Haunting times: Ghosted memory and epistemic revenants in Serhiy Zhadan’s Voroshilovgrad (2010) and NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory (2022)

In reading Serhiy Zhadan’s novel Voroshilovgrad (2010), set in a fictional Ukraine in the early 2000s, an imaginative world where the dead and the living intermingle, and NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory (2022), set in a fictional Zimbabwe in the 2010s, where one encounters ghosts from a past that has not been dealt with. The lecture will consider how the novels expose the repressive practice of epistemic ghosting and stage the resistant practice of epistemic haunting. Those who have been ghosted return resistantly, bringing (back) memories and history that complicate linear and singular memory management – as nomadic subjects who cross conceptual as well as temporal boundaries.

Sarah Colvin held chairs at the universities of Edinburgh, Birmingham, and Warwick before becoming Schröder Professor of German at the University of Cambridge in 2014. Her research and teaching interests include the areas of literary aesthetics, cultural production and social justice, the political novel and prisoner writing as well as narrative theory and narrative ethics. Her recent publications include a co-edited special issue of German Life and Letters on The Literary and Essayistic Writing of Sharon Dodua Otoo (2024) and the monograph Shadowland: The Story of Germany Told by its Prisoners (2022).

Moderation: Professor Dr. Eckhard Schumacher