About

Rosemary J Jolly is a Professor and the Weiss Chair of the Humanities at the Department of English at Pennsylvania State University. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Saskatchewan and completed her Master of Arts and PhD at Toronto. Her contact information includes her email rjj14@psu.edu, phone number (814) 865-1188, and her office is located in the 465 Burrowes Building, with a mailroom at 430 Burrowes Building. She is involved in academic activities within the Department of English, which is situated at 430 Burrowes Building, University Park, PA. Her preferred pronouns are she/hers. Further details about her research focus and key contributions are not provided on the page.

Research topics

• Political science
• Sociology
• History
• Gender studies
• Literature

Selected publications

• Introduction: Reading African Forms Simultaneously

  Comparative Literature Studies · 2025-05-01

  articleSenior author

  ABSTRACT This introduction to the special issue “African Literatures and the Question of Form” draws on Achille Mbembe’s work, arguing that form should be understood as a process. This, the authors argue, forms the basis of a comparative approach to African cultural and literary forms, centering the process of forming. Avoiding imposing preconceived definitions of form on a particular work, this is a “simultaneous” approach to form, in so far as it eschews an objectification of form-as-genre in favor of a practice of “thinking with” specific instances of form and their often multiple and radically diverse affiliations. The four articles and afterword contained in this issue are presented as examples of reading forms simultaneously.

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• The Effluent Eye

  University of Minnesota Press eBooks · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In _The Effluent Eye,_ Rosemary J. Jolly argues for the decolonization of human rights, attributing their failure not simply to state and institutional malfeasance but to the very concept of human rights as anthropocentric—and, therefore, fatally shortsighted. In an engaging mix of literary and cultural criticism, Indigenous and Black critique, and substantive forays into the medical humanities, Jolly proposes right-making in the demise of human rights. <br/><br/> Using what she calls an “effluent eye,” Jolly draws on “Fifth Wave” structural public health to confront the concept of human rights—one of the most powerful and widely entrenched liberal ideas. She builds on Indigenous sovereignty work from authors such as Robin Wall Kimmerer, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Mark Rifkin as well as the littoral development in Black studies from Christine Sharpe, Saidiya Hartman, and Tiffany Lethabo King to engage decolonial thinking on a range of urgent topics such as pandemic history and grief; gender-based violence and sexual assault; and the connections between colonial capitalism and substance abuse, the Anthropocene, and climate change. <br/><br/> Combining witnessed experience with an array of decolonial texts, Jolly argues for an effluent form of reading that begins with the understanding that the granting of “rights” to individuals is meaningless in a world compromised by pollution, poverty, and successive pandemics.

  PublisherDOI

• Decolonising ‘man’, resituating pandemic: an intervention in the pathogenesis of colonial capitalism

  Medical Humanities · 2022-03-16 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper brings together fifth-wave public health theory and a decolonised approach to the human informed by the Caribbean thinker, Sylvia Wynter, and the primary exponent of African Humanism, Es’kia Mpahlele. Sub-Saharan indigenous ways of thinking the human as co-constitutive in a subject we might call human-animal-‘environment’, in conjunction with the subcontinent’s experiences of colonial damage in disease ‘prevention’ and ‘treatment’, demonstrate the lack of genuine engagement with Indigenous wisdom in Western medical practice. The paper offers a decolonial reading of pandemic history, focused primarily on the human immunodefiency virus (HIV), the severe acute respiratory syndrome of 2003 caused by the SARS Covid 1 virus (SARS-CoV1) and COVID-19, caused by the SARS COVID 2 virus (SARS-CoV2) to demonstrate the importance of the co-constitutive subject in understanding the genesis of these pandemics as driven by colonial-capitalism. I emphasise that prevention will indeed take the kinds of massive changes proposed by fifth-wave public health theory. However, I differ from the proponents of that theory in an insistence that the new kind of thinking of the human Hanlon et al call for, has already been conceived: just not within the confines of the normative human of Western culture. I illustrate that Western Global Health approaches remain constitutionally ‘deaf’ to approaches that, although the West may not understand this to be the case, arise from fundamentally different—and extra-anthropocentric—notions of the human. In this context, Man as Wynter names Him is a subject ripe for decolonisation, rather than a premier site of capitalist development, including that of healthcare provision. Recognising that most of us are not individually able to change the structural violence of the colonial capitalist system in which Global Health practices are embedded, I conclude with implications drawn from my argument for quotidian practices that enable healthcare providers see their actions within a harm reduction paradigm, in the context of communities experiencing intergenerational impoverishment consequent on colonial violence.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Knowledge Regarding Learning Disability among Primary School Teachers

  International Journal of Indian Psychology · 2021-06-03 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Learning disability is a heterogeneous group of disorders and is manifested as significant difficulties in the acquisition and use of basic academic skills like reading, writing, spelling, mathematics or language (Hammill, 1990). Teachers play a very important role in diagnosis of disorders related to learning disability. Unfortunately, most of the symptoms of learning disability is either ignored or blame it on the child’s personality branding it as laziness, an attitude problem or aggression. This is due to lack of adequate knowledge about specific learning disability among primary school teachers. This study aims to assess the knowledge of primary school teachers regarding learning disability and also compare the knowledge between private school teachers and government school teachers and based on their experience. The sample for this study includes 100 primary school teachers (50-private school teachers, 50-government school teachers). A structured knowledge questionnaire on learning disability has been used for the collection of data (by Anju George, 2015) Appropriate statistical tools are used for the analysis of the study. The results of this study indicates that the level of knowledge regarding learning disability is moderately adequate among primary school teachers. Also, there is no significant difference in level of knowledge among teachers based on their year of experience and nature of employment.

  PublisherDOI

• Distress, desperation and despair: anxiety, depression and suicidality among rural South African youth

  International Review of Psychiatry · 2020-04-20 · 25 citations

  articleSenior author

  Common mental disorders (CMDs) affect millions of people worldwide and impose a high cost to individuals and society. Youth are disproportionately affected, as has also been confirmed in South Africa. Mental disorders and substance use disorders often occur as concurrent disorders. Although youth in rural South Africa grow up in d Steel, Z., Marnane, C., Iranpour, C., Chey, T., Jackson, J. W., Patel, V., & Silove, D. (2014). The global prevalence of common mental disorders: A systematic review and meta-analysis 1980-2013. International Journal of Epidemiology, 43(2), 476–493. https://doi.org/https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyu038[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]ifficult social and economic conditions, the study of mental disorders in South Africa has focussed primarily on urban populations. One such rural area in South Africa is the Harry Gwala District, where rates of interpersonal violence and self-inflicted injuries among 15–24-year-old men, are extraordinarily high. Suicide is an important proxy measure of severe emotional distress, predominantly depression and hopelessness. This study reports on rates of fatal self-harm among 15–24-year-old men in the Harry Gwala District. We determined the rates and severity of CMDs and their correlates among 355 young males ranging in age from 14 to 24 years in the Harry Gwala District community. High rates of depression, anxiety, hopelessness and worthlessness were reported. One in four of the young men and boys reported current suicidal thoughts associated with depression, anxiety, feelings of worthlessness and binge drinking. Reports of alcohol use were high, as were those of daily cannabis use. Our findings show high rates of CMDs and alcohol use, and highlight the impact of collective dysphoria on the mental well-being of rural youth in South Africa, who are likely coping through drug and alcohol use.

  PublisherDOI

• Pandemic Crises: The Anthropocene as Pathogenic Cycle

  ISLE Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment · 2020-09-29 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  What is important to recognize is that pathogenicity and virulence are microbial properties that can only be expressed in a susceptible host. – Liise-Anne Pirofski and Arturo Casadevall In 2011 I was sitting around a boma, a campfire circle, at a comfortable but not exorbitant game reserve on the Pongola river in the northernmost district of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. I found myself wondering about the isiZulu servants who made up our beds and kept us fed. We looked at the fauna and flora and had massages, while the servants, even if they were housed on the reserve, traversed the boundary between game sanctuary and impoverished surrounding areas, to go about the business of living. At that time, the Pongola area, just south of the Swaziland border, had an HIV prevalence rate of 39.3% (National Department of Health: Epidemiology and Surveillance 32). What, I wondered for the umpteenth time, did it mean, to be driven around, mostly looking at megafauna, while these servants – who have an embodied intergenerational knowledge of white apprehensions of Blacks as baboons – were at our beck and call?1

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• Fictions of the Human Right to Health: Writing Against the Postcolonial Exotic in Western Medicine

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2018-01-18 · 2 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  The last decade has witnessed far greater attention to the social determinants of health in health research, but literary studies have yet to address, in a sustained way, how narratives addressing issues of health across postcolonial cultural divides depict the meeting – or non-meeting – of radically differing conceptualisations of wellness and disease. This chapter explores representations of illness in which Western narrators and notions of the body are juxtaposed with conceptualisations of health and wellness entirely foreign to them, embedded as the former are in assumptions about Cartesian duality and the superiority of scientific method – itself often conceived of as floating (mysteriously) free from its own processes of enculturation and their attendant limits. In this respect my work joins Volker Scheid’s, in this volume, in using the capacity of critical medical humanities to reassert the cultural specificity of what we have come to know as contemporary biomedicine, often assumed to be

  PublisherDOI

• Effluence, “waste” and African Humanism: extra-anthropocentric being and human rightness

  Social Dynamics · 2018-01-02 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  I propose a extra-anthropocentric contextualisation of normative human rights as human rightness. To undo the normative construction of the human, I turn to a theory of the effluent. I argue effluent communities, defined as communities who have never depended on the state, re-envision normative human rights. Effluent communities suggest the necessity for a rethinking of the centrality of the state in Butlerian conceptions of precarity and grievability, since effluent communities have never found the state to be a source of such security. Further, I observe that this decentring of the state points to limitations in forms of postcolonial critical resistance that pose the state (be it colonial or postcolonial) as an adversary; or simply deconstruct the impossibility of the state’s support of the human through postmodernist scepticism. I analyse Mphahlele’s specific reading of African Humanism, demonstrating that it offers a way to grieve material being that is extrinsic to the lenses of the state, racially inflected abjection and subject/object-human/non-human animal binaries. Rather than name a set of effluent communities, I propose an exemplary bearing witness to the material dying/dead, instantiating what is commonly regarded as waste, if not toxic dirt, as the occasion for a practice of extra-anthropocentric human rightness.

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• Introduction: Reflections on Postcolonial Animations of the Material

  The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry · 2018-08-30 · 10 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In this introduction to the special issue, “Animating Theories of the Material: Approaching Animist Being in Postcolonial Literatures,” Rosemary Jolly and Alexander Fyfe consider the recent surge of interest in animisms within postcolonial studies alongside the roughly coeval turn to questions of materiality within the humanities. Introducing the five essays in the issue, they raise questions around the potential limitations of various forms of materialism, both “new” and “old,” and highlight possible ways in which postcolonial scholars might responsibly attend to animist modes of thought. They argue for the political importance and the ethical necessity of an approach to animisms that does not reduce them to a “theory” of the material, yet at the same time bears witness to the full range of materialities that obtain within such worldviews.

  PublisherDOI

• 30 Fictions of the Human Right to Health: Writing against the Postcolonial Exotic in Western Medicine

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2016-06-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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Frequent coauthors

• Derek Attridge

  9 shared

• Alan Jeeves

  Queen's University

  7 shared

• Nomusa Mngoma

  Queen's University

  5 shared

• S Fergus

  4 shared

• Michael Chapman

  2 shared

• William Moore

  2 shared

• Miriam Tlali

  2 shared

• Richard Peck

  2 shared