Grace A Musila
Fellow 2025/26
Grace A. Musila's research lies at the intersection of African and Afro-diasporic literature, popular culture, gender studies and biographical writing. Drawing on various literary, cultural theory and intellectual perspectives, she examines questions of power, representation and knowledge production in African and global contexts.
Musila understands African literature as a dynamic intellectual field in which political, aesthetic and ethical questions are negotiated. A central focus of her work is the analysis of Anglophone African literatures and their engagement with postcolonial, neoliberal and feminist-political discourses. She is particularly interested in narratives of resistance, forms of cultural self-representation, and the tensions between individual and collective forms of expression in literature and popular culture.
Her work on African popular culture opens new perspectives on everyday aesthetics, political imagination, and cultural creativity for theoretical reflection. At the same time, her studies on biography and life writing practices – for example, on Wangari Maathai, Wambui Waiyaki Otieno and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela – deal with questions of subjectivity, agency and memory in African feminist contexts.
Abstract
Refusal and its Im/possibilities
My project examines African and Afro-diasporic literary reflections on forms of refusal against the logics of neoliberal capital staged by economically and politically vulnerable individuals and communities who are often considered to lie beyond the scope or capacity to refuse. In a context where neoliberal capital appears to reign triumphant on a global scale, the project reads these literary portraits as staging important forms of resistance that keep alive the possibility of countering the normatisation of neoliberal logics and imagining alternative forms of worldmaking beyond neoliberal imperatives.
Education
2008 PhD African Literature, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
2004 MA African Literature, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
2002 BA Language & Literary Studies, Moi University, Eldoret, Uasin Gishu County, Kenya
Most Recent Academic Position
Associate Professor, Department of African Literature, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
Most Recent Publications
“Fugitive Forms.” Comparative Literature Studies 62, no. 2 (2025): 285–95.
Author. “The Promise of Belatedness for Africa-Based Scholarship.” African Studies 83, no. 1–2 (2024): 152–66.
Routledge Handbook of African Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 2022.