Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 612

Exhibit B

I recently stumbled upon this short video feature on director Nikyatu Jusu, whose films–Say Grace Before Dying and African Booty Scratcher–you can now watch online in full. (Boima blogged about here for AIAC). In the clip above she gets asked about her favorite films. Watch it.

Apart from Jusu's excellent choices, I was also taken by the people who interviewed her: Exhibit B, a site/blog which focuses on young, New York City creatives.

Events / After The New South Africa

Shameless self-promotion:

The New School's Transregional Center for Democratic Studies, Graduate Program in International Affairs' Media Concentration and Department of Politics, presents

After The New South Africa

With Eve Fairbanks and Sean Jacobs

Tuesday, October 4, 5:00-7:00pm

72 Fifth Avenue, Room 321

Eve Fairbanks is a Washington-born journalist returned from two years of research and writing in South Africa. Her writing on social transformation there has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Foreign Policy, Newsweek, The New Republic, and South Africa's English-and Afrikaans-language newspapers, the Mail and Guardian and Rapport. A graduate of Yale and former political reporter, she covered the 2008 presidential race for New Republic. In late 2011, she will return to southern Africa under a Fulbright grant to write about a group of black and white South African farmers moving up to the Republic of Congo to farm.

Sean Jacobs, a native of Cape Town, is assistant professor and chair of the media and culture concentration at the Graduate Program in International Affairs at The New School. He is an alumnus of the TCDS Democracy and Diversity Summer Institute. Sean worked as a political researcher for the Institute for Democracy in South Africa and has held fellowships at New York University and Harvard University. Previously he taught at the University of Michigan. He is writing a book about the relationship between globalization, neoliberalism, race and media in postapartheid South Africa.

After The New South Africa

Shameless self-promotion:

The New School's Transregional Center for Democratic Studies, Graduate Program in International Affairs' Media Concentration and Department of Politics, presents

After The New South Africa

With Eve Fairbanks and Sean Jacobs

Tuesday, October 4, 5:00-7:00pm

72 Fifth Avenue, Room 321

Eve Fairbanks is a Washington-born journalist returned from two years of research and writing in South Africa. Her writing on social transformation there has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Foreign Policy, Newsweek, The New Republic, and South Africa's English-and Afrikaans-language newspapers, the Mail and Guardian and Rapport. A graduate of Yale and former political reporter, she covered the 2008 presidential race for New Republic. In late 2011, she will return to southern Africa under a Fulbright grant to write about a group of black and white South African farmers moving up to the Republic of Congo to farm.

Sean Jacobs, a native of Cape Town, is assistant professor and chair of the media and culture concentration at the Graduate Program in International Affairs at The New School. He is an alumnus of the TCDS Democracy and Diversity Summer Institute. Sean worked as a political researcher for the Institute for Democracy in South Africa and has held fellowships at New York University and Harvard University. Previously he taught at the University of Michigan. He is writing a book about the relationship between globalization, neoliberalism, race and media in postapartheid South Africa.

Lionel Rogosin's 'Come Back Africa'

In January next year Film Forum will screen the restored film classic "Come Back, Africa" (1959) by the late American director, Lionel Rogosin. The screening will coincide with the 100th anniversary of South Africa's ruling party, the ANC. The film's title is from an ANC slogan ("Mayibuye iAfrika!").  In case you need reminding, this film is a standard bearer of (what passes for) modern South African cinema (only two other films get that nod from me: "Mapantsula" and "Hijack Stories").   "Come Back, Africa," shot in black and white and with a documentary feel, is the story of the daily grind and humiliations endured by a black migrant worker (on the mines and as a garden boy to a white family) in Johannesburg. More broadly, it was the first film that exposed the daily workings of Apartheid. It would also introduce the world to postwar black urban culture South Africa, and, specifically, singer Miriam Makeba. Largely improvised and in part co-written by the then 36-year old Rogosin (in the country on a tourist visa) with a group of black South African intellectuals and filmed clandestinely over a three week period, the film was immediately banned by the South African dictatorship.

"The only American slave narrative written in Arabic"

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Steve McQueen is a talented film director.   He won awards for his feature "Hunger" about the death of an Irish political prisoner.  His next film "12 Years a Slave" tells the true-life story of Solomon Northop, a free black man from New York City who, kidnapped, spends more than a decade on a Southern cotton plantation until he was freed in 1853. (Slavery was abolished in the USA in 1856 1865.) The film is based on a book by the same name. Chiwetel Ejiofor will play the lead role. McQueen is credited as screenwriter along with John Ridley, who wrote Undercover Brother. That last credit made me pause. Here's the trailer for "Undercover Brother." Judge for yourself.

Around the same time–actually earlier in 1831–when Northop's book came out, another book A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said was published.  That book was written by Omar Ibn Said, a West African slave in North Carolina. It would become the only American slave narrative written in Arabic. Ibn Said died in 1863. The book was actually commissioned by the American Colonization Society, "a group that encouraged owners to free their slaves and organized former slaves to colonize what is today Liberia."   A new translation by Ala Alryyes, a literary scholar from Yale University,  of Ibn Said's book is out now.

Robert Dameron, in a review of the new translation in The Wall Street Journal, writes that it is not surprise that Ibn Said's book reflects the politics of its time:

Ibn Said's "Life" is not a customary slave narrative and does not follow the prototypical themes—the search for literacy and freedom—made famous by the autobiographies of escaped slaves, including Frederick Douglass. Then again, the manuscript, unlike most slave narratives, was not published to inspire the Northern abolitionist movement. The intended audience was Southern slave owners. Members of the colonization movement hoped to influence planters to free their slaves by showcasing the intellectual talents of men like Ibn Said.

…

Ibn Said's tale, with its sunny portrait of ownership by a kind master, might be viewed skeptically by a modern reader. Yet the very fact that Ibn Said was writing in Arabic, Mr. Alryyes suggests in his commentary, permitted the author to insert subtly subversive elements beneath the nose of his benefactors. Ibn Said made extensive reference to his Muslim heritage, even as he reached for points of commonality between Christianity and Islam to express his faith.

Certain meanings and implications would have only been clear to Muslims. For instance, Ibn Said begins his text with a full recitation of the Quran's 67th sura, or chapter, titled al-Mulk ("Dominion"), which discusses God's absolute ownership of the universe. For a Muslim slave, Sura al-Mulk would probably have had an incendiary meaning: It tacitly rebukes slave owners by stressing mankind's common subservience to God and promising damnation for those who "persist in arrogance." With the inclusion of the sura, Mr. Alryyes notes, "Omar seems to refute the right of his owners over him."

Ibn Said's sly hand with Scripture is suggested in other places as well. Mr. Alryyes argues that Ibn Said had little trouble thinking of himself as both Christian and Muslim. In a compelling example of this harmonizing of faiths, Ibn Said writes out, side by side, two classics from each religion's liturgy: the first brief chapter of the Quran (Sura al-Fatiha, commonly used as a prayer) and the Lord's Prayer. Placed next to each other, they show striking similarities.

Footnote: BTW, in a new paper by Columbia University's Hishaam Aidi writes about the long uneasy relationship between the American state and Islam, especially orthodox Islam practiced by African Americans, as far back as Omar Ibn Said.

The Nonviolent Transition in South Africa

The American philosopher Lewis Gordon, in an essay on affirmative action:

There are those who praise South Africa for making the transformation to a supposedly post-Apartheid society nonviolently. Without violence? The many blacks (in the Black Consciousness conception) and their supporters who were killed, tortured and imprisoned; the many protesters harmed; the tanks; the guns; the dogs; the 3 AM knock on the door; the many instances of trauma, none of them count? What is hidden in this misguided notion, as with what is suppressed about racism and sexism in the anti-affirmative action rhetoric of reverse discrimination and qualifications, is this: in a white supremacist state, violence is only recognized if it is waged against whites.

So, the hysteria about crime, about insecurity in South Africa is, as no doubt everyone knows, similar to the same in the United States. Even when the actual figures of violent crime declined, incarceration of blacks was high, because there was, in effect, the criminalization of a people. As violent appearance, black visibility was criminalized.

An odd feature of post-colonial states is that criminalization of black populations doesn't require white institutional leadership. In so-called black countries, the phenomenon is there and it is color dependent, where darker-skin blacks are the most criminalized. The reasons for this are manifold, but most amount to the near isomorphic relationship between closed social options and skin color as a legacy of racialized slavery and colonialism in the midst of post-colonial environments heavily invested in keeping capital in the hands of the former governing population.

Source

Photo Credit.

"Francophone Africa's answer to Achebe"

In January this year Chimurenga Magazine proposed a soundtrack for Cheikh Hamidou Kane's 1961 novel, L'Aventure Ambigue, which they dubbed "Francophone Africa's answer to China Achebe's Things Fall Apart.

The songs selected here follow Samba Diallo's journey from the Glowing Hearth koranic school to Paris and back to West Africa – featuring Rail Band, Miriam Makeba, Xalam, Guelawar, Salif, Toumani and many more, plus words from the book.

The songs selected here follow Samba Diallo's journey from the Glowing Hearth koranic school to Paris and back to West Africa – featuring Rail Band, Miriam Makeba, Xalam, Guelawar, Salif, Toumani and many more, plus words from the book.

Still worth downloading.

Music Break / Spikiri

Browsing our archive, I found very little kwaito tunes. Our bad. Some of them are irresistible, like this one by Spikiri and friends. About the videos we can be short: we're still waiting for the first one that doesn't feature a DJ, sizzling meat, bling, cars or house parties. It often also works, less so this time. But that beat…

Nigeria's musical heroes

No Fela Kuti is not the only recognizable musician to come out of Nigeria. Do you known about Orlando 'OJ' Julius, Fatai 'Rolling Dollar,' Emperor Dele Ojo, Tony Benson, Jimi Solanke and Chris Ajilo?

New York City-based Nigerian musician and filmmaker Siji is making a documentary film about key moments and personalities in the history of post-independent Nigerian music. Just based on the trailer (used for fundraising) with its eclectic use of interviews, archival footage and still photographs, this film promises to be quite an event when it finally comes out.

The film also includes interviews with Randy Weston and DJ Rich Medina. I want to see this happen. Siji needs $20,000 to complete the film. Watch the trailer and give him money.

Outsourcing Protest

This is either a bad joke, a brilliant art project or another Dutch viral campaign:

A group called Actie Lab (translated: Action Lab), based in Amsterdam, has found a way for Europeans to 'help' Africans by outsourcing protests to Malawi and South Africa. Basically you don't have to do protesting anymore. You just fill out a form on Aksie Lab's website and Aksielab "gets a bunch of Africans to protest for you." They also do birthday greetings. In the video above a group of Africans do an on-demand protest around the Chinese government's imprisonment of artist Ai Wei Wei. (He is now under house arrest.)

Since they started the "service" in May this year, Aksie Lab has had more than a few clients.

Not everyone thinks its a joke. For example, What's Up Africa!'s Ikenna Azuike thinks it's real and skewers it in the latest episode of his weekly Youtube broadcast.