Martina Kopf
I am Senior Lecturer in African Literatures at the Department of African Studies, University of Vienna. In 2023, I completed my habilitation in African Studies with a thesis on ‘African Literature, Feminist Theory and Development Thought: From Colonial Ideas to Decolonising Literary Discourses’. From 2017–2022 I was principal investigator in the Elise-Richter Project ‘Concepts of Development in Postcolonial Kenyan Writing’ of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). My areas of interest include alternative epistemologies of development, intersectional feminism, literary history of East and West Africa, and narrative approaches to witnessing trauma.
less
Related Authors
Interests
Uploads
Books by Martina Kopf
Combining historiographical accounts with analyses from social science and cultural studies perspectives, the book investigates a carefully selected range of economic, social and political contexts, from agriculture to mass media. With its focus on the conceptual side of development and its broad geographical scope, the book offers new and uncommon perspectives. An extensive introduction contextualises the individual chapters and makes the book an up-to-date point of entry into the subject of colonial development, not only for a specialist readership, but also fro students of history, development and postcolonial studies. Written by scholars from Africa, Europe and North America, the book is a uniquely international dialogue on this vital chapter of twentieth-century transnational history.
Papers by Martina Kopf
Combining historiographical accounts with analyses from social science and cultural studies perspectives, the book investigates a carefully selected range of economic, social and political contexts, from agriculture to mass media. With its focus on the conceptual side of development and its broad geographical scope, the book offers new and uncommon perspectives. An extensive introduction contextualises the individual chapters and makes the book an up-to-date point of entry into the subject of colonial development, not only for a specialist readership, but also fro students of history, development and postcolonial studies. Written by scholars from Africa, Europe and North America, the book is a uniquely international dialogue on this vital chapter of twentieth-century transnational history.
[...] Cooperation always requires understanding and appreciating each other’s realities. In the context of international relations, this also entails a certain degree of agreement upon facts. In order to achieve
global cooperation on any given subject, the parties must first agree on the definition and problematization of the solution to the issue at hand. Making sense of common problems requires a shared view not only on arguments and interests, but also on shared forms of narration. Even though this agreement is not a complete consensus, a policy area with a relatively concordant, intersubjectively constructed number of facts is needed to begin cooperation. Such concordance is possible when registers are shared, similar to what Hannah Arendt calls ‘common world’: A
shared and public world of human artifacts, institutions and settings that provide a relatively permanent context for our activities. Understanding politics as a practice of collective storytelling, in which the role of fiction and narrative is a constitutive element instead of being ‘mere rhetoric’, is still under-theorized. From a narrative point of view, the
boundaries between reality and fiction are always blurry. Thus, an important but largely ignored part of this common world is shared imageries, which are expressed or represented in stories, myths, legends, and literatures.
Complex realities need complex ways of representation. A theoretical engagement with the importance of meaning-giving practices as constitutive elements of politics should not halt at the analysis and the critique of simplifying and simplified versions of the ‘real’. The equally important question is: How and from which sources do we develop alternative and inclusive modes of narration? Against this background, this Global Dialogue focuses on narrative and fiction as a critical, albeit under-researched, element in the
social sciences. Despite increasing interest, and the linguistic turn in the social sciences, the role of fiction and narrative in explaining, representing and inventing identities and frames as well as giving meaning to political practices has been largely absent. In order to begin to change this, this publication brings together different disciplines from the social sciences and development studies to literature and cultural studies to reflect on these various matters. This multi-disciplinary publication is the result of a workshop that took place in Duisburg in May 2015, which also sought to expand on how academic work in the social sciences is analyzed, written,
and presented. The contributions are inspired and expand on this spirit and the various issues discussed at this event. For the sake of coherence, the texts are ordered in terms of the medium they analyze and the audiences they address.
Despite increasing interest, and the linguistic turn in the social sciences, the role of fiction and narrative in explaining, representing and inventing identities and frames as well as giving meaning to political practices has been largely absent. In order to begin to change this, this Global Dialogue focuses on narrative and fiction as a critical, albeit under-researched, element in the social sciences and brings together different disciplines from the social sciences and development studies to literature and cultural studies to reflect on these various matters. This multi-disciplinary publication is the result of a workshop that took place in Duisburg in May 2015, which also sought to expand on how academic work in the social sciences is analyzed, written, and presented. The contributions are inspired and expand on this spirit and the various issues discussed at this event.
The interplay between fact and fiction and the impact of narratives on our understanding of politics have significant implications for how politics is perceived and how cooperation becomes an achievable, realistic goal. The contributions of this edition go to show that political life in the 21st century is increasingly complex and can only be grasped by taking these hitherto underrepresented aspects into consideration. We need to take seriously literature, films, video games and other mediums as objects of investigation if we are to begin to fully comprehend the diverse cultural embeddedness of policies. This contribution seeks to do just that, and calls upon scholars to foster a continuing global dialogue on narrative and fiction as constitutive elements in politics.
This chapter takes its point of departure from the intersection of colonial discourses of development and narrative writing on Africa in France and Great Britain of the interwar period. After theoretical and methodological reflections on the contribution of literature studies to the history of development it will proceed to analyze five texts published between 1931 and 1943. The texts have in common that their authors – a French and an English colonial official, an English missionary educationalist, a Ugandan intellectual and anthropologist, and a Canadian literacy advocate – were agents in state-governed economic development, education, health care, and higher education. It is this mutual relationship of social practice, (imaginative) representation, and communication with a wider public that guided the selection. The analysis focusses on three issues that were of importance in colonial development policies and at the same time turned up as subjects and motives of colonial narratives: 'making the colony productive', 'developing the human being' and 'negotiating knowledge'. The selected texts are part of a larger corpus mainly based on the novels promoted by the French Colonial Writers’ Society on the one hand, and on the book reviews of the journal East Africa on the other.
Through what we will address with Steve Partington (2006) as a “determinate absence” of direct representation, the narratives challenge the reader to engage differently with the presence of violent histories. They shift the focus to other important questions concerning the reception of the genocide in the wider region of East Africa, physically in terms of the diasporas it produced and symbolically in terms of how its significance is to be integrated into a larger narrative of Pan-African belonging. The works discussed are the three short stories Discovering Home (2002) by Binyavanga Wainaina, Weight of Whispers (2003) by Yvonne Owuor and The Gorilla’s Apprentice (2010) by Billy Kahora (2010).