Addressing the Swahili Ocean and Afrasian coastlines as repositories of transcultural memory and ancestral belonging, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor and John Njenga Karugia will delve into literary, acoustic and scholarly practices of chronicling maritime cosmopolitanisms and communal histories while also remaining alert to more-than-human custodians of the sea.

As inhabitants and travellers – or “Jahazis”, as poet and lyricist Haji Gora Haji would say – of these waters, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor and John Njenga Karugia will engage in calling forth the Swahili Seas’ multitudinous pasts and possible futures. Their approach complicates the idea of Kenya today, by way of its intrinsic relation with diaspora cultures and Afrasian imaginaries. The evening will be introduced and moderated by Natasha Ginwala, the Gropius Bau’s Associate Curator at Large.

Dr. John Njenga Karugia is a researcher, lecturer and documentary filmmaker based at the Institute for Asian and African Studies at Humboldt University Berlin. He researched and lectured at the University of Leipzig and Goethe University Frankfurt. He has intensively researched on China-Africa relations, Afrasian interactions, transregional Indian Ocean memory politics and transregional memory ethics. He was a visiting scholar at Duke University and Shanghai Maritime University. His current research focuses on transregional politics, memory politics and memory ethics of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) with, amongst other aims, to contribute to Area Studies and Transregional Studies scholarship.

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor is an author, essayist, public thinker, traveller and creative content developer. Owuor has an MPhil in Creative Writing from the University of Queensland, Brisbane. She won the 2003 Caine Prize for African Writing for her story Weight of Whispers. Her first novel, Dust (2007) was translated into several languages. Her next book, The Dragonfly Sea (2019) explores the long historical entanglement of East Africa and China mediated by the seas and a dared oceanic imaginary. She has written for numerous publications worldwide, including National Geographic. She is presently writer-in-resident for the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin where she is working on a new project.