Nicklas Hållén receives Swedish Research Council funding

ALMEDA researcher Nicklas Hållén has been granted funding for a 3-year project titled “Reading beyond the close/distant divide: Nairobi’s formal and informal literary field.” His project investigates how the informal and formal sectors of the literary field shape each other in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. Hållén will explore ways of mapping how formally published literature responds to cultural practices that emerge out of the material conditions at play in the city’s informal sector. The project takes as its starting point a number of literary magazines from which it captures metadata, which is then linked to existing databases like Wikidata and Worldcat and to traces of literary activity in informal digital spaces. This generates a large collection of data that can be analysed for indications of influences across the literary field. This analysis will then guide close readings of a selection of texts, in a wide sense – from oral poetry to internationally celebrated novels.

The result is a mapping of the literary field and trajectories between its informal and formal sectors, from practices that typically exist outside the field of vision of world literature, to the city’s literary giants. Literary innovations can thus be traced from Nairobi’s low-income estates out into the world beyond Kenya and Africa. This will make it possible to theorise how the literary field is continuously transformed by exchanges between disparate linguistic and socio-economic communities.