The book focuses on how the concept of nationalism is discussed by geographically displaced Nigerians across the World Wide Web. It may not be explicit about how Africans in general survive outside of their homeland; the book definitely speaks to how to harvest the thoughts of Africans in different locations around the world. The methods deployed in the publication definitely came in very handy during the research phase of these collaborations. I had the opportunity, a few years ago, to visit Osijek, Croatia and Makeni, Sierra Leone to experience first-hand how the different communities were coping with the aftermath of war and the role of creative arts and artists in the very different socio-economic societies.

I served as the president of South East African Languages & Literatures Forum (SEALLF). I am also a member (in spirit) of the Association of Nigerian Authors and a founding member of the Coalition of Nigerian Artists. While working as a photojournalist, I coordinated the film viewers’ forum for the Goethe Institute in Lagos, Nigeria. Now I am, is a language teacher at the University of Florida. I am a poet who combines theory and practice of photojournalism, and environmental activism.

I trained first as a Botanist (81-84) and much later received the British Council Chevening scholarship to study for a master’s degree in TV/video for Development from the University of Reading, United Kingdom. I earned another master’s degree in Organizational Communication at Ithaca College, NY. Finally, I obtained a PhD in media studies from Rutgers University, NY.

His writing on postcolonial ecocriticism and foodways has appeared in numerous book and journals. He teaches courses on postcolonial literature and food studies and enjoys cooking.

Reading narratives through the lens of food and foodways reveals different ways that writers deploy agriculture, cooking, and eating to highlight the traumas of history, the emptiness of displacement, and the power of community. What I try to ask is what is food doing in the narrative? How does paying attention to it reveal something that Elizabeth A. Eldredge calls “a hidden transcript”?^[i]The descriptions of preparing a meal, working in a garden, or butchering a chicken, seem so commonplace that the meaning instilled in those passages can go by without notice. What do those domestic moments reveal about the dynamics of gender, of power, and of class in narratives?

https://www.risd.edu/people/jonathan-highfield/
https://www.routledge.com/authors/i15835-jonathan-highfield
http://risd.edu

Shelley Barry is one of South Africa’s most innovative documentary film-makers, the winner of numerous awards and has had her films screened at festivals around the world. Currently a lecturer in documentary and experimental film and national cinema at the University of Johannesburg, she is also the director of her own company Twospinningwheels. Shelley Barry is well-known for her trilogy, Whole a Trinity of Being(2005), Diaries of a Dissident Poet (2014) and Here (2019). Barry’s films are distinctive in focusing on what is usually not seen or thought about. Food and eating – within human beings complex lives –  is one example of this. This session will involve a screening of aspects of Barry’s work focusing on food, and will be followed by discussion.

She is an interdisciplinary feminist academic who has had an abiding interest in culturally marginalized literary, visual and popular cultural texts and traditions. She has taught, participated in research networks or held research fellowships in South Africa, as well as in Finland, India, Sweden, Uganda, the US and Zimbabwe, and is keenly interested in transnational dialogues from the standpoint of the global South. The author of Bessie Head and the Politics of Imagining and co-editor of Surfacing: On Being Black and Feminist in South Africa, she has also published widely on the politics of feminism and sexuality; black women’s writing and visual culture, and, more recently, food as material culture. Her writing on food straddles academic and more accessible writing, and includes “Bodies, Matter and feminist freedm: Revisiting the Politics of Food”, “Decolonising Food Systems and Sowing Seeds of Resistance”, co-written with Donna Andrews, “Food, Anxiety, Freedom”, “’We Eat Sushi Now: Targeting Hungry Students at South African Universities”.

Lewis sees critical food studies as a field warranting serious and focused attention among academics and intellectual activists beyond the academy – both in South Africa and, more generally in the global South. She is committed to exchanges between humanities academics and artists, poets and activists. These, she believes, can generate robust inquiry into some of the most inspiring, complex and challenging developments of our time, while also challenging “scientism” and neo-liberalism in the burgeoning academic and popularised discourses around food.

Her work focuses on understanding and researching poverty, HIV & AIDS, gender inequality and gender-based violence as barriers to education and development in rural communities and schools.  Moletsane She is co-editor (with Claudia Mitchell) of the 2018 book, Disrupting Shameful Legacies: Girls and Young Women Speak Back Through the Arts to Address Sexual Violence. Rotterdam: Brill/Sense Publishers. She is a Co-Investigator in the project: Accountability for gender equality in education (AGEE): Critical Perspectives on an indicator framework for the Sustainable Development Goals(PI: Elaine Unterhalter, University College London). Moletsane is co-author, with Vasu Reddy, of the 2021 article, “In search of the perfect curry: A gender perspective on the Durban Curry in two contemporary cookbooks” in Gender Questions, 9 (1).