Art / Culture

In publishing and creative industries, conversations around diversity sprung up among stakeholders — writers, editors, agents, publishers and marketers. Amongst several shocking revelations, a few facts hit hard: books and stories written by African writers are edited and marketed by their white publishers to target a western audience. It also exists as a barrier to entry, so writers conform to stereotypical storytelling patterns that fixate on hard issues like rape, immigration, race, poverty and politics, to be published or win certain prizes.

Hadero shows us two worlds, dialectical at best: one of ease and comfort, enjoyed by foreigners, and the other of lack and precarity, experienced by locals. The “new” Ethiopia, depicted in her story, has no space for the poor and their “homes made of cloth and rags and wood.” This depiction typifies the irony at the heart of capitalist modernity pursued by the neocolonial elite.

I find myself randomly in my day, ‘seeing’ beyond the final pages before me, clamouring for more of Iryn’s words – there has to be more beyond the words currently captured in The Separation.

A Review of My Missing Valentine (消失的情人節)

At 8, Anthony read Nnedi Okorafor’s "Zahrah The Windseeker" and the novel “changed my whole perspective on Literature. Before then, I’d been reading all these Enid Blyton, Cinderella books and it never occurred to me that not only could a black person be in a book, the black person could even be Igbo. It blew my mind.”

“Lucky,” by Doreen Baingana, is a historical-memoir short story that addresses the subject of war and its devastating effects on human society. The immediate allusion to “Gulu District, West Nile” paints in the reader’s mind the impression of the 1980 insurgency⎯which occurred after Idi Amin was toppled a year earlier⎯and places the story perfectly to the period during the Uganda Bush War, which lasted for nine years from 1980.

The following Taiwanese animated shorts for children were reviewed as part of the “Formosa Fantastica” section of the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival in Switzerland. The film festival will be held from July 2nd to July 10th in a hybrid format, with simultaneously live-streamed events in Neuchâtel and Taipei.

Troy Onyango’s "This Little Light of Mine" is one of the shortlisted stories for the 2021 Caine Prize. It continues that tradition established in Onyango’s earlier works – writing explorations of contemporary rejection, isolation and conflict.

The Accidental President recycles the same tired messages that media pundits have been repeating since 2015.

From changing her name, revitalizing the Igbo culture to making global impact, Chimamanda has always looked out to fix things, to reset the old and suboptimal, like a Grandma reaching out to adjust an ever wonky radio. If it could be better and if there is the possibility that it be adjusted, then why not?

The following is an excerpt of a recent conversation on a longstanding listserv devoted to the work of David Foster Wallace, lightly edited and presented here with the authors’ permission.

SWINGIN’ (輕鬆搖擺) aims to be a charmful, cute, and playful story, even as it touches on contemporary social issues still debated in Taiwanese society. The short film tells the story of eleven-year-old elementary schooler Qiu Qiu, who has two gay fathers, one of which is his biological father.

Cheluchi Onyemelukwe’s debut novel, The Son of the House, won the award for Best Fiction Writer at the 2019 Sharjah International Book Fair.