Robertson, Msimang and More Announced for 2018 Great Texts/Big Questions Lecture Series

The Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) launches its 2018 Great Texts/Big Questions lecture series in April, with a line-up that features acclaimed and award-winning writers, artists, academics and musicians, and includes PEN SA members.

The theme underpinning this Great Texts/Big Questions series, says the ICA, “is drawn from Achille Mbembe’s foreword to Fiona Forde’s An Inconvenient Youth: Julius Malema & the ‘New’ ANC [: ‘South Africa] is still caught … between things that are no longer and things that are not yet.’

Amongst the numerous approaches to this theme, speakers will reflect on: the process of bringing to the page (and imagination) that which is unsaid or unwritten, including the work of researching but also reimagining individual lives within a broader historical narrative; the contested space of gender identity in South Africa and possibilities for liberating men from oppressive models of masculinity; writing fiction that troubles linguistic conventions, realism and the arc of traditional narrative trajectories; as well as notions of freedom, home and placelessness, and what it means to belong in this turbulent moment in post-apartheid South Africa.

The schedule of speakers is as follows:

• Wednesday 11 April: Poet, performer and spoken word educator, Toni Stuart
• Friday 20 April: Musicians Siyabonga Mthembu (The Brother Moves On) & Itai Hakim
• Wednesday 25 April: Novelist and PEN SA member Claire Robertson
• Wednesday 2 May: Professor in the Institute for Social and Health Sciences at Unisa, Kopano Ratele
• Wednesday 9 May: Writer, journalist, multimedia artist and theatre practitioner, Stacy Hardy
• Wednesday 16 May: Writer, and author of Call it a Difficult Night, Mishka Hoosen
• Wednesday 23 May: Journalist, writer, activist and PEN SA Board Member, Sisonke Msimang

All Great Texts lectures take place from 6:00 p.m.–7:30 p.m. at UCT’s Hiddingh Campus, 31-37 Orange Street, Cape Town. Refreshments are served from 5:30 p.m.

All are welcome. To RSVP or for more information, contact ica@uct.ac.za

Image, ‘Elalini’ by Lidudumalingani, courtesy of ICA