Polo Moji and Laura Nkula-Wenz are the co-leads of African Literary Cities: Hubs, Maps and Literary Urban Ecologies, a collaborative project between the Department of English Literary Studies and the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town. The project addresses the “absenting” of African literary cities—a complex engagement with cityness and literariness—in both globally authoritative cultural policy discourses and the emerging scholarly field of Literary Urban Studies.
As a form of urbanity, the literary city can be considered a narrative that (re)produces itself in both material and imaginative forms and can thus not be read solely through a single disciplinary lens. This project therefore proposes the notion of “literary urban ecologies” to make sense of the complex entanglements and (re)productions of cityness and literature.
We are not concerned with creating an authoritative definition of the African Literary City. Rather, we are interested in mapping how literary cityness is locally produced in the contexts of dynamic African cities that are constantly “making connections of all kinds” through their literary (re)presentation. To this end, we have engaged with different Literary Festivals on the continent and are engaged in an ongoing project of mapping representations of African cityness in literary works through a crowd-sourced online map.
Primary representative: Laura Nkula-Wenz