Biographies and Liberation: Life Writing in Transversal Perspectives

Abstract

Abstract

Over the last few years Africa has been experiencing a (auto) biographical wave. In many ways this has to do
with the celebration of independence and liberation. Our project wants to scrutinize this process in thus far
new and innovating fashion, which elicits a number of aspects that need highlighting: the gender question,
the uses of literacies, the visual culture of independence and the several entanglements that have been so
far mostly silenced (between the local and the global, highbrow and popular culture, cosmopolitanism and
the politics of ethnicity and race, the South-South connections). The project encompasses three Research
Sections and proposes the creation of a new field: South-South Knowledge Production, by bringing six
scholars, four from Africa (and two ACCs), one from Brazil and another one from Germany. It consists of
fieldwork in Mozambique, South Africa and Dar es Salaam, as well as two fieldtrips to ACCs, Moi and Rhodes.
Its results and outcome will be made available on a digital platform as well as in a monograph, a collective
book and a number of academic papers. The project will finalize with the organization of an international
workshop to be held at the Universidade Eduardo Mondlane in August 2022. There about twenty scholars,
ten of whom from Mozambique, will engage in discussing the topic – as well as the primary results - of our
project: Biographies and Liberation. Of course funds for publications and the organization of the workshop
will be applied for separately.