MA, PhD Cape Town

Email: Wisani.Mushwana@uct.ac.za

Office: Room 216, AC Jordan Building

Biography

Wisani Mushwana is a writer and a lecturer in the Departments of English Literary Studies and African Studies at the University of Cape Town. He graduated with his MA in Creative Writing (with distinction) from UCT in 2021. His debut novel, A Soft Landing, was published by Kwela in 2023 and went on to become the Book Lounge’s 2023 Book of the Year, as well as being included in Brittle Paper’s 100 Notable African Books of 2023. The novel was also shortlisted for the 2024 University of Johannesburg Prize for South African Writing in English, and longlisted for the Sunday Times Literary Awards, the Humanities and Social Sciences Awards, and the South African Literary Awards.

Wisani holds a PhD in English Literary Studies with a dissertation entitled Writing Against Shame: Contemporary African Writing on Queer Subjectivities. The dissertation takes a pan-African view of literary production that counters what he has named an archive of delinquency which constructs queer African subjects as delinquents in need of violent reorientation. Examining a wide range of novels, short stories and poetry, and drawing on the work of writers like Yaa Gyasi, Jennifer Makumbi, Chinelo Okparanta, Koleka Putuma, Nakisanze Segawa, Makhosazana Xaba, the dissertation demonstrates how contemporary African writers, in writing about queer subjectivities, intercept this archive to produce what he has called a restorative archive, one which humanizes queer Black African people.

Research Interests

African literature and archives

Queer theory

Postcolonial urbanism and literary ecologies

Creative writing

Memory studies

Publications

Peer-reviewed articles (open access)

“The disruption of the white spatial imaginary in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow” (Politikon, 2025)

“Resisting Religious Trauma and the Stultification of Queer Subjectivities in  Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees” (The Thinker, 2025)

Book(s)

A Soft Landing (Kwela 2023)