The Invention of Africa by Franco & T.P.OK Jazz
– Ntone Edjabe A few years ago, while researching the political history of Congo/Zaire/Congo via the country’s music archive, particularly through the output of Luambo Makiadi aka Franco, we turned to the legendary record collection of “Jumbo” Donald Vanrenen – a scholar of late-style rumba and early soukouss (a sound he helped construct via various A&R gigs […]
TO REFUSE THAT WHICH HAS BEEN REFUSED TO YOU
Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman sit down to talk about the temporal and traditional in the age of refusal – of movement, of citizenship. They offer up a different way of thinking, a pathway to another understanding of community as well as the possibility of harnessing fugitivity as a creative empowering strategy*. Saidiya Hartman: One […]
They Won’t Go When I Go
A Manifesto/ Mediation on State of Black Archives in America and throughout the Diaspora by Harmony Holiday The ashes a black mother scattered into the lap of a seemingly indifferent police chief, her daughter’s remains in ash and shackle, the ashes of her daughter who had been killed in jail either by neglect or force, […]
THINGS THAT GO IN AND OUT OF THE BODY
How can we think about bodies and circulation without deferring to the dominant binary of western discourse on the so-called “refugee crisis”, which is central to both contemporary European politics and how the early 21st century will be remembered. On one side is the openly racist discourse that underpins the border policies responsible for thousands […]
THINKING TOO MUCH
Silence and dark humour seem like the most authentic way for people in Zimbabwe to deal with cross-generational trauma and mamhepo, the winds that carry misfortune. On a visit home to her ailing grandmother, Florence Madenga reflects on the silences that live in the folds of family – the “tying of ends that don’t want […]