King's Postcolonial Seminar

Dr. Rachel Knighton discusses “Narrating the Physical and the Psychological in African Prison Memoir” on Monday 25 March in VWB 6.01 at 18.00.
Chair: Dr. Zoe Norridge (English & Comp.Lit., King's)
Refreshments will be served and all are welcome!

This seminar takes Writing the Prison in African Literature (2019) as its focus. The paper explores the theoretical underpinnings of the research project, summarising the place of prison memoir in autobiographical and life-writing theory so far, and in particular the position – and relative importance – of African prison diaries in current literary criticism. Moving to specific textual examples, Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died and Nawal El Saadawi’s Memoirs from the Women’s Prison, are memoirs that contain divergent thematic emphases. Soyinka’s concern for the psychological contrasts against Saadawi’s preoccupation with the female body. Both writers use these subjects to represent different experiences of prison, and also to advance a personal and collective form of resistance towards their political imprisonment.

Dr Rachel Knighton completed her PhD in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge in 2017, as a graduate scholar of Girton College. Her subsequent book, Writing the Prison in African Literature, has just been published by Peter Lang, Oxford.