Imagine you’re a 17 year old middle class Dutch girl. You just cycled home from another boring day at school. Trapped in the conventional humdrum of the day, you are deprived of the stirring type of high school tales that you often watch. Back home, you switch on the TV and stumble upon a rerun […]
Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s first solo show in New York opened last week. The British-Nigerian artist’s last works, large photographs of the naked male body, are on display at the Walther Collection in New York City. These are images of rites which explore the artist’s familial background as keepers of the shrine in Ife, Nigeria, and the […]
The South African photographer Zanele Muholi is exhibiting some of her work–at the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation (26 Wooster Street) as part of an exhibition of contemporary photographers, “Lesbians Seeing Lesbians: Building Community in Early Feminist Photography” Here’s a link to the catalog essay. The exhibition, which opened earlier this month, is on till October 22.
Relevant (longish) excerpt from Anita Desai’s review of Joseph Lelyveld’s new biography, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India in The New York Review of Books:
Before we close out the year we have to give a nod to the Centre for Development of People (CEDEP) in Malawi, has won the 2010 AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa (ARASA) HIV, TB and Human Rights Award. ARASA is a partnership of over 50 civil society organisations working together to promote a human […]
I just finished an essay (with my research assistant Adam Esrig) on new developments in African film–most notably the business model of Nollywood, the emergence of South Africa as a cheap back lot for B-grade Hollywood films and TV commercials, and developments around “Beur” Cinema) for a new book on African cinema. In the process […]
As @ekapa correctly noted in his comment on my post about “Homophobia as National Sport” in South Africa, “… depressing as this is its a symptom/result of the increasingly vocal and visible African and Coloured activists who are no longer willing to hide and suffer in silence but now demand the rights and protections set […]
This may make for depressing reading with your breakfast, but there’s nothing new about the entrenched homophobia in South Africa, a place where men rape lesbians to “correct” them, a government minister last month refused to open a state-funded exhibition featuring photographic images of intimacy between gay women (the image above is an example), and […]
What popular images did young American males in the 1950s and 1960s–fed on a diet of parochial media–have of Arabs. For one, they took their cues from men’s adventure magazines: “… In those days, [Arab] tended to conjure up images of sheiks, harems and desert adventure in the Lawrence of Arabia style.” [It explains a […]
So Uganda, with the help of their rightwing, American Christian boosters, want to “wipe out” gay people by making laws that bans even thinking about it. Now Kenya wants to do a “census” of its gay population. Their excuse is this is a way to fight AIDS. This is when it is common knowledge that […]
