Africa Is a Country

Africans in New York City

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Africans in New York City

By
Boima Tucker

"Afro-Spectacle," a music and film event by DJ collective, Dutty Artz, explores the working class African immigrant experiences in the city.

A promotional image from "God's Own Country."

The film, “God’s Own Country,” by director Femi Agbayewa, presents the story of a young Nigerian lawyer who immigrates to New York City only to discover that life in America is not what he hoped.  A mix between an American hip hop gangster flick and a Nollywood drama, the film is a great initiation into the West African film industry for an American audience unfamiliar it.

A public screening of the film is happening on February 1st, at the Spectacle Theater in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It will form part of “Afro-Spectacle,” hosted by my Dutty Artz brethren, DJ Rupture and Lamin Fofana. Before the screening, they will host a special 2-hour live radio show around these themes. African music videos purchased in the corner stores of New York City, will be projected throughout the show for those present.  The broadcast will also be carried live on WFMU, the  East Orange, New Jersey, community radio station.

The theme of the night dovetails nicely with my own project, African in New York, which is out due out February 21st.

Femi Agbayewa is currently in London developing his television series “Brooklyn Shakara,” so he won’t be able to make it in person.  The space is limited, and it’s first come first serve. If you can’t make it, check us out live, or listen back to the archived show on Lamin’s The Embassy and Rupture’s Mudd Up pages.

Further Reading

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.

Energy for whom?

Behind the fanfare of the Africa Climate Summit, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline shows how neocolonial extraction still drives Africa’s energy future.