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Diane Oliver
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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Sunday Buttered Toast 

Last night around ten o’clock, Jess drank a mug of Horlicks with a Hershey’s Kiss dropped inside, scavenged from an expired bag she found in a cabinet.  It was white and fossilized by now, but with some vigorous stirring, she managed to melt it into a blob which she ate at the end with a vanilla cream wafer biscuit.

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Jennifer Neal
Notes on her Colour

Many scenes in this powerful novel about race, family dynamics, mental health, trauma and queerness are surprising, thrillingly lustful or abysmally ugly – they will likely burn themselves into the reader’s memory.

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Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Undrowned

Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs is one of the strangest books I have read recently – and I mean that in an extremely positive way. I admit I had to get into it first, but then this unusual way of talking about dolphins, whales, seals and co. in connection with Black experiences won me over.

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Decolonization is not (just) a metaphor

One of our aims with poco.lit. is to try to demystify some of the key ideas in and around postcolonial studies. In this post, we take a look at an article called “Decolonization is not a metaphor”, published by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang in 2012.

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Tayari Jones
An American Marriage

An American Marriage has been Tayari Jones’ literary breakthrough. She takes her readers to the US-American South and offers detailed insights into an unfortunate turn in the lives of a middle-class African-American couple.

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Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

Honorée Fanonne Jeffer’s first novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is extensive and demanding: The family history of the African American Ailey Pearl Garfield is traced back over several generations and reveals complicated family entanglements that are consequences of settler colonialism and enslavement.

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