Africa Is a Country

Summer in the City

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

Summer in the City

By
Wills Glasspiegel

The pick of summer 2012's shows and parties in New York City.

Africa is a Country doesn’t always claim a city or even a continent. But we do claim New York as one home among many for live music in the late summer.

We’ll be taking a break from posting during August. For many of the site’s contributors, summer’s finally here so you’ll find us outside. The editor asked the collective to let readers know what they were up to: which shows, exhibitions, happenings they think we shouldn’t miss out on, which books they’ll be reading, or what music they’ll be pumping at their garden parties, and share it in the form of a list. Here’s my pick of upcoming shows and parties in New York City.

Below is a short list of recommended shows and parties. Some we’ve discussed on AIAC; some we haven’t. Please feel free to add your own show and party recommendations in the comments section.

Shabazz Palaces’ short film for Black Up is contemporary visual poetry at its best. Butterfly (is it ok to still call him that?) brings his critically-acclaimed fever-dream rap project to Ft. Green Park tonight.
Shabazz Palaces
7.24 | Ft. Greene Park

Venus X and $hanye’s legendary (at least around these parts at AIAC) NYC party returns to Manhattan with some of the artists that were there in the beginning when this party first developed its trend-setting tendencies in 2010.
GHET20G0TH1K ft. Total Freedom, Nguzunguzu, Slink, $hayne and Venus X
7.25 | 200 Varick St.

Check out Los Gaiteros de San Jacinto’s classic Smithsonian Folkways release and you’ll hear the high lonesome and not-so-secretly African sound of America (the continents). It’s gaita music from Colombia and it’s definitely the realest shit happening on Bleeker Street in late July.
Los Gaiteros de San Jacinto w/ Geko Jones (Que Bajo?!)
7.26 | Le Poisson Rouge

It’s hard to believe Turkish psych folk goddess, Selda Bağcan, is coming to NYC for the first time.
Selda Bağcan
7.28 | Lincoln Center

DJ Spoko, an underground South Africa house music genius behind DJ Mujava’s transcendent “Township Funk,” arrives in the US for the first time straight from Pretoria where he’s a local legend for making “Bacardi House.”
DJ Spoko, MJ Cole, Micachu & the Shapes
7.28 | PS1 Summer Warmup

WizKid is massively popular throughout the continent and the Diaspora. People often call him the African Justin Bieber.
WizKid, Banky W, Skales, Rotimi
7.28 | Grand Ballroom

Following on the success of their opening exhibition which focused on gothic futurism of multimedia sculptor and art-rap genius Ramellzee, Susanne Geiss has put together a superb series of concerts this summer in their intimate SoHo space. This one looks particularly good:
James Ferraro, Tim DeWit, Wu Tsang, Shayne Oliver
7.28 | Susanne Geiss Gallery

Timbuktu diva extraordinaire Khaira Arby is back yet again in NYC with her indomitable band.
Khaira Arby
8.1 | Lincoln Center

Sidi Touré, The Pedrito Martinez Group, Wouter Kellerman
8.6 | Marcus Garvey Park

And 2Face is a really good reason to love Naija pop right now, as he has been for years:

2Face, M.I., Brym
8.8 | Irving Plaza

Further Reading

Who deserves the city?

Colonial urbanism cast African neighborhoods as chaotic, unplanned, and undesirable. In postcolonial Dar es Salaam, that legacy still shapes who builds, who belongs, and what the middle class fears the city becoming.

Djinns in Berlin

At the 13th Berlin Biennale, works from Zambia and beyond summon unseen forces to ask whether solidarity can withstand the gaze of surveillance.

Colonize then, deport now

Trump’s deportation regime revives a colonial blueprint first drafted by the American Colonization Society, when Black lives were exiled to Africa to safeguard a white republic.

On Safari

On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

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.