Forum for Modern Language Studies Advance Access originally published online on February 20, 2009
Forum for Modern Language Studies 2009 45(2):140-143; doi:10.1093/fmls/cqp007
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This article appears in the following Forum for Modern Language Studies issue: SPECIAL ISSUE: Global Francophone Africa [View the issue table of contents]
Benjamin's Cousins
(Translated from the French by Dominic Thomas)
waberi{at}free.fr
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Abstract |
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During an extended residency in Berlin, the Franco-Djiboutian novelist, poet and essayist Abdourahman A. Waberi ponders the connections between the German-Jewish critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin and a longer history of African-European relations including during the colonial period, the Second World War and the postcolonial era. The 1884–1885 Berlin Congress provides the occasion to think about European history and to explore the symbiotic connections between politics and culture, generations of refugees, exiles and displaced subjects, and more recent relations between the West and the global south, globalisation, migration patterns, and the parameters of a Black Europe. This meditation also includes reflections on the potentialities of literature and art to engage with socio-political questions as well as insights on the role of literature in global consciousness.
Key Words: Black Germany • Benjamin, Walter • African literature • writing • exile
[Translator's note: The article presented here was first published in German in Frankfurter Rundshau, 1 June 2007, pp. 40–1, under the title "Walter Benjamins Vettern", translated from the French by Egon Hartwig.]