Support poco.lit. with Steady!
Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree was unexpected. It’s a tale that hits like a lost, slow-moving freight train. A rambling, chugging adventure in prose that diverts again and again before pulling you back to its core. It is a tale of Partition sprinkled throughout with magical realism.
more...Kavita Bhanot is a writer, editor, translator, teacher, and activist based in Birmingham, UK. We were lucky enough to chat to her about her work and her perspective on translation – translation as a political act, a form of violence, and a tool to foster dialogue when used responsibly.
more...Max Czollek’s Versöhnungstheater (Theatre of Reconciliation) is an equally confident and lively intervention in current debates as his previous books. Despite the specific focus on post-national socialist continuities, some aspects discussed in the book bear similarities with postcolonial aims.
more...Reading through various studies on gender bias in machine translation, I stumble across the sentence: The doctor asked the nurse to help her. It’s used in a study that tests how gender is translated from English into languages which, unlike English, have grammatical gender. This attribution is particularly relevant when it comes to terms that label people. In English, for example, doctor is gender-neutral, whereas in German one would traditionally have to choose between ‘Arzt’ or ‘Ärztin’, the former a male doctor, the latter female. Intrigued, I open one of the most popular translation engines to see what happens when I translate this sentence into German.
more...African Europeans is an academic book about the history of Black Europeans that builds on existing research. Otele looks back as far as the 3rd century to explore questions about identity, citizenship, resilience and human rights, and considers how this legacy is important for Black European activism and alliances today.
more...Glory is a book at once comical and horrifying. Cynical and unforgiving, yet somehow hopeful in its last breaths, NoViolet Bulawayo’s second Booker Prize shortlisted novel is keen political commentary and formal innovation in one.
more...Love is a central theme of many books. Here we present some pieces of fiction and non-fiction with a particularly interesting, surprising or political perspective on love.
more...One of our aims with poco.lit. is to try to demystify some of the key ideas in and around postcolonial studies. In this post, we take a look at an article called “Decolonization is not a metaphor”, published by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang in 2012.
more...It took some time, but in the end, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida won me over with its combination of absurd scenes, magical realism, and critical engagement with the civil war in Sri Lanka.
more...The Most Distant Memory of Men is a stirring celebration of literature. The novel mischievously holds up a mirror to the European literary establishment.
more...
