Rumba In Kinshasa - Politics and music in the Congo

Artistic ‘Freedom’ in the 80s and Now

Jane Duncan, The Con

The 1980s was a heady time in South Africa’s cultural history. Apartheid repression was at its height, but so was mass resistance. The independent label Shifty Records brought together a courageous, outspoken and rebellious group of artists who captured in their music the despair and hope of that turbulent period. It is this legacy that is being celebrated in Shifty September, and rightly so, as the label gave South Africa some of the most important contemporary local music ever made.

Simphiwe Dana is nobody’s darling

By Siphokazi Magadla, Thought Leader, 23 September 2013 

“Part of what makes Simphiwe Dana so compelling for me, part of why I had to write this book, is that she is almost impossible to govern,” writes Professor Pumla Dineo Gqola in her latest book, A renegade called Simphiwe. This book is a “creative-intellectual portrait” of the public (and private) life of the musician. In this country where our imagination of political liberation has largely focused on the soap-opera like manoeuvres of politicians, Gqola carefully recasts our eyes by showing us the intersection between the creative and the political. While we have been accustomed to colourful politically focused book titles fit for Hollywood blockbusters fromEight Days in September to Mangaung: Kings and Kingmakers, Gqola dares and goes against the grain in this book.

Django Unchained, or, The Help: How “Cultural Politics” Is Worse Than No Politics at All, and Why

Adolph Reed, Jr.

by Adolph Reed, Jr., Nonsite.org

Django Unchained, or The Help

On reflection, it’s possible to see that Django Unchained and The Help are basically different versions of the same movie. Both dissolve political economy and social relations into individual quests and interpersonal transactions and thus effectively sanitize, respectively, slavery and Jim Crow by dehistoricizing them. The problem is not so much that each film invents cartoonish fictions; it’s that the point of the cartoons is to take the place of the actual relations of exploitation that anchored the regime it depicts. In The Help the buffoonishly bigoted housewife, Hilly, obsessively pushes a pet bill that would require employers of black domestic servants to provide separate, Jim Crow toilets for them; in Django Unchained the sensibility of 1970s blaxploitation imagines “comfort girls” and “Mandingo fighters” as representative slave job descriptions. It’s as if Jim Crow had nothing to do with cheap labor and slavery had nothing to do with making slave owners rich. And the point here is not just that they get the past wrong—it’s that the particular way they get it wrong enables them to get the present just as wrong and so their politics are as misbegotten as their history.

Fanon, black female sexuality and representations of black beauty in popular culture

by Efemia Chela, 2012

Frantz Fanon’s works are all very personal. Black Skins, White Masks, a treatise on the lived experience of being black is based on his experiences in Martinican society, being a student and then a black doctor in France. A Dying Colonialism is the Algerian War through the prism of his work with the FLN and The Wretched of The Earth arises from his experiences visiting post-colonial African countries, interacting with future African leaders and observing colonial and native elites. Even though Fanon was a man his oeuvre have great relevance to women and this piece will focus on the representation of black women in Fanon’s works and how his observations can be used to analyse contemporary depictions of black beauty in popular culture and hip-hop. This essay will also address the dimensions of black female sexuality and the similarities between sexism and racism.

Radical Thought: Cedric J. Robinson