Dr Lobke Minter (PhD Stellenbosch University) has been awarded a STINT International Postdoc in Sweden. This scholarship makes it possible for her to pursue the two-year project Forest Imaginaries, Colonial History and the Timber Commodity Frontier: Tree Plantations in South African Literature, the first to examine representations of forests in South African literature through the region’s ongoing history of timber plantations. The project thus situates South African fiction in the context of South Africa as an industrial tree-planting region especially affected by the accelerating planetary-scale crisis, where ‘greening’ images of forests can be used to support commercial tree plantations. At LNU, Dr Minter will be based at LNUC Concurrences and work closely with the research cluster for Ecology, Culture and Coloniality (ECCo). Dr Minter also visited LNUC Concurrences in February and March to participate in the Cultures of the Polycrisis workshop took place February 27-28, and to begin work on an edited collection on the topic of polycrisis and literature.
