Small Magazines and Black Internationalism: Corridors of Storytelling

Chris received his BA (1st class hons) in the Literature Theatre and Film Department at Moi University, Eldoret Kenya. After completing his MA in 2007 in the Department of African literature at University of the Witwatersrand, Chris went on to receive his doctorate in 2011 in the same department, where he worked under the Andrew W Mellon mentorship program. He specialised in new diasporic African fiction and focused on childhood as a set of ideas for engaging with contemporary African identity formation. In looking at the recurrent figures, images and memories of childhood the study engages with a range of ideas around memory, alternative archives, heritages, legacies, traditions and genealogies of identity and identity-making. Chris’s work has since then sought to find the connections between childhood and contemporary diasporic African identities, especially around the politics of cultural production and the migration of material cultures across continents. Chris is co-founder of the Diaspora Working Group (DWG) at UCT. He is currently co-editor of the journal Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies.