Situation is Critical
Jeremy Weate moves from text to context in search of the current state of African writing. I’ve just received my review copy of Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them. I’m not sure I can stomach it all the way through, still less write about it. The tome lies on my table, a lead weight too heavy to […]
How to write about Africa
by Boniface Mongo-Mboussa Serpent à Plumes’ republication of Yambo Ouologuem’s Le Devoir de violence has given this novel a new lease of life. Christopher Wise’s preface insists on the novel’s place in the history of African literature, highlighting the author’s biographical details and situating the book in the historical context of pre-colonial Mali. It also confronts the first publisher’s (Editions du Seuil) […]
In Suburbia
Suburban South Africa is glowing. The sun is up, the trees are in bloom, the lawns are magnificent, and if you ask nicely, you might even get a windowless room. Tanya Pamplone writes about the blessed and the damned, a home she likes and would also like to leave, and painfully assesses the situation of […]
The Chronic – mapping the new – soon come
“In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was […]
What Follows? The State of Black Collectivity in the Year of the Sheep
Continuing to sing a vital and urgent message of black collectivity, Harmony Holiday writes from New York critiquing the state of things now and the shape of jazz to come. Here we are at the start of the Year of the Sheep, and may we no longer be martyrs to our own following. In 1977, filmmaker Charles Burnett, wrote and directed […]