INCOGNEGRO: A MEMOIR OF EXILE AND APARTHEID
Frank B. Wilderson, III
South End Press
Recently named winner of the 2008 American Book Award by the Before Columbus Foundation, Incognegro chronicles Wilderson's five years in South Africa, which include appointments as an elected official in the African National Congress and a member of its armed wing, Umkhonto We Sizwe. Wilderson is a member of the ICWT's Advisory Board.

 

THE DOMESTICATION OF DERRIDA
Lorenzo Fabbri
Continuum, Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy Series
This new book analyzes the way in which Richard Rorty has tried to reconcile the thought of Jacques Derrida with the American pragmatist and liberal tradition. Lorenzo Fabbri, who taught with the UCI Department of French and Italian, received a 2007-08 ICWT Faculty Associate Grant in support of this project.

TRANSLATION STUDIES
Routledge
Translation Studies, a biannual journal launched in early 2008, explores cross-discplinary connections. The upcoming issue, available in January, features "Translated by the author: My life in between languages," an article from ICWT Director Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o that recounts the role of translation in his novel-writing. ICWT Executive Board Member Laurence Venuti is as a Consultant Editor and Global Conversations Conference presenter Rita Kothari serves on Translation Studies' International Advisory Board.

AFRO-MEXICANS
Discourse of Race and Identity in the African Diaspora
Africa World Press, Inc.
From Global Conversations Conference presenter Chege Githiora comes this book about "a little known branch of the African Diaspora—Afro-Mexicans. It discusses their conditions of arrival and establishment in Mexico within the context of Spanish colonialism, and the racebased socio-economic hierarchy known as sistema de castas which provided a basis for the contemporary socioracial terms that are the focus of the main study: indio, blanco, negro and moreno. Today, these terms are used ubiquitously in variable ways as tags of social identity in Mexican discourse. An ethnographic sketch of a representative Afro-Mexican community located in the state of Guerrero then provides a setting for the analysis of their contemporary uses. These are then tied to concepts of “race” and identity in Mexico, all within the wider context of modern global Diaspora formations."

BREAKING KNEES
Zakaria Tamer, translated into English by Ibrahim Muhawi
Garnet Publishing, Arab Writers in Translation Series
Ibrahim Muhawi received a 2006-07 ICWT Translation Grant for his work thiscollection of short stories that functions individually and together to form an intricate social narrative. They are sketches of life, snippets of society at specific moments in time and place. The original Arabic text was published in 2002 as Taksīr Rukab by Zakaria Tamer, a prominent contemporary Syrian writer of Arabic literature. Dr. Ibrahim Muhawi, Courtesy Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon, completed and published the English translation titled Breaking Knees in 2008.

The collection is beautifully written, satiric and “poetic in its economy,” as Muhawi reflects in his introduction. He describes Tamer as a satirist whose target is “the Arab world—its culture, politics, social practices, and dominant religion.” Muhawi tells us that the predominant theme of Tamer’s work, including this latest, is repression. In Breaking Knees, Muhawi states the theme to be repression “of the individual by the institutions of state and religion and of individuals by each other, particularly men by women.” In the sixty-three short stories that make up this book, religion, politics, and sexuality are the underlying topics supporting this theme of repression.

Click here to continue reading extended commentary on this book
by ICWT intern Sukeinah Kassir

MEAN
Colette LaBouff Atkinson
University of Chicago Press, Phoenix Poets Series
On this prose poem collection from ICWT Associate Director Colette LaBouff Atkinson, former United States Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky reflects: "The intelligent, merciless narrative cool arrays a sad comedy, with an unemphatic but penetrating 'and then . . . and then': accounts of love pursued far more often than it is glimpsed or realized."

THE OBSERVER TRANSLATION PROJECT
Now in its fifth issue, this online international magazine features Romanian writing in translation. The site's literary pieces translate into English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Polish, with some guest languages. The director of the Project, Jean Harris, received a 2007-08 ICWT Translation Grant in support of her work on the selection from “The Boars Were Mild”/ Mistreţii erau blânzi from Iarna Bărbaţilor / Men in Winter by Ştefan Bănulescu, that opened the first issue of The Observer Translation Project.

 

PRATILIPI
Pratilipi is an online bilingual magazine which features works in both Hindi and English and aims to "provide a space for conversation / debate between diverse sorts of writing and writers." Poems written by Global Conversations Conference presenter Sukrita Paul Kumar were featured in a recent issue.