Peruvian media have revived the debate regarding Negro Mama, a popular character of the prime time TV show El Especial del Humor. The show, aired on one of the country’s main TV channels, Frecuencia Latina, features actor Jose Benavides in blackface, wearing a prosthetic nose and lips as well as black, hairy gloves on his hands. […]
He performs to packed-out theatres and is a regular correspondent on a satirical television news show, Late Nite News with Loyiso Gola (LNN) on South African private TV channel, Etv. He’s at times raucously funny and almost always on point. He writes, he tweets and he tjunes white okes (for the non-South Africans: he gives […]
Ashton Kutcher, known for his unusual savvy when it comes to investing in tech companies, and for actually being a presence in those spaces (attending conferences and personally meeting startup founders), must know that many of those technical companies have key employees or founders of South Asian descent. So imagine the surprise of many when […]
Pepe Reina, Liverpool and Spain’s national team goalkeeper, is a spokesperson for the Spanish multinational insurance company Groupama Seguros. In a new TV ad, Reina lands up in a jungle where a blackfaced chief claims Reina as his wife. You get the joke: it’s supposed to be a play on Reina’s last name which translates […]
A French magazine’s brilliant idea “to honor [Nigerian music superstar] Fela Kuti” The story.
What’s old is new again. This time from French fashion magazine, Numéro, which manages to merge two of our favorite (fashion) trends into one spread: black babies and blackface! I would be offended except this is completely boring and wholly unoriginal. Yawn. Via Jezebel (h/t Jacob Mundy).
Apparently not content with her (failed) attempt at igniting controversy last year with her questionable spread in Italian Vogue, Rihanna has decided to try her hand yet again at the latest epidemic sweeping the globe. This time through her new and, let’s be honest, particularly boring video for “Rockstar 101.” In it, she doesn’t wear […]
First world hipster bloggers and music websites (with foreign correspondents’ not far behind) are besides themselves about South African performers, Die Antwoord. Linking to them. Talking about their style. Good for them and Die Antwoord. But even boosters for the Die Antwoord, like Richard Poplak,have to concede this: “… what their lyrics mean — or what they stand for precisely — no one in Brooklyn or Paris or São Paulo can say.” Which is why I like this piece of of writing, below, by Cape Town writer Rustum Kozain, about Die Antwoord’s music and style. While I wouldn’t say that what Die Antwoord does is necessarily blackface, I think some of its problematic aspects need to be discussed.
I really like this series of photographs by University of Virginia African history and history of photography professor (and photographer), John Edwin Mason, on the Cape Town New Year’s Carnival, a series of marches, competitions and celebrations that incorporates Christmas Choirs, “Malay” Choirs and klopse (known to some participants as “Coons” or minstrels).
It must be Blackface season. All manner of white people, whether people dressing up for Halloween, Australian TV variety shows, fashion magazines and even French TV programs think it is okay to put on Blackface. The clip above–the latest incident of blackface–is from the French TV program, “Rendez-vous en terre inconnue,”” which sends celebrities to […]
