Novuyo Rosa Tshuma will give a talk on her writing on indigenous and Afro-diasporic cosmologies and read some excerpts from her novel Digging Stars. Through an exploration of Bantu geometries, indigenous astronomies such as the IsiLimela “digging stars,” technology, migrancy, and the love, grief, and loss that marks their identities, Tshuma’s characters ask fundamental questions about the politics of knowledge, family, race, place/space, and a range of perspectival practices that intersect with the scientific enterprise.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Novuyo Rosa Tshuma is the author of the novels Digging Stars (W. W. Norton 2023), which was a 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature Selection, and House of Stone (W. W. Norton 2019), which won the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award and the Bulawayo Arts Award for Outstanding Fiction, and was listed for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Balcones Fiction Prize, and the Rathbones Folio Prize. Her novella and short story collection Shadows (Kwela Books, South Africa 2013) won the Herman Charles Bosman Prize and was listed for the Etisalat Prize for African Literature. The recipient of honors including a Lannan Foundation Fiction Fellowship, Tshuma has lectured on her novels in the USA and Europe. A native of Zimbabwe, she is Assistant Professor of Fiction at Emerson College and lives in Boston.

This event is free and open to the public.

Sponsored by the Political Science Department and the Africana Studies Program.