Convivial Worlds

This book discovers everyday forms of conviviality in fiction and life writing from Eastern and Southern Africa. It focuses on ordinary moments of recognition, of hospitality, of humour and kindness in everyday life to illuminate the significance of repertoires of repair in a world broken by relations of power. Through close readings of specific capacities of living with difference, the book excavates ideas of world-making, personhood and the possibilities of alternative social imaginaries from African perspectives. It highlights evanescent and more durable attempts at building solidarity across local and translocal settings by focussing on modes of address that invite reciprocity in contexts of injustice, which include Apartheid, colonialism, racism, patriarchy and xenophobia. Putting current research on conviviality in conversation with the literary texts, the book demonstrates how conviviality emerges as an enabling ethical practice, as critique and survival strategy and as embodied lived experience.The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of Literary and Cultural Studies, especially Postcolonial Literature, African Studies and Indian Ocean Studies.

Tina Steiner is Associate Professor in the English Department at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She is the author of Translated People, Translated Texts: Language and Migration in Contemporary African Literature (2009), the co-editor of the bilingual travelogue In India and East Africa/E-Indiya nase East Africa by D. D. T. Jabavu (2020) and part of the editorial collective of the journal Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies.