This week, AiW Guest Katarzyna Kubin launches her new series examining the relationship between Africa and Eastern/Central Europe with a review of Monica Popescu’s South African Literature Beyond the Cold War. AiW Guest: Katarzyna Kubin Colonial and postcolonial history has customarily been perceived along a North-South axis,… Read More ›
South Africa
A New Series on Africa and Eastern/Central Europe
A new AiW series curated by AiW Guest Katarzyna Kubin examines relations between Africa and Eastern/Central Europe. AiW Guest: Katarzyna Kubin In the essay “How Poles Became White,” the anthropologist, Kacper Pobłocki, writes: “Ideas tend to get ‘incarcerated’ into places. One… Read More ›
Review: ‘Together We’re Strong!’ – Book Dash Storybooks
AiW Guest: Nard Choi This week, AiW Guest Nard Choi continues our journey into African children’s literature.
Review: Signs for an Exhibition by Eliza Kentridge
AiW Guest: Erica Lombard The illness or death of a parent and the impulse to return in writing to one’s formative years are intimate companions, and have been particularly prevalent tropes in white South African literature of the past two… Read More ›
CfP: “Ukutshona kukaMendi”/ “Ukuzika kukaMendi”: The Mendi Centenary Conference, 28-30 March 2017, Cape Town, deadline: 30 September 2016
“Ukutshona kukaMendi”/ “Ukuzika kukaMendi”: The Mendi Centenary Conference, 28-30 March 2017, Cape Town Deadline: 30 September 2016 This conference, hosted by the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town, commemorates the sinking of the SS Mendi that… Read More ›
A Review of Stacy Hardy’s Because the Night
AiW Guest: Anu Kumar It is almost an anomaly of sorts: that any literary work from South Africa, as from India for that matter, demands a certain context—who is telling the story and why. But Stacy Hardy’s short stories—and all the… Read More ›
Les Blancs – Farber’s production provoked reflection on innocence, the personal and the political, and choosing sides
AiW Guest Katarzyna Kubin The National Theatre’s production of Lorraine Hansberry’s play, Les Blancs, directed by Yaël Farber, involved phenomenal use of sound, music and lighting, live fire on stage, and a nuanced mastery of the smallest details: from the… Read More ›
Caine Prize 2016: “Memories We Lost”—The Text, Its Readers and the World, a review by Pede Hollist
AiW Guest Pede Hollist The biography at the end of “Memories We Lost” quotes South African writer, filmmaker, and photographer Lidudumalingani as saying, “I am fascinated by mental illnesses, having seen my own extended relatives deal with it.” He also… Read More ›
Event: #ApartheidMustFall to #RhodesMustFall?: The Soweto Uprising of 16 June 1976, 16 June 2016, London
Remember Soweto Thursday, 16 June 2016 at 17:00, London, United Kingdom By: Institute of Commonwealth Studies, Institute of Education, University of London, Southern Africa Seminar Studies On 16th June 1976, peaceful student protest at Afrikaans language education in the Soweto… Read More ›
It’s Not Easy Being Green: A Review of Henrietta Rose-Innes’s Green Lion
AiW Guest: Graham Riach Henrietta Rose-Innes’s latest novel opens with drifter Constantine on his way to retrieve the belongings of his childhood friend and one-time crush, zookeeper Mark Carolissen. Mark lies bandaged in hospital after a mauling by a rare black-maned… Read More ›
Review: Best “New” African Poets 2015 Anthology
AiW Guest: Rashi Rohatgi Best “New” African Poets 2015 Anthology Anthologie Des Meilleures “Nouveaux” Poètes Africains 2015 Antologia Dos Melhores “Novos” Poetas Africanos 2015 “We couldn’t give poets topics because we are not Africa. We didn’t want to determine what Africa… Read More ›
Review: Things We Lost in the Fire by Vuyelwa Maluleke
AiW Guest: Toni Stuart Vuyelwa Maluleke’s Things We Lost in the Fire is a meditation on all that still lies broken within and between South Africans. It is at once a meditation on the woundedness of South Africa’s black men, and,… Read More ›
Q&A with Toni Stuart: Poetry gives people the power to make their voices heard
AiW Guest: Matthew Lecznar Toni Stuart is a South African poet, performer and spoken word educator, who presently works between Cape Town and London. Her work has been published in anthologies, journals and non-fiction books in South Africa and internationally. In 2013,… Read More ›
Longform Q&A: Margie Orford, ‘Queen of South African crime fiction’
Margie Orford – ‘the Queen of South African crime fiction’ – is also an award-winning journalist, photographer, film director, and children’s author. Her internationally acclaimed literary crime fiction novels, featuring her journalist lead Clare Hart who assists the police investigating… Read More ›
Review: Moses Tladi UNEARTHED, South African National Gallery, 24 September 2015 – 31 March 2016
AiW Guest: Anthea Gordon To get to the South African National Art Gallery (SANG) you walk through the Company Gardens in Cape Town’s city centre. After passing baobab trees, a rose garden, and fountains in the middle of green lawns,… Read More ›
Review: Ivan Vladislavić’s 101 Detectives
AiW Guest: Thando Njovane. As demonstrated by his substantial and sophisticated body of work, South Africa’s Ivan Vladislavić is certainly one of the most remarkable and versatile writers of our time. Vladislavić’s latest gift to letters is the insightful, elaborate,… Read More ›
Review: Kholofelo Maenetsha’s ‘To the Black Women We All Knew’
AiW Guest: Helen Cousins. What a bittersweet eulogy this is to the suffering of Black women at the hands (and often the fists) of Black men; not always surviving, as indicated by the past tense of the title. The novel… Read More ›
CfP: The Verbal Text & National Literary Historiography, 10-12 November 2016, London, Deadline 01 April 2016
The Verbal Text & National Literary Historiography An Interdisciplinary Conference 10-12 November 2016 Queen Mary University of London Call for Papers Deadline for proposals: 1 April 2016 Sustained attention to the place of the verbal text in national literary historiographies… Read More ›
CfP: Writing South Africa Now: a Colloquium, 16th-17th June 2016, Deadline 04 March 2016
Writing South Africa Now: a Colloquium, 16th-17th June, 2016 Call for Papers: Writing the South African City Deadline: 4th March, 2016 Hosted by LSE Cities, London School of Economics, in collaboration with the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge In… Read More ›
Review: ‘Do Not Go Gentle’
AiW Guest: Danielle Faye Tran. “It is my wish […] that people should know I died of AIDS” (27) -from a letter written by character Zola to be read aloud at her vigil The spread of HIV creates a tense… Read More ›