Willson Center Distinguished Lecturer: Bhakti Shringarpure's "Publishing at a Crossroads: Notes on the "D" word"

Dr. Shringarpure has co-founded the online magazine, Warscapes, in 2002 to create an alternative space for writing, reportage, reviews and art that is often kept out of mainstream media circulation. Warscapes was awarded grants by the Open Society Foundation and the Flora Foundation and has recently transitioned into the Radical Books Collective under Dr. Shringarpure’s leadership. The Radical Books Collective organizes virtual book clubs as a response to the need for a progressive, alternative and non-commercial approach to books and publishing. It was recently profiled in the Literary Hub and dubbed as a "fast-growing initiative with an international audience of general readers, academics, intellectuals, and book lovers." Recent authors who have accepted invitations to attend this collective are Nobel Prize Winning Abdulrazak Gurnah, Amitav Ghosh, Jennifer Makumbi, Chinelo Okpranta, and many others. Dr. Shringarpure’s book Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital (Routledge, 2019) unfolds the history of postcoloniality and its effect on literary production during the Cold War. Her edited works include Literary Sudans: An Anthology of Literature from Sudan and South Sudan (Africa World Press), Imagine Africa (Archipelago Books), Mediterranean: Migrant Crossings (UpSet Press), and the forthcoming Insurgent Feminisms: Women Write War. She is the co-translator of Neustadt prize-winning writer Boubacar Boris Diop's novel Kaveena (Indiana University Press). She received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award (Kenya) in 2019 and a research fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. She is currently the editor of a short books series called Decolonize That! Handbooks for the Revolutionary Overthrow of Embedded Colonial Ideas which is being published by OR Books in New York. Her co-produced section for the Los Angeles Review of Books titled Decolonize | Defund | Abolish engages scholars, artists, and activists in dialogues about structures of colonialism persisting in the world today, and about creative and speculative practices of freedom in response to these structures. She has written for Africa is a Country, New Frame, Scroll, Brittle Paper, LitHub and The Guardian.