Memento Mori
A Letter from Harlem by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts. When I came home from abroad, death was in style. I don’t remember when I first noticed it; I remember only the moment when a few sightings could no longer be understood as a coincidence. I looked upon familiar scenes and noticed things that had previously escaped me, or perhaps were not there. I […]
Speech to the Science Graduation Ceremony of the University of Witwatersrand, 2008
Good Evening. I will use my own life history tonight to argue that it is your duty as scientists never to allow good science to be used for bad purposes. You have a moral duty. You know the difference between good and evil. You must do your best to ensure that your science has good outcomes for […]
Senselessness
Stacy Hardy reviews the English translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya‘s Senselessness (New Directions, 2008, Katherine Silver, trans.). “I am not complete in the mind.” So begins the first of exiled Honduran novelist Moya’s novels to be translated into English. This riotous satire, set in an unnamed South American country, tells the story of a boozing, sex-obsessed writer who finds himself employed by the Catholic Church. […]
Threatening the Hormonal Stability of Imbeciles
Born in Honduras in 1957 and raised in El Salvador, Horacio Castellanos Moya is part of a new generation of South American novelists who have been catapulted into the public eye (and into translation) following the Roberto Bolaño craze that gripped North America. Stacy Hardy interviewed him. Like his contemporary Bolaño, Moya’s gritty urbanism and graphic political violence challenges Western perceptions of a Latin American […]
Name Death & Text
Achille Mbembe unpicks the assassination, disfigurement, and attempted degrading of Ruben Um Nyobè. Ruben Um Nyobè, Secretary General of the CPU (Cameroonian Peoples Union), was shot dead on September 13, 1958, in the early afternoon, by French troops dispatched to put an end to a rebellion sweeping the Sanaga-Maritime region since 1955 – a rebellion fomented by the CPU. His death came seconds only […]