Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
Biographic Data
| ID | 3991984 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor |
| GIVEN NAMES | Yvonne Adhiambo |
| FAMILY NAME | Owuor |
| SIGNATURE | OWUOR Y A |
| AFFILIATIONS | 1 Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin Germany |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1709-9812 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 7 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 7 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Phantom Fires in Broken Hearths
Phantom Fires and Broken Hearths: That Homing Instinct explores the layered and evocative notion of “home.” Drawing from the literature across English-speaking Africa, including the works of Warsan Shire, the talk examines how belonging is imagined, fractured, invented and remade. Moving between literary cartographies and personal reflections, it asks how displacement, memory and identity shape our sense of home. As Naguib Mahfouz (allegedly) obs…
Not Dystopia
A man in a white shirt on his way to somewhere stopped, looked, and saw
A man in a white shirt on his way to somewhere stopped, looked, and saw . . . Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS GANDA [End Page 40] “There are presumptions, in the world as it is now framed, of who the worthy victim is and who merits the power of full witness,” writes Caine Prize winner Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor. In the following essay, she reflects on how witness frames what it means to be h…
The “Post”Colonial
This essay, first offered as a causerie, sets out to explore some of the questions proposed by the idea of a “Commonwealth” conference in the context of a “post”colonial, “postmodern” milieu characterized by immense historical and tectonic shifts in the idea of society. The essay probes at the foundations of the crumbling edifice that is the “post” in postcolonial, built, as it is, over the ruins of unrequited memories. The work is a small tapest…
In Search of Poem-Maps of the Swahili Seas
To what extent can a text borne in memory give texture, perspectives, meaning, dimensionality and sense to a place? Where is the locus of meaning in such a case? Can this locus be mapped? Questions about Swahili navigational poetry (poem-maps) motivate this reflection. Can similar repositories of sea experiences be read for biographical threads of the water body to which they refer? This essay explores these questions by focusing on narratives in…
Reading Our Ruins
The essay enquires into what is accepted in academic and political circles as ‘post-colonial’ reality and questions some of the assumptions about its imagination, narratives, and edifices. It does this through the lens of moments taken from lived ‘post-coloniality’, mostly out of Kenya, which, like most ‘independent nations’ presumed a cut-off point between ‘colonial’ and its ‘post’ in the solemn ritual act of swapping flags one midnight. That th…
O-Swahili
This essay explores the idea of Kenya as a linguistic contact zone from a creative writer's point of view and uses the ironic neologism 'O-Swahili', a term fusing Swahili and the Nilotic languages spoken in western Kenya, as an inspirational marker for the multilingual lifeworlds that intersect in contemporary Kenyan society where people typically learn to navigate their lives in at least three different languages. English, Swahili, and the more …
In Search of Poem-Maps of the Swahili Seas
To what extent can a text borne in memory give texture, perspectives, meaning, dimensionality and sense to a place? Where is the locus of meaning in such a case? Can this locus be mapped? Questions about Swahili navigational poetry (poem-maps) motivate this reflection. Can similar repositories of sea experiences be read for biographical threads of the water body to which they refer? This essay explores these questions by focusing on narratives in…
O-Swahili
This essay explores the idea of Kenya as a linguistic contact zone from a creative writer's point of view and uses the ironic neologism 'O-Swahili', a term fusing Swahili and the Nilotic languages spoken in western Kenya, as an inspirational marker for the multilingual lifeworlds that intersect in contemporary Kenyan society where people typically learn to navigate their lives in at least three different languages. English, Swahili, and the more …
In Search of Poem-Maps of the Swahili Seas
To what extent can a text borne in memory give texture, perspectives, meaning, dimensionality and sense to a place? Where is the locus of meaning in such a case? Can this locus be mapped? Questions about Swahili navigational poetry (poem-maps) motivate this reflection. Can similar repositories of sea experiences be read for biographical threads of the water body to which they refer? This essay explores these questions by focusing on narratives in…
Reading Our Ruins
The essay enquires into what is accepted in academic and political circles as ‘post-colonial’ reality and questions some of the assumptions about its imagination, narratives, and edifices. It does this through the lens of moments taken from lived ‘post-coloniality’, mostly out of Kenya, which, like most ‘independent nations’ presumed a cut-off point between ‘colonial’ and its ‘post’ in the solemn ritual act of swapping flags one midnight. That th…
The “Post”Colonial
This essay, first offered as a causerie, sets out to explore some of the questions proposed by the idea of a “Commonwealth” conference in the context of a “post”colonial, “postmodern” milieu characterized by immense historical and tectonic shifts in the idea of society. The essay probes at the foundations of the crumbling edifice that is the “post” in postcolonial, built, as it is, over the ruins of unrequited memories. The work is a small tapest…
A man in a white shirt on his way to somewhere stopped, looked, and saw
A man in a white shirt on his way to somewhere stopped, looked, and saw . . . Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS GANDA [End Page 40] “There are presumptions, in the world as it is now framed, of who the worthy victim is and who merits the power of full witness,” writes Caine Prize winner Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor. In the following essay, she reflects on how witness frames what it means to be h…
Not Dystopia
Phantom Fires in Broken Hearths
Phantom Fires and Broken Hearths: That Homing Instinct explores the layered and evocative notion of “home.” Drawing from the literature across English-speaking Africa, including the works of Warsan Shire, the talk examines how belonging is imagined, fractured, invented and remade. Moving between literary cartographies and personal reflections, it asks how displacement, memory and identity shape our sense of home. As Naguib Mahfouz (allegedly) obs…
Art (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · History (4 works) · Political science (4 works) · Law (3 works) · Literature (3 works) · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies (3 works) · Sociology (3 works) · Aesthetics (2 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (2 works)