Literature in the Postcolony

Mapping Texts, Art, Music

Imagining the Middle Passage: A Visual, Literary and Theoretical Mapping of the Black Atlantic (prezi) – Stella Koudouma

As my cultural map, I formulated a Prezi presentation of different theoretical, literary and visual approaches to imagining the Middle Passage. While the representation of the passage in-between is difficult to visualize, we are invited by thinkers, writers and artists to envision the journey from different perspectives. I aimed at focusing on various conceptions, from…

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Memory, Ocean, and Trinidad and Tobago – Sabria Schouten

Inspired by the discussion of Zong! in this course and by the lecture on poetry, I chose to create a piece of found poetry connected to NourbeSe Philip’s work. The poem below is composed of words from the following quote found in Zong!, in the chapter entitled “Notanda”, where NourbeSe Philip writes:  “Our entrance to…

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Too Much Passion Unsteadies the Hand – Loïs van Albada

Cartography has been perceived as an unbiased practice in the past, the capturing of the world as the world is. But over time it has become clear that map-making is not unbiased as the representation of some matters will always mean the erasing of others. Kei Miller’s poem The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way…

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Performing a speculative geopoetics by mapping Nalo Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads – Danny Steur

To offer a cultural map of the Caribbean, the archipelago profoundly characterized by transculturality and historical, political, social and other kinds of entanglements and Creolization, I used The Salt Roads, written by Jamaican-born speculative fiction writer Nalo Hopkinson, as a point of departure to offer a rendition of the ways in which sociopolitical, cultural and…

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