagination Lab at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke Africa Initiative, Duke Concilium of Southern Africa, Duke English, and the Department of African & African American Studies at Duke University.
You can register to attend remotely at https://duke.is/b/fbga
THE ATLANTIC WORLDS WORKSHOPS
