Traversing Distances and Differences: Developing the African Women’s Playwright Network

Abstract

In 2015, playwright, director and screenwriter from Cape Town, South Africa, Amy Jephta and I set up the African Women’s Playwright Network (AWPN) via a mobile app to traverse literal, conceptual and historic distances to enable artists, researchers, educators, programmers and publishers from various parts of Africa and its diasporas to connect. In this article, I will trace how and why this network was set up, while reflecting on what we need to think about when creating online and in-person spaces for artists and academics to explore difficult questions across cultural lines in postcolonial contexts. These questions include how we consider colonial legacies that continue to impact this kind of contemporary cross-cultural work, and how we shifted the network from discourse on creativity to what Aristea Fotopolou terms ‘doing feminism and being feminist’ (2016:5), as lived and performed behaviours.