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.
more...[poco.lit.space] – a year in review
The year 2024 is coming to an end and [poco.lit.space] with it. We zoomed in on several aspects of postcolonialism in our online magazine, but also at our events and workshops.
more...Bad Cree
A life-sucking horror haunts dreams of female kinship and the prairies in a suspenseful First Nations novel from Canada.
more...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.
more...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.
more...Ashok Ferry on writing Sri Lanka and his younger selves
"This society is fragmented – it’s a product of colonialism, but it’s also just a fact of paradise island.”
more...Praiseworthy
Wright did not create a story that is simply about the Aboriginal town of Praiseworthy in Northern Australia, she created a wholly Indigenous novel.
more...Neither Indigenous nor colonial: Identured Labourers at the boundaries of postcolonial categories
When over 1 million indentured labourers left the sub-Indian continent to work in the British colonies of the world, they had to redefine their cultural identity…
more...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.
more...Cozy reading and writing workshop: giving gifts
Warm invitation to our cozy online workshop to welcome winter. We’ll read and write with Giuliana Kierz.
more...“It’s the language of the colonizer” – An interview with jarral Boyd about indigeneity and language
jarral Boyd grew up on Turtle Island and is the child of Indigenous and Black parents. Since they have lived in Berlin, jarral has worked in schools, created community structures for diversity and inclusion, given workshops as an allyship trainer at conferences...
more...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.
more...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.
more...An Ordinary Day at the Museum
Before I let you in on the strange journey that we were about to commence, I must share my history with you. I was borne by a boulder up in Sápmi, a land the Sámi has lived on sine the ice started revealing the land.
more...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.
more...“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.
more...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.
more...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 […]
more...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.
more...Barrio Berlin Festival: poco.lit. Event on Belonging
Join us for an evening with the 2 storytellers and artists, avrina prabala-joslin and Maya Saravia, who will share their approaches to open questions of belonging.
more...5 Essays about Traveling Ideas
Ideas can travel in different contexts, but they also reach their limits. 5 essays about traveling ideas and their barriers.
more...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.
more...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.
more...Community Event 2024 with Giuliana Kiersz, Ben Osborn and the “Macht Sprache” Book
Warm invitation to our second community event! We would like to meet you all in person and have a chat over a drink. First we will introduce ourselves, poco.lit. and our newly published book “Macht Sprache: Ein Manifest für mehr Gerechtigkeit”. And then, we will be able to enjoy a performance by poet Giuliana Kiersz and musician Ben Osborn.
more...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.
more...A Passage North
A Passage North takes its readers along on a contemplative journey through a Sri Lanka traumatised by a decades long civil war.
more...Call for Submissions – Being from
This is our third call for submissions and we are looking for pieces about being from. Please send us your pitch!
more...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.
more...If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English
After the revolution, a woman and a man become acquainted in a café in Cairo. A romance develops between the two of them, but it then takes a violent turn.
more...Travelling ideas and their baggage
To travel is a privilege not afforded to all. While that might seem a bit hyperbolic in times like these, it is in fact a reality for most of the world.
more...Life isn’t All Haha Heehee
Meera Syal's Life isn’t All Haha Heehee follows the lives of three best friends who grew up together in the Punjabi community of East London.
more...On The Tip Of My Tongue
We moved to Mumbai when I was 5 years old, already speaking Hindi, English, and crumbs of Nepalese, dregs of infancy passed in Kathmandu.
more...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.
more...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.
more...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.
more...From Text Choice to the Individual Word – the Political Decisions of a Translator
Within the framework of the Resonance program organized by the Goethe-Institutes in France, Justine Coquel and Anna von Rath chatted with Lucie Lamy, who, together with Jean-Philippe Rossignol, translated May Ayim's works into French.
more...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.
more...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 […]
more...7 introductory essays on postcolonialism
One of our aims with poco.lit. is to try to demystify some of the core ideas in and around postcolonial studies. Here we’ve compiled 7 introductory essays that discuss different aspects of postcolonialism.
more...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.
more...Where to begin? 5 postcolonial classics
If you are interested in postcolonial literature but don't really know where to begin, we put together a list of 5 postcolonial classics for you.
more...Culture Wrappings: An Excerpt from “The Mourners”
Like any respectable Indian family, the Shantis didn’t use the house kitchen, they cooked in their garage.
more...Kurdistan in VHS – The postcolonial questions of Kurdish films
The postcolonial occupation with art enables a negotiation that positions itself permanently against the colonial gaze, and in doing so can actually be and become a form of resistance.
more...Call for Submissions – Ideas That Travel
For our online magazine, we are looking for contributions on the topic of "Ideas that Travel".
more...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.
more...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.
more...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.
more...How Colonialism Continues to Shape Thinking in Germany Today
Many people who grow up in Germany believe that colonialism belongs to the distant past and has no influence on them. However, this is not true. Postcolonialism is reflected in the Eurocentric worldview, the media, language and in consumer behaviour.
more...Season of the Shadow
Season of the Shadow reads like a crime novel, and its dark historic background unfolds only little by little: the history of the transatlantic slave trade.
more...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.
more...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.
more...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.
more...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 […]
more...Culture Wrappings III: Please Keep Your Beautiful Feet Away from my Beautiful Books
Granted, the cartoon sidewalks are usually spotless apart from the occasional pile of leaves and errant chewing gum, but that doesn’t mean it would have been any better if they’d taken their shoes off. Feet on books? No. Just, NO.
more...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.
more...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.
more...Culture Wrappings: Sanskar aur Parampara (Culture and Tradition)
I would argue that we were raised to see the best parts of our culture and that some of it was made visible via Bollywood. However, this was a world we visited rather than took at face value as the life we should be expected to lead. It is that which has allowed me to hold these films dear whilst still being critical.
more...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.
more...poco.lit.’s new project for 2024: [poco.lit. space]
Thanks to the kind support of the Lotto Foundation Berlin, we will start a new project next year: [poco.lit. space].
more...