Herewith, a randomly ordered year end list of stuff of note from 2008 here at casa forota.
1. MUSIC: Post everything music: BLK JKS, Esau Mwamwaya, Santogold, Vampire Weekend, Radioclit, Diplo, et al found new ways to mash up musical, cultural, epochal influences to create music influenced by everywhere, but of nowhere. Brilliant soundtracks for our rootless time.
2. PHOTOGRAPHY: Most Favorite Image: “Blue Print, Rio” at Sartorialist. Not sure why but I kept coming back to this image.
3. PHOTOGRAPHY: Second Most Favorite Image: “Kwaito in the streets of Alexandra” by Krisanne Johnson from FADER 52. Another image I cannot get enough of.
4. POLITICS: Obama vs Palin. A vote for the open, interconnected, inclusive future vs the insular, backward looking, divisive past. Choice was pretty clear.
5. MAGAZINES: Vogue Italia: A Black Issue. Proved it is still an issue to be black in the beauty business if one needs an issue for black people. Intriguing step forward, though.
6. BOOKS: Chemise by Malick Sidibe. Hipsters, on perusing Sidibe’s images: “Oh look, African hipsters from long ago!”
7. RACE: Black but not Black: Rising Black American middle class, emergence of “Afropolitans” or second generation African immigrants, growing awareness among Afro-latinos is rendering the label “Black” and its connotations pretty obsolete. See also: The End of the Black American Narrative by Charles Johnson.
8. ART/MUSEUMS: “Flow” at Studio Museum of Harlem. Nicely curated collection of Afropolitan art. Also cool: Exhibitions of works by Kehinde Wiley and Barkley L. Hendricks.
Posts will be a bit thin on the ground for the remainder of the year, as I spend less time feeding this beast that is the internet and more with friends and family. I wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a great 2009.
Filmmaker Leah Hamilton documents NYC photographer Lauri Lyons, the first African American female photographer to be represented by Getty Images.
I’m really interested in culture, especially African culture and how it travels throughout the world and changes and transforms and turns into other things and keeps popping up in modern culture without people even realizing it.
FADER 58: Andrew Dosunmu: Off the Wall. Dosunmu and stylist Mobolaji Dawoudu head out to Malaysia during Ramadhan to shoot a fashion spread. Dosunmu is one of my greatest inspirations photography-wise, but sometimes he makes me want to put my camera down instead of pick it up … his images/concepts are so good.
A pan African vision of remembering your origins and imagining a future that honors those but moves forward.
Tricia Rose on the definition of Afrofuturism.
Tricia Rose is a professor of Africana (???) Studies at Brown University. In the audio clip above from the NPR show “Studio 360” she weaves a thread of futurism through black american music linking Sun Ra’s space jazz (“Space is the Place”) with Parliament/Funkadelic’s ghetto sci-fi funk of “Mothership Connection” and Afrika Bambaata’s epic electrofunk in “Planet Rock“. In the present, Lupe Fiasco becomes a robot in “Daydreamin’”. The impetus behind futuristic music in black American pop culture comes from a desire to escape the f**keupness of the current situation (slavery, inner city violence/poverty) and to imagine a better self using the vehicle of science fiction.
See also:
MUSIC: “I’m Not a Robot” by Newcleus. Although immortalized for the frivolity that is “Jam On It”, Brooklynites Newcleus explored sci-fi and spirituality in most of their work.
FILM:Brother from Another Planet. Black space alien crash lands in New York City and ends up in Harlem where the residents, sympathetic to his alien status, accept him and protect him from galactic bounty hunters seeking to return him to the slavery of his home planet.
Why do I blog about Africa? Two words. Chinese film. Wait, let me explain. I grew up a very westernized kid in Kenya. I am in the second generation of people that grew up with the world view that was distilled as follows: “Modernity (Europe + Christianity) = good. Backwardness (Africa + tradition) = bad”. I believe Fela Kuti called it “Colomentality”. Don’t get me wrong, I am intensely proud to be Kenyan; I just felt no real compulsion to learn more about my culture beyond a reasonable competence in my mother tongue.
The Chinese art film I discovered in the 90’s (I’m a huge fan of Zhang Yimou and Wong Kar Wai) was a window into Chinese culture and through that to one central insight. Modernization is not Westernization. For all of us non-Westerners, our challenge is to balance African-ness/Asian-ness/Eskimo-ness/whatever-ness with the best of what the modern world has to offer in science, technology, philosophy, art, culture. That is the promise of globalization.
I blog mostly for myself, filling in the blanks in my own knowledge of the culture of the African diaspora, a lot of which already navigates that space between old and new, tradition and modernity, Africa and Europe. Film, photography, and other visual arts are critical tools to communicate the stories people tell themselves about their place in the world. Like Zhang Yimou’s films which were (are) motivated in part to portray China differently after the shame and chaos of the Cultural Revolution, I hope this obscure little part of the blogosphere and the visual media it highlights becomes part of the the new story we Africans tell about us and our place in this globalizing community.
