Important Dates

Nikitta Adjirakor
​Feodor Lynen Return Postdoctoral Fellow - Alexander von Humboldt Foundation University of Cologne, Germany

"Voicing Death: Postcolonial Elegies in African Contemporary Poetry"

Elegies are an important poetic and cultural tradition in Africa, historically performed around social rituals of death and extensively studied through the lenses of style, structure and social function. This presentation argues that contemporary elegiac poetry go beyond their social ritualistic function of death to also discuss the lived experience of belonging to the postcolonial nation-state. Using examples of contemporary Ghanaian elegiac poems, I examine how the poems’ unique focus on death enable a theorisation of trauma, grief and mourning as the site of postcolonial citizenship.

If you would like to attend this presentation online, please email Brady.C.Blackburn@uni-bayreuth.de or Claudia.Favarato@uni-bayreuth.de to request the Zoom link.