Professor Eloïse Brezault Publishes in the Journal of the African Literature Association

We are delighted to announce that Professor Eloïse Brezault has published a new article titled “‘Suturing the City’: Poetics of Extractivism in the Congolese Novels of Sinzo Aanza and Fiston Mwanza Mujila” in the Journal of the African Literature Association.

This article offers a new ecocritical reading of Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s Tram 83 and The Villain’s Dance and Sinzo Aanza’s Généalogie d’une banalité, foregrounding souffle—breath, pulse, and animating force—as a reparative principle within urban ecologies shaped by extractivism and “slow violence.” Moving beyond readings of postcolonial dereliction, Brezault reinterprets holes, ruins, and absences as porous, generative spaces where memory, sound, and improvisation circulate. Drawing on Achille Mbembe, Felwine Sarr, and extending Cajetan Iheka and Stephanie Newell’s ecosystemic approach, the article demonstrates how these novels transform literature into a vessel for souffle, sustaining life, solidarity, and alternative urban ecologies amid the debris of extraction.