Publisher: Spears Media Press, Cameroon
Pages: 250
Year: 2019
Category: Biography & Memoir, Personal Memoir
Dimensions: 229 x 152mm
Letter from America
Memoir of an Adopted Child
Inspired by Alistair Cooke’s masterpiece “Letter from America”
(1934-2004) that depicted the transformation of British culture in the
United States of America, Ndi-Shang’s text redefines ‘America’, focusing
on the melting pot engendered by African, indigenous, European and
Asian cultures in Latin America through the case of Peru, the erstwhile
epicentre of Spanish empire in Latin America. It is a reflection on the
triangular relationship between Africa, Europe and America against the
backdrop of slavery and (neo-)colonialism which continue to define
intimate experiences, daily interactions, personal trajectories and
human relations in a ‘globalized world’. Ndi-Shang probes into the
legacies of racial inequalities but also the possibilities of a new
ethic of encounter amongst human beings/cultures. The text is based on
an intricate interweaving of the humorous with the tragic, the personal
with the global, the historical with the current and the real with the
creative.
£30.00 – £33.00
About the author
Gil Ndi-Shang (Romance Literatures/Comparative Studies, University of
Bayreuth) holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the Bayreuth
International Graduate School of African Studies (BIGSAS). He is a
member of the Young Colleague Programme, Bavarian Academy of Sciences
(Munich-Germany). In the recent past, he has been Research Fellow with
the Fritz-Thyssen Foundation and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
for his literary research in Congo, Peru and Colombia. He hails from the
North-West region of Cameroon where he grew up before moving to Yaoundé
and Bayreuth (Germany) for his university education. He is the author
of State/society: Narrating Transformations in African Novels and
co-editor of Tracks and Traces of Violence and Re-writing Pasts,
Imagining Futures. He is also a contributing co-editor of the poetry
volume Emerging Voices: Anthology of Young Anglophone Cameroon Poets.
Review
“Ndi-Shang writes in great prose, with a strong poetic tonality.”
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, University of California, Irvine, USA
“Ndi-Shang’s travelogue rewrites the genre; his transformative prose
and analytical precision invest America with conceptual novelty and
with fresh geographical complexity. The work’s decolonial reverberations
will endure for a long time.”
Cajetan Iheka, Yale University, USA. Author of Naturalizing Africa
“I have read the whole text and enjoyed every bit of it. I followed
you as you sojourned devotedly across the various American landscapes.
When you turned, I turned…reflective, analytical, synthetical!”
Simon Nganga, Moi University, Kenya
“A thrilling memoir which taps from and delves into history,
literature, anthropology, sociology and psychology. It (re)connects
people, souls, minds, cultures, and histories across fissures of time,
memory, space, water, and generations.”
Nsah Mala, Aarhus University, Denmark
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