Research
Research groups
Research interests
- African literatures and cultures and World Literature
- The novel: histories and theories
- Literature and space-time
- Literature and its social functions
- Forms and genres
Current research
Ranka Primorac's current monograph in progress, provisionally titled *Queues of Limitless Hope*, asks: what happens to the novel form under the conditions of protracted socio-political crisis? The book situates the question in decolonisation-era Southern Africa, and answers it via a comparative analysis of the Bildungsroman form in postcolonial Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa, and with the help of a critical apparatus that combines genre theory and theories of world literature. Primorac argues that the prominence of texts and forms in the global literary marketplace is not necessarily correlated to their transnational cultural importance. This monograph contends that to ignore non-globalised African forms is to risk misreading the specificity and range of the continent’s imaginaries of freedom.