Aretha Phiri
Biographic Data
| ID | 640474 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Aretha Phiri |
| GIVEN NAMES | Aretha |
| FAMILY NAME | Phiri |
| SIGNATURE | PHIRI A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rhodes University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1204-8779 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Excavating and embodying her matriarchive(s)
No abstract
Black Solidarities
In an article published in the Liberator in 1967 and provocatively entitled, “Ralph Ellison: Shadow or Act?” South African poet laureate and transnational cultural activist Keorapetse Kgositsile, while lauding the artistic prowess of Invisible Man (1952), bemoans a dubious “kind of individualism” that finds expression also in the celebrated American author’s essayistic writing. Questioning whether he is a “Black writer or an American writer who h…
Reframing the Black Atlantic
Migrating narratives
This essay traces the predominant counter-hegemonic, counter-discursive political and cultural models that obtain on either side of the Atlantic – the black Atlantic and the (pan-)Africanist. Typically read as disparate, even oppositional, competing ideologies, this essay examines the ways in which black Atlantic and Africanist thought migrate – travelling and journeying in ironic echoes and reverberations – across space and time, following simil…
Interview
Response
In line with the journal’s titular mandate, this special issue provides productive reflections and amplifications of the deficiencies attendant to canonical Irish–South African relations in general, indicating ways in which these relations can be further expansively and inclusively re-read. Each of the essays here is refreshingly instructive and utilizes an innovative, disruptive approach that paves the way for critically dialogic comparative pos…
The race for reparation(s), the (im)possibility of repair in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull
Demands for reparations led by African American communities for centuries of enslavement parallel calls by the South African state for the reparation of socioeconomic disadvantage rooted in colonial and apartheid pasts. Where such appeals are necessary and legitimate within a broader context of social redress and reconciliation, a comparative, relational reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull (1998) extend…
Zoë Wicomb & the translocal
Expanding black subjectivities in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah
Deploying the call-and-response mode as the artistic premise of her fiction, foremost African-American author, Toni Morrison, has persistently called in her criticism for a participatory, intellectual and political, engagement with her position on and concerns around blackness. Morrison’s ideas are being critiqued and expanded to reflect contemporary ‘African’ attitudes and perspectives within the contemporary Afrodiasporic writing of critically …
Queer subjectivities in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's ‘On Monday of last week’
From the escalating practice of the ‘corrective rape’ of lesbians in South Africa, to the more recent (extra-legal) criminalisation of same-sex relations in Nigeria, Uganda and Zimbabwe, there are grounds to believe that non-normative sexuality on the African continent is viewed as not just undermining cultural imperatives, but as disrupting human, subjective norms. Tellingly, then, the issue of sexuality has typically been, and is still, shroude…
Kopano Matlwa’s Coconut and the Dialectics of Race in South Africa
The public outcry against President Jacob Zuma’s labeling of black ownership of pet dogs as fundamentally “unAfrican” in 2012 and the academic debates around Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s proposal in 2011 for a 1% reparative wealth tax on whites is further evidence of the continued necessity of whiteness studies today, despite South Africa’s independence from a racist Afrikaner regime and its movement towards a nonracist society. Yet, the authority, …
The race for reparation(s), the (im)possibility of repair in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull
Demands for reparations led by African American communities for centuries of enslavement parallel calls by the South African state for the reparation of socioeconomic disadvantage rooted in colonial and apartheid pasts. Where such appeals are necessary and legitimate within a broader context of social redress and reconciliation, a comparative, relational reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull (1998) extend…
Queer subjectivities in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's ‘On Monday of last week’
From the escalating practice of the ‘corrective rape’ of lesbians in South Africa, to the more recent (extra-legal) criminalisation of same-sex relations in Nigeria, Uganda and Zimbabwe, there are grounds to believe that non-normative sexuality on the African continent is viewed as not just undermining cultural imperatives, but as disrupting human, subjective norms. Tellingly, then, the issue of sexuality has typically been, and is still, shroude…
Kopano Matlwa’s Coconut and the Dialectics of Race in South Africa
The public outcry against President Jacob Zuma’s labeling of black ownership of pet dogs as fundamentally “unAfrican” in 2012 and the academic debates around Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s proposal in 2011 for a 1% reparative wealth tax on whites is further evidence of the continued necessity of whiteness studies today, despite South Africa’s independence from a racist Afrikaner regime and its movement towards a nonracist society. Yet, the authority, …
Queer subjectivities in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's ‘On Monday of last week’
From the escalating practice of the ‘corrective rape’ of lesbians in South Africa, to the more recent (extra-legal) criminalisation of same-sex relations in Nigeria, Uganda and Zimbabwe, there are grounds to believe that non-normative sexuality on the African continent is viewed as not just undermining cultural imperatives, but as disrupting human, subjective norms. Tellingly, then, the issue of sexuality has typically been, and is still, shroude…
Expanding black subjectivities in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah
Deploying the call-and-response mode as the artistic premise of her fiction, foremost African-American author, Toni Morrison, has persistently called in her criticism for a participatory, intellectual and political, engagement with her position on and concerns around blackness. Morrison’s ideas are being critiqued and expanded to reflect contemporary ‘African’ attitudes and perspectives within the contemporary Afrodiasporic writing of critically …
Zoë Wicomb & the translocal
The race for reparation(s), the (im)possibility of repair in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull
Demands for reparations led by African American communities for centuries of enslavement parallel calls by the South African state for the reparation of socioeconomic disadvantage rooted in colonial and apartheid pasts. Where such appeals are necessary and legitimate within a broader context of social redress and reconciliation, a comparative, relational reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull (1998) extend…
Response
In line with the journal’s titular mandate, this special issue provides productive reflections and amplifications of the deficiencies attendant to canonical Irish–South African relations in general, indicating ways in which these relations can be further expansively and inclusively re-read. Each of the essays here is refreshingly instructive and utilizes an innovative, disruptive approach that paves the way for critically dialogic comparative pos…
Interview
Reframing the Black Atlantic
Migrating narratives
This essay traces the predominant counter-hegemonic, counter-discursive political and cultural models that obtain on either side of the Atlantic – the black Atlantic and the (pan-)Africanist. Typically read as disparate, even oppositional, competing ideologies, this essay examines the ways in which black Atlantic and Africanist thought migrate – travelling and journeying in ironic echoes and reverberations – across space and time, following simil…
Excavating and embodying her matriarchive(s)
No abstract
Black Solidarities
In an article published in the Liberator in 1967 and provocatively entitled, “Ralph Ellison: Shadow or Act?” South African poet laureate and transnational cultural activist Keorapetse Kgositsile, while lauding the artistic prowess of Invisible Man (1952), bemoans a dubious “kind of individualism” that finds expression also in the celebrated American author’s essayistic writing. Questioning whether he is a “Black writer or an American writer who h…
Sociology (8 works) · Art (6 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies (5 works) · Gender Studies (4 works) · History (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Political science (4 works) · South African History and Culture (4 works)