Program
Keynote Lecture: Dr. Peter Maurits – "The Emergence of the Mozambican Ghost Story; A (Post)Colonial Perspective on Understanding African Supernatural Literature"
Dr. Peter Maurits (Department of English and American Studies, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Nürnberg) will open this year’s conference with a talk on the Mozambican ghost story. Drawing upon Derridean notion of spectres, Dr. Maurits will illuminate the history of the Mozambican hauntology, discussing the notion of ghosts in an arguably underrepresented genre of African ghost story, with a view to delineating its impact in the postcolonial contexts. Arguing that the ghost story was a "foreign form" imported to Mozambique from Europe (Maurits 2015: 181) uses the genre to examine the extent of imperieal powers within literary contexts with the aim of problematising the notion of haunting both in metaphorical and literal senses.
Dr. Peter Maurits has earned his PhD on the Mozambique ghost story from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 2015. He received a DFG postdoctoral fellowship and is currently working at the University of Nürnberg. His latest article, "Fuel Scavengers: Climate Colonialism in the South African Science Fiction of Alex Latimer’s Space Race, Henrietta Rose-Innes’ Poison, and Neill Blomkamp’s District 9" can be found here.