Year of the Rat Marc Anthony Richardson FC2/ University of Alabama Press, 2017 Released to high critical acclaim but scant attention last year, Marc Anthony Richardson’s Year of the Rat is a slim novel excavating the inheritance of generational trauma, violence, economic struggle, and institutional racism that defines much of contemporary life in the US. […]
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WHAT AFRICAN WRITERS CAN LEARN FROM CHEIKH ANTA DIOP
By Chronic on April 23, 2018 in Arts & Pedagogy, Books & Oration, Media & Propaganda, Systems of Governance
In a country that “obstinately clings to its francophone ‘roots’”, on a continent where success as an African writer depends, in part, on the use of a colonial lexicon – stories spun in the tongue of the French, the English, the Portuguese – the idea of a black African transitional literature sits uncomfortably with those […]
WRITING AS AN ACT OF GENEROSITY
MAMADOU DIALLO All of our current texts in English or French were, according to an idea dear to Cheikh Anta Diop, only a simple transitional literature. – Boubacar Boris Diop The debate on national languages is at least as old as independent Senegal. Léopold Sédar Senghor and Cheikh Anta Diop represented, respectively, two opposite poles: […]
The Making of the Impossible
Review by GWEN ANSELL October: The story of the Russian revolution China Mieville Verso, 2017 The Last Days of New Paris China Mieville Picador, 2016 “There is a brand of naive anticolonialism,” China Miéville has said, “that falls back into the ‘Noble Savage’ narrative; that simply replicates a notion of beautiful natives and a place […]
PORTRAIT OF MYSELF AS MY FATHER
A CONVERSATION WITH NORA CHIPAUMIRE Born in Mutare, Zimbabwe, and based in New York, iconoclastic choreographer and experimental dance practitioner Nora Chipaumire uses her work to think through representations of the African black woman’s body – the signs that have made it legible to the world (signs, of course, are always saturated with politics) in art, aesthetics and performance. A disruptive energy courses through her […]