South African Autobiographies: Between Memoir and Self-Help
AIAC’s Neelika Jayawardane’s review of South African memoirs is included in the inaugural issue of Symposium, an innovative new online magazine and blog intended to bring academic research, views, and...
View ArticleOn African Fiction(s)
I’ll admit to a certain amount of nervousness when the debate about who is and who is not an African – and in this version a “real African” writer – begins. As a South African, it seems a wagging...
View ArticleWhen Jean-Michel Basquiat went to Africa
Jean-Michel Basquiat, the first American artist of African descent to achieve international stardom, often referenced Africa or the African diaspora in his work. Take, for example, 1983′s “The Nile” (a...
View ArticleWriting Windhoek
Literature in Windhoek takes many forms. Tucked at the intersections of Independence Avenue and Sam Nujoma Drive in the city centre, Wordweaver Publishing accomplishes perhaps its most challenging...
View Article“Zulu,” the film–starring Forest Whitaker and Orlando Bloom–gets lukewarm...
Caryl Férey’s 2008 crime novel Zulu won the French Grand Prix prize for best crime novel. The film version, starring Forrest Whittaker and Orlando Bloom, closed the Cannes Film Festival. Originally,...
View ArticleThe argument over J.M. Coetzee
Literature should generate lively public debates — all scholars worth their salt will proclaim. We believe in the importance of culture and think that intellectual tussles over significant books, and...
View ArticleAfrican Writers and the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature
As the Nobel Committee for Literature announces their chosen awardee tomorrow (1pm Swedish time), the past several weeks has been littered by quite a few notable predictions, arguments, and...
View ArticleThe “Global Novel” Debate
It has been a few weeks since the literary journal N+1’s diss of the global novel, “World Lite,” landed on our screens. The rebuttals on social media and academic blogs were swift, as was the rebuttal...
View ArticleIntroducing K. Sello Duiker’s novel ‘Thirteen Cents’ to US audiences
K. Sello Duiker’s short novel, Thirteen Cents is simultaneously gruesome, violent, deeply disturbing, whimsical, and beautiful. Ohio University Press has just released the post-apartheid novelist’s...
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New book opens a window to a little known era of South Africa’s jazz history
A new book, Keeping Time, celebrates the public emergence of an extraordinary visual and audio archive begun by Ian Bruce Huntley in Cape Town fifty years ago. In short it challenges a long-held belief...
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The Book of North African Literature: Pierre Joris on Poetry and Miscegenation
A 743-page anthology of North African literature was published by the University of California last year. Ranging from documents made in sixth century Carthage to experimental prose published months...
View ArticleSomali author Diriye Osman’s “Fairytales for Lost Children”
In a dark couple of weeks for LGBT rights, the Indian government’s supreme court has re-criminalised gay sex, ensuring men and women now face police harassment and potential life imprisonment, stating...
View ArticleI am a homosexual, mum
(A lost chapter from One Day I Will Write About This Place) 11 July, 2000. This is not the right version of events. Hey mum. I was putting my head on her shoulder, that last afternoon before she died....
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New Photography Book Depicts the South African Social Landscape
Between 2012 and 2013, an exercise took place known as the France South Africa Season. This bilateral initiative was aimed at strengthening relations between the two countries. In 2012 South Africa...
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Ponte City: A Photobook
Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse’s ‘Ponte City’ will be familiar to many. The photographic project began in 2008 and won the Discovery Award at the Rencontres d’Arles festival in 2011. This...
View ArticleThe #BullshitFiles: Tsunami and the Single Girl — One Woman’s Journey to...
Every side-eye, cringe, SMH and WTF in the world has gathered for a family reunion in the title of this book. It is the perfect set-up for searing satire, which is what I hoped was on offer when I...
View ArticleIn gratitude to Stuart Hall, a socialist intellectual who taught us to...
Stuart Hall was the most important public intellectual of the past 50 years. In an age where having a TV show allegedly makes someone a public intellectual and where the status of the university you...
View ArticleWhat it is to be Winnie Mandela
I just finished reading a fascinating appetizer to John Carlin’s new book on Nelson Mandela, Knowing Mandela, and it set me wondering what might be the place of solitude in the narration of South...
View ArticleAre Nigerians the New Asians?
Recently, the Nigerian newspaper Punch opened an article as follows: “Nigerians … have been rated among certain races who are bound to succeed over others in America, the News Agency of Nigeria...
View ArticleNigerians in Space
Few government agencies have ever inspired confidence in the state, or scientific progress, like NASA did in the 1960s. So when the end of its space shuttle program was announced back in 2010, the...
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