Events: Researching Ephemerality – The Street as Archive. November 1–3, 2023. Machakos University College, Kenya.
In November 2023, ALMEDA team member Nicklas Hållén co-organized a PhD and M.A student workshop at Machakos University with Dr. Charles Kebaya (postgraduate co-ordinator in Literature and Cultural studies, Machakos). The workshop was sponsored by ALMEDA, STINT, Karlstad University and Machakos University, and brought together 14 students for a three-day workshop.
The students were divided into three groups and each group developed a research project which is to become the basis of a co-authored research article. The general topics the students proposed for their projects were the evolution of the aesthetics of Nairobi’s famous matatu culture, an exhibition by Nairobi-based artist Fayth Wanjala, and social critique in the popular Youtube comedy show TT Comedian. Hållén and Kebaya plan to collect the papers into a joint publication. The next on-site workshop in Machakos is scheduled for April 2024.
One topic that came up in the discussions throughout the workshop was the unevenness between institutions in the Global North and in Africa when it comes to students’ access to necessary resources like databases, digital archives and published research. While the participants felt that they are in many ways perfectly situated to study ephemeral material created and circulated in working class neighbourhoods in Nairobi, their work is made very difficult by their limited access to international research in the field. Some of the students were interested specifically in studying material in Sheng (https://hir.harvard.edu/sheng-in-kenya/), a vernacular slang-language that combines mainly Swahili and English and is spoken by youth in Nairobi’s informal and working class neighbourhoods. Sheng evolves so rapidly that only young people can understand its current idioms and vocabulary. Therefore, one can argue that only a small number of people can study this material, since it requires that the researcher can access, understand and have the necessary academic skills to analyse these materials. However, this is made difficult by the fact that a successful PhD or Ma project focused on popular culture in Sheng requires access to recently published research, opportunities to travel to international conferences in Europe and North America and other forms of academic infrastructure.
It is partly for this reason that all of ALMEDA’s method pamphlets will be published as fully open-access PDFs on this site.
Lecture: Afrikaaps and the Literary Archive, Riaan Oppelt
Join us for the next lecture in the ALMEDA seminar series! Riaan Oppelt (Stellenbosch University) will be talking about his case study for ALMEDA. The lecture will be held on Zoom: Time and Date: Tuesday 15 October, 15:15 – 16:30, CEST, online.Zoom Link: https://uu-se.zoom.us/j/9544610031
ALMEDA will be offering two project-related PhD courses in 2025. One on the methods of Distant Reading and its implications for African Literature, and the other on Literary Metadata and the Digital Humanities and their importance for the future African literary archive. Please spread the word. These courses are free,…
The ALMEDA project is proud to be working with the NGO, FEMRITE (https://femrite.org) a Ugandan Women Writers’ Association that has inspired, supported and published African women writers from across the continent. FEMRITE has published numerous anthologies of poetry, short stories and Creative Non-Fiction, as well as novels, autobiographies, translations and…
La revue malienne _Sankoré_ pourrait être considérée comme reflétant un processus de valorisation des langues et littératures africaines dans le cadre du projet de décolonisation des années 1970. Sankoré – une revue de vulgarisation scientifique avec, entre autres, des sections consacrées aux nouvelles, légendes, proverbes, poèmes, devinettes, est un produit…