Searching for Rotimi- A Letter From London
Rotimi Fani-Kayode died 29 years ago (21 December 1989), in exile, after moving to England at the age of 12 to escape the Nigerian Civil War. Today, the combination of raw emotion and transgressive physicality in his photographic portraits and compositions, and his exposes the tensions created by sexuality, race and culture, is as relevant […]
Dislocations in the Congolese World of Sound
“Dislocation” is how Congolese rumba historians describe the incessant splinterings that are part of the story of every major band – in a music system where the “first to leave” holds the place of pride. Between 1997 and 2008 the group Wenge Musica lived through 18 dislocations – almost twice a year, starting with the […]
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, […]
The “Walking Corpse”
Thousands of Africans, physically displaced and economically disabled by postcolonial dis-order, confront daily the violence of passage to, across and within borders of relative safety. Tagged all manner of other: temporary, foreign, homeless, opportunist, ephemeral, 2nd generational, thief, fence jumper, black… they arrive, are birthed, reborn—regardless of birthplace, status, story—as Europe’s “migrant crisis”; moving targets […]