The legend of flying Africans
Adam Sandler’s film Uncut Gems, Black American identity politics, and the narrative appeal of Ethiopian beginnings.
Culture
Family politics and the supernatural
A new documentary film tells a tale of everyday class, religious, and educational contestations around land in Kenya.
Twitter and a new criminal type
What might the fascination in displaying and seeing the body of “the criminal” tell us about South Africa today?
Reading List: Benjamin Talton
The writer, a historian, on scholarly texts, novels, and memoirs that he consulted in writing a political biography of US congressman Mickey Leland and his solidarity politics in Africa.
Excavating forgotten histories in South Africa
Remembering Adelaide Tantsi Dube’s poem 'Africa: My Native Land,' first published in 1913, the same year the white government stripped black South Africans of their land.
Reading List: Peter James Hudson
The writer, a historian of capitalism, white supremacy, and US imperialism, on four books he has been reading.
How African is the African Studies Review?
The journal’s editor acknowledges that it has a long way to go before most Africa-based scholars recognize it as an especially African journal.
A question of desperation
Black popular culture has gained two new heroes in Queen & Slim—a film about desperate violence.
Vanquisher of troubles or light of our home
The music of Albalabel, a pioneering women’s group in conservative and patriarchal Sudan, endures over decades of struggle.
Reading List: Ainehi Edoro
English Professor and Editor of Brittle Paper, recommends five books she’s been reading.
Linda Ronstadt is still playing Sun City
Nearly four decades later, Linda Ronstadt’s arguments against the cultural boycott - repeated in a new film - ring hollow.
The epidemic of thinkfluencers
For this group, politics is often framed as a series of never-ending discussions about social justice: The experience from South Africa.
Will the colonized ever speak?
New French film on decolonization in Africa and Asia incapable of avoiding the Eurocentrism the filmmakers wanted to steer clear of.
The unfinished business of the Tunisian revolution
Meryam Joobeur’s film, Brotherhood explores Tunisia's outsized role in the Syrian conflict.
The artwashing of Sindika Dokolo?
Coverage of the #LuandaLeaks revelations have steered clear of the art world dealings of Isabel dos Santos’s husband, and art luminaries have largely defended Dokolo’s reputation.
There is no one way to talk about migration
Beyond news headlines, African artists complicate common migration narratives.
Fela enshrined
Fela Kuti’s friend, Carlos Moore, the black Cuban emigre writer, is the subject of a film about their at times difficult relationship. The result is complex.
The pitfalls of symbolic decolonization
Mukoma wa Ngugi's opening remarks at the launch (today) of the 2020 Writers Unlimited International Literature Festival in The Hague.
When bad reporting mirrors the thing it wants to criticize
A new film about Kony 2012 is a lesson in how not to fight simplification with more simplification.
The black son shines
Masauko Chipembere's first solo album is a remarkable achievement and a timely musical reminder of the circular nature of pan-Africanist consciousness.