Africa Is a Country

Africa Remix Conference

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

Africa Remix Conference

By
Boima Tucker

Well, the snowstorm in Boston will be shortening the length of the conference, and the performance by Debo Band has been cancelled. However, Harvard’s Africa Remix Conference will be on and live today, Friday, February 8th.

A lot of interesting folks will be presenting, including a keynote speech by Francis Falceto, the owner of the Ethiopiques record label. I am presenting in a panel called Producing Global Sounds, and will be talking about my experiences and practices as a 2nd-generation Sierra Leone diasporan and DJ. If you are conveniently in the Boston area you probably don’t have to go to work, so stop by!

For those of you who don’t want to brave the weather, or don’t live within reasonable distance from Cambridge, Massachusetts, follow the conference on twitter with the hashtag #AfricaRemix starting at 8:30am Boston time. The presentations are being recorded and will eventually be posted on the web, so we will share them with you in some form at a future date.

Further Reading

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.

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.