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With a heavy sigh and an uncanny discomfort, her untrained fingers dug around the plant. Suddenly, her nostrils were filled with a pungent smell which was possibly coming from the dead leaves lying around. What she could not understand was the untimely death of the Tulsi plants in her courtyard every monsoon season.
more...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.
more...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.
more...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.
more...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.
more...The exhibition ZurückGESCHAUT at the Treptow Museum in Berlin distinguishes itself, to my mind, not so much for what it presents as for how it does this. It opened in October 2017 and was the first permanent exhibition to confront Germany’s histories of colonialism, racism and resistance.
more...This essay is the third in a four-part series on Afropolitanism and literature. Brian Chikwava has not written a theoretical treatise on Afropolitanism. But his novel Harare North has been much discussed in the context of Afropolitanism.
more...Understanding botanical gardens as colonial sites seems particularly difficult: their plant inhabitants present themselves as too innocent, too splendid and too lively to be associated with colonial violence, white appropriation and hegemonic systems of knowledge production.
more...In March 2019, I visited the ‘Africa Museum’ at Tervuren just outside of Brussels. It was a deeply strange experience.
more...Alongside the writer Taiye Selasi, who was introduced in the first essay in this series, the political scientist Achille Mbembe is regarded as a key torchbearer of Afropolitanism. Mbembe presents Afropolitanism as an ethico-political stance.
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