POSTPONED: Sarah Nuttall | South/s: Emerging Conceptualizations

This event is being rescheduled. A new date will be announced.

The hemispheric and global South is shifting in its meanings and in the modes of analysis being used to understand it—as place, practice of imagination, politics, and orientation in thought and method. Humanities scholarship is contributing strongly to this, but so are changing geopolitical and geophysical framings, planetary scale crises, and a sharpening of our understandings of imperial aftermaths and reinventions. In this lecture, Nuttall will explore emerging modes of re-articulating and remembering the South, perhaps best described as a multiplicity of South/s, as well as some of the dilemmas these modes of thinking present. The lecture draws on emerging bodies of thought, many of them Africa-based and Indian Ocean-oriented, to comment on those transformations and their implications for theory-making. It also attempts to offer a layered conceptual vocabulary, one which is interested in what institutional forms we currently have and are likely to need, going forward.

About the Speaker

Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at WISER, Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa. For a decade, from 2013–2023, she was the director of the Institute, one of the largest and most established across the global South. She has authored and edited more than fifteen books, many of them aimed at broadening the scope of the situated fields she contributes to, from a global South and African South standpoint, with an interest in the interdisciplinary, collaborative and public humanities. She has published more than 75 journal articles and book chapters internationally and is widely invited to present her work. She has been a Visiting Professor at Yale and Duke Universities and the recipient of a Fellowship at the Du Bois Institute/Hutchins Centre at Harvard University. She is, among others, the author of Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-apartheid (Wits University Press), editor most recently of Your History With Me: The Films of Penny Siopis(Duke University Press) and co-editor since 2023 of, among others, Reading for Water: Materiality and Method (Routledge), and Planetary Hinterlands: Extraction, Abandonment and Care (Palgrave Macmillan). Forthcoming in 2025–06 is her book On Pluviality: Reading for Rain in the African South and the collaborative collection Breathing In: Air and Atmospheres (UCL Press)
 

About the Series

All This Rising: The Humanities in the Next Ten Years features ideas and methods that will mark new paths for the humanities in the next decade. Visitors consider the motives and conventions of their work in progress, how it converses with its discipline, and what it portends for the humanities.

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