Exploring shared postcolonial perspectives with Kenya

Kenyan scholar Dishon Kweya, who completed his PhD at the School of Literature and Language Studies at Wits University in Johannesburg, has joined the Archive & Public Culture research initiative as a post-doctoral research fellow.

After receiving his MA in Literature at the University of Nairobi, Kweya taught African, Caribbean and African American literatures at Egerton University in Kenya before embarking on his PhD project in which he explored oral history and ethnic identity.

'It was while trying to understand the strategies of reading the archive of oral memory and processes of composition and performance of narratives of origin by diverse oral historians from one community that I got interested in the nature and composition of the archive itself, as well as the anxieties particular procedures of imagining it were bound to generate,' says Kweya.

'As I completed my PhD research at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2011, I was conscious of the lingering questions to do with what happens when silenced narratives of irresolvable issues which are layered over in the archive of oral memory resurface in liminal moments of postcolonial transition.'