Nigeria’s Twitter ban and the resistance politics of VPNs
Anyone who cares about civil society, free speech, and human rights should find the state’s digital silencing of its citizens deeply troubling.
Culture
Trapped by history
Mexican American director John Gutierrez new film, set in Cape Town, South Africa, touches on colonialism, displacement, and man’s complicated relationship with nature.
The legacy of French colonial psychiatry
French psychiatry in West Africa saw Black bodies as “alien” to white ones. It hasn't changed much.
The house of migrants
An interview with the filmmakers, Ousmane Samassekou and Aïcha Macky, about their films: two stunning documentaries creating new narratives about migration.
International thief thief
There can no longer be false justifications for holding Benin Bronzes, and other pilfered materials, in museums outside of Africa.
The possibility of thought
A Black South African academic in the United States on breaking the silence on Israeli apartheid in US classrooms and on campuses.
A child of the Rwandan diaspora and the longing for home
A film about young Rwandan-Canadian creates more questions than it answers, particularly about identification, belonging, and memory.
Exile is more than a geographical concept
Episode #39 of AIAC Talk is about exile: a new film on a Libyan dissident and a new exhibition on the black experience. Watch it live Tuesday on YouTube.
John Brown had a sick beard
Grégory Pierrot’s searing analysis of the deep roots of white supremacy and black exploitation in hipster culture. He also offers a way out of this.
Silicon Valley in Africa
Western tech companies in Africa often claim to be "social entrepreneurs." But do their models reduce or contribute to inequality?
Writing is a cultural weapon
South African and Palestinian poets on the shared experiences of Apartheid and resistance. This week on AIAC Talk. Watch it Tuesday on Youtube.
The specter of Mannetjies Roux
An encounter on a cross continental flight with white South African men and their ways, by Robina Marks, a black woman and South Africa’s ambassador in Benin.
Another essentializing moment?
Since Stuart Hall wrote critically about race as an analytical category in the 1980s, naturalized accounts of race are back with a vengeance.
Don’t be fooled by a catchy tune
How the international soundtrack to Black Lives Matter critiques the present by reworking the past.
Farther on from Zion
To consider Bob Marley today demands we look back across distance to the place and age that brought him to us.
Movement of Jah people
This week on AIAC Talk, we reflect on Bob Marley, the “last rock star” and the first artist of world music on the anniversary of his death. Watch it Tuesday on Youtube.
The problem with South African football
South Africa failed to qualify for the 2022 African Cup of Nations in Cameroon and has failed to qualify for the World Cup since 2002. What else can their long suffering fans endure?
Ethiopian women making movies
The presence of successful female writers, directors, and producers set Ethiopia's film industry apart from Hollywood, Bollywood, and the rest of world cinema.
Decolonizing humanity
The political philosopher Achille Mbembe’s latest book asks us to emerge from the enclosure of race.
The impossibility of the black intellectual
Stuart Hall, the British-Jamaican cultural theorist, would have been open to and pragmatic about the ideas of the younger generations of anti-racists now in the making.