Membrane | Akademie Schloss Solitude: Schlosspost

Issue No 9

Membrane

Permeable Thinking in African/-diasporic Literatures and Art

Within the framework of the international literature festival »Membrane – African Literatures and Ideas,« curated by Felwine Sarr, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, and Nadja Ofuatey-Alazard; and initiated by Literaturhaus Stuttgart, Institut français and the Akademie Schloss Solitude, this special Schlosspost issue amplifies the questions and conversations occurring at the festival. These include »Who defines ›African‹ identity?,« »What are the other ways of ›Africa‹?«. This issue also opens up new conversations by fostering and challenging the concept of »Africanity,« Afro-European and Afropolitanism, and by reflecting on questions of race, borders, colonialism, temporal disruptors, and existing vocabularies.
For this issue, Schlosspost worked closely together with the writer and editor Dzekashu MacViban.

Introduction

Editorial

Membrane – Boundary & Connectedness

A membrane is employed as a boundary-object and as a site of connectedness. Looking at this dual character of the membrane, the discussion in this issue is about flows, exchange, permeability, and translations, as well as about restraint, rejections, and protected areas.

Index

Issue No 9 – Membrane

With a widely varied pool of contributions ranging from multimedia content to more experimental forms, this issue includes contemplative and analytical writing in French and English, as well as other media.

Programmatic Festival Statement

The Need for Mutual Permeabilities

by Literaturhaus Stuttgart, Institut français Stuttgart, and Akademie Schloss Solitude

The organizers of the festival »Membrane – African Literatures and Ideas,« explore the possibilities within which permeability in thinking, speaking, and acting is the basic condition of change.

Curator’s Statement

Porosity: Pulse, Flow, Ebb

by Nadja Ofuatey-Alazard, Felwine Sarr, and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

The three curators of the festival »Membrane – African Literatures and Ideas« intend to refresh the flow of words, images, ideas, people, and notions from Africa, from the many Africas into the rest of the world.

Global Dynamics

Interview

Afrotopia or The Future is Open

with Felwine Sarr by Deniz Utlu

Felwine Sarr talks about his essay »Afrotopia« and the need for a »cultural revolution« in Africa: »Now is the time to dream the utopia in Africa itself, and to design the continent ourselves!«

Memory, Time, Places

Travelogue

Entanglements in Transnational Memory Politics

On his way from Germany to Kenya, Eric Otieno passed by Bagamoyo, in Tanzania, where he found traces of German colonialism. A reflection on the difficult, and distorted memory politics, which often repeat national narratives of founders, fathers, and flags.

Fiction

Lebensentwürfe

by Clementine Ewokolo Burnley

By weaving together historical events and imagined texts, »Lebensentwürfe« questions the stories of West African women and their descendants, so as to tell it anew.

Everyday Translations

Travelogue

Learning Berlin

by Sada Malumfashi

Nigerian writer Sada Malumfashi relates an encounter with his friends, while hunting a key in Berlin's night, roaming trough the city, learning Berlin, while in that moment shaping the city with a black perspective.

Comic

From Berlin to Dschang

by Paula Bulling and Japhet Miagotar

For three months Paula Bulling, graphic artist from Berlin, and Japhet Miagotar, graphic artist and lecturer from Dschang, have exchanged images and ideas about life in Berlin and Dschang, about childhood, the everyday and politics.

Interview

Reclaiming African Identities

with Japhet Miagotar by Dzekashu MacViban

Cameroonian cartoonist Japhet Miagotar talks about North-South relations, and describes his work as a reflection of social behavior, shaped by personal history, ideologies, studies, and African statuary.

Travelogue

A Stranger’s Pose (excerpt)

by Emmanuel Iduma

A Stranger’s Pose blends memoir, travelogue, and storytelling as Emmanuel Iduma relates his journey across several African countries.

Short Story

La Rivière sans Fin

In this story, young people from a Congolese town fall prey to dream vendors in search of a better life. They follow a quest, which leads them to the depths of rivers in search of diamonds and gold.

Art Work

Fruits

by Hadja Saran Condé

Posters printed on risograph. 29,7 x 35 cm. Made from (and presented with) Guinean stamps issued in 1959, designer unknown. Photos : EESAB-Rennes

Short Story

Gap in the Map

by Yvonne A. Owuor

A woman who gets lost in a European town in the middle of the night is confronted with the strange feeling of solitude, two foreign languages, and three strangers who are sitting in a shelter, until …

Interview

Moments of Erasure

with Janine Jembere and Nicole Suzuki

Drawing from the Japanese art of shifu, a Sun Ra song, and old screensavers, the works The Text Is Text-ile & Of Sounds And Something Else discuss the recalibration of historical (written) heritage and knowledge.

Movement, Migration, Alienation

Opinion Essay

Afropolitanism – On Identity as an Unfinished Game

by Enos Nyamor, illustrated by ZZDD

»Among some of the recent postcolonial ideas, the concept of Afropolitanism has grown increasingly problematic,« says Enos Nyamor. An essay that attempts to provoke new ways of scrutinizing the promising, but equally elitist, concept of Afropolitanism.

Poem

this rage must have a name

by Vinicius Jatobá

A roaringly powerful poem by Brazilian writer Vinicius Jatobá on the impetuous elemental forces from the beginning of the creation of the continents to their division by the oceans.

Poem

Stag(e) Nation

by Bisrat Negassi

Can one be thirsty in the sea? Can there be distance if we get close? Can music be silent? A poem that reflects on contradictions, and realities existing next to each other.

Space-Time Configurations

Web Residencies by Solitude & ZKM

Black Futurism & Technologies of Joy

with Rasheedah Phillips

How can positive futurity concepts and sustainable technologies of joy be developed that specifically benefit low-income, vulnerable, and marginalized Black communities?

Interview

On Space Travel, and Dreams of the Garden of Eden

with Temi Oh by Enos Nyamor

Temi Oh’s first novel »Do You Dream of Terra Two?« asks which visions of the future we share. Enos Nyamor talked with Temi Oh about space travel, dreams, identity, and the places we call home.

Audio file / Performative lecture

Temporal Disruptors

by Black Quantum Futurist

This is a ritual causality performative lecture in which memories will be re-encoded with new temporal information embodying the features of Black womxn and Black quantum futurist time(s) o unlock memories from different times and places.

Immediacy and Intimacy

Web Residencies by Solitude & ZKM

Radical Care in the Space of Excess

with Luiza Prado

The project »All Directions at Once« by Luiza Prado created for the web residencies by Solitude & ZKM, and part of the »Membrane Exhibition – Refracted Gazes,« explores how solidarity and resistance to colonial power could take shape.

Drawings

Familiar Conversations

by David Mathews

During the international literature festival »Membrane – African Literatures and Ideas,« which took place in Stuttgart May 23–26, 2019, David Mathews made documentary drawings of the many voices of Africa and their audience.

Thank God for Slavery! - Alice Sarmiento

Notes

Thank God for Slavery!

by Alice Sarmiento

In her narrative notes and collages the Manila-born writer and independent curator Alice Sarmiento writes about her personal encounter with the labor migration flow in the Philippines, one of the largest labor exporters in the world.