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Projects: [poco.lit.space]

About the project

In 2024, we carried out the [poco.lit.space] project and received funding from the Lotto Foundation Berlin for it. We invited numerous creatives to share their perspectives on postcolonial topics in our online magazine, or at our events and workshops. The project focused on three different themes:

1) What is postcolonialism?
2) Ideas that travel
3) Being from (indigeneity).

On this page you can find all of the reviews, essays and interviews that we published as part of the project.

[poco.lit.space]

Aquariums

Aquariums – sitting perfectly at the intersection between a family chronicle and a pandemic tale, interwoven with the disastrous progression of the climate catastrophe - offers both indecisive and openminded readers alike a bridge between historical fiction and science fiction.

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Bad Cree

A life-sucking horror haunts dreams of female kinship and the prairies in a suspenseful First Nations novel from Canada.

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Panther Paw

In my family, caste was mostly a far away concept. As an adult, I am trying to constantly interrogate my positionality within my Indian identity and that includes acknowledging the privileged aspects.

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Latitudes of Longing

When a book can make you look up at the sky once in a while, pause, draw in your breath, and gaze at the rustling leaves of the tree outside your window, what does it mean? That it is not gripping enough, or rather I believe that it wants everything around you to grip you completely.

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Life in the City of Dirty Water

Clayton Thomas-Müller’s Life in the City of Dirty Water, A Memoir of Healing is a must read, especially for people interested in climate justice, but it can also help non-Indigenous people to understand the struggles of Indigenous communities, particularly the ones in urban areas in North America.

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Raising the Spirit of Un-belonging

As part of the Barrio Berlin festival, Hopscotch Reading Room, and poco.lit. co-program an evening at the cemetery café Lisbeth. Several dozen people squeeze into the building for a reading by Avrina Prabala-Joslin, a Tamil poet, and Maya Saravia, a Guatemalan artist.

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The Sentence

The recent novel by US-American writer Louise Erdrich centres on an Ojibwe woman called Tookie, grappling with her own past in the midst of the pandemic, protests and upheaval in Minneapolis.

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Poūkahangatus

Tayi Tibble’s Poūkahangatus is a vivid, often playful examination of her own family history, becoming an adult and the tensions that exist in her lived experience as a young Māori.

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“People are read differently depending on where they are”: A conversation with Raphaëlle Red on the principle of the road novel

Raphaëlle Red is an author currently living in Berlin who writes in French, German and English. She is also doing her PhD on literature in the African diaspora. We had the pleasure of speaking with her about her French-language debut novel Adikou, its protagonist’s journey and its context from one language to the next. The German translation of the novel by Patricia Klobusiczky  was published in September 2024 by Rowohlt Verlag.

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Antichristie

I rarely voluntarily choose to read stories about time travel, even though when done well they not only create narrative potential, but also orchestrate and scrutinize connections between the past and present. And this is exactly what Sanyal accomplishes with Antichristie.

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Takeaway

Takeaway Party Anyone? Chef’s Kitchen Chinese takeaway in El Cerrito, California was a beloved after school institution when I was in high school. There was only a small counter, no indoor seating, and an open kitchen. Every so often a burst of fire would shoot up from one of the furiously moving woks. There aren’t […]

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5 Books about Travelling Ideas

Physical bodies travel across oceans, mountains, and borders. Ideas too can travel from place to place, context to context. Here are 5 books that we think represent how an idea can travel.  

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Widening the Gothic World in Kohraa (1964) 

What’s great about cinema though - lest you thought I wasn’t going to mention books versus movies - is that it has helped to diversify this aesthetic of storytelling. So I was especially thrilled when I first came across Biren Nag’s Kohraa, (‘The Fog’) a film from 1964 which is an adaptation of Rebecca the novel by Daphne du Maurier and film by Alfred Hitchcock.

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How do you say Ballroom in German? (Part 2)

In her second essay, Sophie Yukiko continues her critical examination of the German Ballroom culture. She observes that it holds huge potential because from its earliest days, it has always been a space for discussion, criticism, adjustment and conversation.

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How do you say Ballroom in German? (Part 1)

German-American writer, performance artist and cultural curator Sophie Yukiko looks back on a decade of creating and experiencing Ballroom Culture in Germany. With a critical look on the reproduction of powerdynamics, she tries to find out what happened between 1980’s Harlem and today while diving into the conflicts and potentials of the German scene.

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Dispersals

Jessica J. Lee's third book, Dispersals, On Plants, Borders and Belonging, consists of fourteen personal essays about plants crossing borders and putting down roots in new places. Lee chooses several trees, shrubs and algae, which hold meaning in her own life, to engage with their history and journeys into different parts of the world. In doing so, she questions under what circumstances species are considered either cosmopolitan or invasive.

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The Time Regulation Institute

The novel, by writer and literary historian Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901-1962) is considered one of the most meaningful works of modern Turkish literature and offers a satirical glimpse into the processes of modernization during the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey. 

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Babel

In the Old Testament, the story of The Tower of Babel is told: in reaction to the hubris of humankind, God spreads people across the world and muddles up their languages. The barriers to understanding thus become the penalty for humankind’s hubris. R. F. Kuang’s Babel takes place in a similar time of human arrogance: in 1836, Oxford – with its fictive Royal Institute for Translation, informally known as Babel – is at the centre of the British Empire.

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Anita and Me

In Meera Syal’s semi-autobiographical novel, Meena Kumar is the only Indian girl in the former British mining village of Tollington. While her parents wait in vain for their daughter’s sudden and definitive metamorphosis into the model Indian girl, all Meena wants is to be a Tollington wench.

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Issa

Issa, who lives in Frankfurt am Main, is pregnant and desperate. The situation with her child's father is complicated as is with her mother. No longer knowing what to do, and at the urging of her mother, she flies to see her grandmother and great-grandmother in Cameroon.

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Shakespeare travelling

If your interests lie with the postcolonial, Shakespeare might seem like an unlikely port of call. Or rather, he might seem representative of a lot of the things a postcolonial approach would be interested in working against. He could, for instance, represent what needs to be removed in calls to ‘decolonize the university’: a dead […]

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Lüderitz

Around 12,000 kilometers apart are two places that could hardly be more different and yet share the same name: Lüderitz in the north of Saxony-Anhalt and Lüderitz in the southwest of Namibia. The two towns of Lüderitz act as a visual setting for negotiations of the past.

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Cahier d’un retour au pays natal

Cahier d’un retour au pays natal by Aimé Césaire blows up literary and political categories: it is a long poem, but at times it reads like a manifesto; it describes the journey and the search for identity of a young man from Martinique, has autobiographical features, and yet is also a journey into the past that recalls, among other things, the transatlantic slave trade.

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Europe’s Nightmare: The Practice of Decoloniality

Current power relations are the direct result of the colonial division of the world and, in particular, the organization and state of labor since the colonization of the Americas. It is why today we can no longer speak of colonialism, but of coloniality. And identifying coloniality creates an intervention.

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Culture Wrappings IV: Closeted Puja  

The home mandir is integral to daily living. It’s your ‘last stop’ before you start your day and before you go to bed. If something good happens, you go here to show your gratitude. When something challenging or terrible happens, you come here for comfort and strength. 

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Go Tell It on the Mountain

„Go Tell It on the Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else. I had to deal with what hurt me most. I had to deal, above all, with my father. “, James Baldwin said of his autobiographical debut novel, published in 1953. 

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White Spots

Lena Albrecht’s novel Weiße Flecken (‘White Spots’ in English) is an excellent example of a critical examination of one’s own whiteness. The novel shows how a young white woman gets the impetus to question the typical narration of German history, takes her newly acquired perspective personally and deals with the entanglements of her own family.

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Postcolonialism and a Critique of Humanism

In discussing humanism, one is talking about the dignity of human beings and the moral imperative for humane actions. As much as we can justly perceive these hard-earned principles as standards to be maintained, we, as advocates committed to these universally conceived principles, must equally admit their historically ambivalent and abusive role.

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Neighbours and Other Stories

There is perhaps no other art form that makes time travel so vividly possible as literature. In Diane Oliver’s collection of short stories Neighbours and other stories, we are in the USA of the 1960s, a decade known for protest and political upheaval. The so-called racial segregation. which determines everyday life in the USA, especially in the southern […]

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Schwarz. Deutsch. Weiblich.

In her current book Schwarz. Deutsch. Weiblich – Warum Feminismus mehr als Geschlechtergerechtigkeit fordern muss(Black. German. Female – Why feminism must demand more than gender equality in English), Natasha A. Kelly traces the history of Black women in Germany, which she skilfully weaves together with her own life story.

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The God of Small Things

Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997)  is one of the most widely known postcolonial novels. It won the Booker Prize in 1997 and has been translated into more than forty languages.

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Vertraulichkeiten (Confidentialities)

In Max Lobe‘s novel Vertraulichkeiten (Confidentialities, not yet translated into English), a nameless first-person narrator who lives in Switzerland travels to Cameroon, where he grew up, and in a village somewhere on the road between Duala and Jaunde, an old woman tells him about the Cameroonian struggle for independence.

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other projects