The African Literature Association is hosting its next lecture on Saturday, 28 March 2026, and the speaker is Grace A. Musila, who teaches in the Department of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her talk is titled The Aesthetics of Refusal, and it is free to attend via the ALA’s YouTube channel.

Musila is one of the most significant scholarly voices working on African literature and popular culture today. Her research sits at the intersection of East and Southern African literatures, popular culture, gender studies, and biographical writing, with a particular focus on questions of power, representation, and knowledge production. She is the author of A Death Retold in Truth and Rumour: Kenya, Britain and the Julie Ward Murder (2015), Wangari Maathai’s Registers of Freedom (2020), a biographical portrait of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate that also gathers a selection of Maathai’s own writings,, and editor of the Routledge Handbook of African Popular Culture (2022), a wide-ranging volume that brought together international scholars to examine everything from romance fiction and comedy to cinema and digital genres as sites of African meaning-making.

The lecture takes as its starting point a question that feels increasingly urgent: in a world where neoliberal capital has reached into nearly every corner of human life, what room do precarious communities — poor people, rural communities in the Global South, undocumented migrants, refugees — actually have to push back against the systems working against them? Musila’s answer looks to artists and narrative imagination. Drawing on the work of the Practicing Refusal Collective and theorists including Tina Campt, she examines refusal not just as a political act but as an aesthetic one, a way of making and meaning. Her case study is Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s acclaimed 2019 Lesotho film This Is Not a Burial, It Is a Resurrection, which she reads alongside Bhekizizwe Peterson’s thinking on narrative imagination and Black publics’ navigation of what it means to be human in dehumanising times.

The lecture will be introduced by Carli Coetzee.

Date: Saturday, 28 March 2026 Time: 11:00 AM EST / 3:00 PM Lagos / 4:00 PM Johannesburg / 5:00 PM NairobiLocation: ALA YouTube Channel