In the end, it was all about love.
Musa Okwonga’s book is a captivating journey in three parts. Let the narrator take you with him for a spell; you won’t regret it.
more...Lucy Gasser
Scholar of literary studies and editor of poco. lit.
Post/colonial English: The language of African literature?
In light of our translation project, case.sensitive., we’ve had cause to think once more about the relationships between different languages, and how these work in regard to power.
more...
Transcendent Kingdom
Addiction and family, religion and science, being Ghanaian in Alabama: these are some of the issues that Yaa Gyasi’a second novel Transcendent Kingdom confronts. Written from the perspective of Gifty, now a talented biomedical researcher at a prestigious US university, this is the story of the loss of a charismatic brother to opioid addiction, and the complex aftermath of this trauma for those he leaves behind.
more...
Discrimination, language, and translation tools
Many people who find their cultural activities increasingly moving into the realm of the virtual might find themselves working more and more with translation tools. Yet these tools, and the translations they offer, tend to suffer from biases embedded into their making.
more...
poco.lit.’s new project for 2021: case.sensitive.
We are happy to announce a new project for 2021, in which we will collaborate with völlig ohne to develop a web app to foster politically sensitive translation.
more...
The ambivalent powers of speculative fiction
Recently, we’ve published articles on Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism. Both Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism can be framed as belonging to the larger genre of speculative fiction. But what is speculative fiction? Or perhaps more importantly, what can it do?
more...
Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism
The Afrofuturist movement strives for a space for independence and self-determination for Black people and rejects European universalism. Yet writers on the African continent have also expressed how this label doesn’t speak to and for what they are doing…
more...
“Literature from a Black perspective”: an Interview with @eine.schwarze.liest.buecher
“Primarily, I want to create awareness: awareness for the perspective of a Black person in Germany, so that people who belong to the majority white population can develop a sensitivity.”
more...
Lagoon
Aliens have landed off the coast of Lagos, Nigeria. Immediately, they change pollution levels, marine life, the quality of the ocean water – and that’s just before they get to land. Nnedi Okorafor’s novel Lagoon is both a fun, high-action romp through the old sci-fi tropes of alien arrival, and in many ways a carefully considered decolonisation of the genre and its Eurocentric epistemological underpinnings.
more...
The Boundary
They should adapt this book into a movie. It’s a dark, gritty crime noir waiting to be made. What makes it more than your average whodunit murder-mystery genre-novel is the context of its setting.
more...