Beautifully shot vignette of life among the mostly poor residents of The Fred Factory Gardens Project Houses in the majority African-American town of Spencer, Oklahoma.
Filmed by Trevor Tweeten and Richard Mosse.
Street Photographer
June 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Charlie Ahearn’s new documentary of Brooklyn photographer Jamal Shabazz screening on June 26 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
The Motherland
April 13, 2011 By 8 Comments
The documentary film, Blacks Without Borders: Chasing the American Dream on Foreign Soil (2008, directed and produced by Stafford U. Bailey. Co-produced by Judy Thayer-Bailey)–which tells the story of a group of African-American professionals who immigrate to South Africa right after the end of legal Apartheid–is now on Youtube in its entirety. (It’s been since February last year). You can watch it in seven parts. Here‘s a link to part one. Anyway, when the film first came out 3 years ago, I was asked to review it. This what I wrote:
Manning Marable
April 2, 2011 By 1 Comment
On Monday a new book on Malcolm X by the American intellectual and historian Manning Marable will come out. On Friday night Marable passed away. Though Marable, based until his passing at Columbia University, is less well-known outside the US, he started his career with a PhD dissertation on the South African political leader, John Dube (“African Nationalist: the Life of John Langalibalele Dube“, University of Maryland, 1976) and had an internationalist outlook (I remember interviewing him in Cape Town. I found him compelling and engaging. He was there on the invitation of Idasa (my former employer) for a comparative conference and research on racism in Brazil, the United States and South Africa.) The videos, above, and below were shot as marketing for his book, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (excerpted here), and point to some of the new research uncovered by Marable . Before his death Marable had also set up a tumbl blog and a website for his Malcom X Project which are worth visiting. Here and here are links to two obituaries. R.I.P.
Dakar Modern
March 6, 2011 By Leave a Comment
I’ve been wanting to post for a while now about the Digital Diaspora Family Reunion. Primarily the work of the filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris; remember Harris film, “The Twelve Apostles of Nelson Mandela,” about his South African step father. The DDFR is described as an “interactive, multimedia project,” where New Yorkers–mostly Africans and African-Americans–showing Harris their family photos and photo albums and then telling the stories behind the photographs. Great project. In the video above, from the project, Pierre Thiam, chef and co-owner of the Senegalese restaurant Le Grand Dakar in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, not far from my house, gives Harris a look at a newly independent Senegal of the 1960s and 1970s.
Branding “The New Black’
February 21, 2011 By 2 Comments
Andre Pinard is a friend and a neighbor. He works for Alloy ACCESS, “… the nation’s preeminent agency for global brands and organizations looking to understand and effectively reach multicultural millennials.” Their areas of expertise “… are African American, Hispanic and Urban-minded millennials.” He sent me this video on his idea of “The New Black.”
‘First Time in Sudan Africa’
February 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Another one of those videos I was forwarded over the break. It’s become something of a rite of passage for rappers to visit Africa. For example this video of Busta Rhymes refusing to let go of an elderly Senegalese woman on Goree Island in Senegal, briefly went viral late last year. In the video above it’s the turn of the rapper Cassidy (he had brief hits with the songs “Get No Better” and “My Drink and My Two Step“) visited the African continent for the first time. He traveled to Sudan late last year. Lots of static ensue.
Eat, Pray, Love
December 19, 2010 By 1 Comment
On the “sponsored” section of my Facebook wall, an Amazon advert for a “stunning book for those who love Africa, travel or prayer. “… ‘Like Breath & Water’ inspires with stories of tears and hopes across Africa.”
I had to click and learn how Africa, travel and prayer could come together–with tears and hopes.
The World of Tyler Perry
April 21, 2010 By 7 Comments
Whatever The New Yorker‘s rationale for commissioning a piece on Tyler Perry, the “critic-proof” producer and director of black popular theater and television (he is a darling of the mainstream), but it is good take on the race, sexual, moral and class politics of this present-day Oscar Micheaux who has formed a lucrative alliance with a big Hollywood studio. For Hilton Als, who wrote the article, there is “no depth of field” in Perry’s characters (who don’t exist in the real world) and he is “not doing the black community any favors” with work that is “intellectually substandard.” Yet even Als has to concede that Perry is financially successful and has a huge, particularly black working class, following.
The video, above, posted on The New Yorker website, summarizes some of the issues discussed in Als’s excellent essay.
