The trouble with ‘showing the real Africa’
iShowSpeed’s Africa tour is widely celebrated as respectful and refreshing, yet it operates within a long tradition of racialized spectacle that turns Africa into content and Blackness into performance.
representation
When I say Africa
Why are stories about African suffering so persistent?
A picture’s worth
Mabel Cetu is considered South Africa's first Black woman photojournalist and documented the everyday lives of Black communities in the 1950s.
The revenge of the subalterns
The second 'Black Panther' film is a fierce critique of the West's (neo)colonial adventures in Africa and the Americas.
Through the lens of queer Indian South Africans
Queer Indians are largely invisible in South Africa's LGBT discourse. But representation is not enough, we need political transformation and multi-racial class solidarity.
The wounded hippo
In a US confronting its own anti-black racism, sentimental imaginings of Africa do little but uphold the white savior industrial complex.
African joy, joy in Africa
We are usually more attuned to Africa’s pains than to Africa’s pleasures. What would studying African pleasures, beyond censorious judgment, look like?
Equatorial Guinea’s ‘American Dirt’
A novel and Netflix film about Spanish colonialism in Equatorial Guinea raises questions about appropriation and storytelling.
Getting the story right
13 years after Binyavanga Wainaina's satirical essay, many "experts" on Africa continue to fail to comprehend the need for African voices in stories about the continent.
Who gets to speak for black French people?
There is a long history of white artists representing black people in France, reproducing stereotypes and failing to capture the people they claim to represent.
Beyond the usual South African reporting on “Africa”
Journalism on and about the continent tends to veer between the extremes of neglect or stereotype on the one end, and touristic exoticism on the other.
Are you an African artist?
Why are we so averse to acknowledging complexity, difference, subtlety and agency when it comes to art that emerges from and in Africa?
Black Film, White Masks
Namibian filmmaker, Perivi John Katjavivi: The black voice in cinema occurs on the margins and is filtered, distorted, watered-down, negotiated, corrupted.
Can the Somali Speak?
The hashtag #CadaanStudies put the spotlight on the domination of Somali Studies by whites scholars.
Uptown Sahel
Thinking about ways that Africa is represented by NGO's and other international organizations.