Friday, December 10, 2010

PCI annual lecture (fall)

annual lecture (fall):
Speaker: Marlene van Niekerk
Response by Rosemarie Buikema
Date: December 7
Location: Sweelinckzaal,
Drift 21, Utrecht

Time: 16.00 - 18.00
Lecture: The life and times of the outsider in South-Africa:
notes on Michael K. (J. M. Coetzee) as a conceptual persona


Synopsis:
This talk will be about the significance of John Coetzee's book. The Life and Times of Michael K.
for past and current South African contexts of racism, xenophobia, state ideology and political
grand narrative. It will be a writer's (as opposed to a literary theoretician's) close reading of the text
with reference to Deleuze's and Guattari's notion of the conceptual persona in their book  What is
philosophy.

Bios:
Marlene van Niekerk holds the Africa Chair for regioncommission Southern Africa. She is a South

African author who is best known for her novels Triomf and Agaat, both translated into Dutch. Her
graphic and controversial descriptions of a poor Afrikaner family in Johannesburg brought her to
the forefront of a post-apartheid society, still struggling to come to terms with all the changes in
South Africa. Agaat deals with race and power in intimate relationships in a higher middle class
context. She studied Languages and Philosophy at Stellenbosch University and obtained an MA
with the thesis: Die aard en belang van die literĂªre vormgewing in 'Also sprach Zarathustra' in
1978 . She furthered her studies in philosophy and cultural  anthropolgy at the University of
Amsterdam where the focus was on the notions of myth in  the work of Ricoeur and Levi- Strauss.
She is currently writer-in-residence at the University of Stellenbosch where she teaches creative
writing.
Rosemarie Buikema holds the chair of Art, Culture and Diversity at Utrecht University. She is the
director of the Graduate Gender Programme and Head of the department of Media and Culture
Studies. Her publications are on the interface between Cultural Studies, Postcolonial  Studies
and Gender Studies. One of her main expertises is post-apartheid South African literature and
culture.
Related event:
Marlene van Niekerk, Rosemarie Buikema and Alfred Schaffer in Perdu, Amsterdam, friday December 10. Click here for more information (in Dutch).