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Boys Quarter by Chukwuma Ndulue

Reviewed by Naomi Falk

Ndulue directs the mind away from imagining stereotypes of times and places and coaxes it towards a sustained patience with language, one that melts the text into the reader.

Four poems by Léopold Sedar Senghor

Translated by Baba Badji

Here is the Sun/ Which tightens the breasts of the virgins/ Who makes the old men smile on the green benches/ Who would awaken the dead under a maternal earth.

A Forgotten Colony: Equatorial Guinea and Spain

By Adriana Chira

In our geographic imaginaries, Spanish colonialism tends to be mapped onto South America. But the last Spanish colony to claim independence from Spain in 1968 was a territory in West Africa—Equatorial Guinea

Decolonization: A Short History by Jan C. Jansen and Jürgen Osterhammel

Reviewed by Michael Collins

The ambitious aim of Jansen and Osterhammel’s Decolonization is to provide a comparative evaluation of an immensely complex global historical process in a relatively concise volume. The authors revised and expanded their original 2013 German language version for the current text, whose purpose is to explain how the de-legitimation of European colonial rule over Africa and Asia during the course of the twentieth century involved a broad array of structural and normative factors.

Lalana by Michèle Rakotoson

Translated by Allison M. Charette

You cannot walk fast in Antananarivo. There’s a weight in the air, a heat that makes everything slow and viscous. There’s a constant small of noxious gas, an acid odor that gets into your lungs, infests your muscles. There’s the red dust, blackened by exhaust fumes, and the perpetual suffocation of the city, so precariously perched, so dry.

Layering Over the Wounds of Algeria in Contemporary Pied-Noir Art

By Amy L. Hubbell 

France’s former French citizens of Algeria, the Pieds-Noirs, include one of Europe’s largest diaspora communities in the twentieth century. This diverse group of people settled in Algeria during the colonial years, and after one-hundred and thirty years of French colonial rule, Algeria fought for and won its independence in 1962. The seven-year war was traumatic for both the Algerians and the French living in the colony, and nearly one million people crossed the Mediterranean during and after the war to make a new home in France.