The richly layered portraits of Nigerian-American artist Toyin Odutola have been on the Africa is a Country radar for quite some time. Painstakingly created with marker and ballpoint pen, Toyin’s drawings have been making waves in the art world and across social media platforms. Aesthetically striking in their own right, Toyin’s unique style sparks important […]
This past summer I supervised fourteen New School graduate students for the school’s international field program in Cape Town. The students interned at a range of local organizations — a mix of NGOs, social movements and media organizations. You can watch a video (filmed by Dylan Valley) of the program here (watch from 1:33:27). One of […]
Last year, BET introduced a category into their annual awards show called “Best International Act: Africa.” I wasn’t that surprised. We’ve been heading down the road towards a mainstream acknowledgement of #InternationalBlack-ness for a while. I chalk it up to the purchasing power and cultural influence that African immigrants in America and England have been able […]
The Chicago-based literary theorist Walter Ben Michaels has been going on about why we privilege race over class. His right to a point. But that’s it: Race … has been a more successful technology of mystification. In the US, one of the great uses of racism was (and is) to induce poor white people to […]
I was anticipating that sooner or later someone would organize a conference on this theme. The Department of African and African American Studies at George Mason University in Virginia is organizing such a conference in early October. Here’s an excerpt from the call for papers:
