A project of conversation by Dibookeng and the Goethe-Institut.

Reading is an important act of both finding and performing voice. It relates closely or even synonymously with the act of writing, stringing words together to express ideas in time.

The Readolution will be digitized is set to be a digital anthology by Dibookeng in partnership with the Goethe-Institut which calls on the writer to imagine, to make concrete in time ideas, fictional or real that speak to occupying both space and place. The title is a play on Gil Scott Heron’s powerful song and poem The Revolution will not be Televised – which seeks to purge and critically comment on what kind of revolutions would find space in mainstream shared spaces.

Digitisation is defined as the representation of an object, image, sound, document or a signal by a discrete set of its points or samples. Through this project, we call on writers from Africa and the diaspora to begin and continue to claim the digital space, through both writing and reading, in order to help facilitate conversations and representation of self from our own powerful lived experiences.

‘The revolution will be live’ as Heron reminds us. We extend and agree that indeed, the readolution has the ability to exist in both real and imagined time. It is where we are, it is in what our eyes read from a page that has the power to both revolutionize and represent our thinking.

We invite African writers and the larger diaspora to submit strictly 1000 word pieces both fiction and non-fiction. Diary entries and prose will be given first preference in our search for 10 works that will feature in the African Futures Festival  which takes place in Johannesburg from 28 October to 1 November. Each selected work will be awarded a R1000 (South African Rands), helping build our vision of a representative literary space.

The anthology will be available on the Goethe-Institut website for download. Excerpts from the anthology will be available as podcasts on Soundcloud as well.

Original works only. Works must be submitted in English.

Please submit your work to dibookeng@gmail.com until Wednesday 30 September 2015 latest.

https://dibookeng.wordpress.com