Whatever The New Yorker’s rationale for commissioning a piece on Tyler Perry, the “critic-proof” producer and director of black popular theater and television (he is a darling of the mainstream), but it is good take on the race, sexual, moral and class politics of this present-day Oscar Micheaux who has formed a lucrative alliance with a big Hollywood studio. For Hilton Als, who wrote the article, there is “no depth of field” in Perry’s characters (who don’t exist in the real world) and he is “not doing the black community any favors” with work that is “intellectually substandard.”  Yet even Als has to concede that Perry is financially successful and has a huge, particularly black working class, following.

The piece needs a password, but a video, posted on The New Yorker website, summarizes some of the issues discussed in Als’s excellent essay.

Further Reading

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.

After the coups

Without institutional foundations or credible partners, the Alliance of Sahel States risks becoming the latest failed experiment in regional integration.

Whose game is remembered?

The Women’s Africa Cup of Nations opens in Morocco amid growing calls to preserve the stories, players, and legacy of the women who built the game—before they’re lost to erasure and algorithm alike.