S9 E7 Hugo ka Canham & Grace A. Musila: Death, Life & Mpondo Theory

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The Empty Chair by PEN SA

PEN South Africa

63 episodes

3 days ago

In The Empty Chair Podcast: A Transatlantic Conversation, PEN South Africa hosts authors, academics and activists based in South Africa and the USA. The podcast focuses on books, writing, social justice, freedom of expression, shared histories and possible futures. Each of our episodes is dedicated to an imprisoned writer or a writer who has been harassed by the state.

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S9 E7 Hugo ka Canham & Grace A. Musila: Death, Life & Mpondo Theory

The Empty Chair by PEN SA

1 hour 8 minutes 14 seconds

2 years ago

S9 E7 Hugo ka Canham & Grace A. Musila: Death, Life & Mpondo Theory

Grace A. Musila asks Hugo ka Canham about his book Riotous Deathscapes. They explore riotous methods, rural Mpondoland, precarity, storytelling, death and life as well as the natural and ancestral worlds.

Grace A. Musila is a Professor in the Department of African Literature at Wits University and the author of A Death Retold in Truth and Rumour: Kenya, Britain and the Julie Ward Murder (James Currey, 2015). She is the editor of Wangari Maathai’s Registers of Freedom (HSRC Press, 2019) and the Routledge Handbook of African Popular Culture (Routledge, 2022).

Hugo ka Canham is a Professor at the Institute for Social and Health Sciences at UNISA. He is the co-editor of Black Academic Voices: The South African Experience (HSRC Press, 2019). His latest book is Riotous Deathscapes (Duke University Press & Wits University Press, 2023).

In this episode we are in solidarity with academic, human rights lawyer and author Dr. Mohammed Al-Roken. We join PEN International and call on the authorities in the United Arab Emirates to free him. You can read more about his case here: https://www.pen-international.org/our-campaigns/day-of-the-imprisoned-writer-2021

As tributes to him, Hugo reads “Rain Falls on the Abstract World” by Gabeba Badperson and Grace reads from Dr Nawal El Saadawi’s essay “Dissidence and Creativity”.

This is the final episode of season nine. We’re so grateful to all our brilliant participants, our listeners for your support, our producer Andri Burnett, our executive producer Lara Buxbaum as well as Bongani Kona, Nadia Davids, Yewande Omotoso, Kate Highman and the whole of the board of PEN South Africa. Thank you to the U.S. Embassy in South Africa for the grant which made the last eight Transatlantic Seasons of The Empty Chair Podcast possible.

We hope you’ll spend time browsing through our archives. All our episodes are freely available on our website or wherever you get your podcasts.

This podcast series is made possible by a grant from the U.S. Embassy in South Africa to promote open conversation and highlight shared histories.