African literature is a country
What if you survey African literature professors to find out which works and writers are most regularly taught? Only a few canonical ones continue to dominate curricula.
Americas
GMOs for Africa?
Rather than addressing food scarcity, genetically modified crops may render African farmers and scientists more, not less, reliant on global markets.
Des OGM pour l’Afrique?
Plutôt que de pallier l’insécurité alimentaire, les cultures génétiquement modifiées risquent de rendre les agriculteurs et les scientifiques africains plus, et non moins, dépendants des marchés mondiaux.
Toppling statues as a decolonial ethic
The blitz on monuments signifies not the abandonment of history, but rather the rejection of a narrative of modernity created by the heirs of global plunder.
Essential workers
When a young Ethiopian, Haile Gerima, made a film about the exploitative nature of American college sports and the role of Black athletes in society.
Black Atlantic Lives Matter
Black Lives Matter protests build on a long history of anti-racist solidarity and struggle across the Atlantic.
Independence Day
The labor and political organizing of Somali immigrants in the US Midwest should inspire more Americans to join the broader movement for worker rights and racial equality.
‘We have no Harlem in Sudan’
The current global discourse on Black Lives Matter does not yet adequately include anti-black racism beyond how the West experiences it.
The blankest spot on Trump’s world map
In his new book of his time in the Trump White House, former US National Security Adviser John Bolton shares Trump’s very few thoughts on Africa.
The book of his life
Father's Day reflections for the time of COVID-19.
Pandemic in the city
How African immigrants in New York City’s Manhattan borough coped with the COVID-19 pandemic.
The class character of police violence
Police violence and the murder of black people in the United States have provoked outrage and protest around the world, including on the continent. But, why is there so little outrage over police violence in African countries?
We cannot reform ourselves out of the times we are in
To end racism, we will have to change the structures from which it draws its mandate, and get rid of liberal and right-wing politicians who give it oxygen while we are being asphyxiated.
Ivan Vladislavic and Muhammad Ali
How do white South African writers confront the country's as well as their own pasts?
Eric Garner in Palestine
Activists in the occupied territories reinvent the Freedom Rides of 1960s America and in the process link US and Palestinian struggles for liberation.
The new normal
Reflections from New Orleans, Louisiana—the US's most African city—on the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.
The undeclared war in Somalia
The United States’ military operations in Somalia are not well known because they'e carried out secretly or via proxies. COVID-19 hasn't slowed them down.
The third brother
A new thriller by Andrew Welsh-Huggins follows a detective investigating the disappearance of a Somali-American teenager in Ohio.
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.
We wear the masks
The TV series "Watchmen" deserves credit for how it put unsung elements of black history into mainstream culture.