The Invention of African Football
Moses März documents his fleeting orbit of the “African” football scene, from the Afcon 2008 tourney in Ghana to Angola in 2009 and the 2010 FIFA World Cup extravaganza further south. All in all it was brief, expensive, stereotypically Eurocentric and big on defeat. My short-lived career as an African football correspondent began with a […]
POLITRICKS IN THE STADIUM
Melanie Boehi discusses how, for politicians, sports tournaments such as the upcoming Africa Cup of Nations and the World Cup in 2010 serve as magical image-production machines and informal meeting space, where work is disguised as play and play disguised as work. Hosni Mubarak was among the first to congratulate Egypt’s national team upon its […]
Genres of the Human
In his new book, The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics, Louis Chude-Sokei samples freely from history, music, literature and science, conjuring new meanings from dead texts, to build an echo chamber where the discourses of race and technology collide. At a time when automation threatens jobs and pits humans against machine and […]
Zidane’s Melancholy
Zidane watched the Berlin sky, not thinking of anything, a white sky flecked with grey clouds lined with blue, one of those windy skies, immense and changing, of the Flemish painters. Zidane watched the Berlin sky over the Olympic Stadium on the evening of 9 July 2006, and felt the sensation, with poignant intensity, of […]
Poverty is Older than Opulence
Maverick Serbian filmmaker, Emir Kusturica (Time of the Gypsies; Underground), talks with Diego Maradona, the best player EVER and the subject of Kusturica’s documentary-in-progress, about Bush Jr, Castro, John Paul II and the poor of Argentina. Diego Maradona is the man who exploded the shame of the entire world in June 1986, in an historic […]