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Djibril, a young Djiboutian voluntarily exiled in Montreal, returns to his native land to prepare a report for an American economic intelligence firm. Meanwhile, a shadowy, threatening figure imprisoned in an island cell seems to know Djibril's every move.

After committing an irreparable crime, the narrator of The Emperor waits in his bedroom for the police to arrest him. His past reverberates inside of him like a drum: his youth spent in captivity as a zonbi, under the control of a charlatan Vodou leader, and many an alienating dawn delivering the daily newspaper through the cutthroat neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He now has blood on his hands because of the woman on the bus--the only woman he had ever loved.

Poetry that serves as an evocative portrayal of diverse landscapes and cultures.   In these otherworldly poetry sequences, Samira Negrouche reminds us that "all life is movement," where "time passes through me / beings pass through me / they are me / I am them." The "I" is representative of one voice, three voices, all voices, all rooted in movement as their bodies brush past one another, brush against thresholds of time and space. Everything is in flux-including the dream-like landscapes at the borders of borders-as the poet seeks to recover parts of self and memory, on both a personal and universal level. In these poems, history-laden locales such as Algiers, Timbuktu, N'Djamena, Cotonou, Zanzibar, Cape Town, and Gorée are evoked. Even the language, expertly and sensitively translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson, refuses to be pinned down, as it loops back on itself. At times contradictory, at times fractured in meaning, syntax, and diction, the playful language is riddled with "restless" verbs. In the end, the "I" takes on prophetic overtones, instilling hope for the future.

An exploration of phrases and excerpts that inspire a major contemporary artist.   Over the past several years, renowned South African artist William Kentridge has made a collection of particular phrases and sentences that have called out to him from the pages of whatever he has been reading. And these phrases, which he has written into a studio notebook titled Words, have been put to work in many of his artistic projects. Kentridge has often begun a project by paging through the notebook, waiting for a phrase to claim its place in the new work. The text excerpts come from many sources: Aimé Césaire, Yehuda Amichai, Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Setswana proverbs, the Book of Ecclesiastes, Tristan Tzara's Dada Manifesto, and a range of eastern European poets. This volume presents a selection made from the notebook, with phrases arranged neither randomly nor with a clear agenda but finding a space in between. Cleverly designed by the artist and beautifully produced, Words is a thought-provoking collection that provides a window to the mind of a contemporary creative genius.

A searing novel exploring the construction of masculinity in sub-Saharan Africa.   After beating his girlfriend and leaving her for dead on the street, Amok retraces his steps. Frightened by his act, which reproduces the violence of his father, he hopes to save the woman. But it is too late when he arrives at the scene; two women are already carrying the injured woman. Overwhelmed and not daring to reveal himself, he decides to find his father in order to learn how to rid himself of the dark force that he believes runs through the men of his lineage. He embarks on a journey that will be, more than anything, an inner one, forcing him to understand his story and choose a healthier way of being in the world. This second volume of Twilight of Torment is both intimate and political. Through the story of a man and his family, we discover an African bourgeoisie and its many social wanderings in a contemporary Africa whose future seems nebulous.

An enchanting novel of magical realism from a new voice, Kenyan author Wanjiku Wa Ngugi.

With fifteen stunning new color drawings by Kentridge and an additional coda, this revised edition of Accounts and Drawings from Underground continues its remarkable documentation of the stories of migrant laborers and the flows of capital and desire, providing us with a palpable sense of a vanished world.

For nearly four decades, the author, best known for her novels "Segu" and "Windward Heights", has been at the forefront of French Caribbean literature. In this collection of essays and lectures, written over many years and in response to the challenges posed by a changing world, she reflects on the ideas and histories that have moved her.

Master storyteller Ngugi wa Thiong'o blends myth and folklore with insight into the human psyche and the patterns of politics in this fable of how humans came to walk upright, set to appeal to both adults and children. Sunandini Banerjee illustrates.

Explores the problems and potentials of the fictions the author could not bring himself to write. Drawing from his notebooks, this title records here a range of ideas for stories - unsettled accounts, he calls them, or case studies of failure - and examines where they came from and why they eluded him.

The poems in this new volume by Abdourahman A. Waberi are introspective and inquisitive, reflecting a deep spiritual bond--with words, with the history of Islam and its great poets, with the landscapes those poets walked, among which Waberi grew up. The sage yearns here for the simplicity of each individual moment to somehow become eternal, for the histories and people that are part of him--his mother, his wife, his unborn child, the sacred texts that ground his being--to come together harmoniously within him, and to emerge through his words. Lyrical and personal, but with powerful historical and cultural resonances, these poems are the work of a master at the height of his powers.

Translation of: Mets et merveilles"--Copyright page.

The "Modern Sovereign," a notion indebted both to Hobbes's Leviathan and Marx's conception of capital, refers to the power that governed the African multitudes from the earliest colonial days to the post-colonial era. It is an internalized power, responsible for the multiform violence exerted on bodies and imaginations. Joseph Tonda contends that in Central Africa--and particularly in Gabon and the Congo--the body is at the heart of political, religious, sexual, economic, and ritual power. This, he argues, is confirmed by the strong link between corporeal and political matters, and by the ostentatious display of bodies in African life. The body of power asserts itself as both matter and spirit, and it incorporates the seductive force of money, commodities, sex, and knowledge. Tonda's incisive analysis reveals how this sovereign power is a social relation, historically constituted by the violence of the African cultural Imaginary and the realities of State, Market, and Church. It is to be understood, he asserts, through a generalized theory economic, political, and religious fetishism. By introducing this crucial critical voice from contemporary Africa into the English language, The Modern Sovereign makes a significant contribution to field of anthropology, political science, and African studies.

"Everything starts with a song and everything ends with another song," says the narrator of The Divine Song. Paris is an old Sufi cat who keeps watch over his brilliant yet pathetic master, Sammy Kamau-Williams, the Enchanter. In Sammy, we recognize the African American singer-composer, poet, and novelist Gil Scott-Heron who is best known for his song "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." ​The Divine Song takes us from the shores of Africa to Sammy's ancestors' arrival in the Americas in the hold of the slave ships. From there, Abdourahman A. Waberi takes the characters from Tennessee--under the tutelage of Lili Williams, Sammy's beloved African-born grandmother--to New York and the concert halls of Paris and Berlin, wherever blues and jazz find an enchanted audience. African tales, religious practices, segregation, the civil rights movement, addiction, and jail--Sammy's life comes to encompass the whole of the African American experience. At a time when social and racial divisions have yet again come into sharp relief, this lyrical novel by one of African literature's rising stars is necessary reading for anyone who celebrates the resilience of art.

One of South Africa‿s best-known writers during the apartheid era, Alex La Guma was a lifelong activist and a member of the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress. Persecuted and imprisoned by the South African regime in the 1950s and 60s, La Guma went into exile in the United Kingdom with his wife and children in 1966, eventually serving as the ANC‿s diplomatic representative for Latin America and the Caribbean in Cuba. Culture and Liberation captures a different dimension of his long writing career by collecting his political journalism, literary criticism, and other short pieces published while he was in exile.   This volume spans La Guma‿s political and literary life in exile through accounts of his travels to Algeria, Lebanon, Vietnam, Soviet Central Asia, and elsewhere, along with his critical assessments of Paul Robeson, Nadine Gordimer, Maxim Gorky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Pablo Neruda, among other writers. The first dedicated collection of La Guma‿s exile writing, Culture and Liberation restores an overlooked dimension of his life and work, while opening a window on a wider world of cultural and political struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century. Â