Veranstaltungen

What does it mean to encounter “elsewhere” through literature and art? How do texts, images, and exchanges across the African diaspora reshape the boundaries between African and African American cultural production?

In this seminar, Margo Natalie Crawford explores these questions through Édouard Glissant’s concept of the “shock of elsewhere.” Drawing on works such as Chimamanda Adichie’s “Americanah”, the letters between Bessie Head and Langston Hughes, Ama Ata Aidoo’s “Our Sister Killjoy” and “The Dilemma of a Ghost”, and the poetry of Keorapetse Kgositsile, the lecture examines the diasporic impulse that continues to blur literary, cultural, and geographic boundaries. The session will also consider how book covers and visual art illuminate this Black diasporic “shock of elsewhere.”