The daily word of inspiration (cut and pasted from Contemporary Literature) from my favorite, comtemporary Communist, Jeremy Cronin: … At present I am inclined to make my poems much more actively disruptive within themselves, to foreground contradiction and paradox, to enact interruption, to celebrate the parenthetical, to make manifest the unresolved. In the first post-1994 […]
Jeremy Cronin is my favorite Communist. Astute, intellectual and a poet. Cronin is a former political prisoner and now ANC member of Parliament in South Africa. “Even the Dead” is still my favorite poem. I recently chanced upon a 2009 interview he did with the academic Andrew van der Vlies (featured on this blog here) […]
Video of a worthwhile lecture (recorded in February this year) by Berkeley geographer Michael Watts breaking down the workings of the oil industry.
Gabon's unsavory Life President came to visit the US. Probably to discuss oil deals. He became collatoral damage in the US right's media war against Barack Obama. So less time to focus on Bongo. So a win for him then.
South Africa has an openly gay Judge serving on its highest court, The Constitutional Court. The Judge, Edwin Cameron, who has written a book about his sexual orientation also happens to be HIV positive and previously served for 8 years on the country’s High Court of Appeal. That’s an anomaly for court systems on a […]
An interview with Rich Blint, a James Baldwin scholar. Biggest takeaway: Baldwin lamented the fragile human impulse for categorization.
The main reaction to Palin is to mock her, but the problem is someone like her got those close to the most powerful office globally. That should scare us.
Riveting piece of journalism in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine as well as an accompanying video piece (narrated by correspondent Barry Bearak) on the ordinary murder of a Zimbabwean migrant and widespread mob “justice” in Diepsloot, a squatter camp to the north of Johannesburg. The piece is generally good. As one friend remarked: “To […]
Vanity Fair’s June issue has a profile. of Hillary Clinton. It contains tons of information about her working relationship with President Barack Obama, how she made up with Samantha Power, the Obama ally and Harvard professor, who referred to Mrs Clinton as “a monster,” speculates on Clinton running for President in 2016 (she still wants […]
The intersection of rape, power, and impunity in Guinea has a history that is very recent and very dark.
The global financial crisis is real, and its consequences are grave. It should not, however, be the reason for a US government to retreat from global engagement, especially education exchanges.
If you’re tired of the nonsense published in The New York Times or on the BBC website about yesterday’s local elections in South Africa or can’t bear the spin that will come from ANC (this points to widespread approval of its current leadership) or Democratic Alliance spin doctors (tripling your vote from 2% to 6% […]
Blackwater mostly recruits from former US soldiers and former soldiers from dictatorships like Apartheid South Africa
Paul Kagame is a skilled media operator. Sending unprepared interviewers his way, is not how to do journalism.
Tracing the origins and development of newspaper cartooning in South Africa, and its political place.
A 13-year-old South African girl is the latest victim of “corrective rape,” in which men rape lesbians to “cure” them of their sexual orientation in South Africa. As The Guardian reports 31 lesbians have been killed because of their sexuality in the past decade, and more than 10 lesbians a week are raped or gang […]
What is the state of the media in Africa? And how is it dealing with perhaps the biggest emerging story continent-wide, the rise of the extractive sector?
Tunisia, which kickstarted the "Arab Spring," is in a long pause between longtime dictator Ben Ali’s flight and elections scheduled for July 2011.
Political parties in South Africa have a new challenge during elections: commissioning a pop ditty people can dance to while political candidates make empty promises from stages.
It’s the socialist National Football League (of America’s) Draft in New York City this week and one of the two local teams, the New York Giants (they actually play in New Jersey), picked Prince Amukamara, a cornerback from Nebraska, who grew up in the suburbs of Glendale, Arizona. His name and family history (his grandfather was […]