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cape town book fair and chimurenga's virtual library  Sian Butcher | 6/9/2008 at 10:59 AM

if you in CT this weekend, make sure you make your way down to the convention centre for the best books and publishing houses around.. also, look for Chimurenga's launch of their virtual library: "an online archiving project that profiles independent pan African paper periodicals from around the world. It focuses on cultural and literary magazines, both living and extinct, which have been influential platforms for dissent and which have broadened the scope for print publishing on art, new writing and ideas in and about Africa." (from Chimurenga online).  This sounds like a useful resource for all of us involved in knowledge production within and about Africa.  From the 11th of June, check out www.chimurengalibrary.co.za where this archive will be available.  Otherwise, hope to catch you at their Stand F11 this weekend
 


Harare North?  Clare Butcher | 5/21/2008 at 2:18 PM

 

 
The above link leads down a long dark rabbit hole of post-millenial essentialism. Essentialising what? The ‘Africa’ well-known and loved by popular Western European public culture. This issue of ‘Time Out London’ is dedicated to, and I quote: ‘Food, fashion, music and art: the influence of Africa is felt throughout London, and it's growing. Time Out takes a cross section of the city to see the effect of a continent on a capital’ (my italics)
 
By pasting a conclusively ‘hot’ semi-naked, black, we can only assume, African, man at centre-site, the ‘critical guide to arts, culture and going on’ does not begin well and the subsequent ‘cross-section’ of African culture in diaspora in London which it purports to explore only lapses into a rehashing common tropes cluttering most of the developed world’s geographical blindspot – exhibiting, yet again something other as the ‘Other’.
 
The African art section (as my chief interest) provides links with galleries who blatantly state that they present the work only of the African ‘masters’ who have achieved international acclaim. My placing of ‘masters’ in quotations is not to diminish the artistic achievements of individuals such as Cheri Samba and Twins Seven-seven but rather to highlight the perpetual foisting of Western European art historical terminology upon contemporary art practices in other parts of the world. Soap stone sculptures and ritual masks may indeed be considered art objects but what of the video, performance and installation art of African artists still practicing locally?
 
The food, music and market sections of the issue are dominated by representatives from Nigeria and Western Africa. I think that were the journalists to have done their homework they would have discovered a wealth of other cultural groups living, working and representing a much more layered post-colonial parfait [a running joke has re-named London as ‘Harare North’, due to the countless Zimbabweans taking refuge neath the shades of Wimbeldon stadium]
 
Comments at the end of the webpage provide the most interest and have been posted by various Africans living abroad. They are a mixed bag, and I would encourage readers of this blog to engage further with those.
 
My personal gripe stems from two articles I recently read, regarding the display of contemporary African art in European spaces in the early 1990s [‘Inventing the ‘Postcolonial’: Hybridity and Constiuency in Contemporary Curating’, Annie E. Coombes (1992) and ‘Remaking Passports: Visual Thought in the Debate on Multiculturalism’, Néstor García Canclini (1994)] which both ask why, more than one hundred years after African artefacts were first presented in the Trocadéro in Paris [the objects which were so infamously inspirational to Picasso], manifestations of contemporary African visual culture continue to be toted in and out of white cubes in a supposed celebration of their ‘Diversity’, which is really just a postmodern way of saying ‘Difference’.
 
One possibly redeeming feature of this sorry ‘Time Out’ could perhaps be that of ‘Photos of London by the African Diaspora’, allowing a creative platform for individuals to tell visual stories of their London experience. While frighteningly generic in its term this could provide material for some further dialogue. But really, is this 2008?
 
 
 


the weight of word-smithing  Sian Butcher | 5/14/2008 at 11:09 AM

the morning light is making my eyes hurt; my fingers are curled as if hovering over the home keys; my back is hunched; my knees crack when straightened; my throat is dry, but i can't be bothered to get up to remedy that.  it has been a long night.  who would have thought putting words on paper, or text on screen could be so painful/stakingly slow?  i am surrounded, under siege, drowning under the piles of interview transcripts, the scrawled fieldnotes on transient scraps of paper, newspaper cuttings, photos, smses, printed emails and google-chats, fine looking secondary texts, photocopied articles, brainstorming, audio files, good intentions, past regrets and multitudes of used coffee cups.   Why was it that qualitative empirical work sounded so appealing at the start of this twisting/ed road?  Why don't they tell you about the monster you will create and ultimately be unable to control - where was the textbook warning about this morass of data that has literally and figuratively crowded you out of your own head?  And while you're at it, try to work iteratively, moving constantly between data and theory; your own positioning and the context of that particular conversation - thinking about representation and style and the "bloody so-what" (thank you Dr. F) of what you're on about.   When you have finished, start all over again.  How many times can you read the same transcript and still come out with something you never saw before?  I will tell you how many - it is exactly the number of times you read it, as shifted ever so slightly by something you read the day before, by what a professor said in a seminar, by a sign you sawposted on a lampost, by what you ate for breakfast.  yes, i am referring to subjectivity.  How do we do this thing called rigourous qualitative work when it is such a messy, personal, coffee-stained business?  I have no answers, at the end of my latest 24 hour stint of 'writing up' - perhaps i am even more uncertain than i was at the beginning of it.  All i know is you keep going back for more, more of the same exhausting, multi-tasking, anarchic business, until it is done. Or is it ever?


Some musings from the diaspora as the ballots are counted...slowly   | 5/2/2008 at 2:19 PM
 
The air is thick with speculation, skinner, hearsay, rumour, conspiracy – and this at a distance. We sit watching our computer screens, our TV sets, glued to the radio, the newspapers we have never noticed on the street corners. Trying to get a sense of what is happening, behind the bias and the politicking. You read the ‘have your say’ section on the Beeb; you read between the lines of an Econet sms. Our disconnection is rubbed raw. You feel the distance acutely. When last week you were happy to read the back of your South African/Botswanan/English/Australian cornflakes box in the morning, you are now hungry for news of home. ‘Home’ – an elusive concept. You think you have lost the right to use that word a long time. But suddenly you are daring to remember it – to play with it in a corner of your mind. You hover between imagining the dangerous overturning of a status quo and continuation of the same. More of the same. Not at your expense really. Instead the reality of ‘more of the same’ is visited on those who don’t have an internet connection to watch the constituency results appear as they are released. It is visited on those who have borne the weight of economic decline and authoritarianism across time and space, everywhere – the poor who are bound and grounded in that place. Yes, they may have a material sense of ‘home’, but maybe it is as hollowed out as yours. For different reasons.  
 
When ‘home’ once meant security, and provision of your basic needs, families are now robbed of their dignity to make a living in the city with lights and water, and have their children educated, and someone to go to when sick. Suddenly your existential identity crisis and self-imposed exile seem luxurious in the extreme. To be part of the diaspora, with a new ‘home’ somewhere else, is to have had mobility and the choice to use it. This is not to discount the temporary migration of survival forced upon many, scurrying through fences cut with rocks, paying bandits for safe passage; on buses overstuffed with groceries and manufactured goods; on trains, minibuses to Lindela and back. But all of us, temporary migrants and the diaspora-d, are on the edge of our seats, wondering what the ‘homefront’ happenings will mean for me and mine. You and yours.
 
What if there is chinja? What will it look like? Will it have room for you? Do you go home? Is there a home to go to? But you must not get distracted from the mundane demands of your new life and place, where things are ticking over just as they do everyday, without any slowing or consideration for what is taking place in a small, landlocked nation shaped like a tea-pot at the bottom of a forgotten/ignored continent. You must not spend too long listening, watching, waiting – but confine it to tea breaks, lunch-breaks, after dinner. They cannot know you are in chaos. Your mind has migrated. It is sitting in a concrete hall painted a government-regulated blue, with a cobra-polished red floor, listening to a woman read out figures about constituencies you don’t know. Or it is scanning a Herald on a street corner, speculating with others in vernacular you thought you had forgotten. Or it is busy mulling over a cup of milky tea boiled on a wood-fire because there is no paraffin, wishing there was sugar to sweeten it. The hope for a different tomorrow brought back to earth by the realities of today. Or maybe only strengthened by them.