In August 2023, Ashleigh Harris partnered with ALMEDA researcher Pedzisai Maedza (University College Dublin), Nkululeko Sibanda (University of Pretoria), and Kelvin Chikonzo (University of Harare) to catalogue the manuscript collection of Rooftop Productions’ Theatre in the Park, directed by Daves Guzha.
In addition to cataloguing the 253 manuscripts in Rooftop Productions’ collection (all data is available on request), we also discovered the remnants of a fragmented archive of the National Theatre Organisation of Zimbabwe. Some materials from the NTO archive, including some historically significant materials such as the typed manuscript for a play, A Dying Beauty by Stanlake Samkange, has been incorporated into Rooftop Theatre’s collection. Another part of the NTO collection is being catalogued at the REPS theatre in Zimbabwe. The third part of the collection we found severely damaged in an open-air cage where it has been left to the elements. We are currently attempting to find out whether there is an available catalogue of this material so that we can assess whether to initiate a salvage exercise or not.
Ashleigh Harris has a new ALMEDA pamphlet reflecting on the problems and potentials of AI in and for the field of African Literary Studies. Harris will be participating at the Charting New Territory: Digital Humanities and AI in African Studies organised by Frédérick Madore, Vincent Hiribarren in Hanover in February,…
The ALMEDA project is committed to a broad multilingual framework, not only to ensure excellent and substantial multilingual inclusion across as many African languages as possible (see our work with literary lexicons), but also to provide data on African literature’s global movements and circulation in non-African languages. To this purpose,…
Our latest lexicon of literary terms has just been published by Maurice Simbili Mwichuli, Kenyatta University. All ALMEDA’s data and lexicon publications are open for download and reuse under a Creative Commons Attribution 4 Licence. If you are a linguist or literary scholar working in an African language and are…
We are delighted to be joined by Anna Marie Skråmestø Nesheim who has received a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Postdoctoral Fellowship for her project ‘Monetizing Performance Culture in French North and West Africa’. The project examines how the introduction of copyright systems affected the production of African performing arts in the…