Tag
Africa
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Spectacles of Return: The Silent Labors of “Dahomey”
“Dahomey” narrates the Danxomèan treasures’ epic journey home. And yet, the film remains haunted by the visible and invisible human labor that made this homecoming—and its cinematic telling—possible.
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Putting French Literary History on Trial
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s Goncourt-winning novel confronts the racist history of France’s literary prizes.
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B-Sides: Bessie Head’s “The Collector of Treasures”
South African literature has long struggled to become drought-resistant: its plotlines, and even its paper production, presuppose abundant water.[none-for-homepage]
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Episode 3: Data & Automation
What harms can result from AI and automation, and how might we address and prevent those harms?
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Public Thinker: Annette Joseph-Gabriel on Black Women, Frenchness, and Decolonization
“The women in my book really disrupted France’s ideas about citizenship, about who belongs. I’d like us to be similarly disruptive.”[none-for-homepage]
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Can Photography Be Decolonial?
Can the inherent contradictions of “whiteness” and the “decolonial” ever align with the reparative potential of photography?
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B-Sides: Denis Williams’s “Other Leopards”
Denis Williams was a painter in London, a novelist in the Sudan, an art historian in Nigeria, and an archeologist in his native Guyana: the polymath’s polymath …
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Summer Reads: Pan-African Literature
To celebrate Africa Day, May 25, Zimbabwean information project Kubatana curated its top-10 titles from Exclusive Books’ Pan-African Writing …
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Africa “Without Amnesia”
Responses to the idea of a “post-racial” society usually follow a certain script. In most progressive circles in the US, the notion is dismissed as fantasy or delusion. In southern Africa, and particularly in South Africa and Zimbabwe, the analogous term is “nonracial” (not to be confused with its close cousin “multiracial”). As Americans have…
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The Afronaut Archives: Reports from a Future Zambia
“Most Westerners don’t even know whereabouts in Africa we are.” So said …
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“The Horticulturalist of the Self”
In a 1963 issue of the New York Review of Books, Susan Sontag hailed the translation of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s major early works into English, unabashedly calling the …
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B-Sides: Dambudzo Marechera’s “The House of Hunger”
Contemporary southern Africa is littered with the detritus of grand schemes—imperialism, apartheid, development, independence, socialism. Wrought first by colonial violence and then by anti-colonial movements gone bad, the wreckages of utopia heap up in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, and South Africa. The fallout of these schemes accumulates and compacts. Citizens find themselves making their lives on…
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Somalia and Italy across a Century
The United Nations Refugee Agency has calculated that, by the end of 2016, there were almost 68 million “persons of concern” (refugees, asylum seekers, and other vulnerable groups) living on this planet, more than the population of California and New York combined. If this unprecedented crisis is indeed, in James Wood’s apt phrasing, “the central…
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Cursed Masculinity
Masculinity is a curse. This, at least, is the driving conceit behind Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Ugandan epic, Kintu, published in Kenya by the Kwani Trust in 2014, and in the US by Transit Books …
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Atlantic Got Your Tongue
Safia Elhillo’s poetry comes to us exactly when we need it, in the era of the travel ban and the border wall. The richness of feeling and formal inventiveness of her work open up an alternative universe from the tweet-shouting of anti-immigrant rhetoric today. Her first collection, The January Children, offers a lyrical vision of…
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Wading Through the Swamp: Nairobi, Kenya
Above the low traffic hum on Woodvale Grove, the main street running through Nairobi’s affluent neighborhood of Westlands, a woman in braided hair …
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Burning Books to Stay Alive in Agualusa’s Angola
In 1975, amid the violence and chaos in Luanda on the eve of Angolan independence, Ludovica Fernandes Mano barricaded herself in her apartment. There she remained …
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Afrofuturism: Everything and Nothing
Whence the “Afro” in “Afrofuturism”? In the 1994 interview with Samuel R. Delaney that inaugurated the term, Mark Dery defines Afrofuturism as “speculative fiction that treats African American themes and addresses African American concerns in the context of 20th-century technoculture—and, more generally, African American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future.”…
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Harare in Four Pharmacies
Village Pharmacy in Harare’s upper income Borrowdale Shopping Centre is clean and quiet. There’s a faint antiseptic smell. Its shelves are neatly stacked with imported bath foam …
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Can Child Soldiers Be Saved?
Everybody loves stories about child soldiers, it seems, as long as redemption is involved. A memoir about Sierra Leone’s civil war, for example, is not exactly the feel-good stuff you’d expect to see at a Starbucks counter. But in 2007 Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, one of the first…
