Dr Abdelbaqi Ghorab
Postdoctoral Fellow, October 2024 - July 2025
Home institution: Lancaster University
Abdelbaqi holds a PhD degree from Lancaster University. He specializes in African literary and cultural studies with a major focus on Algerian and South African nationalism. His research explores topics related to settler colonialism and the division of space, African post-colonial literature and the interrogation of colonial memory, the process of identity formation in colonial societies, as well as studying indigenous forms of colonial resistance. His thesis mapped the transversal aspect of nationness and national identity in an Algerian and a South African context by linking the distorted notion of the post-colonial self to the two nations’ colonial eras.
Project title: Writing the National Crisis in Algeria and South Africa
The current project is a continuation of the research that he has conducted in his PhD and shifts the attention to the post-colonial unrest that plagued Algeria and South Africa. It is a cross disciplinary project that takes literature as a main area of study while drawing on history and sociology to tackle the Algerian Black Decade and the South African Apartheid. Through the study of the literary and artistic production of the two nations during their respective national crises, the research examines how the two nations’ post-colonial instability goes beyond ethnic, linguistic or religious factors.