Late last year I had the opportunity to review College of William and Mary History Professor Robert Vinson’s remarkable new book, The Americans Are Coming! Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa. Vinson details both physical and intellectual journeys between South Africa and the United States in the decades before apartheid. His characters […]
R&B sounds and look very different in the video and song for “Body Down” by singer Novel. (It is actually fitting that the video references Malcolm X and Martin Luther King as it points to the part-political roots of the genre in the 1960s.) ”Body Down” is a remix of an indie pop song by English singer Jack Peñate. […]
I am dipping in and out of Manning Marable’s over 600-page biography of Malcolm X. As Tariq Ali, correctly writes in The New Left Review (in a review of the book), there’s too much on Malcolm X’s personal life so that as a result “… the events that shaped his continuing intellectual evolution—the killing of […]
Apart from his role in American racial and class struggles from the 1950s onwards, Harry Belafonte (now 83) played a central role in popularizing struggles for justice on the African continent, especially against white racism in South Africa. Not just by hosting and advancing the careers of South African artists (Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela), making […]
