Dr Wamuwi Mbao

South African literature; South African film studies; pop culture; philosophy of violence.

South African post-apartheid literature; literature and trauma; modernist architecture

2022–2023

National Humanities Center Research Fellowship, Durham, North Carolina

2021–2024

STIAS ISO LOMSO Research Fellowship

2014

Mellon Academic Staff Development Grant: grant awarded for early career research

ORCID Number: 0000-0002-4026-7872

Books

Years of Fire and Ash: South African Poetry of Decolonisation. Jonathan Ball, 2021.

Peer Reviewed (selection)

“Feeling towards the Contemporary: Judging New South African Fiction.” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, vol. 34, no. 1, 2022, pp. 88–95.
“Terror Terroir: Building Disruptive Possibilities in Ivan Vladislavić’s The Folly.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 36, no. 4, 2020, pp. 9–26.
“Perplexing the Liquid University.” English Studies in Africa, vol. 63, no. 1, 2020, pp. 72–88.
“Culture and spectacle: making meaning from the spectacular reception of Inxeba.” Agenda Feminist Literary Journal, vol. 34, no. 2, 2020, pp. 78–85.
"Testing Style: Imraan Coovadia’s Transformations and the Performance of Restless Wisdom.” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, vol. 28, no. 1, 2016, pp. 88–95.
“Inscribing Whiteness and Staging Belonging in Contemporary Autobiographies and Life-Writing Forms.” Whiteness Studies: A South African Perspective, special issue of English in Africa, vol. 37, no. 1, 2010, pp. 67–75.

“Paw-Paw Politics: Lady Skollie and the Curating of Contradiction.” Paper read at UCKAR African Feminisms Conference, July 2017
“A House Where Nobody Lives: Reading South African Unsettledness Within a Realm of Distance .” Paper presented at the ACLALS conference 12 July 2016.
“Terror Terroir: ‘Problem Buildings’, Abandoned Spaces and the Aesthetics of the Sub/urban.” Paper presented at AUETSA, Grahamstown 2015.
Clean Nostalgia: Township Car Washes as Sites of Meaning.” Paper delivered at WISER seminar Curating the Afropolitan City: New Ethnographies of Johannesburg, 2014.
“Mandela’s Cressida: Sideways Reflections on Automotive Culture in South Africa.” Paper delivered at Stellenbosch University Research Seminar, May 2014.

Numerous short stories and literary reviews in the Johannesburg Review of Books.
“The Bath”, short story published in various collections including Queer Africa and Recognition. Included in Twenty in 20, a collection of the twenty most significant South African short stories post-1994.

Dr Mbao is on the Editorial Advisory Panel of the Johannesburg Review of Books.
He is current editor of De Arte journal.
He has served on the Board of Directors of the poetry journal New Contrast.
Dr Mbao writes literary reviews and other articles for the Johannesburg Review of Books. He is a columnist for Business Day's Wanted magazine and his articles and interviews have also appeared in the Sunday Times, Africa Is a Country, the Daily Maverick and other sites.