January 17, 2025
2025 LASA Conference: Call for Papers
Theme: Status Quo and Besides: The State of South African Literary and Cultural Studies
Date: 8 to 9 May 2025
Venue: 26 Degrees South, Muldersdrift, Gauteng, South Africa
Due date for abstracts: 15 February 2025
Contact: info@lasa.org.za
The Literature Association of South Africa (LASA) invites literary scholars and postgraduate students to submit abstracts for its 2025 conference, to be hosted at 26 Degrees South, Muldersdrift, Gauteng, South Africa, from 8 to 9 May 2025.
Looming large in South African literature and culture are elements of a deeply painful and divisive past. Centuries of colonisation were followed by a long struggle against apartheid, which ended with the first democratic elections in 1994. While the initial sense of hopefulness surrounding this event has faded over time – especially in relation to the many failures and faultlines of the post-apartheid nation-state – 1994 remains a watershed in the South African collective consciousness and imaginary. This moment has become a central point around which historical, literary, and cultural meaning/s have become perpetually anchored. There have been important attempts to refine our view beyond the bifurcated thinking that often characterised the logic of apartheid itself. Binary mappings along ideological lines (resistance/apartheid) and temporal ones (apartheid/post-apartheid) have been powerfully problematised by notions of the ordinary (Ndebele, 1986), the seam (De Kock, 2001), complicity (Sanders, 2002), entanglement (Nuttall, 2009), nostalgia (Dlamini 2009) and the post-transitional (Frenkel and MacKenzie, 2010), to mention just a few. Nonetheless, despite these important analytical interventions, South African literature is still strongly shaped by its cultural and political memory of apartheid.
Within scholarship and university curricula, our history has generally taken shape in an increased research and teaching focus concerned with South African literature and culture, and this has also expanded into forays into African literature and culture. The 2025 LASA conference seeks to explore the status quo of South African literary and cultural studies on two planes:
- Un/making the status quo: We invite scholars to consider the past and present of South African literary and cultural studies, in their broadest conception, in order to gain a view of what is yet to come, or what might be called for. In other words, what was/is the status quo, how did we get here, and what might it be(come) within the next decade?
- Besides: Despite the emphasis of many scholarly spaces on South African and African literary and cultural studies, we would also like to invite scholars to ruminate on those sub-disciplines, genres and sub-genres, areas of interest, literary and cultural theories, and scholarly quirks that also populate the full picture of scholarship in South Africa, which are no less important than that which might be considered the scholarly “mainstream”. We are particularly interested in scholars who wish to contribute to our understanding of key concerns and issues in contemporary literary and cultural studies scholarship in South Africa, even if the sites of analysis are outside the borders of South Africa.
To this end, we invite papers on both broader and more focused topics, all within the area of South African literary and cultural studies:
- Considerations of the status quo
- Literary studies in South Africa (past, present and future)
- The role and function of national narratives (especially in terms of cultural touchstones and sports events)
- Freedom and captivity
- Land, identity, and meaning
- Nostalgia
- Futurism, dystopia, and utopia
- Repair/disrepair, advancement/decline
- Artificial intelligence
- Representing gender, sexuality, and race
- Literature and the politics of space/place
- Decolonisation and the postcolonial
- Africa and Africanisation
- The Black Archive
- Migration
- Borders and boundaries
- Drama and film studies
- Literature and literary theory in multilingual spaces
- Comparative readings: South Africa in conversation with the world
- The teaching of literature in South Africa
- Canonical textual studies from beyond Africa
Abstracts of between 250 and 300 words can be submitted by 15 February 2025 to info@lasa.org.za. (Acceptance to be confirmed soon after submission.) Papers can be presented in English or Afrikaans. 30 minutes will be set aside for each paper: 20 minutes for reading and 10 minutes for questions. Conference fee and payment details to be announced later.
Presenters at the conference will have the opportunity to rework their papers into full length articles (approx. 6000 words) for submission to a special conference issue of Journal of Literary Studies. The journal is peer reviewed and indexed in the following: Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) of Web of Science, Index to South African Periodicals, British Humanities Index, Humanities International Index, Scopus (Q1, as of November 2024), and MLA International Bibliography. It is also listed on the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).