Following the First Book Subvention Award of Isabel C. Gómez’s  Cannibal Translation: Literary Reciprocity in Contemporary Latin America (2023) at the 2022 edition of the Prize, we are delighted to announce the winners of the 2023/4 editions of the Prize:

Alexandra-Ecaterina Irimia’s Figures of Radical Absence Blanks and Voids in Theory, Literature, and the Arts(2023).

Dr. Irimia’s book proposes the concept of ‘radical absence’ to describe a certain tradition of resistance to ontology, predication, and representation, contesting their reliance on a metaphysics of presence. Constructing an argument by way of montage, this book is an annotated inventory of textual, visual, and conceptual figures of absence. Spanning different media, it reveals a creative tradition that uses absence not as a negative aesthetic category, but as a productive state of radical indeterminacy with its own politics and poetics. An ambitious, wide-ranging theme and project, it presents a strong interdisciplinary focus, with a sustained and cogent engagement with Critical Theory and Philosophy as well as with literary and artistic fields. The study of ‘radical absence’ asks important questions and validly attempts to push and redefine boundaries between disciplines and methodological approaches. 

Jeannette C. Oholi’s Afropäische Ästhetiken: Plurale Schwarze Identitätsentwürfe in literarischen Texten des 21. Jahrhunderts (2024).  

Dr Oholi’s book as a whole not only maps a transnational Black European literature, but uses this mapping to demonstrate how the dominant narrative of a ‘Europeanness’ rooted in Whiteness is – and has always been – a chimera. It approaches this de-centring, de-territorialisation, and decolonisation of Europeanness through the methodological lens of queering – here read and deployed as an act of radical subversion of these dominant narratives. It queers white European hegemony by placing central the cultural production of  Black authors from Germany, France and England; it considers these works as aesthetic products (not political tracts) which in their aesthetic innovation map queer futures – a future of ‘radical multiplicity’ rooted in Afropean aesthetics; and it makes the case for new forms of Comparative Cultural Studies: a disciplinary innovation equally rooted in this radical multiplicity.

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