Retelling the story of development

Beschreibung

While in Europe, the mainstream of discourses on contemporary Africa still cling to an image of the continent frozen in time, a generation of writers has set out to retell what it means to be African in the 21st century. In Kenya, these have been above all the writers of the Kwani? generation. One who has particularly captured the spirit of this new cultural self-determination in literary writing, which moves seemingly effortlessly between global, pan-African, national and local identities, was Binyavanga Wainaina. One aspect in which this cultural and political self-determination is expressed is Wainaina's critique of the international development industry in Kenya and his engagement to retell the story of “development” from a Kenyan perspective. In this paper, I will explore this aspect through a reading of his memoir One Day I Will Write About This Place (2011).

Zeitraum	13 Feb. 2020
Gehalten am	Kenyatta University, Kenia
Bekanntheitsgrad	International