http://bookslive.co.za/blog/2012/04/17/extract-from-charles-cantalupos-joining-africa-being-american-in-eritrea/
Extract from Charles Cantalupo’s Joining Africa: Being American in Eritrea
by Sophy on Apr 17th, 2012
In February this year, Michigan State University Press released Joining Africa: From Anthills to Asmara, American Charles Cantalupo’s memoir of Africa. In Joining Africa, Cantalupo, Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and African Studies at Penn State University, documents his 20-year journey across the continent with a mixture of personal and national history.
Warscapes has released an extract from chapter six, entitled “Rome’s Rome”, in which Cantalupo describes his time in Asmara, Eritrea:
I traveled as a kind of pilgrim. I wanted to witness the site of one of Africa’s greatest, harshest, and most recent revolutions for independence: Eritrea’s thirty-year armed struggle—the longest war in modern African history—to liberate itself from Ethiopian colonial rule, added on to Eritrea’s seventy-year struggle to liberate itself first from Italian and then British colonial rule before Ethiopia took over. Yet I also traveled as a literary pilgrim: to write about what I experienced and toting two of my books, published by Kassahun Checole’s Africa World Press, to personally deliver them to Arefine Tewolde, the manager of its office in Asmara and Kassahun’s uncle.
“Ah, Cantalupo. Benvenuto a Asmara. Avete un buon viaggio? Venga all’ interno e rendasi comodo.” Arefine stood in a huge glass and iron open doorway under a red, yellow, black, and green sign with “Africa World Press/Red Sea Press” superimposed on an image of the earth with Africa in the center.
Keep reading: Warscapes
Book details
Joining Africa: From Anthills to Asmara by Charles Cantalupo
EAN: 9781611860368
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Photo courtesy A nave do bom gosto
Cats: Africa, Biography, Book Excerpts, International, Non-fiction, South Africa
Tags: Africa, Asmara, Biography, Book Excerpt, Book Excerpts, Books LIVE, Charles Cantalupo, English, Eritrea, Extract, From Anthills to Asmara, International, Joining Africa, Michigan State University Press, Non-fiction, South Africa, Warscapes
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Received on Tue Apr 17 2012 - 22:31:59 EDT
