Queenie
If you’re looking for a humorous, easy-to-read book that is intelligent despite all the clichés about chick lit, Queenie is just the book for you.
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Afropean
Johny Pitts takes his readers on a journey to find Afropean spaces in Europe. The impressions Pitts shares of the various places he visits are in turn amusing, moving, and critical, as he offers the insights of an interested listener and observer who consciously seeks challenging encounters.
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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.
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Tulsi
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.
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Dangerous Love
Set in Lagos, Nigeria, during the 1970s, Dangerous Love follows the story of Omovo, a young man who finds himself trapped in a life that is anything but easy: his mother is dead and his brothers escaped a home controlled by a recently remarried, violent and disillusioned father.
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Gegenwartsbewältigung
“Gegenwartsbewältigung” is an invitation to participate in shaping a society that is less discriminatory and violent than the present one.
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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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Afterlives
With an awareness for the gendered dimensions of human experiences, Afterlives conveys how people in German East Africa maintain their dignity and remain steadfast.
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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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Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjey-Brenyah: an ilb event
Last Friday evening I tuned in to livestream the ilb’s reading with Nana Kwame Adjey-Brenyah of Friday Black, a collection of short stories that explores issues of race and social justice in dystopian near-future settings.
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