Mickey Mouse is pulling apart a bomb: inside is the torso of George W. Bush, and they’re both looking perfectly happy about the whole thing. Soraya Morayef is taking a photo of the wall where these figures are painted, on a busy street in downtown Cairo, when a man walks up to her and asks […]
Guest Post by Mukoma Wa Ngugi In 1982, as the air force-led coup attempt in Kenya unfolded, we sat glued to our transistor radio listening to the BBC and Voice of America (VOA). In fact, the more the oppressive the Moi regime censored Kenyan media, the more Western media became the lifeline through which we learned […]
Within hours of Adam Lanza shooting dead 20 Sandy Hook Elementary first-graders and seven adults, including his own mother, and taking his own life, media channels everywhere were festooned with analysis and opinion on what drove the 20-year-old to do it. Some blamed America’s gun culture and the free-availability of these weapons of mass massacre, […]
Post by Palesa Mazamisa* The heinous, brutal rape and subsequent slaughtering of Anene Booysen in South Africa’s Western Cape province has brought into the open, once again, the miry underbelly of our rainbow nation. At the heart of violence that Anene was subjected to, lies a bigger issue that South Africans wilfully shunt and ignore. This issue […]
The American philosopher Lewis Gordon, in an essay on affirmative action: There are those who praise South Africa for making the transformation to a supposedly post-Apartheid society nonviolently. Without violence? The many blacks (in the Black Consciousness conception) and their supporters who were killed, tortured and imprisoned; the many protesters harmed; the tanks; the guns; […]
An incendiary piece of video art, more like a short film–of raids, profiling and state terrorism–done by director Romain Gravas, for a new M.I.A. joint, “Born Free.” It was initially posted on Youtube yesterday, but taken down for “the violent and sexual images.” On Vimeo, not a mass video viewing site, it has had over […]
So, is the U.S. any different from other Western colonial powers? Damon Salesa, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies Program, explains to Chicago Public Radio. Listen Here.
