Bhakti Shringarpure is a writer, editor and academic, who is creative director of the Radical Books Collective, founding editor of Warscapes online magazine and is an associate professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of Connecticut. [1] Her work "engages questions of decolonization, race, gender and violence through a focus on literary and cultural production from the Global South and their circuits of dissemination". [2] She is the author of Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital (2019), and has been an invited participant and speaker at many educational institutions and literary festivals internationally. [3] [4] [5]
Shringarpure holds a BA degree in literature from Bard College and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. [6]
She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Warscapes, [7] an independent online magazine established in 2011 with a focus on current conflicts across the world, publishing fiction, non-fiction, poetry, interviews, reviews, photo-essays and retrospectives of war literature. [8]
In 2012, she edited Literary Sudans, "intended to highlight the two Sudans as sites of literature and culture", initially an online project before publication as a book [9] by Africa World Press, endorsed by Nuruddin Farah, Salah Hassan and Dinaw Mengestu, among others. [10]
Shringarpure co-founded, with Suchitra Vijayan, the Radical Books Collective, [11] of which she is creative director. [12] The initiative was conceived during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, when she was living in Nairobi, Kenya, as a Fulbright scholar (2019–20), [13] and had to rebuild connections online for her monthly literary salons. [14] Using on the masthead of its website a quotation from Angela Y. Davis – "You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time" – the Radical Books Collective organizes virtual book clubs, author events and seminars on foundational radical books. [15]
Shringarpure held a research fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, in August–November 2022, [2] during which period she took part in the Cultural Identity and Memory Studies Institute Seminar Series at the University of St Andrews. [16]
Among publications for which she has written are The Guardian , The Funambulist, Los Angeles Review of Books , Literary Hub and Africa is a Country. Shringarpure is Series Editor of Decolonize That! Handbooks for the Revolutionary Overthrow of Embedded Colonial Ideas, published by OR Books (New York). [13]
Tsitsi Dangarembga is a Zimbabwean novelist, playwright and filmmaker. Her debut novel, Nervous Conditions (1988), which was the first to be published in English by a Black woman from Zimbabwe, was named by the BBC in 2018 as one of the top 100 books that have shaped the world. She has won other literary honours, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the PEN Pinter Prize. In 2020, her novel This Mournable Body was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2022, Dangarembga was convicted in a Zimbabwe court of inciting public violence, by displaying, on a public road, a placard asking for reform.
Taban Lo Liyong is a poet, academic and writer of fiction and literary criticism from South Sudan. He was born in Kajo Kaji, Acholiland, in the Equatoria region of southern Sudan, but taken to Uganda at an early age. His political views, as well as his outspoken disapproval of the post-colonial system of education in East Africa, have inspired both further criticism as well as controversy since the late 1960s.
Nuruddin Farah is a Somali novelist. His first novel, From a Crooked Rib, was published in 1970 and has been described as "one of the cornerstones of modern East African literature today". He has also written plays both for stage and radio, as well as short stories and essays. Since leaving Somalia in the 1970s he has lived and taught in numerous countries, including the United States, Britain, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Sudan, India, Uganda, Nigeria and South Africa.
The decolonisation of Africa is a process that largely took place from the mid-1950s to 1975 during the Cold War, with radical government changes on the continent as colonial governments made the transition to independent states. The process was often marred with violence, political turmoil, widespread unrest, and organised revolts in both northern and sub-Saharan countries including the Mau Mau rebellion in British Kenya, the Algerian War in French Algeria, the Congo Crisis in the Belgian Congo, the Angolan War of Independence in Portuguese Angola, the Zanzibar Revolution in the Sultanate of Zanzibar, and the events leading to the Nigerian Civil War in the secessionist state of Biafra.
African literature is literature from Africa, either oral ("orature") or written in African and Afro-Asiatic languages. Examples of pre-colonial African literature can be traced back to at least the fourth century AD. The best-known is the Kebra Negast, or "Book of Kings."
Sudanese literature consists of both oral as well as written works of fiction and nonfiction that were created during the cultural history of today's Republic of the Sudan. This includes the territory of what was once Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, the independent country's history since 1956 as well as its changing geographical scope in the 21st century.
Bushra Elfadil, also spelled Bushra al-Fadil is a Sudanese writer. He has published several collections of short stories and novels in Arabic, with some of his stories translated into English, including anthologies of contemporary fiction from Sudan. In 2017, he was awarded the Caine Prize for African Writing.
Chinweizu Ibekwe, known mononymously as Chinweizu, and also by the pen-name Maazi Chinweizu, is a Nigerian critic, essayist, poet, and journalist. While studying in the United States during the Black Power movement, Chinweizu became influenced by the philosophy of the Black Arts Movement. He is commonly associated with Black orientalism and emerged as one of the leading figures in contemporary Nigerian journalism, writing a highly influential column in The Guardian of Lagos.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor is a Kenyan writer who is the author of novels, short stories and essays. She won the 2003 Caine Prize for African Writing for her story "Weight of Whispers".
Jama Musse Jama is a prominent Somali ethnomathematician and author. He is notable for his research on traditional Somali boardgames such as Shax.
Maaza Mengiste is an Ethiopian-American writer. Her novels include Beneath the Lion's Gaze (2010) and The Shadow King (2019), which was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize.
Taiye Selasi is an American writer and photographer. Of Nigerian and Ghanaian origin, she describes herself as a "local" of Accra, Berlin, New York and Rome. In 2005, Selasi published "Bye-Bye, Babar ", her seminal text on Afropolitans. Her novel, Ghana Must Go, was published by Penguin in 2013.
Mahmood Mamdani, FBA is an Indian-born Ugandan academic, author, and political commentator. He currently serves as the Chancellor of Kampala International University, Uganda. He was the director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) from 2010 until February 2022, the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University and the Professor of Anthropology, Political Science and African Studies at Columbia University.
Joan Anim-Addo is a Grenadian-born academic, poet, playwright and publisher, who is Emeritus Professor of Caribbean Literature and Culture in the English and Creative Writing Department at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Deirdre OsborneHon. FRSL is an Australian-born academic who is Reader in English Literature and Drama in the Theatre and Performance Department at Goldsmiths, University of London, and also co-convenes the MA degree in Black British Writing.
Otosirieze Obi-Young is a Nigerian writer, editor, culture journalist and curator. He is editor of Open Country Mag. He was editor of Folio Nigeria, a then CNN affiliate, and former deputy editor of Brittle Paper. In 2019, he won the inaugural The Future Awards Africa Prize for Literature. He has been described as among the "top curators and editors from Africa."
Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin is a Sudanese fiction writer with roots in Darfur in western Sudan, whose literary work was banned in Sudan in 2011. Since 2012, he has lived in exile in Austria and later in France. He is mostly known for his novels The Messiah of Darfur and The Jungo, translated from the original Arabic into French, English, Spanish and German.
Ibrahim Ishaq, also referred to as Ibrāhīm Isḥāq Ibrāhīm, was a Sudanese novelist, short story writer and literary scholar.
Adil Babikir is a Sudanese literary critic and translator into and out of English and Arabic. He has translated several novels, short stories and poems by renowned Sudanese writers and edited the anthology Modern Sudanese Poetry. He lives and works in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
The Johannesburg Review of Books is a South African online magazine based on other literary magazines such as the New York and London Review of Books. Its bi-monthly issues include reviews, essays, poetry, photographs, and short fiction focused predominantly but not exclusively on South Africa and other African countries.