Africa Is a Country

Who Are We?

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Who Are We?

By
Sean Jacobs

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zoqsw3n8D6g&w=500&h=307&rel=0]
My man Gary Younge, New York-based feature writer and columnist for The Guardian, has a new book out on 21st century identity politics: Who are We–And Should It Matter in the 21st Century? The clips above and below, are from an interview with Gary about the book on the BBC program, “Booktalk.”  After the jump, as they say, is part two. (What’s sort of surreal is that Gary gets to finish his sentences. This is not American TV.)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsbyGCt-HAE&w=500&h=307&rel=0]

Gary has also been interviewed by Andrew Marr and The Socialist Review.

Here is an excerpt from the book.  I am reading it now. Gary writes about his ambivalence with identity politics and its uses and abuses after 9/11.  The writer Margaret Atwood tweeted that it is an “excellent” book. The early reviews are also encouraging: Bookbag called it “thoughtful … incisive [and] accessible.”  There’s also a good review here.

— Sean Jacobs

Further Reading

Djinns in Berlin

At the 13th Berlin Biennale, works from Zambia and beyond summon unseen forces to ask whether solidarity can withstand the gaze of surveillance.

Colonize then, deport now

Trump’s deportation regime revives a colonial blueprint first drafted by the American Colonization Society, when Black lives were exiled to Africa to safeguard a white republic.

On Safari

On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.