Ibaaku’s space race
Through Afro-futurist soundscapes blending tradition and innovation, Ibaaku’s new album, ‘Joola Jazz,’ reshapes Dakar’s cultural rhythm and challenges the legacy of Négritude.
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Christopher J. Lee
Christopher J. Lee, a historian, has published eight books, including works on Frantz Fanon, Alex La Guma, and Kwame Anthony Appiah. He is a former Contributing Editor at AIAC and Lead Editor of the journal Safundi.
The anti-extractivism of Mdou Moctar
‘Funeral for Justice’ is a bracing recording that blends the critical sensibility of Frantz Fanon with the melodies of a genre born from an ongoing liberation struggle.
A man of the people
Robert Vinson’s biography of Albert Luthuli hints at how liberation histories might be reframed to better address the problems of the present.
David Graeber, Africanist
David Graeber (1961-2020) started his career as a scholar studying Madagascar, which informed his ideas about anarchism, debt, and globalization.
Solidarity under quarantine
Nelson Mandela’s life teaches us that being quarantined is not the end of politics, but for the regeneration of politics.
The necropolitics of COVID-19
COVID-19 isn’t simply a medical or epidemiological crisis; it is a crisis of sovereignty.
Du Bois in Berlin
Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Lines of Descent (2014) argues that W. E. B. Du Bois’s two years as a graduate student in Berlin vitally informed his views on race and politics.
Detritus of revolution
Nthikeng Mohlele’s novel Small Things (2013) provides a rejoinder to J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), depicting a black man’s perspective on the failures of South Africa’s transition.
American tribalism
Political ‘tribalism’ has for far too long been seen as an African problem. It is also an American problem, reflecting parallel legacies of colonialism.
Fanon’s fugitive archive
‘Alienation and Freedom,’ a massive collection of Frantz Fanon’s works, reveals his intellectual and political motivations, but also proves him enigmatic and inscrutable as ever.
The global ways of white supremacy
White supremacy always relies on an international interdependence as Trump’s support for white extremists in South Africa shows.
Back in the USSR
In 1978, exiled South African writer and leftist Alex La Guma traveled to the Soviet Union and wrote a book about it. A new, critical annotated edition is out now.
Fanon at Ninety
Frantz Fanon remains vital not only for his bracing anti-racism and anti-colonialism, but equally for the less-recognized, empathetic politics of solidarity he cultivated and exemplified.
Every Man Gotta Decide His Destiny
Survival is an album with a purpose. Released in 1979, it is Bob Marley’s most political recording.