My name is Michael Chapman. I am
currently Professor Emeritus at the University of KwaZulu-Natal,
Durban, South Africa, where, at the end of 2010, I retired as Senior
Professor of English Studies, a position I had held since 1984 at
what was then the University of Natal, its change of name consequent
upon a merger process in South African tertiary education.
I was born in Durban and grew up in the
mining town of Kimberley, a rich literary field, as well as diamond
field in the later 19th century. After studying the canonical
Chaucer to T. S. Eliot syllabus at the University of London, I turned
to South African, African, and now postcolonial, world and
comparative literatures.
As an A-rated researcher (National
Research Foundation), a research fellow at University of
KwaZulu-Natal and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study
(www.stias.ac.za ), author of numerous books and articles, and editor
of several anthologies in the literatures primarily of southern
Africa, I hope on this site to introduce you to what, I think, is a
challenging area of study.
A major question for us, here, has been
and continues to be how to talk about art in a politically demanding
society.
It is a question central to both my
literary history Southern African Literatures (1996; 2003) and my
collection of essays Art Talk, Politics Talk (2006). The question
lends coherence also to more recently published projects, the first
Post-Colonialism: South/African Perspectives (2008), the second
forming the contents of a special 21st-anniversary issue of the
journal Current Writing (21,1&2) and, with modifications and
additional contributions, in the book SA Lit: Beyond 2000 (2011).
[See Books]
I am the editor of the accredited
journal Current Writing, now in its 23rd year and published by Taylor
and Francis. [Google T&F Current Writing]
I recently contributed to two national
investigations of humanities/social science education in South Africa
(the Charter Group for the Humanities and the Association of Science
of South Africa 'Consensus Report' on the Humanities). A current
project, which I direct, is related to the foregoing reports,
entitled 'Uses of Literature in Society: South African Case Studies'
