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 […]
New Oil Old Lamps
The old Arab adage that “Cairo writes, Beirut publishes and Baghdad reads” is no longer. Instead “the Arab world writes, while Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah and Doha decide who gets the big bucks”. Thus argues André Naffis-Sahely, as he explores the contemporary narrative playing out in the land of petro-dollared development, where an Arab literary […]
Shifting Gulfward
The apparent demise of the millennia-old Arab cultural centres and the rapid growth, in their place and across all genres, of Emirates-based investment are raising some questions. Is oil money alone fuelling the contemporary art boom, and in whose interests is the cash being flashed in the name of Arab cultural renaissance? Marcia Lynx Qualey […]
Life After Oil
Jeremy Weate explores the cultural politics of the petro-based economy in Nigeria, where crude as commodity has perpetuated ethnic divides and the illusion of development and modernity through a national pastime of forgetting. He asks: what culture and what memory will be left of oil, after it has gone? The culture of oil that has […]
The Bite and the Embrace
A Letter from Malabo by Recaredo Silebo Boturu. I’m writing from here in the city of Clarence, or, if you prefer it, Santa Isabel, or, if it’s more comfortable, the city of Malabo. I am here in this tiny city surrounded by greenery and filled with shantytowns and apartment buildings, entrenched and choking from the heat […]