by Amy on Jan 14th, 2013
Jacana is pleased to share a book preview of the German book, Afropolis: City/Media/Art, which has now been translated into English.
The flipping preview contains an entire contents page, which delineates the five different cities (Cairo, Lagos, Nairobi, Kinshasa, Johannesburg). The preface, foreword, and the three first chapters from the Cairo section make up the bulk of the preview of the book, which takes a fascinating look at the African metropolis.
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by Amy on Dec 12th, 2012
Metropolises often evoke images of flashy high-rise buildings, permanent background noise, backed-up cars and people moving quickly in all directions in their masses. New York, Tokyo, London, Sao Paulo. But what about Cairo? Lagos? Nairobi, Kinshasa, Johannesburg?
More than half of the world‘s population lives in cities. Countries of the South in particular are facing fast-paced globalisation, with the highest rates of urbanisation taking place in African cities. Beyond Western models of urban development, African cities are creating their own urban structures, topography and cultures. How do these structures work? How do the residents of these cities organise their daily lives? What discussions are taking place in Africa about the history and future of cities? And how are artists thinking about and representing urban life in Africa?
Lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched, Afropolis is the product of an exhibition developed by the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Cologne, Germany. The book focuses on the Big Five of African cities: Cairo, Lagos, Nairobi, Kinshasa and Johannesburg, and brings together positions of artistic and cultural studies, as well as detailed histories and the specific dynamics of these African cities, in order to expand our understanding of the concept of urbanity and the phenomenon of the City from an African perspective.
This is the first time the book is available in English.
About the editors
Larissa Förster is a research associate at the Morphomata International Centre for Advanced Studies Genesis, Dynamics and Mediality of Cultural Figurations, University of Cologne. Her doctoral thesis dealt with postcolonial landscapes of memory. She has spent long periods in Namibia and South Africa for her research, which focuses primarily on museum studies, visual and material culture, and the history and cultures of remembrance in southern Africa. She also co-curated the exhibition Namibia – Deutschland: eine geteilte Geschichte: Widerstand, Gewalt, Erinnerung shown in the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Cologne and the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin (2004/2005).
Christian Hanussek, born in Frankfurt am Main in 1953, is an artist, author and curator currently based in Berlin. He studied art and art theory at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and at ateliers 63 in Haarlem (NL). His art often combines three-dimensional painting with film and video, and his works include a number of permanent installations. Since 2001, he has published a series of articles on art from Africa. In 2005/2006, he curated his project Gleichzeitig in Africa… with exhibitions, seminars and discussions in several German cities.
Kerstin Pinther is a Professor for African Art at the Department of Art History, Freie Universität Berlin. Until early 2010, she was a research fellow at Goethe University Frankfurt/Main. Within her general research fields of photography and visual cultures in West Africa, she is presently focusing on architecture and urbanity in Africa, and on specific issues related to Africa’s contemporary art and cultural production in a global context. Her most recent publication is Wege durch Accra. Stadtbilder, Praxen und Diskurse (2010). Kerstin Pinther curated the exhibition Black Paris. Kunst und Geschichte einer schwarzen Diaspora (2006). She has spent periods of research in Accra, Paris, Lagos, and Cairo.
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by Emily on Sep 7th, 2009
Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina – who spends a fair amount of time in our neck of the woods – was interviewed by American Public Media late last year for a piece on their Speaking of Faith series.
He spoke to APM’s Krista Tippett about “the ethics of aid”; they tossed around the question of whether aid from one country to another is always a good thing.
Now the uncut, unedited interview has surfaced as a podcast, which, if you get past the first four minutes or so, transforms from a fumbly arranging of interviewer and interviewee and seats and microphones and test-the-microphones chitchat (which includes the weighty subject of what Wainaina had for breakfast) into an incisive and exercising gloss of north-south relations – and a glimpse into the violence that marred Kenya’s recent elections.
Here’s the podcast; and see below for a link to the transcript:
Podcast with Binyavanga Wainaina [100:31m]:
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Transcript: The Ethics of Aid: One Kenyan’s Perspective
Krista Tippett, host: I’m Krista Tippett. Today, “The Ethics of Aid: One Kenyan’s Perspective.” We explore a challenging view of the morality and efficacy of Western approaches to Africa’s problems.
Mr. Binyavanga Wainaina: A lot of people arrive in Africa to assume that it’s a blank empty space and their goodwill and desire and guilt will fix it. And that to me is not any different from the first people who arrived and colonized us. This power, this power to help, is just about as dangerous as hard power, because very often it arrives with a kind of zeal that is assuming ‘I will do it. I will solve it for you. I will fix it for you,’ and it rides roughshod over your own best efforts.
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Photo courtesy PEN American Center
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by Emily on Aug 26th, 2009
Now in its 10th year, the Caine Prize presents another unmissable opportunity to tune in to what is going on in African fiction. Work in Progress and Other Stories: The Caine Prize for African Fiction 2009 brings together the shortlist for the 2009 award as well as stories written at the Caine Prize writers’ workshop held near Accra, Ghana – in all, 16 short stories that make up some of the best new writing from across the continent.
The 2009 shortlisted authors were:
Mamle Kabu [Ghana] for “The end of Skill”
Parselelo Kantai [Kenya] for “You Wreck Her”
Alistair Morgan [South Africa] for “Icebergs”
EC Osondu [Nigeria] for “Waiting”
Mukoma wa Ngugi [Kenya] for “How Kamau wa Mwangi Escaped into Exile”
EC Osondu won the £10 000 award.
Last year’s winner, Henrietta Rose-Innes, is one of 11 other writers featured in this remarkable collection, which showcases the cultural relevance of the short story and up-and-coming talent in equal measure. Her story, Work in Progress, provides the title for the collection. See Rose-Innes’ own posts on the collection.
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Download this eBook at LittleWhiteBakkie.com
