By Kristen Harding, Student Curator
In my second year as an English student in South Africa, our lecturer asked the class if we could point to Nigeria on a map. About one hundred faces stared blankly at the picture of Africa projected onto the screen ahead. To further prove her point, she asked us where Los Angeles and New York are, which we located almost automatically. It was a startling yet unsurprising realisation that we knew more about other continents than the one we were actually living on.
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| Photo: Africa on the globe by James Wiseman (https://unsplash.com/@jameswiseman). Reproduced under a Creative Commons licence (https://unsplash.com/license). |
My name is Kristen Harding and before moving to England to start my Master's in Film and Literature at York, I studied English at Stellenbosch University for four years. As I progressed through my studies, it became clearer that stories – whether from books, films, the news or the radio – play a huge role in determining what we know and don't know about the world. It's this, together with my own position as a person from Africa, that inspires my project as a Student Curator Intern in the library this term.
Over the next few weeks, I'll be curating a list of materials available in our library to promote a selection of African stories told by Africans themselves. This will be to shed light on the fact that Africa is much more than the bleak, homogenous continent that Western narratives make it out to be. I would also love for the collection to encourage us to reach for African work not only for educational purposes but also just for the value of a good story.
Making a consistent and intentional effort to engage with discourses outside of those that are dominant, has the potential to open our minds to new ways of seeing the world. So I hope that the books, films, articles, and other media I'll be sharing through this project will contribute to a reimagining of the African continent that is playful, queer, and even magical.
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