Décoloniser la littérature africaine
Les études littéraires africaines devraient donner plus d'espace aux nombreux écrivains vivant sur le continent, dans les langues africaines.
Lit
Decolonizing African literature begins with language
Senegalese writer, Boubacar Boris Diop, on the problematic circuits of teaching African literature first legitimized in Europe in African universities
The philosopher king
A new biography of Tanzania's first president, Julius Nyerere, reveals a complicated legacy.
Frozen in time
How African literature is taught reveals a depressing lack of knowledge concerning North African writers and their works.
The Cold War’s unfinished legacy
Journalist Vincent Bevins’ new book, The Jakarta Method, shows that some of the 20th century’s ugliest episodes are still unfolding.
The exiled writer from Equatorial Guinea
A new documentary about Equatorial Guinea and the exiled writer Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel provides an honest, critical examination of the country's political, social, and cultural issues.
African literature is a country
What if you survey African literature professors to find out which works and writers are most regularly taught? Only a few canonical ones continue to dominate curricula.
White eyes
Pressure on African writers to avoid the criticism of poverty porn limits the imagination of the writer and the ability to speak truth to power.
A deafening salvo
With a new book, Chimurenga resurrects Festac, the blackest and largest ever gathering of artists from Africa and its diaspora in 1977 in Lagos, Nigeria.
An ambivalent sense of belonging
Janet McIntosh's fascinating book, Unsettled: Denial and Belonging Among White Kenyans, forces an interrogation of the past.
The Two Sudans
During the Cold War, Khartoum was very successful at frustrating solidarity by other Africans for South Sudan's independence struggle.
What does it mean to be African in a post-apartheid academy?
The Nigerian scholar and poet, Harry Garuba, who died in February 2020, was a key figure in African Studies and teaching literature in South Africa.
Reading List: Xavier Livermon
Livermon’s new book explores how South African kwaito artists, Lebo Mathosa and Mandoza, pushed against the boundaries of gender and performance in their music.
The wife’s tale
First published in 2018, Aida Edemariam’s The Wife’s Tale is an extraordinary book that will help in opening up new narratives about women's histories.
A murder in Congo
What does the decade-old “Congo-case,” involving two Norwegian mercenaries, tell us about residue coloniality in Scandinavia?
Reading List: Cara Moyer-Duncan
Media scholar Cara Moyer-Duncan wrote a book about postapartheid South Africa. Here she gives her book picks for our #ReadingList series.
The other Afropolitans
What it means to be a man and a feminist.
The afterghosts of protest
Jumoke Verissimo’s first novel, A Small Silence, explores the psychic afterlives of protest in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic.
Ivan Vladislavic and Muhammad Ali
How do white South African writers confront the country's as well as their own pasts?