About Lynda:
Lynda Gichanda Spencer is an associate professor and former Head of the Department of Literary Studies in English at Rhodes University. She holds PhD (English Studies) from Stellenbosch University. She has also taught in the field of English and African Literary Studies at Stellenbosch University, the University of South Africa and Vista University. Her research interests include contemporary women’s popular writing, popular culture in Africa, African women’s writing, Eastern African fiction, African cultural studies and transnational literatures.
She is co-convenor (with Sharlene Khan) of the African Feminisms (Afems) Conference; the principal investigator (with Minesh Dass) of Urban Connections in African Popular Imaginaries which is funded by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2017-2023); principal investigator (with Ashleigh Harris) Contemporary Africa Texts and Contexts: Decolonising the Archive, Genre and Method (2018-2022) funded by the National Research Foundation (NRF) and The Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education (STINT), and editor of The Journal of Eastern African Cultural and Literary Studies.
About keynote presentation:
Lynda’s keynote presentation at the Imagining the Ordinary City Conference is titled Crime and the city: creating female sleuths and solving crime in selected novels from South Africa.
Women who write crime fiction may yet be the ultimate subversives. The shock troops of feminists come and go, the backlash swells, but, ignoring the tumult, nice women sit down to typewriters and word processors and create deceptions. (Claire McNab – quoted in Walton & Jones, 1999: 10)
In this keynote address, Lynda will focus on HJ Golakai and Angela Makholwa, two female writers who draw on various elements of crime fiction and use the genre as a vehicle for social commentary and political critique of contemporary society. These authors rescript the literary aesthetics of what is ostensibly a masculinist genre by offering a female perspective that subverts, disrupts, destabilises, and problematises the dominant discourse of crime fiction. Lynda reads Golakai and Makholwa as killjoys who have embraced crime fiction to portray the vulnerabilities and anxieties experienced by women in precarious and perilous urban spaces.
The full conference programme will be released soon. Stay tuned!