I am a literary comparatist who studies how African writers, photographers, and performers negotiate visibility across colonial, postcolonial, and diasporic worlds. My work examines memoirs, novels, photographic archives and practices, and public exhibitions to understand how African subjects contest the visual and textual regimes shaped by empire, reordering textuality, time, space, and self-representation to claim alternative modes of being within global literary and visual cultures. My training and scholarship centers twentieth- and twenty-first-century African literature, African diasporic cultures of the Indian Ocean and the Americas, postcolonial studies, and visual culture, with broader interests in life writing, the health humanities, India–Africa relations, and cultures of human rights and photography.
My research is also shaped by sustained engagement with contemporary photographic communities in East Africa, and South Africa. I collaborate with Nairobi-based, and Johannesburg-based photographers and visual artists in co-curatorial and archival projects that use images and public exhibitions to generate counter-narratives of selfhood, nationhood, and urban life. Working within these creative spaces allows me to understand photographic practice not as a static archive but as a living, contested form: a site where artists negotiate visibility, confront the residues of imperial optics, and craft new vocabularies for representing African cities and the people who inhabit them. These collaborations inform my scholarship by grounding my theoretical claims in the material, aesthetic, and political choices made by practitioners themselves.
In addition to my research, writing, and teaching, I contribute to the field’s intellectual infrastructure through editorial and peer-review work. I serve as an Associate Editor of Matatu: Journal of African Literary and Cultural Studies, where I help shape scholarship on African, and diaspora, literary and visual cultures. I have also reviewed manuscripts for the Journal of East African Literary and Cultural Studies, and the Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies, work that reflects my commitment to maintaining rigorous standards of argumentation and advancing the study of African and postcolonial cultures across disciplines.
Sam Dennis 