Speaker:
Anthony Ossa-Richardson, Lecturer in English Literature, UCL
Moderator:
Beth Harper, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Monday, March 11, 2024
Time: 5:00 pm Hong Kong Time (9:00 am London)
Venue: On Zoom
Last year Anthony Ossa-Richardson published (with his colleague Richard Oosterhoff) a translation of the 1526 Cosmography and Geography of Africa by the Moroccan diplomat al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan, commonly known as Johannes Leo Africanus. This was the first book about Africa published in Europe and the main written source of knowledge about the continent until the eighteenth century. The translation is the first (in any language) to be based on the only known manuscript of the work, which was rediscovered in 1931. In this talk, Ossa-Richardson will discuss some of the circumstances of the manuscript discovery and its seismic implications, not only for the nature of the work itself, but for our understanding of intercultural communication in the Renaissance more generally. He will argue that, understood in its full context, the manuscript offers a powerful challenge to our notion of ‘decolonisation’.
Anthony Ossa-Richardson is a lecturer in English literature at UCL. He has written two monographs, the more recent of which is A History of Ambiguity, an account of the way readers posited, denied, conceptualised and argued over the presence of multiple meanings in texts from antiquity to the twentieth century. In addition he has authored around thirty essays on various aspects of literary and intellectual history, including recent pieces on Proust, George Eliot, and the seventeenth-century pamphleteer John Taylor. He is currently completing a monograph on postwar British architectural thought.
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