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.
Wondering Hand(s) and Spirited Ink: Snapshots into the Black Public Humanities (Keleketla! Library, 2024)
Keleketla! Library, in partnership with the Narrative Enquiry for Social Transformation (NEST) presents Wondering Hand(s) and Spirited Ink: Snapshots into the Black Public Humanities.
Inspired by the provocations of the 2019 Narrative Enquiry for Social Transformation (NEST) colloquium Call for Proposals, the papers that form part of this collection directly confront questions of black memory, thought, imagination, and praxis under conditions of extreme racialised and gendered violence.
Each of the essays thinks deeply and seriously about the historical and epistemological foundations of our inherited conceptual frames and the subsequent impact for the ways we invoke these frames in narratives of resistance, hope and freedom. From their different disciplinary and sociopolitical locations, the authors in this collection take seriously sites beyond the academy – the art gallery, stage, music video, the bedroom, the township, and the dance floor, to name a few – as key sites of knowledge production that have and continue to inform emerging narratives around black futures.
The collection traverses thematic spaces such as desire and consent, consumption and freedom, black performative possibility, post-apartheid black subjectivity and black memory. The aim of the collection is to create a pedagogical device that foregrounds the sonic, aesthetic, epistemic and performative strategies of creating emancipatory thinking, feeling, imagining and being, that will contribute to critically expanding the decolonial black archive.
Edited by: Moshibudi Motimele and Rangoato Hlasane with contributions by: Mawethu Nkosana; Moshibudi Motimele; Ayabulela Mhlahlo; Nomancotsho Pakade; Gorata Chengeta; Tumi Mogorosi; Same Mdluli; Rangoato Hlasane and Zukolwenkosi Zikalala.