Amarachi  holds a BA in International Relations (2018) and African Studies, from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). She also holds an MA in Conflict Security and Development, from King's College LondonAmarachi’s research is funded by the Economic Social Research Council, through the London Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership (LISS DTP). She is currently investigating radical indigenous reconciliatory imaginaries in the Azanian context, through the sonic and poetic arts, specifically Jazz and Jazz Fusion genres. 

Research Interests 

• Transitional Justice
• Post-conflict reconciliations
• African post-colonial nationbuilding
• Aesthetic Resistance and Anticoloniality

Thesis 

Stimela, Beyond Metaphor: Activating radical reconciliatory imaginaries in Azanian (South African) sonic and poetic resistance practices

This paper addresses the centrality of aesthetic liberatory practices through sonic and poetic productions, in Azania’s national reconciliation narrative. It posits that musical artists spanning genres of Jazz, Jazz Fusion, Marabi, Toyi-Toyi and Gospel, operationalised a radical ‘people’s reconciliation’, which moved away from the era(ce)ive institutional confines of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) (Iheke, 2022). This project considers artists in this way as conduits not only for alternative narrative construction and memorialisation, but also as practitioners of epistemic and ontological justice.

Indeed, at the heart of this paper is the aesthetic articulation of justice along the epistemic and ontological lines. In this way, this paper directly engages the conditionalization of humanness in apartheid’s settler colonial apparatus, in turn, rearticulating Transitional Justice necessarily as decolonial practice (Madlingozi, 2015). The project – while it does address institutional approaches to reconciliation - is not focused on interrogating the shortcomings of the TRC or offering an evaluation of its success as instrument for ‘post-conflict’ reconciliation. Rather, it is concerned with radical reconciliation as the liberation of black indigenous self, from colonial victimhood, through the self-expression of poet-musicians. Ontological restructuring in this way is also addressed in its multi-dimensional, multi-sensorial and communitarian radicalisms. 

Supervisors 

• Professor Rachel Kerr
• Dr Nicola Palmer 

Publications 

Moving Beyond Semantics: Examining the ‘Biafran’ genocide claim

To keep up to date with all of Amarachi's publications please visit the Research Portal