Submit a Manuscript to the Journal
Current Writing
For a Special Issue on
Life writing in/ on Southern Africa
Abstract deadline
Manuscript deadline
Special Issue Editor(s)
Judith Coullie,
University of KwaZulu-Natal
[email protected]
Life writing in/ on Southern Africa
While auto/biographical representation has long existed in the southern African region – indigenous oral life histories preceded and continued beyond European settlement – life writing remained a marginal focus in southern African literary scholarship for much of the twentieth century.
In recent decades, however, a range of theoretical innovations – including poststructuralism, New Historicism, testimony studies, postcolonial critique, gender studies, and relational and performative models of selfhood – have reshaped understandings of how life narratives are constructed and interpreted. During the same period, life writing has gained significant scholarly visibility, with steady growth in monographs, journal articles, and postgraduate research. The genre itself has also undergone substantial transformation: from the traditionally conceived, factually verifiable account of a life to a wide proliferation of autobiographical forms across languages, media, genres, and communities.
This special issue seeks contributions that shed new light on auto/biographical practices in or on the southern African region as well as on comparative connections between southern Africa and wider postcolonial concerns.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
Historical and Cultural Contexts
- Indigenous, mother-tongue, and community-based auto/biographical practices
- Histories of auto/biographical representation in particular Southern African countries
- Life writing, archives, and the politics of voice, visibility, and authority
- Studies of key figures in southern African life writing
Politics, Testimony, and Activism
- Autobiography as testimony, witnessing, or activism
- Life writing that challenges dominant cultural norms, including work from marginalised positions – LGBTQ+ identities, minority ethnic communities, rural or migratory contexts, disability, illness, addiction, or destitution
- Autobiographical engagement with the natural world – its flora, fauna, landscapes, and related sciences
Forms, Media, and Modes of Self-Representation
- Creative nonfiction, autofiction, personal essays, and other hybrid life-writing forms
- Dramatic, photographic, filmic, graphic, and other multimodal forms of self-representation
- Blogs, online journals, podcasts, and social-media micro-narratives
Scholarship, Reflexivity, and Teaching
- Auto-ethnography and reflexive scholarly self-narration in southern African contexts
- Life writing in southern African university curricula
- Publishing, readership, and the political economy of life writing
Submission Instructions
Email submissions to Judith Coullie at [email protected].
Key dates:
15 March 2026: Submit brief biographical note of about 100 words and abstracts of about 200 words.
15 September 2026: Submit papers of about 6000 words.
June 2027: Expected publication date.