Green Library – a year in review
The year 2020 is coming to an end, and our Green Library series with it. Here’s a short retrospective.
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Ecocriticism and Postcolonialism: When Land Remembers
Ecocriticism is a concept with an interdisciplinary approach that emerged in the United States to examine the different ways in which people imagine human relationships to nature and the environment, and how they portray it in books, films and works of art. Escpecially in combination with postcolonialism, ecocriticism offers incredible potential for analysis.
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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?
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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…
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Afrofuturism 2.0 – a legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois
Afrofuturism is a future-oriented concept that centers Africa and/or Blackness. The Afro-German academic activist and curator Natasha A. Kelly explains in her recently published anthology that Afrofuturism 2.0 builds on the theoretical and artistic legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois.
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Ode to the Dandelion
An original essay for our Green Library series on writing nature and the environment.
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Postcolonial literatures and Eurocentrism: Zoe Wicomb’s You can’t get lost in Cape Town
Postcolonial literatures are too often configured as being in some kind of relationship to Europe. Isn’t this just a different kind of Eurocentrism? Zoe Wicomb’s You can’t get lost in Cape Town shows up the inadequacy of a European literary tradition to the stories she wants to tell.
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Thinking about imperialism with Hannah Arendt
There is, currently and running until the 18th of October 2020, an exhibition on at the Deutsches Historisches Museum (German Historical Museum) in Berlin on Hannah Arendt and the 20th Century. My interest in the exhibition was roused by recently having read The Origins of Totalitarianism, which, unfortunately for me, made up a relatively small part of the exhibition.
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What Rights does Nature have? with Sumana Roy
This year’s international literature festival Berlin has placed particular emphasis on alternative and sustainable economic forms. Poco.lit. visited an event presenting Sumana Roy’s contribution.
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Queer Afropolitanism in Germany: SchwarzRund
This essay is the last in a four-part series on Afropolitanism and literature. SchwarzRund’s intervention in the Afropolitan literary market thus stands out not only because of the setting and language of the novel, but also because of its evidently intersectional approach.
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