MA, PhD Cape Town

Office: Room 216, AC Jordan Building

An updated academic bio

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 was awarded his PhD in 2025 for his thesis, Writing Against Shame: Contemporary African Writing on Queer Subjectivities. Mushwana’s debut novel, A Soft Landing, was published by Kwela in 2023. The novel was named the Book Lounge’s 2023 Book of the Year and featured in Brittle Paper’s 100 Notable African Books of 2023. It was 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. 

Areas of supervision:

Postcolonial African Literature, Archival Practice, Queer and Gender Studies, Postcolonial Urbanism, Poetry and Poetics, Creative Writing and Memory Studies.

Courses:

ASL1201S Representations of Africa

ELL4074/ELL5074S Modern African Literature

Current Research:

Mushwana’s current book project entitled Writing Against Shame: Contemporary African Writing on Queer Subjectivities is based on his PhD dissertation and 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.

Mushwana’s second project theorises a poetics of sacrilege in works by Chris Abani (Graceland and The Virgin of Flames), Kobby Ben Ben (No One Dies Yet), Romeo Oriogun (Sacrament of Bodies) and Kopano Maroga (Jesus Thesis and Other Critical Fabulations).

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)