An Afropean Journey

A few years ago, on a snowy January evening, a stranger mistook me for someone he had seen the previous week, aboard an evening train heading to Frankfurt. The moment…..

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2 mins read

March 11, 2014

#WhiteHistoryMonth: Aimé Césaire on Europe

I’ve been reading Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism. He puts it all plainly. In the flurry of theory, tangles of citational prose, and the demands for refereed this, that, and the other that ping throughout an academic’s daily grind, such clarity is bracing. And welcome. I’ll be assigning the whole text to my undergraduates next year.

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3 mins read

March 5, 2013

How does it feel to be an African asylum seeker in Europe

“Bon voyage” (“Have a nice trip”), a Swiss animated short movie by Fabio Friedli, seeks to convey how it feels to be an African asylum seeker in Switzerland, and it…..

6 mins read

March 21, 2012

‘Golden Theater or Gutted Whore-house?’

The latest issue of Savvy Journal (#3) includes an article, ‘Transcending “Africa”‘, by Emeka Okereke, photographer and founder of the ‘Invisible Borders Trans-African Photographic Initiative’ (whose work we’ve been excited about here). It is…..

1 min read

February 23, 2012

Azonto Germany

So apparently there’s more to the Ghana-Germany connection than the Boateng boys. I think the above Azonto rave in Hamburg this past January is proof of that. It’s perhaps an…..

Less than a minute read

July 22, 2011

Colonialism

A satirical film made by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 1986. Worth seeing again. It should also be the dvd you pop in at your colonial-themed wedding.

1 min read

November 3, 2010

Europe’s Apartheid

[vodpod id=Video.4792175&w=500&h=411&fv=] In a recent interview on French television to promote his new book “Sortir de la Grande Nuit: Essai sur l’Afrique Décolonisée,” Johannesburg-based political philosopher Achille Mbembe suggested that Europe “seems…..