The Loft Hour: Tadiwa Madenga + Juliana Ramírez Herrera

Tadiwa Madenga is a scholar of African and Black diasporic literature, gender and sexuality, and print cultures. Her research is concerned with the relationship between literature and sexuality which she traces through 20th and 21st century African book fairs and their subgenres: keynotes, book stalls, magazines, poetry. Across her academic and creative projects, her reading practice centers archival work and site specificity as critical methods for literary analysis. These interests converge in her current research project which focuses on the emergence of African queer literature and politics through the Zimbabwe International Book Fair. The book fair was a preeminent destination for African literature and arts throughout the 1980s and 1990s, but it also became notorious for staging public debates around race and homosexuality. By examining how the book fair functioned as a contested site that codified the limits and possibilities of sexual freedom, the project also reconsiders what genres and spaces are imagined to be the foundational subjects of African literary studies and Black queer studies. Madenga’s research has been supported by various fellowships and grants at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies, and the Hutchins Centre for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

Juliana Ramírez Herrera specializes in the arts and archaeology of the Indigenous Americas, particularly those of the so-called small-scale societies of pre-Conquest and early colonial Panama, Colombia, the Caribbean, and Amazonia. She received her PhD from Harvard University and her MA and BA from the University of Toronto. Her first book project, tentatively titled Astronauts in the Rainforest: The Metallurgy of Darién, examines the entangled histories of metal body ornaments in the Colombia-Panama borderlands, from pre-Conquest gold to twentieth-century silver-coin jewellery. Her work has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, among others, and has been published on RES, Sculpture Journal, and Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl. In 2024-2025, she was SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto and the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art, where she reconceptualized and curated the new gallery of Ancestral Abiayala

Zamansele Nsele is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary African & African Diasporic Art. She is currently working on her first monograph, provisionally titled, “Reckoning with Post-Apartheid & Imperialist Nostalgias in Archival Art Practice in Africa”. In the monograph, Zamansele Nsele explores how nostalgia can generate visual epistemologies that sanitize, disavow, and aestheticize oppressive racial histories— despite nostalgia’s conventional significance as an affective structure that affirms Black social life. One of the central themes that is consistent in Zamansele’s research and writing is her critique of image-based rituals of antiblack violence. Zamansele Nsele is the co-editor and contributor to the book: The Imagined New (or what happens when History is a Catastrophe?) Working through Alternative Archives: Art, History, Africa, and the African Diaspora published by Iwalewahaus (2022). She has teaching and interests in critical theories of Blackness in visual art; with a particular emphasis on the tradition of resistance art movements in the United States and South Africa. Her research interests also explore the citationality and curatorial adaptation of the Black literary tradition into visual artworks and art exhibitions—this is the subject of Zamansele’s second book project. She was Lecturer and course coordinator for the Art History & Visual Culture program at Rhodes University (2014-2017) and Lecturer at the University of Johannesburg (2017-2022) where she taught Black visual culture.