Remembering Transition, a Literary Journal of Africa: A Symposium

Category
Seminars & Lectures
Venue
MISR Seminar Room 1
Event Date
July 11, 2018
Event Time
02:15 PM

Founded in Kampala in 1961 by Rajat Neogy, a Ugandan of Bengali Indian origin, and remembered as one of Africa’s top literary magazines during the early postcolonial period, Transition was able to shape critical thought among the earlier generation of African writers in both the public sphere and the African university. 

This symposium seeks to examine how Transition became, both an intellectual and social space, vibrant with articles, essays, poems, vignettes, short stories, and opinions, featuring contributions from the likes of Wole Soyinka, Ali Mazrui, Chinua Achebe, Christopher Okigbo, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Peter Nazareth, V. S Naipaul, Ezekiel Mphaelele, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, David Rubadiri, Tom Mboya, and Julius Nyerere, able to galvanize a commanding momentum with a powerful virtuosity that brought statesmen, politicians, and scholars conversing and raising questions about Africa and the world.. The symposium will explore how what might have started as a simple journalistic initiative prospered into metadiscourses of development politics, culture in transition, nationalism, race relations, continentalism, and epistemological grid of ideas produced from Africa, but which was nevertheless able to inform world experiences.

Panelists:

  1.  Laury Ocen, former Post-Doctoral Fellow, MISR
  2. Benedetta Lanfranchi, Research Fellow, MISR
  3. Okello Ogwang, Deputy Vice Chancellor, Academic Affairs, Makerere University
  4. Bernard Tabaire, Co-founder of the African Centre for Media Excellence
  5. Mahmood Mamdani, Professor and Director, MISR.

Papers may be collected from the MISR Library. Attendance is limited to 60 persons. To register please email: communicationatmisr@gmail.com For more details, please call: 02003052000.