Janne Rantala

Current Fellows: Postdoctoral 

Janne Rantala is a cultural anthropologist who defended his thesis in September 2017 at the University of Eastern Finland. His research interests include themes such as structure and liminarity, public memory and remembering, hip hop, poetic license and social movements. During 2018 he does his postdoctoral research in the DST/NRF Flagship Programme, the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR), University of the Western Cape where he continues his research about Mozambican rap and public memory. During his PhD studies he was a visiting fellow at the Centro de Estudos Africanos in the University Eduardo Mondlane, Mozambique, and spent shorter periods at the University of Dar es Salaam, the Rhodes University, the Instituto de Ciências Sociais (ICS) at the University of Lisbon, Anadolu University, the Nordic Africa Institute, and the University of Kwazulu-Natal. His recent work about Maputo rap is ‘‘Hidrunisa Samora’: Invocations of a Dead Political Leader in Maputo Rap’, published in the Journal of Southern African Studies (JSAS). He was winner of the Colin Murray Grant at 2017 awarded by the JSAS, which helps him to launch his new field research in Beira, central Mozambique. He has recently debuted his first radio feature manuscript ‘Samoran lapset’ (in English: Children of Samora) on voices and memory of Maputo, which was based on his PhD research.