Reanimating mobile cinema
Sunshine Cinema is repurposing a tool of 20th century European colonial and neocolonial capitalist domination.
South Africa
Accountability for Apartheid?
The legacy of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission twenty-one years later.
Against Zionism
The moral drama of the Israeli occupation plays out at a South African school.
South Africa’s Third Way revival
Economies are broken everywhere, but while the rest of the world considers the radical, South Africa resigns itself to the rational.
Abantu Book Festival as an archive of the future
A radical feature on South Africa's literary calendar, Abantu celebrates black intellectual labor, and resists the tropes that marginalizes it.
The film festival film
A documentary film about a black filmmaker and her struggles to make a film about Marike de Klerk.
Laughing pains
Stand-up comedy, especially black stand-up, and the political in South Africa.
The spear of the nation
Apartheid propaganda, white media and Afrikaner nationalists painted Verwoerd's killer as crazy, but Dimitri Tsafendas was a committed political activist.
The war on women and children in South Africa
The family is the site of extremely violent incidents in South African society—particularly involving women and children. What can the state do?
The house of exile
Edward Said once said of the usefulness of exile for intellectual work: it involves adopting “a spirit of opposition, rather than accommodation.” James Baldwin and Sisonke Msimang took it to heart.
Schooling desegregation and decolonization are not the same thing
Constant attention to segregation in formerly white South African schools limits our understanding of how race works in the school system.
Albert Luthuli, MLK and global human rights
Albert Luthuli was ANC President when South Africa's biggest liberation movement turned to armed struggle. He's been the subject of much conjecture. What did he actually think about political violence?
The politics of reforming traditional land in South Africa
Land reform in South Africa has to not only tackle racial inequalities of ownership, but also the power of chiefs and the Zulu royal family.
The creation of black criminality in South Africa
The seamless continuity in industrial levels of imprisonment employed by the colonial and the modern South African state.
Everything must fall
Fees Must Fall (#FMF) brought student activism at South Africa's elite universities into the global media spotlight. A new documentary zooms in on the case of Wits in Johannesburg.
The Mandelas at Harlem’s Africa Square
On the anniversary of Nelson Mandela's passing—December, 5th 2013—reflecting on Africa's place in African American politics and popular culture.
Cape Town’s Inner Ugly
Patricia De Lille, one of South Africa's most popular post-apartheid politicians, claims she tried to redress spatial apartheid in Cape Town, but the legacy of her seven year run as mayor is one of violent forced removals and a refusal to upgrade informal settlements.
Achille Mbembe’s Fanonian meditations
Mbembe’s 'Critique of Black Reason' is useful for our analysis of the postcolonial present.
Postcolonial theory and the strong arm of identity
The major problem with the term "decolonization" is its status as empty signifier, argues South African psychologist Wahbie Long.
Mandela’s dreams
Media studies scholar Sharon Sliwinski asks whether dreaming can be recast as a vital form of resistance to political violence. A review of her book.