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News & Updates
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).
August 19, 2023
Special Issue of the Journal of Literary Studies on Yellowstone (2018): Call for Papers
Yellowstone (Paramount Network), Taylor Sheridan’s neo-Western television series that premiered in 2018, has grown into a cultural phenomenon. Not only has the show itself been enormously popular (as measured by its ratings and fan following within the United States and South Africa, for example), but its characters, and the Dutton family that are central to the story, have since been incorporated into a shared story universe covering a period from 1881 to the present day. This story is centred around the fictional Yellowstone ranch in Montana, which is both the main setting and metaphorical heart of the show.
The production quality of the show, and the scope of its locations and narrative events, have seen the show being labelled as “prestige TV for conservatives” (Mathews 2018; Horton 2022) and a “Heartland drama” (Hibberd 2022). At the same time, it has been contrasted with shows that cater for a (perceived) more progressive audience – in particular with the HBO series and critical darling Succession (2018-2023), which, like Yellowstone, is centred around a wealthy patriarch and his children. As Horton (2022) and Wanzo (2022) have argued, however, it is a mistake to label Yellowstone as “red-state-Succession”. As Wanzo explains, “Yellowstone is certainly in the tradition of settler colonialism entertainment, but surely something interpretative is lost in understanding it only as that” (Wanzo 2022, 81). Furthermore, she writes, “there are some contexts in which the category of ‘conservative’ may not do analytical justice to the complicated ways in which pleasure, genre history, and politics work. Taylor Sheridan’s work certainly deserves more rigorous – and more interesting – categorization than that one word can deliver”.
Besides Wanzo (2022), there is a dearth of scholarly work on Yellowstone and its attendant prequel series, 1881 and 1923. This is clearly a critical lacuna, especially when one considers the popularity of the series. Popular cultural texts can provide the reader with access to the social realities of a specific moment in time and can be read as mimetic of societal views (Kellner 1996). Consequently Yellowstone, with its enormous popularity both within and outside of the United States of America, offers an opportunity to explore multiple, and intersecting, transnational discourses both within and surrounding the show. While the show has been produced as a high-budget television series, there are numerous narrative elements therein that draw from a multitude of cultural and literary influences, including constructed cultural memory (such as the idea of Manifest Destiny and embellished folk tales set during the expansion of the Western frontier of the United States) and popular narratives of the Old West (in film, television, computer games, and novels). Furthermore, the series keys into discourses around identity, belonging, nationality, gender, and race. As such, the critical lenses of both literary and cultural studies are well-suited to analyse the multivalent themes and discourses, as well as narrative techniques, utilised in the show.
The Journal of Literary Studies calls for submissions to a special issue that explores the multiple sites of analysis in Yellowstone. The issue will be edited by Hannelie Marx Knoetze (Department of Communication Sciences, University of South Africa) and Reinhardt Fourie (Department of Afrikaans and Theory of Literature, University of South Africa).
The focal points of submissions are to fall within the broad fields of cultural and literary studies. Some potential areas of exploration include, but are not limited to:
- race
- gender and sexuality
- narrative techniques
- genre and reception
- culture and identity
- ecocritical readings
- postcolonial and decolonial approaches
- postmodern approaches such as adaptation, homage, parody and pastiche
- comparative studies (popular culture and literature)
- transnational cultural and political discourses
- paratexts
Abstracts of around 300 words can be submitted for consideration to marxh1@unisa.ac.za by 1 December 2023. The deadline for the submission of final papers will be 1 February 2024, with publication after peer review expected during 2024.
The Journal of Literary Studies is an open access journal published in collaboration between the Literature Association of South Africa (LASA) and Unisa Press. It is indexed in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) of Web of Science (formerly ISI), Index to South African Periodicals, British Humanities Index, Humanities International Index, Scopus, MLA International Bibliography and the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO). It is also listed on the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and is accredited by the South African Department of Higher Education and Training. Articles that appear in the journal are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence, which means that authors may freely disseminate their articles on other platforms such as Academia.edu and Researchgate, as well as via their own institutional repositories.
References
Hibberd, J. 2022. ‘Yellowstone’ Season 5 Premiere Breaks Ratings Record With 12.1 Million Viewers. The Hollywood Reporter, November 14, 2022. Accessed August 14, 2023. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/yellowstone-season-5-premiere-ratings-1235261644/
Horton, A. 2022. Yellowstone: the smash-hit TV show that exposed a cultural divide. The Guardian, January 12, 2022. Accessed August 14, 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/jan/12/yellowstone-the-smash-hit-tv-show-that-exposed-a-cultural-divide
Kellner, Douglas. 1996. Media culture: Cultural Studies, identity and politics between the modern and the postmodern. London & New York: Routledge.
Mathews, L. 2023. There’s Nothing on TV Quite Like Yellowstone, but That Will Change. TV Guide, April 23, 2018. Accessed August 14, 2023. https://www.tvguide.com/news/yellowstone-paramount-network-conservative-prestige-tv/
Wanzo, R. 2022. “Taylor Sheridan is sorry but his characters are not: the messiness of categorizing conservative television.” Film Quarterly 76 (2): 78-82. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2022.76.2.78.
September 1, 2021
LASA Biennial General Meeting 2021
All members of LASA are warmly invited to the Biennial General Meeting of Members.
Date: Thursday, 30 September 2021
Time: 17:00 (GMT+2)
The meeting will take place online, via Microsoft Teams. All members have been sent the invitation with a link to the meeting. If you have not yet received such an e-mail, kindly contact the secretary, Neil van Heerden, at info [at] lasa.org.za.
August 12, 2019
2019 LASA Conference: Programme
The 2019 LASA Conference will take place from 14 to 16 August on the Vanderbijlpark Campus of North-West University. The programme for the event can be downloaded by clicking here.
April 2, 2019
2019 LASA Conference: Call for Papers
LASA Conference and Biennial General Meeting
First Call for Papers
Theme: Renewal – “O, brave new world!”
Date: 14-16 August 2019
Venue: North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus
The Literature Association of South Africa (formerly SASGLS) invites literary scholars and postgraduate students to submit abstracts on the theme of renewal in literature. Miranda’s words, “O, brave new world!”, taken from William Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest (1611), and used in the title of Aldous Huxley’s (1932) dystopian novel are taken as a point of departure. This also departs from the themes of previous LASA colloquia and conferences, which spoke to a shared sense of disillusionment. However, the irony implicit in Miranda’s exclamation warns against simple optimism. Chimamanda Adichie cautions against “the danger of a single story” and, like Huxley’s novel, her Americanah (2013) is inspired, in part, by the New World, the USA epitomising a technology- and consumer-driven society. The idea of renewal contains an ambiguity – a tension between renewing the old and initiating the radically new – suggesting various sub-themes:
- Language and literature – the power of imaginative fiction, drama and poetry to conceive of new worlds and alternative realities, new genres or cross-genres, new or renewed approaches to literature, New Materialism
- Consciousness – beyond the subject, intersubjectivity, discourse and the end of individualism
- Society – sexual diversity, new forms of living, new modes of being, migration, globalisation, rediscovering the local, urban renewal
- Culture – modernity, postmodernity, indigenous knowledge, New Animism, cultural diversity
- Technology – disruptive technologies, the challenges of biotech and infotech, big data, surveillance, digital dictatorship, posthumanism and transhumanism
- Politics – the end of nation states, new forms of government, postcolonialism, decoloniality
- Economy – neoliberalism, consumer capitalism and alternatives, intensifying or overcoming the divide between rich and poor, literature as commodity, green economy
- Ecology – ecopoetics, petrofiction, Cli-Fi, climate change, climate refugees, Anthropocene, Chthulucene, rewilding
These sub-themes are by no means exhaustive. Students and scholars of literature are welcome to consider anything else related to the theme of “Renewal – ‘O, brave new world!’”.
Deadline for submission of abstracts:
Please submit abstracts of between 200-300 words by 1 May 2019 to Dr Neil van Heerden: E-mail: vheern@unisa.ac.za | Tel.: 012 429 6424. 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.
August 20, 2017
SASGLS General Conference 2017
17 & 18 August 2017, Unisa, Sunnyside campus, Pretoria
The call for papers for the 2017 SASGLS General Conference has now closed. The registration form for the conference can be downloaded by clicking here
August 20, 2017
SASGLS General Conference – CALL FOR PAPERS
CALL FOR PAPERS
“Things fall apart”
17-19 August 2017, Unisa, Pretoria
The South African Society for General Literary Studies (SASGLS) invites scholars to submit proposals on the theme “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” for its biennial conference, to be hosted at the University of South Africa (Unisa), Pretoria, from 17 to 19 August 2017.
The theme of the conference is taken from W.B. Yeats’s apocalyptic poem “The Second Coming”, famously used by Chinua Achebe as the title of his influential postcolonial novel. The line from the poem suggests crisis, both as a key term in traditional poetics and as a much broader theme, in the sense of flux – or even disintegration and collapse. It problematizes the idea of literary representations of chaos or the collapse of order. However, it also presents opportunities for renewal or the imagining of possible worlds, as the collapse of old structures makes way for a new order. The theme is not intended to focus only on political imagination or critique, whether pessimistic or optimistic, utopian or dystopian, but can also be applied to literature on an individual, psychological level or on an abstract, theoretical one. Thus, the theme invokes not just postcolonialism and decoloniality but also poststructuralism and deconstruction, and many other fields of research besides.