Mikela Lundahl (Göteburgs Universitet, Sweden)

Submitted: Sat, 14 Jun 2008 11:20:01 +0200


Mikela Lundahl
Ph.D. in History of Ideas
Department of History of Ideas and Science Theory
Göteburgs Universitet
Sweden

phone:     +46 31 786 5277
cell:      +46 709 360 119
fax:       +46 31 786 4548
e-mail:    mikela.lundahl@idehist.gu.se

Web-page: http://hum.gu.se/institutioner/idehistoria-och-vetenskapsteori/personal/mikela-lundahl


My current project is called "Images and Imaginations: The History of 
Arabic, African and Latin American Literatures in Translation into 
Swedish." In this project two colleges and I are studying how these 
translations become part of discourses about those regions, and also 
contribute to them. We are studying how Swedish contexts and interests 
have determined which literature was translated, and how it was presented 
to its readers. We are looking among other things for what we call the 
Swedish benevolence discourse. 

My Ph.D. is entitled "What is a Negro? Negritude, Essentialism, Strategy." 
(only published in Swedish as Vad är en neger? Negritude, 
essentialism, strategi, Göteborg: Glänta 2005). In this 
dissertation I investigate notions about essentialism in the writings of 
Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire, as well as the 
assertions of their writings being essentialist, by for example Jean-Paul 
Sartre and James Clifford. There is a forthcoming article on the subject 
in English which will appear in 2008 in a bilingual volume entitled 
Negritude: Legacy and Present Relevance published by Cambridge 
Scholars Publishing.