16-Oct-2019

Wales, Nora-Lee (DLitt et Phil)
Nora-Lee Wales read for her Bachelor’s and Honours degrees at Rhodes University
(RSA) and then completed her masters in Film and Literature with distinction at the
University of York (UK). She began her doctoral studies at the University of
Johannesburg in 2013 and worked as a tutor in the English department for 2 years.
She was appointed as an assistant lecturer in the department (2015-2018) and
lectured postcolonial poetry, modern drama, the 19th century English novel,
contemporary fiction and gender theory. During this time, she also presented work
from her doctoral thesis at local, national and international conferences. She now
works as an English lecturer at Embury, a private institute for higher education.
In her thesis, The Great Africanised Family of Humankind: Securing and Undoing
the Human through Africa in Literature and Film, Nora-Lee Wales examined texts in
which Africa is simultaneously the object of western intervention and the means of
human salvation. Her study acknowledged that these are white saviour narratives
but demonstrated that this narrative trope was a symptom of the more fundamental
problem of the texts’ humanism. Her analyses showed that these texts were sincere
in their projection of a universal community based on shared species-being and a
single African origin, but that the ontology of the human on which they based this
universal togetherness was flawed. Her analyses also indicated that it was when
these texts were ambivalent about the nature of being human that possibilities for a
more meaningfully inclusive human community emerged.
Supervisor: Prof SR Mngadi
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