Thembelani Mbatha
Postdoctoral Fellow ('23 - '24); Assistant Professor ('24 - ), African and African American Studies
- Email: mbatha@nospam.wustl.edu
My book project, tentatively titled “Registers of Black Witnessing: Testimonial Archives in South African Literature and Art,” sets out a literary-photographic history of twentieth-century South Africa as a critique of existing formulations of witnessing and mourning. An interdisciplinary project concerned with the decolonization of South African historiography and epistemologies, “Registers of Black Witnessing” contends that if blackness is historically constituted through its encounters with colonial traumas, then the decolonization of the politics of testimony brought to this nation’s history cannot happen without an attendant willingness to rechart the cartographies of global blackness. In this way, this project aims to depart from scholarship that has critiqued the literatures of testimony while retaining inherited constructions of blackness. My second book project, “Topographies of Blackness: Ecological Grief and the African Imaginary,” excavates the histories of environmental exile and migration in Africa and the African diaspora as an entry point to discourses of blackness that emerge at the site of political and ecological displacement.