The ASAA condemns the use of the police and military by African states to mete out violence against its citizens. We especially condemn the ongoing brutalities in Nigeria, spurred by the violation of human rights and abuses by the erstwhile Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS). The Anti- Robbery Squad (SARS) was a Nigerian police force unit that was created in late 1992 to deal with crimes associated with robbery, motor vehicle theft, kidnapping, cattle rustling and crimes involving firearms. However, over the years, SARS has been linked to extrajudicial killings, extortion, torture, framing citizens for crimes they didn’t commit, and blackmail.
Mukanda
22.10.2020 | by ASAA
For Romero, this is one of the points of art: to help us face up to our own part in slavery and its legacy, and a powerful way to reveal, and explore, our past. “With this story, we wanted to tell the British angle – this is British history,” says Romero of The Whip. “We’re in constant dialogue with our past: we have to be.”
Afroscreen
22.10.2020 | by Holly Williams
“If it hadn’t been for World War II, African countries wouldn’t have been able to liberate themselves from colonial empires”. This observation, made by Mamadou Diouf – a Senegal-born Pole, activist and legend of the Warsaw music scene, during a debate organized in June 2019 as part of the 30th Malta Festival in Poznań seems to be a provocation rather than an objective statement of facts. The average Pole is unable to imagine that this cruel conflict, which began in Poland, could bring anything positive for humanity. In a country so profoundly affected by this war, Diouf’s statement is surprising, almost shocking.
Afroscreen
20.10.2020 | by Katarzyna Cytlak
The broad gains have led some in the British media to herald “the end of the ethnicity pay gap”, traducing the data and diminishing the issue to a “white v other” scrap among workers. The MailOnline’s dog-whistling headline – “Young employees from minority groups now earn MORE than white British workers” – is emblematic. This narrative is dangerous and misleading. Whether it is intentional or not, pitting the dominant ethnic group against minorities ignores systemic disadvantages between and within communities.
To read
16.10.2020 | by Halima Begum
The cumulative individual tragedies on slave trails to the coast, in the barracoons, and on the beaches: no one can even count. So the four centuries of African enslavement by Europeans remains an abstract story. The need to make it real, to find things that you can see, touch and feel is what most motivated me to participate in the ambitious documentary series Enslaved with Samuel L Jackson, to be broadcast on the BBC starting on Sunday. It’s an attempt to get away from the numbers and statistics and instead focus on the real people who endured this era – their flesh and bone, dreams and legacies.
To read
16.10.2020 | by Afua Hirsch
Compiled from episodes of their show, which has gained millions of listeners over the past 10 years, the book introduces us to mysteries that most of us have never considered. Why are manhole covers round? Why do the Japanese infuse them with elaborate decorations? What do painted yellow symbols on streets tell us? Why are traffic lights red on top and green on bottom? What might we notice about the designs and support systems of buildings and bridges? Why have so-called love locks or love padlocks become a problem around the world? Why are some streets straight and others curvilinear?
City
15.10.2020 | by Kenneth T. Jackson
The gaze and its processes of rotation and retroactivity are central to the philosophical and epistemological reflection of the 20th and early 21st centuries. From Merleau Ponty’s phenomenology of perception to Viveiros de Castro’s Amerindian perspectivism, passing by Sartre’s phenomenological descriptions, the thinking of the perceptive and cognitive models is combined with a reflection on the relationships between the subject/observer and the object/observed. The possibility arises of overcoming the conventional binary framework of the modern hegemonic visual and epistemological formations.
Afroscreen
30.09.2020 | by Raquel Schefer
In a society still marked by profound gender inequality, and understanding emancipation and freedom as processes that are daily struggles, we debate achievements and rights, and expectations when it comes to the body, career, maternity, representation, circulation, and artistic proposals. Part of it are also sickness, birth, war, violence, sexual freedom, the domestic universe, the world of labour (and invisible labour) and our current forceful will to break with the status quo.
I'll visit
14.09.2020 | by Marta Lança
The present photo-essay is the result of recent fieldwork. On the islands, the inhabitants had to harness available resources (e.g., rain, soil, mountains and oceans) and follow a frugal but ingenious diet. Collectively, they triumphed over natural forces, western colonialism and deterministic forecasts.
To read
13.09.2020 | by Kaian Lam
In the last weeks, political tensions in Portugal have arisen following public demonstrations of extreme right organizations that have also threatened anti-racist activists. On August 11, black antiracist activist Mamadou Ba and other nine persons (antiracist, antifascist and LGBT rights activists, MPs and trade union leaders) received an e-mail sent by a neo-Nazi movement that threatened them and their families if they did not leave the country in the next 48 hours.
Mukanda
02.09.2020 | by vários
Creating a sensational dialogue between our translucent memories and the luminosities that surround the landscape of this island–art gallery, hangs in the middle of the space, a site-specific artwork created by Ana, Joana and Paulo. A work composed by two suspended raw linen cloth paintings, with more than three meters, in which one holds the coulours of the dawn and the other of the sunset, alongside a soundtrack where we hear Paulo’s voice, dyed with the sounds of the island echoing through the exhibition space, so you too can hear and see the colours of São Tomé and Príncipe.
I'll visit
14.08.2020 | by Inês Valle
As Felwine Sarr insisted in his conference, the questions steam from the centrality of the canonic interpretation of what is a ‘cultural’ good, what is a collection, how was it formed, and above all, what power-knowledge relationship is at the core of the constitution of these collections; why is it problematic to ‘return’ the objects? Is it because it means European countries have to acknowledge their violent colonial past and that they have robbed the history and cultural production of others? Can we move beyond invisibility towards emergences (Santos, 2014)? Can we overstep the epistemic violence that shapes our times?
To read
13.08.2020 | by Maria Paula Meneses
From the point of view of an uncompromising condemnation of colonialism, the indictment of the present-day practices of the state of Israel is a logical consequence. And to condemn all forms of colonialism is not equivalent to taking on an ideological stance, it is, purely and simply, a moral imperative.
To read
04.07.2020 | by António Sousa Ribeiro
As academics, we teach about empire, slavery and colonialism because without them, the world makes no sense. Observing the protests against racism in the streets of the US, UK, Australia and elsewhere feels like watching not only a mass movement, but also a classroom, crackling with intellectual energy.
To read
27.06.2020 | by Sanjay Seth, Francisco Carballo and David Martin
On the basis of our experience as university teachers, we are not surprised that the murder of George Floyd in the US has injected renewed energy into the movements against racism worldwide, not least in Britain. No grounds for shock or surprise here.
To read
27.06.2020 | by Sanjay Seth, Francisco Carballo and David Martin
According to a government decision of the same year, Independence squares were to be set up in all provincial capitals and to receive identical but smaller statues produced in North Korea by Mansudae Art Studio: the statue erected in the capital is 9 meters high, while those implanted in other cities are 2.9 meters high.
To read
11.06.2020 | by Roberto Conduru
At the height of the movement, Harlem was the epicenter of American culture. The neighborhood bustled with African American-owned and run publishing houses and newspapers, music companies, playhouses, nightclubs, and cabarets. The literature, music, and fashion they created defined culture and “cool” for blacks and white alike, in America and around the world.
City
15.04.2020 | by vários
O sentimento de vulnerabilidade partilhada que hoje vivemos, enredados na crise encetada pelo coronavírus, interroga-nos, também, sobre os limites da nossa memória para democratizarmos o nosso passado, descolonizando as hierarquias raciais, coloniais e patriarcais que definem o que é alheio. Na “lembrança minha” deveria lembrar-me de inúmeras histórias de fim do mundo, histórias há muito testemunhadas por aqueles e aquelas para quem a COVID-19 é apenas mais episódio de uma continuada exposição à desigual distribuição da precariedade.
To read
30.03.2020 | by Bruno Sena Martins
Judith Butler discuss the COVID-19 pandemic, and its escalating political and social effects in America. "Unfortunately, in the time of the pandemic, none of us can wait. The ideal must now be kept alive in the social movements that are riveted less on the presidential campaign than the long term struggle that lies ahead of us. These courageous and compassionate visions mocked and rejected by capitalist “realists” had enough air time, compelled enough attention, to let increasing numbers – some for the first time – desire a changed world."
To read
30.03.2020 | by Judith Butler
Nothing could better show that the art of memory, in the way that Boltanski thinks about it and makes it, is memory itself. It knows its workings and saves it from erasure. This is the lesson that Christian Boltanski repeats to us in all the corners of his immense oeuvre. And that, literally, makes time.
To read
07.03.2020 | by Roberto Vecchi
