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BY THE WINNER OF THE 2013 JOSÉ SARAMAGO PRIZE AN AFRICA39/UNESCO CITY OF LITERATURE 2014 TOP AFRICAN WRITER UNDER 40 A GUARDIAN TOP FIVE AFRICAN WRITER, 2012 WINNER OF THE GRINZANE PRIZE FOR BEST YOUNG WRITER, 2010 By the beaches of Luanda, the Soviets are building a grand mausoleum in honour of the Comrade President. Granmas are whispering: houses, they say, will be dexploded, and everyone will have to leave. With the help of his friends Charlita and Pi (whom everyone calls 3.14), and with assistance from Dr. Rafael KnockKnock, the Comrade Gas Jockey, the amorous Gudafterov, crazy Sea Foam, and a ghost, our young hero must decide exactly how much trouble he’s willing to face to keep his Granma safe in Bishop’s Beach. Energetic and colourful, impish and playful, Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret is a charming coming-of-age story from the next rising star in African literature.
"A moving mural of lives in the underclass of Luanda." – The Guardian In a crumbling apartment block in the Angolan city of Luanda, families work, laugh, scheme, and get by. In the middle of it all is the melancholic Odonato, nostalgic for the country of his youth and searching for his lost son. As his hope drains away and the city outside his doors changes beyond all recognition, Odonato's flesh becomes transparent and his body increasingly weightless. Alongside, disparate stories are woven into the narrative, spanning from the tragic to the comic, from the surreal to the every-day, culminating into a depiction of near-future Luanda. A captivating blend of magical realism, scathing political satire, tender comedy, and literary experimentation, Transparent City offers a gripping and joyful portrait of urban Africa quite unlike any before yet published in English, and places Ondjaki among the continent's most accomplished writers. NOMINATED FOR THE 2019 BEST TRANSLATED BOOK AWARD A VANITY FAIR HOT TYPE BOOK FOR APRIL 2018 A VULTURE MUST-READ TRANSLATED BOOK A LIT HUB FAVOURITE BOOK OF THE YEAR A WORLD LITERATURE TODAY NOTABLE TRANSLATION OF 2018
The story of a group of friends who create a perfect childhood in a revolutionary socialist country fighting a war.
The main objective of this book is to explain how contemporary literatures in Spanish and Portuguese are dealing with artistic creativity when artmaking is no longer a specialised field of cultural production, but rather an expanded field of socioeconomic interaction, personal and creative self-definition and collective imagination. The project positions the contemporary art novel as the most suitable place to understand how the economisation of cultural labour is affecting writers and artists alike. The authors examined in this book, including José Saramago, Rita Indiana Hernández, María Gainza, Mayra Santos Febres and Ondjaki (amongst others) explore the contradictions of the art market, the dynamics of art education, the multifaceted activity of curators and socially engaged artists in relation to broader debates on the role of culture in the configuration of socioeconomic dynamics. The book maps a new trend within contemporary literature that taps into the visual art system to reassess the role of literature in critical ways.
How can we talk about World Literature if we do not actually examine the world as a whole? Research on World Literature commonly focuses on the dynamics of a western center and a southern periphery, ignoring the fact that numerous literary relationships exist beyond these established constellations of thinking and reading within the Global South. Re-Mapping World Literature suggests a different approach that aims to investigate new navigational tools that extend beyond the known poles and meridians of current literary maps. Using the example of Latin American literatures, this study provides innovative insights into the literary modeling of shared historical experiences, epistemological cros...
From Angola, a country riddled with civil war and it' s aftereffects for the last 30 years, comes a surprising story of hope, passion, and magical realism from a groundbreaking, young African novelist. A young man arrives at the church of a small African village and starts whistling so beautifully that the priest is left in tears. As his weeklong stay continues, the whistler finds himself affected by the colorful inhabitants of the village as they all become bewitched and surrender to the moods of his melodies.
In 1975, after much resistance, Portugal became the last colonial power to relinquish its colonies on the African continent. The tardiness of Portuguese decolonization in Africa (Cabo Verde, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, São Tomé e Príncipe) raises critical questions for the emergence of national literary and cultural production in the wake of national independence. Bringing together the works of poets, short story writers, and journalists, this book charts the emergence and evolution of the national literatures of Portugal’s former African colonies, from 1975 to the present. The aim of this book is to examine the ways in which writers contended with the process of decolonization, forging national, transnational, and diasporic identities through literature while grappling with the legacies and continuities of racial power structures, colonial systems of representation, and the struggles for political sovereignty and social justice. This book will be the first of its kind in English to include canonical, emerging, and previously untranslated authors of poetry and short-form fiction to a new public.
This volume approaches literary representations of post and neocolonialism by combining their readings with respective theoretical configurations. The aim is to cast light upon common characteristics of contemporary texts from around the world that deal with processes of colonization. Based on the epistemic discourses of postimperialism/postcolonialism, globalization, and world literature, the volume’s chapters bring together international scholars from various disciplines in the Humanities, including Comparative Cultural Studies, Slavic, Romance, German, and African Studies. The main concern of the contributions is to conceptualize an autonomous category of a world literature of the colonial, going well beyond established classifications according to single languages or center-periphery dichotomies.
Situates the cultures of Portuguese-speaking Africa within the postcolonial, global era.
Interweaving the influential voices of African, Caribbean, and Latinx authors, this book challenges eurocentric notions of World Literature.