What could the curriculum be – if it was designed by the people who dropped out of school so that they could breathe? The latest issue of Chimurenga provides alternatives to prevailing educational pedagogy. Through fiction, essays, interviews, poetry, photography and art, contributors examine and redefine rigid notions of essential knowledge.
Presented in the form of a textbook, Chimurenga 15 simultaneously mimics the structure while gutting it. All entries are regrouped under subjects such as body parts, language, grace, worship and news (from the other side), numbers, parents, police and many more. Through a classification system that is both linear and thematic, the textbook offers multiple entry points into a curriculum that focuses on the un-teachable and values un-learning as much as it’s opposite.
Inside: Amiri Baraka waxes poetic on the theoretics of Be-Bop; Coco Fusco flips the CIA’s teaching manual for female torturers; Karen Press and Steve Coleman instruct in folk-dancing; Dambudzo Marechera proposes a “guide to the earth”; Dominique Malaquais designs the museum we won’t build; through self-portraits Phillip Tabane and Johnny Dyani offer method to the Skanga (black music family); and Winston Mankunku refuses to teach.
Other contributors include Binyavanga Wainaina, Akin Adesokan, Isoje Chou, Sean O’Toole, Pradid Krishen, E.C. Osundu, Salim Washington, Sefi Atta, Ed Pavlic, Neo Muyanga, Henri-Michel Yere, Medu Arts Ensemble, Aryan Kaganof, Khulile Nxumalo and Walter Mosley amongst others. Cover by Johnny “Mbizo” Dyani.
The Issue with Care Edited by Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja, Katharina Fink & Nadine Siegert.
Labor, Love & P*leisure in times of loss and uncertainty.
This volume comes from an impulse of needing to think, imagine and feel care whilst living through several global pandemics: COVID-19, racism, femicide, queercide, climate crisis. The years are 2020 and 2021 and sud- denly the need for radical care is heightened. These years remind- ed us about the relational ethics needed for cultivating and engaging with care. Caring for others is caring for the self. Care is a verb, meaning that it is a sensorial and shared practice in principle. While care and caring seem to be essential aspects of humanity, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s theorisation of care reminds us that care is ambivalent, complex and speculative because it means different things to different people.
Comes with an A3 poster with poem by Beauty Boois and handwritten quotations by all authors included.