Sarah Kastner
I am a PhD student in the English department at Queen’s University. My dissertation focuses on three authors, Yvonne Vera, Bessie Head, and Dambudzo Marechera, who blur the boundary between autobiography and fiction through a postmodern African aesthetic. My work explores the interrelatedness of biography, narratives of self, and the construction of identity in postcolonial and post-apartheid environments. During my Masters degree in the Public Texts program at Trent University, I worked as an archivist to the personal papers of Zimbabwean author, Yvonne Vera. My thesis, entitled “Writing Against Possession: Archiving Yvonne Vera, and the Obedience Manuscript,” read Vera’s archives through her subaltern approach to writing, and argued for a reading of her final unfinished novel that does not attempt to apprehend its complete state. I am interested in personal archives theory, electronic archives, and digital editions.
