25 March 2020, Lowell, Massachusetts, USA. In my day job as faculty member in a university near Boston, I began an email to my students the other day, addressing the changes we are making to move instruction online for the… Read More ›
AiW Featured – archive highlights
Responding to Carli Coetzee’s “Unsettling the Air-conditioned Room”: “Laboratory Building” and Africa-based and focused Literary Activism (2/2)
AiW Guest Bwesigye bwa Mwesigire AiW note: Africa in Words has long been engaged with the work of Carli Coetzee, and we particularly admire the care that she takes in thinking through the nature of our work as academics and… Read More ›
Responding to Carli Coetzee’s ‘Unsettling the Air-conditioned Room’: Journal Work as Ethos (1/2)
AiW Guest Rotimi Fasan AiW note: Africa in Words has long been engaged with the work of Carli Coetzee, and we particularly admire the care that she takes in thinking through the nature of our work as academics and the… Read More ›
Plagiarism, Intertextuality, and the Same Old Story: The Caine Prize Controversy is Not Original
On September 3, 2019, the Caine Prize for African Writing announced that it was removing Tochukwu Okafor’s “All Our Lives” from the 2019 short list for the Prize for short fiction for “failure to attribute an original source.” The 2019… Read More ›
Words on Teaching: ‘Creative Thinking, Bold Idea-ing, Do-it-yourselfing’: Literature and Education in Binyavanga Wainaina’s Works
AiW Guest: Ruth S. Wenske. AiW note: Welcome to the first in our new “Words on…” series. In “Words on Teaching,” we’re thinking around print culture – books, images, texts, mags, spaces – and broad senses of what “teaching” might… Read More ›
Books in Your Ears: On Literary Podcasts
This Guest post marks the launch of Africa in Words reviewing literary podcasts. This Sunday 1 July, Africa in Words is hosting a conversation at Africa Writes on one of the most exciting trends in African literature over the… Read More ›
Flexible Forms and Publics: Moradewun Adejunmobi and Stacy Hardy on Small Magazines
AiW Guest Penny Cartwright A place for ‘extended curiosity, new adventures, critical thinking, daydreaming, socio-political involvement, partying and random perusal’: so Stacy Hardy, of South Africa’s Chimurenga, imagines the small magazine. Speaking as part of a closing keynote conversation hosted… Read More ›
Is your reading really ‘useful’? Maryse Condé in Cape Town – ‘The Story of the Cannibal Woman’
I’ve recently picked up Tim Parks’ collection of essays Where I’m Reading From: The Changing World of Books (2014). One of the essays in Part 2, ‘The Book In the World’, entitled ‘Writing Adrift in the World’, critiques post-colonial literary… Read More ›
Exorcizing Afropolitanism: Binyavanga Wainaina explains why “I am a Pan-Africanist, not an Afropolitan” at ASAUK 2012
AiW Guest Stephanie Bosch Santana. Traces of Binyavanga Wainaina’s address, “I am a Pan-Africanist, not an Afropolitan”, delivered at September’s African Studies Association UK 2012 conference, have lingered with me over the past few months: the image of invisible digital networks of… Read More ›