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Stuart Hall | Interview on multiculturalism

Thinking Allowed, BBC Radio 4, March 2011

“I’m not surprised that identity has become a political question, but I’m in despair, and also ironic, about the actual forms that takes…I think those are pretty ridiculous. But, at the same time, globalisation has greatly overplayed the decline of the nation state and national culture. These two things work hand in hand, so the question of, well, ‘what are we attached to?’, especially for a society which has constructed its history to suggest that, you know, these are special people - they came out of the North Sea already tolerant, liberal, open-minded, addicted to freedom etcetera. It’s horrendous distortion of what the national history has been, as our story, which is going on right now. We’re about to teach a version of it that says the only thing is really that we did come out of the sea civilized. I think all of that is not amusing at all. A difficult and dangerous preoccupation, and its a preoccupation that Paul Gilroy called ‘[postcolonial] melancholia’ a kind of mourning for a lost object, and its an unrequitable mourning because it’s not going to come back in that form.”

full interview

Mar 27, 20117 notes

#david cameron's munich speech #history #identity #niall ferguson #on multiculturalism #race #stuart hall #thinking allowed #uk #colonial #postcolonial

“I guess ‘Hidden Place’ is sort of about how two people can create a paradise just by uniting. You’ve got an emotional location that’s mutual. And it’s unbreakable. And obviously it’s make-believe. So, you could argue that it doesn’t exist because it’s invisible, but of course it does. And it’s sort of a one-nil situation. Or, if you believe in something high enough - I mean, maybe at first when you mention it, and you talk about it and it doesn’t exist. It might be artificial, but you just keep on believing in it and it grows strong. It’ll become real, you know. And I guess that’s something, sort of the human spirit conquering the dullness and boredom.” —- Björk

Mar 26, 201117 notes

#bjork #hidden place

Mar 26, 2011279 notes

#robert pruitt #tobia #nina simone

Play

Mar 26, 201111 notes

#blue #derek jarman #film #isaac julien #visual art

“What I love about filmmaking is that everything I’ve ever done in my life, it all seems to come into the filmmaking. Anything I’ve done. Dancing is something I used to do and when you’re working with cameras and actors, it is a bit like putting movement together and it reminds me of dancing, the choreography between actors and cameras. So that’s what I loved about it when I started. Everything I’ve ever done now makes sense. It isn’t redundant anymore.” — Andrea Arnold, Filmmaker | interview

Mar 25, 201112 notes

#dance dance dance i was a dancer all along #filmmaking #marrying passions #fishtank #red road

“Things won are done;
joy’s soul lies in the doing.” — Troilus and Cressida, Act I, scene ii

Mar 25, 201115 notes

#troilus and cressida #doin it and doin it and doin it well #shakespeare #get it

Mar 20, 2011585 notes

Mar 20, 20117 notes

#theorizing diaspora #rosie ntjam #afropean

MARION COLEMAN | One of America’s Best Known African American Quilters

Marion Coleman’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally. She has done artist residencies at the de Young Museum, Parchester Community Center through Richmond Arts Center, Edna Brewer…

(via bcconfidential:)

Mar 16, 20118 notes

#marion coleman #african american art #art #quilts

BINO AND FINO

BINO AND FINO | A Black Cartoon Made in Africa For Kids Worldwide

Bino and Fino is a cartoon series about a brother and sister named Bino and Fino who live with their grandparents ‘Mama’ and ‘Papa’ in a modern day city in Africa. Produced by Nigerian animators Sola, Kunle Dada and Adamu Wazira the cartoon series that could be considered as the African version of ‘Dora the Explorer’ and ‘Charlie and Lola’.

Mar 16, 20119 notes

Mar 16, 201121 notes

Mar 14, 201154 notes

#communal #kristeva #love #thesis #universal #western subjectivity

Mar 13, 201110,806 notes

#penguin #books #book covers #design #colour #consistency #pattern

“Those whose lives are fruitful to themselves, to their friends, or to the world, are inspired by hope and sustained by joy: they see in imagination the things that might be and the way in which they are to be brought into existence. In their private relations they are not preoccupied with anxiety lest they should lose such affection and respect as they receive: they are engaged in giving affection and respect freely, and the reward comes of itself without their seeking. In their work they are not haunted by jealousy of competitors, but are concerned with the actual matter that has to be done. In politics, they do not spend time defending unjust privileges of their class or nation, but they aim at making the world as a whole happier, less cruel, less full of conflict between rival greeds, and more full of human beings whose growth has not been dwarfed and stunted by oppression.” —Bertrand Russell | Proposed Roads to Freedom - Anarchy, Socialism and Syndicalism (NY, 1919), pp. 186-7

Mar 11, 201121 notes

#bertrand russell #aims #time to save the world #chomsky

Mar 9, 201146 notes

#pelo #brazil #salvador #hair #transas!

Sokari Ekine | Pambazuka

‘The danger of ignoring Gabon’s revolution isn’t just that opposition forces will be arrested or worse. It’s that we fail to understand the profound shifts underway across the world that change the nature of popular revolution. The wave of protests that swelled in Tunisia may not break just in the Arab world, but across a much larger swath of the planet … And as audiences around the world watch in wonder as Christian and Muslim protesters pray together in Tahrir Square, they wonder why struggles in Gabon can’t command at least a fraction of this attention.’

Clearly we’re stuck in certain troughs of thinking: genealogical & geographical; lines of filiation. We’re thinking about the inspiration to revolt as being particular to the ‘Arab World’ and of revolution spreading/seeping across borders in comprehensible ways that we might be able to map. But, as Ekine points out, this is to the detriment of understanding how and why things are happening in Gabon, Nigeria, Uganda - but most importantly what is happening. Lots of the discourse that is fearful of the Islamist governments that may be elected, or comprehends Egyptian, Libyan, Bahrainian young people as Westernised (‘the Facebook generation’) and catching up with Western modernity simply fails to grasp the enormity of what is going on, that it is resistance to both narratives of traditionalism and nationhood that dictators propound, and to US/European democratic hypocrisy.

Our geopolitical ways of thinking about influence/interaction/affiliation remain limited by colonially inscribed limits and borders. If the ‘Middle East’, ‘Africa’, ‘The West’ are imaginaries then the way that we think, write, and talk about them has to move beyond these imaginaries, if we are to allow space for new paradigms to emerge that will reflect and in turn shape different (more just!) political realities.

Mar 3, 201119 notes

#arab spring #democracy #pambazuka #protests across africa #sokari ekine #protest #imaginary

“As a black cultural critic, I consistently try to broaden the use of terms like “intellectual” and “cultural producer” to include other cultural practices like music and film to disrupt the ways in which the description of intellectuals is often limited to practices based on writing and/or to people employed as professors.” —Hazel V. Carby, Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African American (London & New York: Verso, 1999) p.182

Mar 1, 201127 notes

#africana #black studies #hazel v. carby #the intellectual #writing #literacy debate

Mar 1, 201118,292 notes

“

By writers even as refreshing as Graham Greene, the Caribbean is looked at with elegiac pathos, a prolonged sadness to which Levi-Strauss has supplied an epigraph: Tristes Tropiques. Their tristesse derives from an attitude to the Caribbean dusk, to rain, to uncontrollable vegetation, to the provincial ambition of Caribbean cities where brutal replicas of modern architecture dwarf the small houses and streets. The mood is understandable, the melancholy as contagious as the fever of a sunset, like the gold fronds of diseased coconut palms, but there is something alien and ultimately wrong in the way such a sadness, even a morbidity, is described by English, French, or some of our exiled writers. It relates to a misunderstanding of the light and the people on whom the light falls.

These writers describe the ambitions of our unfinished cities, their unrealized, homiletic conclusion, but the Caribbean city may conclude just at that point where it is satisfied with its own scale, just as Caribbean culture is not evolving but already shaped. Its proportions are not to be measured by the traveller or the exile, but by its own citizenry and architecture. To be told you are not yet a city or a culture requires this response. I am not your city or your culture. There might be less of Tristes Tropiques after that.

” —

from Derek Walcott’s Nobel Lecture | 7 December 1992

BOOM! here in its resplendent entirety.

Mar 1, 201113 notes

#caribbean culture #derek walcott #nobel lecture #radical difference

“The west supports democracy when democracy supports the west. But Egypt further proves that, for the west, freedom is a question of strategy not principle. That’s why, while most of the world looked on at the throngs in Cairo with awe and admiration, western leaders eyed them with fear and suspicion. They know that if the Arab world gets to choose its own leaders, those leaders would be less supportive of everything from rendition and Iran to Iraq and the blockade of Gaza. The west’s foreign policy in the region has not simply tolerated a lack of democracy, it has been actively dependent on dictatorship.” —Gary Younge | The Guardian

Mar 1, 201176 notes

#Gary Younge #The Guardian #Egypt #democracy #liberalism #hypocrisy