METEORISATIONS Reading Amílcar Cabral’s agronomy of liberation

METEORISATIONS  Reading Amílcar Cabral’s agronomy of liberation This article reads Amílcar Cabral’s much under-studied early soil science as a body of work not dissociable from his project of liberation struggle against Portuguese colonialism in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. Drawing on research situated within an artistic practice, the article explores the definitions of soil and erosion that Cabral developed as an agronomist, as well as his reports on colonial land exploitation and analysis of the trade economy, to unearth his double agency as a state soil scientist and as a ‘seeder’ of African liberation.

Afroscreen

28.02.2019 | by Filipa César

Tufo dance: Cultural heritage of Mozambique

Tufo dance: Cultural heritage of Mozambique Women come together to perform Tufo wearing capulanas and bright-coloured shirts. Their faces are covered with mussiro, a type of facial cream used by Macua women. They tie head wraps and use jewellery, necklaces and bracelets for an extravagant finishing touch.

Stages

27.02.2019 | by Hélio Nguane

The angels of God are white to this day, interview with Paulina Chiziane

The angels of God are white to this day, interview with Paulina Chiziane Paulina Chiziane (Majacaze, 1955) is surely one of the most prominent figures of current Mozambican literature, and not just that. She is an essential reference for the country’s feminist movements, a woman who confronted particularly conflictual aspects of African cultures in her literary works with startling intensity, developing themes that no one else wants to hear or discuss, not in the private sphere, much less in the public or political spheres. These are silenced themes, taboos, especially painful, pending and unresolved subjects, such as the Mozambican civil war, women’s rights in polygamy and black magic.

Face to face

25.02.2019 | by Doris Wieser

On the colonial war: memories and post-memories, transmission and imagination

On the colonial war: memories and post-memories, transmission and imagination The distance between the writer and the traumatic reality about which they write determines the result of literary attempts to convey the experience of violence. Nevertheless, there are similarities between the artistic representations of memory offered by direct witnesses of events and those re-elaborated by their descendants (those we call post-memories).

To read

24.02.2019 | by Felipe Cammaert

European colonization of Americas killed so many it cooled Earth's climate

European colonization of Americas killed so many it cooled Earth's climate Research finds killing of native people indirectly contributed to a colder period by causing deaths of around 56 million by 1600. European colonization of the Americas resulted in the killing of so many native people that it transformed the environment and caused the Earth’s climate to cool down, new research has found. Settlers killed off huge numbers of people in conflicts and also by spreading disease, which reduced the indigenous population by 90% in the century following Christopher Columbus’s initial journey to the Americas and Caribbean in 1492.

To read

22.02.2019 | by Oliver Milman

Luta ca caba inda: from archive to fragment

Luta ca caba inda: from archive to fragment  The book condenses some important aspects of the project. Its authors are not made explicit, pointing to the collaborative nature of this effort of rescue and rereading. But it also ends up suggesting that this living process of documenting complicates the very notion of authorship as a sovereign gesture with the authority to determine how images are exposed (or concealed), or to guide interpretation and impose meaning.

Afroscreen

12.02.2019 | by Miguel Cardina

Interwinings: peripheral arts, artivism and post-memory

Interwinings: peripheral arts, artivism and post-memory The neologism “artivism” was coined in the 1960s to describe demonstrations against the Vietnam War, as well as student movements and counter-culture. The situationist Guy Debord theorized this conjuncture in his book “The Society of the Spectacle” (1967), in which he argued that it was necessary to overcome existing modes of politics and art, to sabotage the demands of capitalism and to find new modes of art and life. The term reappeared only in the mid-1990s, with the internet revolution, as part of a critical lexicon to describe not only the practice of political art, but also to interrogate what counted as politics and art. In that context, the fundamental question was the transformation of capital into a spectacle, and subsequent artistic problematics.

To read

12.02.2019 | by Fernanda Vilar