Gabeba Baderoon
Education
Websites
Professional Bio
Gabeba Baderoon is a poet and scholar. She is an associate professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies, Africana studies, and comparative literature and holds a courtesy appointment in the School of International Affairs. With Alicia Decker, Baderoon co-founded the African Feminist Initiative (AFI) at Penn State in 2015, creating a community of scholars, writers, activists and artists committed to feminist work on the African continent. The AFI (https://afi.la.psu.edu) has since grown into a vital transnational network of over 700 members. Baderoon received a doctoral degree in English from the University of Cape Town and has held Post-doctoral fellowships in the Africana Research Center at Penn State and the “Islam, African Publics and Religious Values” Project at the University of Cape Town. Among her honors are an Extraordinary Professorship of English at Stellenbosch University, the Sarah Baartman Senior Fellowship at the University of Cape Town, fellowships at the African Gender Institute, the Nordic Africa Institute, the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and an Honorary Doctorate from Nelson Mandela University. Baderoon is the author of Regarding Muslims: from Slavery to Post-Apartheid, which received the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences Best Non-fiction Monograph Award, and the poetry collections The Dream in the Next Body, A hundred silences and The History of Intimacy. With Desiree Lewis, she is the co-editor of the award-winning essay collection, Surfacing: on Being Black and Feminist in South Africa. Baderoon’s poetry has been recognized with the Daimler award, the Elisabeth Eybers Poetry Prize, the University of Johannesburg Prize for South African Writing and a Best Poetry Book Award from the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences. She chairs the board of New Contrast (https://www.newcontrast.net), an influential South African literary journal founded in 1960, which counts JM Coetzee and the late Zoë Wicomb among its literary patrons.
AREAS OF SPECIALIZATION
- African Literature
- African feminist and queer theory
- South African studies
- Studies of slavery
BOOK DESCRIPTIONS
The Dream in the Next Body (Kwela/Snailpress, 2005) https://www.nb.co.za/en/view-book/?id=9780795701979
Gabeba’s debut collection, The Dream in the Next Body, sold out its first print run in six weeks and ultimately sold over 3000 copies. Its poems received the Daimler Award for South African Poetry in 2005.
A hundred silences (Kwela/Snailpress, 2006), https://www.nb.co.za/en/view-book/?id=9780795702280
This second collection explores the formal and thematic range she had established as her poetic terrain in The Dream in the Next Body. “The pen,” the final poem in A hundred silences, was the subject of an episode of Poetry Unbound. The collection was a finalist for the University of Johannesburg Prize for South African Writing.
The History of Intimacy (Kwela, 2018, Northwestern, 2021), https://www.nb.co.za/en/view-book/?id=9780795708886
The History of Intimacy was met with broad acclaim and received the Elisabeth Eybers Poetry Prize, the University of Johannesburg Prize for South African Writing and the Best Poetry Book award from the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences. A US edition came out with Northwestern University Press in 2021 and features a new poem, “Green Pincushion Proteas.”
Regarding Muslims: From Slavery to Post-Apartheid (Wits, 2014), https://archivewitspress.co.za/catalogue/regarding-muslims/
Regarding Muslims engages with the colonial and contemporary archives of images of Islam in South Africa, ranging from paintings of Muslim slaves to the vibrant scope of post-apartheid literary and artistic portrayals. Regarding Muslims received a Best Non-Fiction Monograph Award from the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences in 2017.
Surfacing: On Being Black and Feminist in South Africa (Wits, 2021), https://archivewitspress.co.za/catalogue/surfacing/
Surfacing is partly an archive and partly an inspirational source for ongoing debate and critique. The collection demonstrates that radical knowledge-making is a collaborative, interactive and continuing struggle to imagine human freedoms. Surfacing received the Best Edited Collection Award from the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Science.
