The skin I’m in: Afro-Bengali solidarity and possible futures
Naeem Mohaiemen reviews Vivek Bald’s Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America, which chronicles for the first time an early history of Black-Bengali racial solidarity. Taraknath Das floated as a pale ghost at the edge of my mind during my first reading of Vivek Bald’s first book, Bengali Harlem and […]
Paris-Algiers, Underground Class
by Mustapha Benfodil It’s romance landed me this job. I am a mailman of love. Yes. Let’s call it that. A mailman of love. I deliver sweet missives from one end of the village to the other. I am the memory of sweetness; I am the Amorous Conscience of the village. The kids here call me aderwiche. The dervish. A […]
“I’m Not An African Writer, Damn You!”
by Akin Adesokan One is an African writer, or rather one becomes an African writer, it seems, not so much by writing as by winning a prize. Better if the prize is awarded to a work of fiction. Better still if the prize is awarded from Western Europe or North America. Much better still if […]
Number 11
Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño muses on writing, borders, Latin American literature and the instability of identity in his 1999 acceptance speech for the Gallegos prize. I’ve always had a problem with Venezuela. An infantile problem, fruit of my disorganized education; a minimal problem; but a problem nonetheless. The center of the problem is of a verbal […]
The Hyphenated African
Teju Cole takes a break from Twitter to speak to Sean O’Toole at the Open Book Festival in Cape Town, who struggles to find a compact with an author of “complicated attitudes and responses”. “Eight press interviews in Cape Town so far,” tweeted author Teju Cole on 10 September 2013, a day after […]