Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe

Description

The swelling flows of migration from Africa towards Europe have aroused interest not only in the socio-political consequences of the migrants' insistent appeals to 'fortress Europe' but also in the artistic integration of African migrants into the cultural world of Europe. While in recent years the creative output of Africans living in Europe has received attention from the media and in academia, little critical consideration has been given to African migrants' modes of narration and the manner in which these modes give expression to, or are an expression of, their creators' transcultural realities. Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe responds to this need for reflection by examining the manner in which migrants compose and negotiate their Euro-African affiliations in their narratives. The book brings together scholars in the fields of literary and art criticism, cultural studies, and anthropology for an extensive interdisciplinary exchange on the specific modes of narration displayed in Euro-African literatures, the visual arts, and cinema, as well as offering ethnographic case studies. The result is a wide range of reflections on how African artists, writers, and ordinary people living in Europe experience and explore their transcultural and/or postcolonial environments, and how their experiences and explorations in turn contribute to the construction of modern Euro-African life-worlds. Transcultural Modernities TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements Illustrations Introduction NEW EURO-AFRICAN LITERARY SPACES Voices Lost in a Non-Place Kossi Komla–Ebri and Migrant Writing in Italy Poetics of Transition Chronicling Beyond Abyssinia African Voices in Finland and Sweden LITERARY PERSPECTIVES Transcultural Modernities and Anglophone African Literature Euro-African Trans-Spaces? Culture in Transit Black Masculinity, Migration and Psychological Crisis Polyphony, Old ‘Lyonnais’ and Animism Negotiating Untranslatability and Islam ‘Occupying the Isolated Terminal Space and Silent’ Linguistic Counterpoint in Gbenga Agbenugba’s VISUAL AND CINEMATOGRAPHIC NARRATIVES New Labels, But It’s Still Labelling North African Modernities Spies in the Sixteenth Arrondissement Emigrants and Immigrants of Burkina Faso, Senegal, and France Towards an Aesthetic of the Migrant Self Critical Dialogues IMAGINING LIFE – NARRATING STORIES Imagining Disaster in the African Postcolony Refugee Life Narratives Shared Paradoxes in Namibian and German History From Utopia to Atopia to Diaspora? “Here in Europe it’s like a secret cult” “Performing ‘Africa’” in Germany Misunderstandings CREATIVE WRITING Le Pyjama bleu Cotton Candy Notes on Contributors and Editors Notes for Contributors