http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7boL1EkW7M Mos Def, “Umi Says,” Live at the Austin City Limits Festival 2009.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWbSVS0AmtA] I’ve been wanting to post for a while now about the Digital Diaspora Family Reunion.  Primarily the work of the filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris; remember Harris film, “The Twelve Apostles of Nelson Mandela,” about his South African step father. The DDFR is described as an “interactive, multimedia project,” where New Yorkers–mostly Africans and African-Americans–showing Harris their family photos […]

British filmmaker John Akonfrah will be artist-in-residence this Spring at New York University’s Institute of African American Affairs. He is joined by the Ethiopian-American musician Meklit Hadero. The institute has a number of events planned around these two with the theme “The African Diaspora And/In The World.” They’re described as being “at the forefront of […]

Thanks to HavePlentyMusic I saw that big time house producers experimenting with Kuduro for a few years, are perhaps finally ready for Coupe Decale (Click through to listen to the remix). Kind of full circle really, as I really think Bob Sinclair’s and similar productions were a big influence on the sound of Coupe Decale, […]

Our man Teju Cole’s novel “Open City,” set in post-9/11 New York City, is doing better than very well. The critics can’t stop raving about it. Now people need to buy it. A lengthy review in “The New Yorker” (reviewer James Wood writes: “Cole has made his novel as close to a diary as a […]

Pioneer Unit’s on fire. Yet another release by the Cape Town label, this time a collection of ‘lost tapes’ by Lesotho-born musician Konfab, who describes himself as a “presently disadvantaged, previously dissed and damaged, seriously pissed-off, with anger mismanaged, half-foreign, urbanised darkie.” This is one of the featuring collaborations (with AIAC favourite JAAK): [bandcamp track=3741264537 […]

Images by anthropologist Yasmin Moll. For more work by Moll, watch Fashioning Faith or read her recent contributions to The Revealer.

Last year, Chris Abani introduced Ghana-born writer and poet Kwame Dawes (who spent most of his childhood and early adult life in Jamaica) to a Lannan Foundation audience: And talked with him:

The music video for the remix of Brooklyn rock singer Tamar Kali’s “Pearl” featuring the rapper Jean Grae. Damn.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lhzd1vgtBk Time to promote some continental filmmakers again. The young ones. The organizers of Design Indaba, an annual design fair held in Cape Town (this year’s edition was last week), recently commissioned six local filmmakers to make short profiles of the country’s designers. Not an original idea, but the subjects are interesting. Here’s two of […]

[vodpod id=Video.5675225&w=500&h=411&fv=] Amoeba is a landmark record store in Berkeley (on Telegraph). Now they have branches in San Francisco and LA. They also hosts live concerts with artists, like Nneka above (we get a 38 minute set out of her), or Asa, Bassekou Koyate and Ngoni Ba, The Noisettes, etcetera.

When the Danish film, “For a Better World,” won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film Sunday night, I immediately started googling it– all the descriptions and reviews suggested it took place “in an African village” (it turns it is supposed to be Sudan); and the trailer conjured up the usual stereotypes (white man saves natives). […]