Writing whiteness, writing America
What happens when black and brown authors write about white people? Although novels by Chinelo Okparanta and Mohsin Hamid tread into this risky unknown, they do not go far enough.
12 Articles by:
Bhakti Shringarpure
Bhakti Shringarpure is an associate professor of English at University of Connecticut, editor-in-chief of Warscapes and author of Cold War Assemblages (Routledge, 2019).
But, first we’ll take this W
Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Nobel Prize for Literature win raises questions about the role of the LitNobel and how they construct what we think of and buy as African literature.
Notes on fake decolonization
What counts as “authentic” decolonization as the term takes over our social media and influencer bubbles? And how we can sharpen our activism.
Precarious Somali boyhoods
Somali-Canadian writers lay bare the harsh realities of being Black, migrant and Muslim in multicultural and ostensibly tolerant Toronto.
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.
Decolonizing the Lens
Because of the 1994 genocide, Rwanda occupies a complicated place in the world’s imagination. A new film, about the preceding 1973 pogrom, wants to demystify that view. Does it succeed?
The radical afterlives of Frantz Fanon
A documentary film takes Fanon’s ideas out of the past and tracks the ways in which his ideas are resonating with today’s young across the planet.
African poets get their own documentary
The friendship of the poets Syl Cheney-Coker and Niyi Osundare is the subject of the road movie documentary, “The Poets.”
Why is the cultural life of Black Panther so derivative?
In the Global North, Africa never inspires radically new terms of representation. It always presents itself as an entity grounded in an anthropological reality.
Empire and Ambivalence
Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s perturbing review of Maya Jasanoff’s travelogue of going up the Congo River as she’s accompanied by Joseph Conrad’s novel, ‘Heart of Darkness.”
The Assassins of Memory
The South African question is far too important to accommodate an explanation that is simplistic and childish.
Literary Sudans
The online retrospective, “Literary Sudans,” is intended to highlight the two Sudans as sites of literature and culture.