Method After Fela
by Akin Adesokan “You reckon a guy just goes and cuts down a guy of timber. You gorra do it proper man or you won’t live to cut another log. Dead men tell no tales kid. Until that guy is sawn up and turned to a bench or table, the spirit guy is still struggling inside it, […]
Fifty Years Of African Decolonisation
by Achille Mbembe (translated by Karen Press) Here we are in 2010, fifty years after decolonisation. Is there anything at all to commemorate, or should one on the contrary start all over again? Here restoration of authoritarian rule, there administrative multi-partyism, elsewhere minimal, easily reversible advances, and just about everywhere, extremely elevated levels of social violence […]
The skin I’m in: Afro-Bengali solidarity and possible futures
Naeem Mohaiemen reviews Vivek Bald’s Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America, which chronicles for the first time an early history of Black-Bengali racial solidarity. Taraknath Das floated as a pale ghost at the edge of my mind during my first reading of Vivek Bald’s first book, Bengali Harlem and […]
‘Nation Is A Skin Stretched Over The Bones Of The State’
Jon Soske struggles to pin down Hamid Parsani, the elusive, mercurial Iranian archaeologist, first for an interview, then in the interview. It took me nine months to contact Hamid Parsani, after an audience member approached me following a talk I gave in Berlin and suggested that I find a way to interview the notorious – […]
A Letter from Home
by E. C. Osondu My Dear Son, Why have you not been sending money through Western Union like other good Nigerian children in America do? You have also not visited home. Have you married a white woman? Do not forget that I have already found a wife for you. Her name is Ngozi. Her parents […]