Wow Buraka.

Gustavo Petro Calls Gaza a Global Warning at The Hague Summit YouTube video by Observer Diplomat

He said it youtu.be/6zadHb3MQus?...

What a different time.

I’m just now remembering that my first ever commissioned writing was about the transnational connections of Shakira’s World Cup song for South Africa.

What about a cheese castle?

Modern suburban parents: if our child is going to play soccer, we want their team to have them on a serious professional track.

Same parents: a BA in history is simply not practical

Kabaka Pyramid & DJ Smo - Extreme (Official Lyric Video) YouTube video by Kabaka Pyramid Music

The view from where I'm sitting www.youtube.com/watch?v=jezl...

Lately it’s very.

It’s kind of wild how often a journalist will write unprecedented for events mirrored in a history book I read the night before.

That translation is fire.

I agree that’s not what he’s doing. What I’m arguing here is that if Coogler were serious about engaging with a politics of liberation, the destruction of the binary should be at the center. Instead he has a main character choose the blues over the church as means of staking out a position.

But, I believe what he does is the opposite of what the Blues attempts by recreating a racial hierarchy, albeit with blackness at the center, and trafficking in a Black American exceptionalism that ultimately reduces everyone involved to caricatures of the historical humans they aim to represent.

In Sinners, Coogler similarly attempts to create a liberatory framework by reversing the tables, protecting the intimate spaces from the vampiric outsider (by using the old world rules). Even incorporating "outsider" elements (the white passing girl, the Chinese family) in order to show malleability

However, once the performance is over, the hierarchies of American society remain in place. In the segregated Jim Crow South, the navigation of this took on a very tangible material dimension. Today it's more ethereal but no less real.

What they can't do is embody the histories and the pasts and the struggles of resistance that created the music. At best, white Bluesmen are a creole class that represent a new culture of liberation, one in which through performance, the racial dimension of the culture matters less.

This is why debates have arisen over the years on whether or not whites can play/sing the Blues. The truth is they can play the music, and there are many throughout history that have done so quite well.

The Blues' contradictory foreign-intimacy is what makes it seem magical to Americans, and thus why its retained such a prominence at the core of American cultural identity and mythology. However like any culture, those who are immersed in it, don't carry the same illusions as those who aren't.

(Here Americans would do well to look beyond the US borders to see how these practices are replicated across the continent.)

The Blues is at the heart of everything (as he argues in montage). However, America's fascination with it stems from its inability to understand the lives of rural southern blacks, who are practicing the cultures they inherited and transformed as descendants of enslaved Africans in the Americas.

Second, the reason why such mythology surrounds Blues culture and its parallels is because the Blues and African spiritual practice are simultaneously the most foreign aspects of American culture and its most centrally intimate.

To me, like with Black Panther, what he does is continue in the legacy of dehumanization of African people even if trying to do so in empowering ways.

I don't think that Coogler dismantles this binary at all, in fact he inadvertently leans into it, believing that a positive reversal of such mythology will deconstruct the racial superstructure of American empire.

First, they do this because this is a colonial framing meant to dehumanize Africans (and thus justify their enslavement). The belief that the African non-Christians were inherently devilish, evil, worthy of extermination.

America engages with the Blues and Black Southern culture constantly as if it were this mysterious magical genre that conjures spirits and plays between god and the devil.

What Coogler fails to accomplish in the film is to illustrate that the blues and voodoo practices are real practices from real people from real places. In fact I'd argue that's why he brings hip hop in, as a way to humanize, because the script itself fails to do so.

What irks me most about the movie is principally, the couching of fantasy and mythology (a vampire fable) in the history of the black South without dismantling the legacy of dehumanization of Africans that lies at the center of Americans' engagement with the black rural and urban margins.

Since no one asked, here's my Sinners take: It's a fine fun action fantasy movie that is technically accomplished and is able to raise some interesting questions in a context of a contemporary Hollywood studio system with a dearth of black perspectives at the highest levels of funding (as with BP).

#ReadABook on the radio 📡

www.spectorbooks.com/book/ten-cit...

Louder in Lagos Africa Is a Country Radio continues its season focused on African club culture. Our next stop is Lagos. Listen here and on Worldwide FM.

I’ll have to look for a digitized version. In the meantime africasacountry.com/2021/10/loud...

Have you read the Lagos chapter of the Ten Cities volume?