The poet and author Chris Abani talks about alienation and poetry.
Edem Awumey is an awarded author from Togo who has written short stories and two novels. The central theme in his works is the exile.
One of South Africa’s most interesting young poets, Gabeba Baderoon reads her own poems. Astrid Asefa reads some in Swedish.
Badoe is an author, a documentary filmmaker and researcher with bases in Ghana and England.
The young generation in Uganda is now beginning to make their voices heard. What themes are of interest? Meet Doreen Baingana and Monica Arac de Nyeko.
Biyi Bandele, Nigeria, author and playwrighter talks about his novel Burma Boy, about a boy’s entry into adulthood.
Maïssa Bey discusses her new novel 'Bleu Blanc Vert', about time after the Algerian independence struggle with translator Monica Malmström.
The choreographer Birgit Åkesson wrote a groundbreaking book about African dance. It will now be launched in Tanzania. The publisher Walter Bgoya presents it.
This paper applies an impressionistic and reflexive genre of ethnography to understand the ethnographer’s meeting with the humanitarian aid workers in post-tsunami Sri Lanka. It offers an analysis of the political atmosphere in the country prior to the tsunami as a central framework for understanding current tensions and debates over the distribution of tsunami aid resources, and traces the emergence of what has been termed Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism. Based on three months of ethnographic fieldwork from April to July 2005 among aid workers at the central level in Colombo and a careful attention to the rhetorics and arguments that characterized the writings in the Sri Lankan press during this period, the paper argues that while public debates over tsunami aid distribution has been entwined with political rivalries between the Sri Lankan government, and Sinhala and Tamil nationalist groups, the everyday reality of international humanitarians evolved around the forming of a common development language to categorise the demands of the aid intervention and on the performances of individual organisations, personified by a limited number of individuals in the professional fora of the humanitarians in Colombo.
Lukas Bärfuss critically acclaimed novel 'Hundert Tage' takes place during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, where two people fight for their innocence.
What is happening with Mozambique’s literature today? Paulina Chiziane, the first woman to publish novel in the country, in conversation with Henning Mankell.
The purpose of this study is to analyze and disseminate an experiment of rural self-help housing initiated as part of the vocational training of a group of students of architecture and which allowed to improve significantly the housing conditions of a group of deprived peasants in rural Tunisia.
The discussion of the various aspects and requirements of the project gives rise to a series of reflections about the means and conditions indispensable for implementing projects oriented to meet the basic needs of the deprived groups. Equally crucial are the reflections about the dissemination of the results of the project.
Conclusions connected with aid policy, training in architecture and the resulting quality and economy of the housing scheme are drawn, but the main interest is put on self-help construction as a housing policy strategy. The author stresses the positive results of the Rohian experiment for the beneficaries on a short-term basis, but she is doubtful about self-help as an adequate strategy and of a general validity for solutions to a larger scale.
This open access book uses Swedish literature and the Swedish publishing field as recurring examples to describe and analyse the role of the literary semi-peripheral position in world literature from various perspectives and on meso, micro and macro levels, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. This includes the role of translation in the semi-periphery and the conditions under which literature travels to and from that position. The focus is not on Sweden, as such, but rather on the semi-peripheral transitional space as exemplified by the Swedish case.
Consisting of three co-written chapters, this study sheds light on what might be called the semi-peripheral condition or the semi-periphery as an area of transition. As part of the Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literatures series, it makes continuous use of the concepts of 'cosmopolitan' and 'vernacular' – or rather, the processual terms, cosmopolitanization and vernacularization – which provide an overall structure to the analysis of literature and literary phenomena. In this way, the authors show that the semi-periphery is an ideal point of departure to further the understanding of world literature, because it is a place where the cosmopolitan (the literary universal) and the vernacular (the rootedness in a particular culture or place) interact in ways that have not yet been thoroughly explored.
The transformation of the publishing world in recent decades—which includes, among other things, the increasing significance of large retail outlets, the emergence and establishment of literary agents, and the merger of publishing houses into large media corporations—has been amply documented. Among the consequences for postcolonial literary fiction, and African English-language fiction, which is the subject here, are increasing use of the author as a public figure and marketing device, and heightened expectations on cultural representativity that link authors to particular places and cultures. With a focus on the initial and middle phases of his career, this article discusses the ways in which East African author Abdulrazak Gurnah has responded to such pressures in his novels and in essays and articles. It shows how both the form and the content of Gurnah’s writing exemplify a double effort to complicate ideas which frame authors and their texts through culture-specific identities and the seemingly opposite, generalizing notion of the postcolonial’ author which flattens history—a strategy of ‘self-authorization’ which can be seen as Gurnah’s critical resistance towards received categories used in both book marketing and postcolonial authorship. In a further twist, this resistance is in some tension with Gurnah’s choice to write in English and use an unmarked linguistic style and register since these seemingly align with marketing interests and enable easy translation which facilitates the global circulation of his books.
This article starts from two premises: that the almost exclusive reliance on the novel in several of the dominant elaborations of world literary models gives a very partial view of the global circulation of literature and, consequently, that much can be gained through analyses of complementary or alternative media and, secondly, that certain arguments within postcolonial literary studies on the circulation and audiences of African literature are inadequately grounded empirically. Taking the literary magazine Transition as an example – and more precisely its first, Ugandan, period –, this article seeks to make a contribution to both fields. Through discussion of the publication’s content and its circulation pattern, it shows that most of the authors published came from African countries, but also included British, American and Caribbean contributors; that poetry was its most represented literary genre, even as the magazine published seminal prose material; that the magazine’s readers, many of whom interacted actively, were found across the African continent and in Europe and the U.S.A.; and that Transition combined characteristics of "little" and "big" magazines. These empirical findings, the article argues, raise questions about key issues in world literary as well as postcolonial literary conceptualization – such as the status of the nation or the national field in world literary studies, the limitations of the notion of "literature" they use, and the relationship between (post-)colonial and "imperial" channels for production and circulation of literary artefacts.
The Somali author constantly depicting his home country talks about his just finished trilogy.
Petina Gappah is a writer with law degrees from Cambridge, Graz University, and the University of Zimbabwe. She was one of the featured writers at this year’s Gothenburg Book Fair. Gappah's debut short story collection, An Elegy for Easterly (2009), was awarded the Guardian First Book Award and the collection was published in Swedish by Albert Bonniers Förlag in 2010. Its Swedish title is 'Sorgesång för Easterly'.
Meet 1991 Nobel Laureate in Literature in a conversation with Per Wästberg, chairman of the Nobel Committee.
The essays in this publication range from poetry and drama to church music, architecture, and popular magazines. Common to them is the effort to make the disciplines of arts and those of social sciences meet. African cultural expressions are treated here as anchored in the experiences common to the people of Africa, while the provincial exclusiveness of Afrocentrism is shunned.
This year’s Peter Pan Prize winner Piet Grobler from South Africa shows his headstrong pictures and talks to Britt Isaksson.
Helon Habila discusses his novel Measuring Time and his writing with Kirsten Holst Petersen.
This book contains contributions from African writers who discuss current issues in African literature, such as the role of the writer in society, the writers commitment to society or to the craft, a new woman's voice in literature, and recent South African literature, superseding the protest tradition.
This book explores the work of Nigerian author Amos Tutuola and how it can enhance our understanding of gender and peacebuilding in Africa. Critical feminist contributions on how a gender perspective can broaden inclusion in post-conflict processes, as well as change institutions and mindsets are surely innovative but have not succeeded in dislodging liberal peace as the means of dealing with conflict on the African continent. Such works also draw their critiques from largely rationalist, Western roots. Entering Tutuola’s world, where human and non-human characters change and interchange, allows scholars and practitioners to see peacebuilding as organic, reliant on multiple identities and interlocutors, and grounded in local knowledge. I contend that such an expanded lens that integrates exogenous and endogenous knowledge systems non-hierarchically is not only relevant to the peacebuilding context, but could also find application in other areas in need of decolonisation.
Brian James is a Sierra Leonean short story and screen writer. He has won a number of local short story and poetry competitions and is a recipient of the Sierra Leone Pen’s Most Promising Writer award. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Mass Communication. James’ publications include short stories On the Road to Godiva (2005), Devils at the Door (2008), and Simple Economics (2009) He is based in Freetown, Sierra Leone, where he also works as a consultant editor and documentary film maker.
East Africa’s most important cultural magazine is presented by the Managing Editor Billy Kahora and its founder Binyavanga Wainaina. In conversation with Madeleine Grieve.
This second collection of proverbs from East Africa by Pastor Leonidas Kalugila consists of both original Swahili proverbs and renditions to Swahili of proverbs from diverse East African languages such as Haya, Ganda, Chagga and Gikuyu. Some are also originally Arabic or Indic rendered to Swahili and used by many Swahili-speakers.
Meet John Kilaka, author and illustrator of children’s books and Tingatinga artist in a conversation with Sven Hallonsten.
Adam Afzelius botanist and professor at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, and one of he last of the pupils of the famous Linnaeus spent the years 1792-1796 as a botanist in Freetown, Sierra Leone. The first parts of his journals and his collections were destroyed in Freetown during a French attack in 1794, but the journals from 1795 and 1796 survived and are preserved in the manuscript collections of the University Library at Uppsala. Afzelius had a keen eye for minute detail and his journals abound with descriptions and notes of great botanical and ethnographical interest.
This text is about an ongoing research project about contemporary African literature that circulates outside the infrastructures of the global book market. The researchers involved in the project are based at Uppsala University, Sweden, and collaborate closely with librarians at the Nordic Africa Institute where a small collection of ephemeral, often self-published texts is being established. This collection is a part of the book collection at the Nordic Africa Institute’s library, but can be accessed as a sub-collection in the library catalogue. The article is co-authored by one of the researchers and two of the librarians and is organized into two main sections: one is written from the perspective of the researchers who collect and study the material. This section outlines the project, its scope, general research questions and how texts have been collected. The second part is written from the perspective of the librarians, presents some of the possibilities and challenges involved in cataloguing the material and the ways in which it differs from the rest of the library collection.
Innehåller drygt 14.000 ord vanliga i svenska och swahili samt en översikt över swahili-grammatik.