On 13 March the Jagiellonian Research Center for African Studies invites you to a guest lecture by prof. Renata Díaz-Szmidt [“In her own voice - women's literature in Portuguese-speaking African countries”]. The lecture will start at 1:15 p.m, room 08, building of the Faculty of International and Political Studies (4 Reymonta Str).
The lecture will focus on the development of women’s writing, mainly in Mozambique, but also in other countries, such as Angola or Cape Verde. The speaker will try to show the role of women who, using literature, make efforts to change the stereotypical image of African women created by men both in Africa and in the West. Starting with Négritude, when women shaped the image of Mother Africa and participated in the creation of nationally engaged poetry, through the period of the struggle for independence and its first years marked by work to settle accounts, we will reach post-colonial times, in which female writers present current social and gender problems of women and try to talk about them from their own perspective.
PROF. RENATA DÍAZ-SZMIDT
Assistant professor at the Institute of Iberian and Ibero-American Studies of the University of Warsaw, where she heads the Department of Interdisciplinary Research on Portuguese-Speaking Countries. She also taught at the Jagiellonian University, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, and the University of Granada. In her research she focuses on the literature and culture of Portuguese-speaking African countries (especially Mozambique and Angola) and the literature and culture of the only Spanish-speaking country in Africa - Equatorial Guinea. She is interested in research conducted from the perspective of postcolonial studies. She was on scholarship at the University of Lisbon and the University of Santiago de Compostela. She also conducted research in Mozambique and Cameroon. Member of the Polish Africanist Society (PTAfr). Author of the following books (in Polish): Muthiana orera, onroa vayi? Where are you going, beautiful woman? – transformations of female identity in the novels of the Mozambican writer Paulina Chiziane (2010) and Where Are You, Guinea? Attempts to shape national identity in the works of writers from Equatorial Guinea (2017). She is the author of numerous scientific articles in Polish, English, Portuguese, Spanish and French. She also co-edited books on contemporary African literatures (in Polish): African Kaleidoscope: Problems of identity in African literatures at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries (2012), Contemporary African literatures and other cultural texts in the light of post-colonial research (2015) and African intellectuals and the experience of dictatorships (2018).
