2016 Honorable Mention:

Be it known that Meg Arenberg, of Indiana University, was awarded honorable mention in the competition for the 2016 Horst Frenz Prize for the best presentation by a graduate student at the annual conference of the American Comparative Literature Association, which, in 2015, was held atthe Seattle Sheraton Hotel in Seattle, Washington.

The judges admired Meg Arenberg’s essay for attempting to generate a conversation among African writers responding to one another rather than between (or in addition to) African writers and European scholars. What is being parodied are largely earlier African texts that suggest a “final” and “African” truth.  The comparative method is applied within Africa rather than between Africa and Europe - which we find a healthy move in Comparative Literature. African comparative work can take place among African writers and doesn’t need to anchor itself in Europe’s reading of the African.