Stefan Helgesson

Biography

B. 1966. Docent in Comparative literature, Uppsala University. PhD in Literature from Uppsala University in 1999. STINT Post-doc 2003-5 at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg. Between 2000 and 2006 co-organiser of the project “Literature and Literary History in Global Contexts” (VR). Individual project between 2007 and 2010, “Inventing World Literature” (VR). In 2009 director of SALT at Uppsala University. Since 2010 lecturer in the English Department at Stockholm University.

Ongoing research

Helgesson will analyze the clash between temporalities actualized in some Latin American and African historical narratives. Chinua Achebe’s Nigerian novel Things Fall Apart (1958) problematises the production of legitimate history. The historicist discourse of the “Commissioner” legitimizes colonization and invalidates (African) Igbo experience as legitimate history. This conflict is constitutive of postcolonial cultural expression. Arguably, it was first addressed by writers, whereas the massive undertaking by postcolonial theorists (notably Mudimbe 1988; Chatterjee 1993; Bhabha 1994; Mignolo 1995; Spivak 1999; Lazarus 1999; Chakrabarty 2000; Mbembe 2001) to reconceptualize historical time is of a more recent date. The purpose here is to investigate if literature is more amenable to interrogating what Mbembe has called the entanglement of temporalities. If so, how, and within what limits? The project will approach these questions along a South-South comparative axis. By reading Euclides da Cunha’s Brazilian “scientific essay” Os sertões (1902) alongside the South African novel The Story of an African Farm (1883) by Olive Schreiner, it will look at the incomplete attempts of these “nation-founding” texts to appropriate Spencerian evolutionism. A second part will most likely look at Thomas Mofolo’s South African novel Chaka (1910), Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) and Miguel Angel Asturias’s Guatemalan novel Hombres de maíz (1949), narratives that all offer forms of transit through asymmetrical temporal conflicts. (This corpus of texts may be modified, however.) The investigation will conclude by critiquing specific conceptions of a unified literary-historical time (Casanova 1999; Thomsen 2008). How do these varied approaches to entanglement affect the narration of global literary-historical time? His work will result in chapters and articles in journals such as Interventions, Luso-Brazilian Review, Research in African Literatures and Critical Inquiry.

Selected bibliography

Writing in Crisis: Ethics and History in Gordimer, Ndebele and Coetzee. Pietermaritzburg: UKZN Press, 2004.

– “‘Minor Disorders’: Ivan Vladislavić and the Devolution of South African English”. Journal of Southern African Studies 30:4 (2004).

– “Reformernas epok: striderna kring litteraturundervisning för svensklärare 1965-1975”. (“The Age of Reform: The Controversies Surrounding the Teaching of Literature for Teachers of Swedish 1965-1975”.) Bengt Landgren (ed.), Universitetsämne i brytningstider. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2005.

– “Modernism under Portuguese Rule: José Craveirinha, Luandino Vieira and the Doubleness of Colonial Modernity”. Stefan Helgesson (ed.), Literary Interactions in the Modern World part 2, vol. 4 of Literary History: Towards a Global Perspective. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006.

– Transnationalism in Southern African Literature: Modernists, Realists, and the Inequality of Print Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 2009.