Manufacturing African Celebrity
Jesse Weaver Shipley* explores the power of celebrity in contemporary African pop culture – with its common themes of seduction, aspiration, and desire for unattainable status – but also how celebrity in both content and form is abstracted, recycled and circulated in a globalised market. The MTV Africa Music Awards, more popularly known as the MAMAs, […]
Soft Power Desire Machines and the Production of Africa Rising
Alongside texts by Jesse Weaver Shipley, Moses März and Oribhabor Aigbokhaevbolo, this map features in the new Chronic. In this edition we ask: what if maps were made by Africans for their own use, to understand and make visible their own realities or imaginaries? How does it shift the perception we have of ourselves and […]
Creative Industries as Underdevelopment
Are the creative industries turning the tide against urban development in the global South, gobbling up space, agency and voice in the pursuit of distorted trends of progress? Stefano Harney and Tonika Sealy, founding members of Ground Provisions, an educational and curatorial collective in Barbados, argue that nouveau creative compradors are getting rich through cultural […]
Reviews in Brief
by Stacy Hardy. Our Lady of the Nile Scholastique Mukasonga (transl. Melanie Mauthner) Archipelago Books, 2014 In Our Lady of the Nile, Scholastique Mukasonga plunges her reader into a looming dreamscape where an elite Catholic girls’ school has become a microcosm for a society on the brink of war. Here, the jagged terrain of […]
Portrait of the Artist as a Daughter
by Ed Pavlić. “Where material is absent, dialectics is groundless.” – James Snead, “On Repetition in Black Culture” “For me to go find my father,” writes Harmony Holiday, “has meant to fall in love or infatuation with black artists who are a lot like him. This search morphs from being about one man, to being about […]