AfricaIs aCountry

Jeffrey Wright Reads Walt Whitman

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Jeffrey Wright Reads Walt Whitman

By
Sean Jacobs

This is from a minute ago, but I had to post it as it features part of my neighborhood. Wright, actor and unassuming Fort Greene, Brooklyn, resident (that’s also my neighborhood) reads his favorite Walt Whitman poem (from his blackberry) in front of the Walt Whitman Houses on Myrtle Avenue in the neighborhood. The reading was for “… a segment from “Works In Progress,” a new TV and online series about storytellers around the world in development from creator Ina Howard Parker.” The series also includes a less dramatic interview with Ismael Beah, the writer from Sierra Leone, at Madiba Restaurant, also a few blocks from my house. BTW, is that it for the series?–Sean Jacobs

Further Reading

No one should be surprised we exist

The documentary film, ‘Rolé—Histórias dos Rolezinhos’ by Afro-Brazilian filmmaker Vladimir Seixas uses sharp commentary to expose social, political, and cultural inequalities within Brazilian society.

Reading List: Barbara Boswell

While editing a collection of the writings of South African feminist Lauretta Ngcobo, Barbara Boswell found inspiration in texts that reflected Ngcobo’s sense that writing is an exercise of freedom.

Kenya’s stalemate

A fundamental contest between two orders is taking place in Kenya. Will its progressives seize the moment to catalyze a vision for social, economic, and political change?

An annual awakening

In the 1980s, the South African arts collective Vakalisa Art Associates reclaimed time as a tool of social control through their subversive calendars.

More than a building

The film ‘No Place But Here’ uses VR or 360 media to immerse a viewer inside a housing occupation in Cape Town. In the process, it wants to challenge gentrification and the capitalist logic of home ownership.