speculation I riddle I proemdra (ACLA 2025)

Organizer: Danai Mupotsa

Co-Organizer: Ayabulela Mhlahlo

speculation I riddle I proemdra

Zukolwenkosi ZIkalala’s essay “Forced Landing in Dark Time”, speculates on the method of a proemdra arises—a strategy, or trick-form that combines poetry, drama and prose whose effect, a ‘cloze procedure’ operates as a recursive beginning [and end]. This speculative inquiry exists within the broader project of Black public humanities, examining the tension between thinking, writing, and the "non-arrival" of Black freedom. This notion draws on multiple dimensions of time, space, and interiority, reframing the historical gaps and imaginings of Black life in Southern Africa. We draw connections between Zikalala’s (2024) ‘cloze procedure’ with Ayabulela Mhahlo’s language games (2022, 2024), in a dynamic play with time and history the navigator, who, in reading [the] map and its paratext, seeks to decipher codes embedded within the text. The text, in this sense, becomes a puzzle, where knowledge itself is fragmented and multifaceted, and the reader must juggle these multiple passageways to glimpse the elusive truth. As the navigator journeys through the labyrinthine structure of time, space, and narrative, the spiral dimension emerges. One of the language games Mhlahlo introduces is the ‘lore-riddle’:

an epistemic trick wraps itself around the lore-riddle. The mode of interpretation that constantly engages the lore-riddle must be aware that a trick lies within the repertoire of questions, which are contained within the ethical substance of the story. What is the trick? Is the question posed by the story the trick? Or is the trick within the events and contents of the story? Or is the story-as-question the trick itself?

Our seminar aims to respond to this ethical procedure, inviting proposals that critical engage with the connections between cloze reading and the themes of ethics, storytelling, and interpretation revolves around how gaps in narrative or meaning, uncertainty and substance. Possible approaches to could include, but are not limited to:

• Cloze reading as an ethics of responsibility towards what is left unsaid, unexplored, or unacknowledged


• Form, storytelling, substance and interpretation


• The gap as a threshold


• The riddle as an ethical or interpretive challenge


• Gaps as ethical substance


• Time, [un]determined by space; Space [un]determined by time


• Hyper-dimensional Time


• Revelation
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