时间：2025年4月1日18：30

地点：腾讯会议室786721308（密码0401）

主讲内容：

The designation “African literature” is an anomaly among geographical classifiers of planetary textual formations: it is a quasi-national label, which, nevertheless, invites a comparative and multilingual critical engagement. To speak of African detective fiction is to address the historical and discursive logics that govern this compound literary field, whose origins lie in the histories of formal decolonisation and pan-African solidarity. Detective plots have been integral to African fictional landscapes for as long as the novel form itself. To describe this literary form as “imported” is to obscure Africans’ agency in appropriating and making their own the violently enforced cultural technologies of modernity. The lecture maintains that the African novel of detection is thus not best approached as a single literary tradition, coming down and “decolonising” the oft-rehearsed history of the detective genre in the global North. Instead, it is more profitably regarded as a multivalent node in a world-literary network of generic assemblages, within which it has its own set of histories and provisional points of origin. The lecture formulates a world-historical problem related to the genre conventions of African detective fiction and a conceptual apparatus with which to address it. It then offers a cluster of comparative readings of strategically paired African detective novels from Nigeria, Zimbabwe and Kenya.

主讲人简介：

Ranka Primorac is an Associate Professor of the Department of English, University of Southampton in the UK. She has written extensively about Southern African literatures and cultures; some of her pioneering work has been on Zambian, Zimbabwean and South African detective fiction. She co-edits the Boydell and Brewer monograph series African Articulations.