iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

hell yeah!! (huge day for us tumblr lit girlies 👑)

Screenshot of a section from Carson's rendition of "An Oresteia", featuring dialogue between Pylades and Orestes (“PYLADES: I'll take care of you. ORESTES: It's rotten work. PYLADES: Not to me. Not if it's you.”), here meme-fied to “PYLADES: I'll take care of you.
ORESTES: It's rotten work. PYLADES: Not to me. Not if it wins the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature.”

Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

back from 3 weeks in scotland! so many sheep, mountains and lochs, please take me back. winter term’s about to start in germany, i’m not ready! 🐑

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

t-minus one week until this baby has to be sent off to EUP. watch me try limiting my use of “entangled” to twice max./chapter… 😭 (who am I kidding!) #BlackAtlanticEcologies #EnvHum #SlaveryStudies #Lit 🌊🌳🪨🌾

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 21/12/2025

liebe @rennmausinuk.bsky.social, hier noch einmal ganz offiziell: ich bin ✨hin und weg✨, gleich zweimal absolut ins schwarze getroffen! um die patti smith autobiographie schon oft im laden herumgeschlichen, und super gespannt auf das debut von tochi eze! danke-danke-danke! #litgangwichteln

photograph of two books laying on a grey couch: patti smith’s new memoir bread of angels, featuring a black and white cover (a picture of the artist, hands raised, in midst of foliage), and the novel this kind of trouble by tochi exe, with an orange cover featuring leaves on a branch, which include the title and author name.

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

this is not only a fantastic article, it’s also helped me discover this graphic/comic biography of one of my favourite artists!

Cover of a book, a comic biography of artist Ana Mendieta (published in 2011); the cover is black with white letters, in the lower right hand corner there is a black and white drawing of a naked female figure hugged by a skeleton, both sit in a bed of leaves which also blow out from
them and scatter across the cover.

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

mit dem postgang gleich mein eigenes wichtelgeschenk in empfang nehmen dürfen! bin schon sehr gespannt, warte mit dem auspacken aber noch bis weihnachten, glaube ich. aufregend!! #litgangwichteln

photo of an unopened parcel, signed with the hashtag litgangwichteln, next to an advent wreath.

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

das #litgangwichteln packerl macht sich die tage auf den weiten weg. dieses jahr sind die verpackungs-vibes weniger weihnachtlich, dafür umso thematisch passender zum buch. ich hoffe so sehr, meine wichtel-person hat es noch nicht gelesen! 🌱

a wrapped present, viewed from above. the wrapping paper is midnight blue, the card is a very light turquoise and has gold-embossed stems and flowers on it. the present is tied with a green ribbon that looks like tiny leaves.

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 09/09/2025

ahhhhh so happy!! just signed the contract for my second book with EUP @edinburghup.bsky.social!! "Writing Black Atlantic Ecologies: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Black Life Writing beyond the Colonial Anthropocene" is now officially ✨✨ ✨ 𝒻𝑜𝓇𝓉𝒽𝒸𝑜𝓂𝒾𝓃𝑔 ✨✨ ✨

Screenshot of the contract, showing the book's title and the series, Edinburgh Critical Studies in Atlantic Literatures and Cultures.

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 02/09/2025

toll!!! ich hab diesen urlaub auch alle gemocht, die ich gelesen hab, außer eins, das musste ich wieder weglegen, das war einfach zu zynisch (rejection: kurzgeschichtensammlung, die ganz nah ranbohrt an das schlimmste im menschen; war einfach nicht süd-italien/strand-urlaub material 😅)

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 17/07/2025

summer term done! 👏👏👏 my first as junior prof @unitrier.bsky.social, and it was a really really good one. now onto this 348-page baby!! in collab with wonderful @dependencybonn.de colleagues. (other book baby needs to be patient a little while longer… 😅)

photograph of the title page of an edited volume, showing the title: “ecological interdependencies: strong asymmetrical relations and more-than-human worlds,” edited by zeynep y. gökçe and jennifer leetsch.

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 04/07/2025

after a couple of stressful weeks (thanks to a nasty flu and the ensuing admin/email pile-up), I've finally had a chance to look at the first anonymous reviews for my second book, and I am just so moved and humbled by how closely, carefully (and caringly) these scholars engaged with my work... 🙏🙏🙏

meme featuring spongebob squarepants in a scene where he gestures with his hands to create a rainbow. The rainbow arches above his head, and the caption at the top of the image reads "PEER REVIEW" in bold white letters with a black outline.

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

Meine Gedanken zu ozeanischen Grenzen und #WarsanShire morgen bei der Ringvorlesung “Grenzen – Grenzräume – Grenzbegegnungen” @unitrier.bsky.social. Alle Infos, auch zur Online-Teilnahme, hier: www.uni-trier.de/studium/weit...

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 02/05/2025

📢 JOB KLAXON 📢 Come work with me: I am advertising a PhD position in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (50%, for 3 years initially, starting date: September 2025) - please share widely! www.uni-trier.de/fileadmin/or...

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 29/01/2025

Big news! I’ll be taking up a Professorship for Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Trier University next month. Beyond excited, a bit nervous and, to be quite honest, very relieved—I feel like I haven’t really wrapped my head around this whole no-longer-a-precarious-academic-thing yet…

Collage of three different photos: the top one shows a brown, red and golden mural of the old Roman city of Trier that’s part of Trier Central station. The bottom left is a selfie in which I am smiling and holding the official appointment documents. The bottom right is a photo of the wintery Moselle river that flows through Trier.

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

Very glad to see this out in the world! My colleague Sinah Kloß and I edited this special issue on indentureship and embodiment, with a range of fantastic contributions, pedagogical interventions and a curatorial response. It's available open access here: www.scienceopen.com/journal-issu...

Cover of the 4:2 issue of the Journal of Intentureship and its Legacies

ToC
1. Sinah Theres Kloß and Jennifer Leetsch: Introduction: Indentured bodies/embodiments of indenture
2. Morag Flora Wright: Promiscuous, diseased and unfit: Discourses and embodiments of Indian indentured women across the British Empire, c. 1840–1920
3. Christopher L. Ballengee: Ghostly (re)visions: Embodying the Indian Caribbean churile
4. Rupa Pillai: Teaching how to critically read Indo-Caribbean bodies in nineteenth-century postcards
5. Baishali Ghosh: Indentured impressions: The embodied materiality of artistic practices in Mauritius
6. Sandrine Soukaï: Embodied performances of (post-) indenture: Creolization
of Indian dance, music and nadrons in Guadeloupe
7. Grace Aneiza Ali: Indentured bodies/embodiments of indenture: A curatorial response
8. Bethan Holt: Book Review -- Why Should We Be Called ‘Coolies’?: The End of Indian Indentured Labour by Radica Mahase
9. Joy Mahabir: Poem -- Rumshop Illuminations

Nicholas Dornellas, Adrian–w/ void, 2022, hand woven &
quilted screenprint using appliqué technique on assorted fabrics,
60 × 40.5 in. Courtesy of the artist. nicholasdornellas.com

(Detail) Alka Dass, Family Heirloom, cyanotype and thread drawing, 2023, 100 × 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist. @alka_the_artist.

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

$Screenshot of the article with the following quote highlighted: “But there’s something about literature, an art form that evokes consciousness while being composed of language, which for many (though not all) of us is the medium in which consciousness makes itself felt. Literature is fractal in this way – it is about, among other things, the thing that it’s about other things with. One text can hold seemingly (though not actually) everything.”$

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

ok konnte doch nicht mehr warten-die neugiede war einfach zu groß! und was soll ich sagen? MY FIRST PRATCHETT!! als absoluter sci-fi/fantasy fan war das bisher eine meiner grössten lücken. und dann auch noch feminismus + stereotype gender rollen als thema? CAN’T WAIT! danke danilo! #litgangwichteln

Hardcover of Terry Pratchett’s Monstrous Regiment

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

#litgangwichteln das buch macht sich, gut eingemummelt, morgen auf den weg! 🤍

Picture of a wrapped book: the wrapping paper has a dark blue and creamy white William Morris flower pattern, there’s a dark blue envelope and light golden gift ribbon and a straw star pendant. The present is laid in a paper box and surrounded by crumpled paper wrapping to keep it safe during transport.

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

Show me a picture on your phone that has your energy that isn’t a selfie

Picture of a Halloween puppet: it’s a large, perhaps life-size, green witch with a black hat, green skin, yellow eyes, only a few teeth and wild tangled hair. There is a white sheet of paper taped to her side stating “Please do not play with the witch. She is fragile.”

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

Hooked from the start. Brilliant reflection on the impossibilities of the archive and the possibilities of art.

Screenshot of the LRB article, with the following passage highlighted: “This is what historians call the problem of the archive. Our surviving written and visual materials from the past are not neutral. They don’t do equal justice to different people and groups. On the contrary, they perpetuate the disparities of the past. And this is a particular problem for the era of the transatlantic slave trade. Millions on millions of men, women and children were kidnapped, enslaved, systematically abused and murdered yet the only now remaining traces of their lives were created by people who treated them as disposable ciphers. We have to engage with this hostile and dehumanising evidence in order to speak about the enslaved and the silenced because we have almost nothing else, but it’s extremely problematic material.”

If the painting was nothing more than a realistic portrait of an 18th-century Black scholar in his study, that would be extraordinary enough. It’s the earliest such image in Western art, the first self-presentation of a Black person as an intellectual.
But in fact, it is much more than that. It is a very detailed message from Francis Williams, which its original viewers would have immediately recognised. It says not just: ‘This is who I am!’ It also says: ‘Look! This is what happened, and this is what I did!’ This painting commemorates an event, one with huge significance for Williams – and not just for him, but for everyone across the 18th-century Enlightenment world.

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 24/11/2024

the inaugural issue of the new open-access journal Public Humanities is out — nodding along to the brief piece by Susan McWilliams Barndt, “Why Study the Humanities When People Are Dying?” www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

“Cambridge University Press is launching a new journal, Public Humanities, which seeks to bridge the connection between the academic and everyday life. The journal will provide a new space for scholars, students, activists, policymakers and general readers to explore human habits and histories, art and ideas, language and beliefs – past, present, and future. An open access publication, the journal will demonstrate the breadth, depth, and value of the humanities in its varied contributions to public life, and will engage with a wide range of issues, authors, and readers.
This means the journal’s remit ranges from historical examples of the humanities at work in the world, to theoretical debates about the field today; from governmental policy related to the humanities, to scholarly interventions in ongoing social problems.”

Description of the journal on the Cambridge University Website, link here: https://www.cambridge.org/universitypress/about-us/news-and-blogs/scholarship-with-fire-and-footnotes-introducing-public-humanities

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

A few of my recently acquired non-fiction books for the bedside table to tide me over these dark dark times (politically, seasonally).

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 14/10/2024

From time to time, they vote. From time to time, language dies. —Fady Joudah

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 27/09/2024

The special issue closes with an exploratory coda in which Hannah Nelson-Teutsch offers an approach she calls “Scrappy Reading; Or, Reading the Breakdown in a Small Place” which moves intimately with and through Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place.

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 27/09/2024

My own article on “Oceanic Kinship and Coastal Ecologies: More-than-Human Encounters in Cristina Ali Farah’s ‘A Dhow Crosses the Sea’” connects oceanic kinship networks to colonial histories, offering a vision of Black ecological solidarity across more-than-human realms.

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 27/09/2024

Arunima Bhattacharya’s “Beyond the Developmental Narrative of Postcolonial Nation-Time: The Materialities of Water and Geological Faultlines in Shubhangi Swarup’s Latitudes of Longing” offers a geo-ecological reading to highlight storytelling as a means of discovering empathy.

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 27/09/2024

Christina Slopek-Hauff’s contribution on “‘Making Generative Oddkin’: Female Bodies as a Site of Connectivity in Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light” traces interspecies solidarity as a way to respond to planetary precarity in the Caribbean.

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 27/09/2024

The second section on multi-species encounter opens with Apala Bhowmick’s “The Mechanics of Authoritarian Power and Interspecies Violence in Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote: A Canine Reading,” which reads animals as mired in a complex network of power relations within Africa.

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 27/09/2024

The section ends with a contribution by Peri Sipahi on “Rejecting Victimhood and Weaving Solidarity in Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s Eco-Poetics” which focuses on the strategies of rejecting nuclear and climate victimhood discourses through poetic practices of weaving.

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 27/09/2024

Trang Dang’s “Colonial Exploitation and Indigenous Resistance in Sheila Watt-Cloutier and Cherie Dimaline” pairs Watt-Cloutier’s memoir and Dimaline’s young adult speculative fiction to interrogate the ongoing colonial exploitation of Indigenous peoples and their lands.

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 27/09/2024

Next is Alisa Preusser’s “Poetic Reconfigurations and Reclamations of the ‘Wasteland’ in Craig Santos Perez’s Habitat Threshold” which analyses literature’s capacity to intervene in the discursive production of Oceania as a wasteland.

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 27/09/2024

Our first section addresses climate vulnerabilities and begins with an experiment titled “Reading at Scale: Wetland Futures and Deep Time in Helon Habila’s Oil on Water” by Baldeep Kaur and ponders the possibilities of ecologically-attuned literary and cultural studies.

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 27/09/2024

I don’t think I’ve ever been prouder of a project: this was a true labour of love and community, of care and of critical exchange. We have a co-written intro and articles and creative reflections across planetary sites of ecological engagement and relation.

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 27/09/2024

NEW PUBLICATION: Our double special issue on “Ecological Solidarities across Post/Colonial Worlds.” Find all articles free and open access here: www.postcolonial.org/index.php/pc... #EnvHum #Ecology #PostcolonialLit

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 10/09/2024

bye bye beaches and back to work. one of my absolute favourite holiday reads was tanya tagaq’s split tooth which i read in one sitting and which swallowed me whole.

picture of the baltic sea and its sand dunes at dusk

picture of the book split tooth by tanya tagaq and its white cover laying flat on white-grey sand

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 15/07/2024

Happening this week! Looking forward to thinking across disciplines and about marronage with amazing people. 🌿 www.dependency.uni-bonn.de/en/outreach/...

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 28/05/2024

Later today, in my BCDSS working group on ecological dependencies, we'll be reading along arboreal lines. 🌳 Commoning forests from different perspectives: Stara et al. on the sacred forests of Epirus and Moulton on back geographies and ecologies of the Jamaican forest. Lmk if you'd like to join!

Screenshot of the first page incl. abstract of the chapter "Religion and the Management of the Commons: The Sacred Forests of Epirus". Link to the text: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-26315-1_15

Screenshot of the first page incl. abstract of the article "Towards the arboreal side-effects of marronage: Black geographies and ecologies of the Jamaican forest". Link to the text: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/25148486221103757

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 13/05/2024

So proud of our brilliant contributors! Go read @juliaditter.bsky.social on extraction ecologies, @espinoza.bsky.social on Marryat's tropics, Katharina Kalthoff on Wells's sea lady, and @marlenatronicke.bsky.social on neo-victorian environments. A big thank you to all of you. 💚🌿

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 10/04/2024

Blackecologies Zine, an open-access resource containing sixty-six pages of essays, interviews, short fiction, poetry, experimental field notes, and original art (via @JTRoane on Twitter): www.academia.edu/106404911/Bl...

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 03/04/2024

Currently re-reading these two side-by-side for my working group on ecological dependencies at the BCDSS. If you're interested in joining (this session on Friday April 19th, or the WG in general), let me know! 🌿

Cover of Amitav Ghosh's novel Sea of Poppies: it features a bright green background, and in the foreground there are red poppies rising up from blue and white waves. At the bottom in the middle, there is a ship crossing the ocean. Here is the description of the novel on the author's website: https://amitavghosh.com/books/sea-of-poppies/

Cover of Amitav Ghosh's non-fiction book The Nutmeg's Curse. It is dark and gloomy, in dark blue and black, and there is an active volcano in the background - it seems to rise from a dark ocean, the sky is cloudy. The name of the author is written across the clouds in bright yellow lettering, and the title is white in the foreground. Here is a description of the book on the publisher's website: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo125517349.html

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 22/12/2023

bye-bye inbox, see you never (next year)!

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 17/12/2023

#litgangwichteln mein wichtelgeschenk ist angekommen! danke @psychalexa.bsky.social! mit dem auspacken wart ich noch bis nächstes wochenende, freue mich schon sehr. ✨✨✨ @litgangwichteln.bsky.social

picture of a present wrapped in christmassy wrapping paper, on a wood table with a bowl of tangerines next to itz

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 14/12/2023

#litgangwichteln 2023: nach vielem hin und her ist es nun entschieden, und das päckchen ist gerade zur post. bin so nervös, ob es wohl gefällt!! 😱😱😱 @litgangwichteln.bsky.social

Photo of a wrapped present: the wrapping paper is a pink and brown flower pattern by william
morris, there’s a card with a blackbird motive and a rust-red coloured bow. next to the present there’s a pink and beige tea cup and the foot of a mustard-yellow lamp.

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 13/12/2023

no you’re crying. am slowly crawling towards the winter break, and feeling pretty burnt out, but messages like this… boy do they help.

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 30/11/2023

Working at the intersections of the environmental humanities and asymmetrical power hierarchies? We are looking for contributors to an edited volume on Ecological Inter/Dependencies: Strong Asymmetrical Relations and More-than-Human Worlds. CfP below and here: tinyurl.com/3uv3d4ds. Please share!

Call for Papers

Ecological Inter/Dependencies: Strong Asymmetrical Relations and More-than-Human Worlds (edited volume, to be published with De Gruyter)

Edited by Jennifer Leetsch and Zeynep Y. Gökçe

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Jenny Leetsch @jennyleetsch.bsky.social · 03/11/2023

We have chapters on dance (@ananyajahanara.bsky.social), documentary film making, mass media, novels, life writing, theatre... there are interviews (with Charl Landvreugd and Mieke Bal), and a short story by Olumide Popoola. Thank you to all of you, for doing this with us.

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