a journal of research & art
By Chris Boonzaaier and Harry Wels
The commodification of culture in tourism is often critiqued and lamented in academic texts. What this process often seems to entail is that so called “cultures” of local communities are showcased to tourists from around the world. Often, it is especially what is considered “exotic” and “indigenous” that is showcased to tourists.
Translated by Todd Fredson
I dream the poem of a borderless sea / I dance a welcoming music in my skin / first ground for any home / while the hands of plenty the portly souls / weave their barbed wire
Translated by John K. Cox
Ivan urged his mother impatiently on, watching her root around in the ruins on Uskočka Street. He screamed at her, flapping his arms, cursed, threatened her, looked around in nervousness and fright: It’s already getting dark! But Milica, not paying him any heed, sat down on a smashed ceiling joist, and, now with her cane and now with her bare hand, she picked through the indistinguishable mass of rags, furniture, burnt scraps…
By Sokari Douglas Camp
In this art series, Nigerian artist Sokari Douglas Camp finds herself inspired by European painters William Blake, Botticelli, and Michelangelo. These pieces aim to signify beauty and hope.
By Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson
The history of European integration and colonialism is best understood through a geopolitical entity once known as Eurafrica.
By Annalisa Butticci
African women and men are mobilizing the resources of the long-established African diasporas, joining local civil rights associations, and fiercely expressing their anger at the racial violence and the economic and social injustice.
By Veit Bachmann
The term “Eurafrica” invokes a global panregion that has long and pervasively been a fantasy of imperialistic geopolitics, yet that has never existed. First, the spatial construction of panregions is in itself problematic as it describes a “large functional area linking core states to resource peripheries and cutting across latitudinal distributed environmental zones” and is thus inherently exploitative and imperial. Second, it is superficial, incomplete, and possibly essentializing as it suggests a homogeneity that has never existed.
By Chika Unigwe
But suffering is not without its lessons. Here, she has learned thrift. Not the thriftiness of her mother back home in Nigeria who bargains for palm oil until she gets a good price, and boasts.
Reviewed by Naomi Falk
Ndulue directs the mind away from imagining stereotypes of times and places and coaxes it towards a sustained patience with language, one that melts the text into the reader.
