Trespasses
Louise Kennedy’s story about the primary school teacher Cushla is set in 1975, at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in a deeply divided Belfast.
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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…
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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Uprooting – From the Caribbean to the Countryside
Marchelle Farrell’s Nature Memoir Uprooting – From the Caribbean to the Countryside is an emotional search for a place to put down roots. She didn’t expect this place to be a small village in Somerset.
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