The Hungry Tide
Amitav Ghosh’s novel asks a fundamental question: What is more worthy of protection, human life or the environment?
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Postcolonial Potsdam: digital insights into German colonial history
Postcolonial Potsdam has developed a web app. It introduces users to German colonial history through images and sound.
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The Story of Us
Ali’s writing is characterised by a felicitous turn of phrase. She has a way of buckling two or three words together in surprising but evocative ways, and a capacity for refreshing metaphor.
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Europe and the Postcolonial: Visiting the Treptow Museum
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.
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The Grassling
In The Grassling, Burnett manages to write so elegantly and touchingly about nature, and what people can learn from it, that big issues suddenly feel more tangible.
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In Search of Better Skies: An Interview with Jennifer Neal
On the 8th of July 2020, Jennifer Neal joined us on zoom and gave us some insights into her work. She is an Australian-American writer, artist and occasional stand-up comedian who currently lives in Berlin. She has published short stories and a wide array of journalistic articles and essays, and has recently finished a novel. Jennifer talked to us about writing nature and environment, and shared some thoughts on speculative fiction.
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In the belly of the queen
In an undefined neighbourhood of an undefined German town live a boy and a girl. They grow up, experience first love affairs, first disappointments. So far, so conventional – but Karosh Taha’s novel In the Belly of the Queen is not primarily a heterosexual coming-of-age story.
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Afropolitanism as a dead-end road: Brian Chikwava
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.
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Freshwater
What makes Freshwater exceptional and so valuable as a literary intervention is the way it turns Western epistemologies of mental health on their head.
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(Post-)Colonialism and the Botanical Gardens at Potsdam
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.
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