Press events, Cooperation agreements

Fatin Abbas, born in Khartoum/ Sudan and raised in New York, earned her PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University, and her MFA in Creative Writing from Hunter College, New York. She will read from her debut novel Ghost Seasonfollowed by a discussion with Prof. Kwame Anthony Appiah and the South African artist donna Kukama (Professor of Contemporary Art / Global South at KHM) who will also moderate the programme.
The five central characters in Abbas' novel, set in current Sudan, reveal intimate and unexpected experiences of personal belongings and boundaries. How do the panelists view these dynamic identities, also with regard to their specific backgrounds and personal "Wings with Roots“.

Fatin Abbas is an international writer and journalist. Born in Khartoum, Sudan, and raised in New York City, she gained her BA in English from the University of Cambridge, her PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University, and her MFA in Creative Writing from Hunter College, the City University of New York, where she was awarded both the Bernard Cohen Short Story Prize and the Miriam Weinberg Richter Award for her writing. She has published essays and reports in The Nation, Le Monde diplomatique and Die Zeit, among others, and short prose in the magazines Granta and Freeman's. She has taught fiction writing at MIT and the Pratt Institute in New York and comparative literature at Bard College Berlin. Dave Eggers commented on Ghostseason, her first novel: "Absolutely fascinating ... an extremely important novel." Fatin Abbas currently lives in Berlin.

Kwame Anthony Appiah is a renowned international philosopher and writer, who has written about political philosophy, race, ethics, the philosophy of language and mind, African intellectual history and Identity. He grew up in Ghana and England and received his doctorate at Cambridge University. He has taught at Yale, Cornell, Duke, and Harvard universities and lectured at many other institutions in the US, Germany, Ghana, South Africa, and Paris. Besides his academic work, Appiah has also published several works of fiction. His first novel, Avenging Angel, set at the University of Cambridge, involved a murder among the Cambridge Apostles. Appiah's second and third novels are Nobody Likes Letitia and Another Death in Venice. Appiah has been nominated for, and received, several awards. He was the 2009 finalist in the arts and humanities for the Eugene R. Gannon Award for the Continued Pursuit of Human Advancement. In 2010, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine on its list of top global thinkers. In 2013 he received the National Humanities Medal. Currently, he is a professor of philosophy and law at New York University.

donna Kukama, since 2023 Professor of Contemporary Art / Global South at KHM, is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice engages performance art as a tool for creative research. Her work presents institutions, monuments, gestures of protest, rumors, and fleeting moments that are as real as they are fictitious. Shifting between performance, video, text, sound, and multimedia installations, her practice takes on a form that is experimental, applying methods that are deliberately undisciplined. She uses performance as a strategy that allows her to invent as well as to apply methods that are outside the canon of what is predictable or expected. She questions how histories are narrated and subverts how value systems are constructed, often centering methods perspectives that originate from the Global South.

There will be a book table with the following publications by the authors:
Fatin Abbas: Zeit der Geister (Rowohlt Verlag)
Fatin Abbas: Ghost Season (W. W. Norton & Company)
Kwame Anthony Appiah: Identitäten. Die Fiktionen der Zugehörigkeit (Hanser Literatur)
Kwame Anthony Appiah: The Lies that Bind. Rethinking Identity (W. W. Norton & Company)

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Wissenschaftlicher Ansprechpartner:
https://www.khm.de/personen/id.30565.prof-donna-kukama/

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Originalpublikation:
https://www.khm.de/termine/news.5744.ghost-season/
https://www.stimmenafrikas.d