The State of European Literature

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The lecture will be in French, with Dutch and English subtitles. You can attend either on location in the Agnietenkapel or join the livestream.

Alain Mabanckou, whose books have been translated in almost twenty languages, is a novelist, essayist and poet, and a professor of Francophone literature at UCLA. Mabanckou grew up in Pointe-Noire in The Republic of Congo. The port city of Pointe-Noire also provides the setting for several of his novels, that deal with the experience of contemporary Africa, and with the African diaspora in France and the United States. In his address, Mabanckou will explore the interconnectedness of Africa and Europe, the role of colonial legacies, and the specific position of the literary imagination in this field. His lecture will be commented upon by author Vamba Sherif and literary scholar Judith Jansma.

About the speakers

Alain Mabanckou is a novelist, essayist and poet, and a professor of Francophone literature at UCLA, whose books have been translated in almost twenty languages. He received the Prix Renaudot for his novel Mémoires de porc-épic (2006, translated as Memoirs of a Porcupine). He has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize twice, in 2015 for his body of work, and in 2017 for his novel Black Moses (original title Petit Piment, 2015). Other notable works include the novels Verre cassé (Broken Glass, 2005), Black Bazaar (Black Bazar, 2009), Les cigognes sont immortelles (2018, The Death of Comrade President), his memoir Lumières de Pointe-Noire (2013, The Light of Pointe-Noire) and his collected columns and essays Le sanglot de ‘l homme noir (2012, The Tears of the Black Man). Huit leçons sur l’Afrique contains Mabanckou’s lectures for the Collège de France in 2016, when he held the Chair for Artistic Creation.

Judith Jansma is an assistant professor in European Culture and Literature at the University of Groningen. Her research provides an interdisciplinary perspective on the reception of controversial cultural works in our polarized societies. In her PhD thesis, titled “From Submission to Soumission: Populist Perspectives on Culture” (2021) she studies the various ways in which (right-wing) populists in France and the Netherlands make use of culture to forge (socio-cultural) identities of “us” and “them”.  Jansma holds both a MA and a BA degree in French Language and Culture.

Vamba Sherif is a novelist, essayist, film critic and speaker. He has written many novels. His debut novel, Land of My  Fathers, is about the founding of Liberia as the first African republic in 1822. Vamba Sherif’s work has appeared in many languages, including Dutch, English, French, German, Spanish, and the Indian Malayalam. He has also published essays, stories, film reviews, columns and opinion pieces in The New York Times, the German Kulturaustausch, African Writing, Trouw, Volkskrant, NRC and ZAM-Magazine, among others. With Ebissé Rouw, he compiled Black: Afro-European literature in the Netherlands and Belgium, a unique anthology of Afro-European experience in the Low Countries. In April 2021, his memoir Unprecedented Love was published, in which he tells his life story in a letter form to his ten-year-old daughter Bendu, the namesake of his mother.

Margot Dijkgraaf (moderator) is a literature critic, author, interviewer and ‘ambassador of French literature in the Netherlands’ and vice versa. She was director of the Centre Français du livre at Maison Descartes, director of SPUI25 and intendant literature at the Dutch embassy in Paris. Amongst her publications are Franstalige literatuur van nu (2003), Spiegelbeeld en schaduwspel. Het oeuvre van Hella S. Haasse (2014) and Lezen in Frankrijk. Een literaire tour de France (2018); and Zij namen het woord. Rebelse schrijfsters in de Franse letteren (Atlas Contact). Recently she published  Met Parijse pen. Literaire omzwervingen (Uitgeverij Boom), a collaboration with photographer Bart Koetsier. She is the laureat of the Gouden Ganzenveer 2021.

Guido Snel (moderator) is a writer, translator, and assistant professor of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Most recently he published Huis voor het hiernamaals (2016, stories),  De mirreberg (2018, novel) and Negen Steden (2022), city stories, a journey from Vienna to Istanbul. His work is published by De Arbeiderspers.

The State of European Literature

The State of European Literature is an annual lecture delivered by a renowned author or poet of international stature, about the state of literature and the state of Europe through the perspective of literature.

Today, the languages of Europe continue to write and tell stories about the continent, its intimate lives, neighbors and about its shifting position in the present, past and future.  Due to political polarization and the contestation of the actual fact of the matter of the continent’s present condition (whether it is about the tectonic shifts in geopolitics, transnational legacies such as colonialism, but also climate change, the division of wealth, or the demographic future of Europe), there is a renewed urge for the truth of literary fiction and the power and precision of poetic expression. Whether it is about the alleged limits to the literary imagination in discussions about identity, emancipation, gender, decolonization, or in the field of contested memories, or about the growing predominance of English as a common European language, literature today seems as vital as ever. The State of European Literature wishes to enhance awareness of the pivotal role of the key values of literature and culture for the current and future state of Europe: curiosity, imagination, reflection, critique, translation, eloquence, tradition, invention (in random order).