poco.lit.‘s top 5 picks in 2022
The editors of poco.lit. share their favorite books of 2022 – five novels by incredibly talented writers from around the world
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The Impostor
The Impostor is an exciting book that offers insights into a complex reality. It is set in a time shortly after the end of apartheid; South Africa is in transition.
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The Promise
The Promise marks the third time a South African writer has won the Booker: Galgut joins fellow laureates Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee. The book is executed with a real skill for the craft of writing, and commands respect for the author’s handling of his medium.
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Always another country
In her autobiography, Sisonke Msimang portrays her life as strongly influenced by the South African ANC members in exile and the frequent moves of her family to different continents. In an extremely self-critical narrative voice, Msimang recounts the contradictions she had to – and also wanted to – learn to live with.
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5 books set in Southern Africa worth reading
Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania… Here are five books we can recommend to take you on some journeys through Southern Africa.
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Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism
The Afrofuturist movement strives for a space for independence and self-determination for Black people and rejects European universalism. Yet writers on the African continent have also expressed how this label doesn’t speak to and for what they are doing…
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Postcolonial literatures and Eurocentrism: Zoe Wicomb’s You can’t get lost in Cape Town
Postcolonial literatures are too often configured as being in some kind of relationship to Europe. Isn’t this just a different kind of Eurocentrism? Zoe Wicomb’s You can’t get lost in Cape Town shows up the inadequacy of a European literary tradition to the stories she wants to tell.
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Thinking about imperialism with Hannah Arendt
There is, currently and running until the 18th of October 2020, an exhibition on at the Deutsches Historisches Museum (German Historical Museum) in Berlin on Hannah Arendt and the 20th Century. My interest in the exhibition was roused by recently having read The Origins of Totalitarianism, which, unfortunately for me, made up a relatively small part of the exhibition.
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Moffie: A brooding film about the violence of masculinity, homophobia and race in apartheid South Africa
In “Moffie”, we see that brutal norms of militaristic masculinities are part of how the film treats the theme of race and complicitness.
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Afropolitanism as ethico-political stance: Achille Mbembe
Alongside the writer Taiye Selasi, who was introduced in the first essay in this series, the political scientist Achille Mbembe is regarded as a key torchbearer of Afropolitanism. Mbembe presents Afropolitanism as an ethico-political stance.
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