Open the Door 2023: In conversation with Gabeba Baderoon and Barbara Boswell

Join two creative thinkers discussing legacies of black feminism in South Africa. Monday 26th june 1 to 2.30pm GMT, Online

As part of our Open the Door writers and activists themed festival we will be hosting a fascinating lunchtime conversation with poet and scholar Gabeba Baderoon, editor of Surfacing: Being Black and Feminist in South Africa, a collection of writing brim-full of different voices from emerging thinkers and established scholars to activists and creative practitioners. Baderoon will be in conversation with creative writer and fellow scholar Barbara Boswell who has written a chapter on Miriam Tlali, one of our celebrated Open the Door writers, in the collection. Expect an informal conversation between two unique writers who will bring critical and creative perspectives to thinking about the often invisible histories and deep networks of feminist practice that have shaped writing in South Africa.

Barbara Boswell is a creative writer, Associate Professor and Head of the Department of English Literary Studies at the University of Cape Town. She holds a PhD in Women’s Studies from the University of Maryland, and an MPhil degree in Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of the Western Cape. Her areas of teaching and research expertise include African women’s writing, Black Diasporic feminist writing, queer theory and postcolonial studies. Barbara is the author of Grace: A Novel (2017), winner of the University of Johannesburg’s Debut Creative Writing Prize. She also authored the monograph And Wrote My Story Anyway: Black South African Women’s Novels as Feminism (2020) and is the editor of Lauretta Ngcobo: Writing as the Practice of Freedom (2022)

Gabeba Baderoon is a South African poet and scholar.  She is the author of the poetry collections The Dream in the Next Body, A hundred silences and The History of Intimacy as well as the monograph, Regarding Muslims: from slavery to post-apartheid. With Desiree Lewis, Gabeba is co-editor of Surfacing: On Being Black and Feminist in South Africa and she has also edited poetry books by Bandile Gumbi, Epiphanie Mukasano, Phillippa Yaa De Villiers and Natalia Molebatsi. Gabeba is a member of the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund, which has published over 100 collections by African poets since 2012, and co-directs the African Feminist Initiative at Penn State University. She is the 2023 Sarah Baartman Senior Fellow in the San and Khoi Centre at the University of Cape Town, where she has been working on a new collection “The Concussion Diaries: Relief Map of a Drifting Mind.”

This event is part of Open the Door Festival, a year long celebration of Writers/Activists and supported by Glasgow University Creative Conversations series.