Olivier Moreillon: "An Intersectional Reading of Johan Van Wyk’s Man Bitch"

Olivier’s PhD "In Between Spaces – Black/Coloured Residential Areas and Townships in Recent South African Literature: Their Depiction and Function" (working title) aims at a re-evaluation of this particular urban space, which according to Achille Mbembe is under- and misrepresented in contemporary scholarship (2008). Breaking away from the idea of pinpointing the residential area’s and township’s literary presentations to a simple double symbolic significance of both the destructive force of the apartheid regime as well as the prototypical community which the racial segregation sought to restrain, the project focuses on the analysis of the community’s "mental (geographic) mapping" on the page, the characters’ interpersonal relations but also on the social, cultural as well as political tensions characters face within their "fictional reality" and the way they confront them. Exploring recurring themes as well as ambiguities and paradoxes within the depicted community will give an insight into the structuring of the life in the residential area and the township. These themes, ambiguities and paradoxes then allow a fertile comparison between different writings and a "(re)mapping" of the township as vibrant urban space in its own.

Olivier Moreillon studied History as well as English Literature and Linguistics at the University of Zurich and graduated in 2009. After his licentiate Olivier started his teacher training and he has been teaching English, German and General Education at the Vocational School for Qualified Retail Assistants in Zürich since 2008. In 2011, Olivier started the preliminary research for his PhD project, supervised by Prof. Therese Steffen and Prof. Ina Habermann at the English Department of the University of Basel.

In autumn 2012, he was admitted to the Doctoral Programme of Literary Studies at the University of Basel and was awarded a one-year start-up funding grant. His research and fieldwork in South Africa, for which he will be travelling to Durban and Cape Town this summer has been funded by the Swiss South African Joint Research Programme (SSAJRP) project "City in Flux".