South African Literature: Global Challenges, New Humanities

This project positions South African Literature within the emergence of the New Humanities (Medical, Environmental, Digital), and orients both toward Medical, Scientific and Social Sciences’ emphases on the Sustainable Development Goals. The Global Challenges facing our planet constitute a lingua franca in global academic research, but both Literature and the New Humanities are typically excluded from the common ground of global policy agendas and scientific, medical or social scientific research collaborations.
By engaging with and contesting Global Challenges from the specific, silenced site of South African Literature, my research seeks to open global research policy and asymmetrical Global North, Global South research partnerships to decolonizing critique within the New Humanities. I argue that the Global Challenges can only be addressed in a fully inclusive way – which includes the thriving, multilingual traditions of progressive, adaptive African Knowledges contained within our South African national literature.