As readers of Moshtari Hilal’s book, we are allowed to accompany the sometimes painful process of coming to terms with what is constructed as ugly, in order to realize that ugliness is actually what is behind this construction.
Ailton Krenak’s Ideas to postpone the end of the world (translated from Portuguese by Anthony Doyle) is a slim volume bursting with important ideas. Krenak is a philosopher and socio-environmental activist for Indigenous rights from the Krenak homelands along the Doce River.
Betiel Berhe explores and explains how closely related the dimensions of race and class are, by way of her own biography and various events of recent years.
During an online reading of this book, she was asked if her plea for radical tenderness also extended to Nazis. Kurt said no. It was questions like these, and the impulse to continue writing politically about feelings, that lead Kurt to think intensively about hate.
Max Czollek’s Versöhnungstheater (Theatre of Reconciliation) is an equally confident and lively intervention in current debates as his previous books. Despite the specific focus on post-national socialist continuities, some aspects discussed in the book bear similarities with postcolonial aims.
The lawyer, activist and author Rafia Zakaria came from Pakistan to the USA at the age of 17 and worked for 5 years on the board of Amnesty International USA after having studied law. She has incorporated these experiences into her book Against White Feminsim.
With a confrontational title, the message of the book is pretty straight-forward and ambitious. The text is a long essay which consists of a set of guidelines that offers white people a way to confront systemic racism that does not fall into historically cliched and ineffectual advice.
One of our aims with poco.lit. is to try to demystify some of the core ideas in and around postcolonial studies and the ways in which postcolonial literatures have been read. In this post, we take a look at Orientalism by Edward Said and some of its key contributions to thinking about colonial practices.
This is a wonderfully strange book, and probably the most obvious reason for its strangeness is the confluence of genres it enacts. Ghosh’s book gives his readers both the findings of many years of research, and the story of his undertaking that research.
In her book, Hadija Haruna-Oelker thinks conscientiously and mindfully about all possible facets of social differentiation. She seeks thus to demonstrate how respectful interaction can be practiced.