ASW - Reading the African Novel as Studio Practice with Tinashe Mushakavanhu

Join us for our in-person African Studies Workshop! The workshop series is a scholarly space for Africa-centered research, offering a diverse range of topics and scholarly backgrounds to explore historical and current conditions.

MARCH 23: BOOK TALK 

Speaker: Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Assistant Professor in African and African American Studies, Harvard University 

Title: Reading the African Novel as Studio Practice 

Discussant: Doris Sommer, Harvard University 

 Bio: Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu is Assistant Professor in African and African American Studies at Harvard University. His work sits at the intersection of African literary studies, visual culture, and archival theory, with a focus on how narrative form engages time, and the politics of representation. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Kent and an MA in Creative Writing from Trinity College, Carmarthen.  

Abstract: In this talk, Tinashe Mushakavanhu proposes reading the African novel as studio practice, where narrative form becomes a site of visual and temporal production, much like a photographic studio that frames, exposes, and develops images. Focusing on twentieth-century African novels, he shows how select writers absorb and retool photographic logic to invent alternative ways of seeing history and framing ethical encounters. This approach shifts the focus from representation to what happens when reading itself becomes a material, creative practice, attentive to framing, perspective, and failure. In an era of proliferating images and contested visual truth, the African novel is an important critical technology for thinking through the politics of seeing, witnessing, and making meaning.  

If you are in Cambridge/Boston, we encourage you to join us in the Seminar Room at the Center for African Studies. If you are joining us virtually, please register here on Zoom. 

For future workshops, please join our ASW mailing list. All speakers are listed below.