Professorial Inauguration: Professor Ronit Frenkel
In its most basic form, reading literature is a type of cultural history that offers us a different lens through which to understand both local and global formations. This was the message by Ronit Frenkel when she delivered her Professorial Inaugural address at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) on Thursday, 12 May 2022.
In her address entitled Global African Literature, Professor Frenkel reflected on African and African diasporic cultural production and the critical cultural theory that frames it.
Prof Frenkel, who is also the editor of the flagship African Studies journal, The Thinker at UJ, argued that by placing South African literature into conversation with larger continental and diasporic textual circuits, certain thematics in relation to global narratives emerge that reconsider ideas from and on Africa itself.
She broadly discussed using specific keywords in mapping the connections across her work and how each of the keywords are used as a methodology to interrogate cultural theory and literature as interrelated forms.
Watch the full Professorial Inauguration address: