‘Memory Work Alerts Consciousness’: Danai S. Mupotsa and Mbali Mazibuko in Conversation by Danai Mupotsa, Mbali Mazibuko,Maya Caspari, and Ruth Daly
“This article forms part of the special issue of parallax, ‘Reading Otherwise: Decolonial Feminisms’. The issue features conversations which took place 2021–2023. Prompts relating to the speakers’ work and the key terms of the issue were circulated ahead of this conversation. We started the conversation by asking what had brought them to their work.
Danai Mupotsa is Senior Lecturer in African Literature at Wits University. She is a poet, feminist teacher, researcher, and cultural critic. Her work focuses on gender and sexualities, Black intellectual traditions and histories, intimacy and affect, popular culture, and questions of justice and feminist pedagogies. In 2018, she published her debut collection of poetry, feeling and ugly, with impepho press. Recent publications include ‘Framing notes–COVID-19: The intimacies of pandemics’ (2021), ‘Cinematic imaginaries of the African city’, in Social Dynamics (2021), and ‘A Queering-to-Come’ (2020).
Mbali Mazibuko is Lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of South Africa. Mazibuko completed her doctoral degree titled ‘Rebellious Black femininities: Embodiments of freedom, desire and agency in South African popular culture from 1980 to present’ in 2023. Her work focuses on gender-based violence, power, affect theories, popular culture, methodological ethics of sensuality, care, compassion and rage and feminist pedagogical justice. Her most recent publications include ‘Nasi iStocko! Forging contemporary feminist imaginaries of liberation’ (2022), ‘Being a Feminist in the Fallist Movement in Contemporary South Africa’ (2020), and a review essay of Surfacing: On Being Black and Feminist in South Africa (Desiree Lewis and Gabeba Baderoon, eds.) (2022). ‘Semhle, Sbwl: Where Black Women Can Meet Grief During and Beyond a Pandemic’ was published in Lavender Fields: Black Women Experiencing Fear, Agency and Hope in the time of COVID-19 (ed. Julia S. Jordan-Zachery) in 2023.”
Please read the article here.
