Lieselot De Taeye is a junior FWO postdoctoral fellow. She completed her PhD in Dutch Literature in 2018. Her doctoral dissertation Tegen het verzinnen [Against Fiction] was focused on the literary experiments with non-fiction that emerged from the 1960s counterculture. From September 2018 till Februari 2020 she was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley. Her current research project investigates the roles of religion and Middle-African cosmologies in narratives on Congo that were published between 1945 and 1975. The approach she uses is comparative: her corpus includes texts by Congolese and Flemish authors, such as Sony Labou Tansi and Jacques Bergeyck. Among others, she is interested in the narrative functions of ancestral spirits: how does their agency in the world of the living affect the political dynamics in the story? Which temporalities, which views on the relationship between past, present and future inform their influence on the plot? Through this lens, she aims to learn more about the ways in which the coloniality and postcoloniality of Congo have been imagined.
