Katie Reid
Research Student (Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies)

Research

My DPhil research explores the various modes and expressions of the work of Ivan Vladislavic, a South African fiction-writer, keenly sought after editor, and reflexive art-essayist, whose role as Social Studies and Fiction editor at interventionist, anti-apartheid publishing house Ravan Press in the 1980s, included editing the groundbreaking anti-apartheid protest magazine Staffrider, and whose work to date involves a broad range of 'joint' projects with visual artists, photographers, urbanists, and architects, projects which continue to engage with the unfinished event of apartheid in a range of subtle and complex negotiations of the postapartheid space. Registering the imprint in Vladislavić’s oeuvre of the various roles and institutional spaces he has occupied in South African literary culture, I identify an accretive logic, one of collection, and a related curatorial mode through a series of his prose-fictions. By investigating the impact of what have widely become known as universalising global currents, as texts go into print, circulation and in reception, the thesis seeks to contribute to emergent discussions about Vladislavić’s increasing visibility on the world-literary stage and the difficulties of positioning his canny, wry texts on its terms.  

My supervisor is Professor Steph Newell.