Dr Bonaventure Muzigirwa Munganga

I am developing a monograph to be published by Rowman and Littlefield’s New Critical Humanities book series, tentatively titled Critique and Ecology: Reading Indigenous African and Australian Literatures. In a nutshell, this book offers a groundbreaking comparison between Indigenous Australian and African studies by taking stock of striking commonalities of time and grounding with Country in both worlds’ cosmologies, epistemes and/or metaphysics, which underpin their cultures, literatures, arts and media. In both worldviews, my book argues, all beings (humans and nonhumans, living or non-living and the land itself) are endowed with life force that they radiate to one another in a relational way. As a matter of fact, nothing dies, but only transforms/transmutes to emerge in new ontologies which, even so still fit in the web of all beings’ entanglements. Time is also construed as nonlinear, but rather spiralling, slipstream, or pasts, presents, and futures flowing together like currents in a navigable stream. All beings are thus projected in such a conception of time not as independent in their nowness, but rather defined and constrained by both the past and the future. This interconnection in turn attunes humans to openness, companionship, conviviality and becoming with the more-than-human, which in turn allows us to construe being and identity as fluid, never rigid. 

Besides this book project, I am working on three other projects, including:

1. Localising the Anthropocene: Reconceptualising Time, Place, and Knowledge for local meanings of and response to Climate Change, Environmental Protection and justice in the Congo Tropical Forest region

This project focuses on climate fiction from countries across the Congo Basin forest to unpack how time, place, knowledge and their entailments of humans and nonhumans entanglements are conceptualised, as well as implications for the local meanings of the Anthropocene, climate change, environmental protection, justice, and policies. Part of this project has attracted funding from the British Academy, for a joint project titled “Re-valuing Local Knowledges: Understanding Voice, Land and Power for Climate Action in Eastern DRC”, hosted by the University of Liverpool” (Award of £ 147,298.13, Reference: IOCRG\101313). Under this joint project, my work will investigate the cultural memory of climate change, land and land rights in the Eastern Congo in oral and narratives from diverse sources, including the Liaspo-The Congolese Tales audio archives at Manchester Central Library.

2. Black Memories and Epistemologies: The Poetics of Cosmopolitan Identity in Afro-Diasporic Arts and Media

This project studies how contemporary Afro-Diasporic Arts and Media epitomise black memories and epistemologies as the writers’ negotiation of a black identity in a cosmopolitan locatedness. The history of Africans’ “emigration directly or indirectly precipitated the emergence of a new wave of African writings with diasporic leanings. There is also a transgenerational dynamic to this history, as some of the émigrés fed with their children, who later came of age in the West but still maintained various forms of affiliations and attachments to Africa” (Adebayo 2023, 74). African affiliations and attachments are enacted in black memories and epistemologies, which interface and intermesh with issues of race, gender, ecology, and identity. Black memory, as used here, is encompassing, following literature Nobel Prize laureate, Abdulrazak Gurnah (2023)’s view of memory in literature as the writer’s hinterland, the source materials, the place where the writer goes to check the plausibility of certain notions and ideas, the writer’s experience of events, the stories s/he has heard about other people or places, or news and histories s/he has read about, or dreams and imaginings that thrilled or baffled him/her. This project construes black memories and epistemologies as both resisting Black fungibility and disintegration, while at the same time copyrighting black cultural authorship in world Arts and Media.

3. Worlds in the Land Down Under: Ethnicity, Indigeneity, and Identity Constellations in Australian Multicultural Literature

The project seeks to find whether and how Australian multicultural writers enact worlds that epitomise a multicultural Australia and how as readers we read and/or interpret these worlds from a multicultural perspective. Multicultural Australian literature “is not simply a matter of adding more new names to the existing canon but of learning to read differently, in other words, to read via cultural difference.” (Gunew 1988, 75) Learning to read differently implies visiting and inhabiting different worlds (at least during the reading) and returning in Australia. I intend my study as a fundamentally comparative one, treating multicultural writers from Aboriginal, African, and Asian origins and argue that they bring their audience to experience worlds bound up with the writers’ ethnicity and Indigeneity. Australian Multicultural literature, I therefore argue, epitomises identity constellations as the writers’ claims and negotiations of who they understand they are as humans in their cosmopolitan locatedness and of which, in so doing, they seek public recognition (Taylor 1994, Modood 2013, Parekh 2006) in the multicultural Australia they envision.