The collection of over a hundred publications explores the various ways in which contemporary artists and designers utilize the magazine format as an experimental space for the presentation of artworks and text.

The works on view include an array of international titles, from community-building newspapers to image-only photography magazines to conceptual design projects.

Other featured publications include A Prior, Apartamento, Bidoun, Cabinet, Copenhagen Free University, Correspondencia, Le Dictateur, Fillip, Institute for Social Hypocricy, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, Journal of Radical Shimming, Knit Knit, Metronome, Point d’Ironie, Zug and many more.

February 20–May 14, 2012. Mezzanine, The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building, The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street  New York.

More here: www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1244

Friday 24 February, 19h00 till 22h00 at the Gugu s’Thebe Arts and Culture Centre, cnr Washington and Church Street, Langa. Free Entry

“There are three sides to every story. His. Mine. And the truth.”

-          Ade (Hakeem Kae-Kazim)

Man on Ground is a drama structured as a thriller to expose the complexities that inform the personal and public navigations of a place called home. Written and directed by Johannesburg-based filmmaker Akin Omotoso, Man on Ground follows the estranged relationship of expatriate Nigerian brothers, London based Ade (Hakeem Kae-Kazim) and South African based Femi (Fabian Adeoye Lojede). Ade, upon discovering Femi’s disappearance on a trip to South Africa, ventures to solve the mystery of his brother’s vanishing against the backdrop of escalating xenophobic violence.

Starring a stellar cast including Hakeem Kae-Kazim, Fana Mokoena, Fabian Adeoye Lojede, Makhaola Ndebele and Bubu Mazibuko, Man on Ground has featured at prestigious international film festivals such as the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and 8^th Dubai International Film Festival.

For the project three Cairo-based, conceptually diverse DIY initiatives (Zine El-Arab, TokTok, and Cairobserver) have set up temporary printing bureaus in Townhouse’s First Floor Gallery. Over the next three weeks, practitioners behind each of these uncensored, Arabic-language projects will be working on their publications in the gallery space, meeting with their collaborators, and discussing their initiatives with the general public.

The project also includes a reading room where visitors can continue these cross-disciplinary discussions over a cup of coffee, and consult a curated selection of publications, including Chimurenga.

Visit www.thetownhousegallery.com or their facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/events/320253274685235/ for more details.

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts

We caught up with Sharifa at the PASS Studios during a recent visit to Cape Town to talk about the book and its place in her broader projected exploring black utopia.

James Joyce once boasted that were Dublin raised to the ground, it could be rebuilt from scratch with Ulysses as the blueprint. Could the same be said for Harlem is Nowhere? What would a city-within-a-city built on your blueprint look like?

It would be a very idiosyncratic Harlem! Years ago when I was a teenager I did a course where they had us make maps of places, highlighting what drops out just based on personal experience of a place. I think of this book very much like that – a personal map of the places I went or that caught my eye. Many things are left out. I was always sure it wasn’t going to be an encyclopaedic book.

The title refers to Harlem’s multiple realities and histories, but also its mythical status – that imaginary Harlem that hovers over the city. What role does and can that myth play in informing current realities. 

Firstly it’s important to point out that the title is borrowed from Ralph Ellison – so I had him to contend with from the beginning… all of those writers! At first, I found myself at first bumping heads with them and their declarations about Harlem. In 1925 Alain Locke wrote in the The New Negro that Harlem is prophetic, that is had the same roll to play for black American that Dublin did for Ireland or Prague for the new Czechoslovakia. So there was this gauntlet thrown down at the beginning that it had this roll to play. It’s always enacted this self mythologizing.

In terms of how it works out today it’s most evident to me in different setting. On the one hand, going to political meetings and people saying, ‘what happens in Harlem matters everywhere’, which is true but it also overstates the case and doesn’t allow for the specificity of other places and their particular experiences. Harlem looms larger than everything and overshadows everything. The result is that dialogue with other places is closed down. Then there is this sense when you’re on the street and talking to people that Harlem always appears in quotes or block letters. So I found myself always trying to go behind that, to find a real entry point. It’s like trying to go behind the Hollywood sign. Sometimes there’s nothing there. My question is always what do you see when you’re not dealing with a place as a pronouncement.

How did you avoid getting weighed down, consumed by all that myth and history? With the weight of all the history how does one move forward toward new futures?

This is a question that’s been on my mind a lot here in Cape Town – reading, listening to music and sometimes I feel like everything that troubles us has already been accounted for and that we just haven’t managed to put it in motion. That requires an engagement with history. So, yes, I feel the weight. I feel it in the form of prose – which is a very heavy form for me right now. As a prose writer I sometimes felt like I had dragged a whole library on my back. My process was really an immersion – reading, spending time revisiting things I thought I knew already then synthesising it.  I knew from the beginning my challenge would be to make all these different kind of knowledge exist on the same plane – the things I was reading; things I remembered (both correctly and incorrectly); things someone told me in passing; things I picked up from the street. All these things needed to balance out. So that was one very deliberate strategy that I used.

Harlem has been a hotbed of creativity, dissent, innovation – in music, literature, politics, life! What is the relationship between place and creativity for you? What conditions are necessary for a place to become one of emergence?

 I live in New Orleans now and have for about two years now. Along with Harlem, it is, of course, one of the most iconic crucibles of black creativity. The one thing that jumps out for me as a person that’s passing through there, is that continuity is a conduit for creativity. Up until Katrina and the failure of the levees it was a place where many people stayed. The beginnings of jazz were there. There have been huge movements from New Orleans – to California, the rest of the country, the world. But all through that it’s remained a place where people have been rooted. People have a really strong feeling of a direct connection to what happens in that place. So something  that they do on a Sunday is related to something people did on a Sunday a hundred years ago.

But of course creativity can also be determined by flux – a sense of influx or dispersal. Harlem historically was a weird convergence of what was happening at that moment, which can be defined in so many ways – the end of the rural life; urbanisation; the begins of this industrial age; artistically, modernism; politically, nationalism… all these things happen at the same time. On top of that you have people coming from so many different places. Not just from the South but from the Caribbean and Africa, and of course black New Yorkers who had been there for many years.

The book is part of a larger exploration into black utopia – that includes Haiti and the Black Belt South. Utopia has always been a Western concept – from Plato’s Republic to Thomas More’s Utopia. It was one of the founding ideas behind colonialism. How does the idea of a black utopia function in relation to this history? What’s your understanding of black utopia?

For me it goes back to a question of how do you constitute a space that you haven’t chosen to be in. The question of black people in America is a question of building – where are you going to build, how are you going to live – literally, virtually, politically. Recently I’ve been reading Harold Cruse’s The Crisis Of The Negro Intellectual and he’s really great at identifying the blind spots of the black radical movements and moments. He looks at the 1920s as this lost moment when black political and creative culture got usurped by the integrationist mandate and then again in the 1960s, the vision of the nationalism that emerges and the pockets that were rejected and ejected from political and creative life during that period. It becomes almost a decision to yield the ground literally. So, the question is, how do we build? Who lives there? Who pays for it? In the Harlem I encountered today, those questions are all still relevant. Sure, you can declare Harlem as the Mecca, a cultural capital but it means nothing if the money is being controlled by other people. The consistency between where you end up and how you got there is crucial. The situation Harlem is in today as black place that is being like sold off by black people, though of course not exclusively, points to that contradiction. It’s a utopia that is nowhere, that is nothing.

So how do we move from this point? Is it possible to still be utopian?

The third book in the series focuses on the South and the founding of black towns both before the civil war and after the civil war. There are stories of people coming together – sometimes on the same land they had been enslaved on – in mutual protection with a great sense of hope about the possibilities of community. Sure, many of those places failed or don’t exist anymore but I’m interested in that beginning, which is that really lofty and space filled with a mission to live out something that has been promised. So in the next books I hope to trace that ground and make a stronger connection between that point and where we are now. I feel I circled or danced around it in the Harlem book but I want to be more direct about what the lesson from those places is; how they are relevant for us now.

I think black American thought has arrived at a really weird moment with writers of my own generation making really weird declarations about “post blackness”. It’s something I’m really trying to work out. It seems to me that these dispatches from this “post-something world” point to a lack of history, a lack of that continuity where what you do is directly connected to something in the past. So there is this sense of the gap, a rupture, a break that relates to the missed chances, the blind spots that Cruse talks about. My generation seems to be suffering from a claim that there is nothing left to fight for. I just don’t see that. Maybe I’m being a throw-back but I see lots to fight for. We are still living in such heavy times; black people in America are facing such heavy times. It’s such an old idea but that sense that we are all connected, that we share a history is imperative to care about the future.

Harlem, Haiti, the Black Belt South… why aren’t any African cities included in the project? Is it possible to explore black utopia without Africa? What role does Africa play in the project? How is it present?

For me it was about working within the limitation of history, living within the boundaries that were marked off. So Africa is completely present in the book and in other ways it isn’t. One of the things that dropped off my map of Harlem is West 116th Street which is called Little Senegal. It’s full of West Africans and immigrants most of them Muslim and French speaking. It wasn’t a part of my everyday life – I walked there, sure and I often ate there but the stories in book are all from my everyday life and it just never entered in that way. Rather it enters peripherally – people I saw, things I saw that I didn’t necessarily understand.

Ironically after I finished the book I took up a three month residency in Paris and after I returned I visited a store to buy this African incense that I fell in love with in Paris and I starting speaking to the shop owner in French and suddenly a door that was previously closed, because I didn’t know the language, opened up. So the book is also about my limitation. It’s about how someone slips into my life and I slip into there’s. I didn’t have an experience which is such an important part of contemporary Harlem. So Africa is there and it isn’t. It’s there in its absence – like a dare!

It’s impossible to think Harlem without thinking music. What role did music play in the book – in its content but also its rhythm, its sound?

 Music is a touchy issue because I didn’t write about music in the book and I wanted to. I’ve always rejected the narrative in black American culture and social life that music is the pinnacle. It always makes me very angry, people always saying things like, ‘the thing we should all be aspiring to is a John Coltrane solo.’ That always felt like a cop out for me. And an insult to me as a writer – that I shouldn’t even try, should just give up in advance because the only thing that articulates this thing is music. But now being here, with all these records, listening to all this music, I’ve started to wonder if maybe I’m wrong about all that….

You’ve been spending some time in Cape Town – a city that truly is “nowhere” – apart from Africa yet not really a part of Europe. A city composed of multiple cities-within-the-city. What has your experience of Kaapstad been?

 I’ve seen so little of it so it’s hard to say anything, but one thing that jumps out at me is that it’s a place where history is written on bodies. It’s a place where you always think about history because you’re continually wondering: how did you get here? What the hell are you doing here? Where do you come from? That important to me because I don’t write about race I write about history. But if you talk about history you have to talk about what happened and if you can talk about it maybe you’ll want to do something about it instead of just saying, oh, its a question of identity. That’s been on my mind a lot in this place.

Will we ever reach a point where Harlem is everywhere?

 I’ve always thought the implied inverse of the title is Harlem is Everywhere and certainly the contemporary question of gentrification – which is an over-used, not very useful word – but questions of displacement, of over-development, of poor people being pushed out of cities is everywhere! That’s why I always come back to the question of land, physical space not being negligible. Where you live is always going to be important. The things you do in a place – eating, sleeping, living, loving and the things that grow of that… it begins with a place.

Join us in Cape Town to launch long-time Chimurenga collaborator, Kwani? founding editor and celebrated writer, Binyavanga Wainaina’s groundbreaking new memoire, One Day I Will Write About This Place.

December 2 from 6.30pm

at the Slave Church on Long Street, Cape Town

Wainaina will read from his book followed by a discussion session with Centre for African Studies Director, Prof Harry Garuba.

“If words, in English, arranged on the page have the power to control my body in this world, this sound and language can close its folds, like a fan, and I will slide into its world, where things are arranged differently.”

Seven years in the making, spanning Wainaina’s middle-class upbringing in Kenya, his failed attempt to study in South Africa, a moving family reunion in Uganda, his travels around Kenya, music, soccer, food, politricks, beauty, tragedy, fragile ripeness, sexual fantasy, love and philosophy, One Day I Will Write About This Place has been released to widespread critical acclaim.

‘Binyavanga Wainaina is a singer and painter in words. He makes you smell, hear, touch, see, above all, feel the drama and vibrations of life below the brilliantly and concretely captured surface of things in Kenya and Africa. The memoir bursts with life and laughter and pathos in every line and paragraph.’ – Ngugi wa Thiong’o

‘Brilliant… Wainaina’s beautifully elastic sentences fizz and crackle, pounce on their meanings, stretch and snap back into place, and evoke not only the self-replenishing wonders of childhood but the more complex wonders that follow. An outstanding book, bursting with life and full of love.’ – Teju Cole, author of Open City

‘Fascinating memoirs are now appearing from a new generation of Africans, born after the independence struggles and cultural conflicts that defined their parents’ age … Wainaina’s book, which typifies the new trend, is politically and socially engaged – that is, it attempts to explain Kenya and Africa, but it does so without a knee-jerk resort to colonial woes, and this is very welcome …’ Helon Habila, Guardian

Binyavanga Wainaina is a Kenyan author, journalist and winner of the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing. He is the founding editor of Kwani?, a leading African literary magazine based in Kenya. He has written for The EastAfrican, National Geographic, The Sunday Times (South Africa), Granta, the New York Times and The Guardian (UK). Wainaina has taught at Union College and Williams College, and is currently the Director of the Chinua Achebe Center for African Literature and Languages at Bard College.

Harry Garuba is the Head of Department and Associate Professor in the Centre for African Studies. In addition to being an author and poet, he is a member of the editorial advisory board of the Heinemann African Writers Series and one of the editors of the newly established electronic journal Postcolonial Text. His recent publications have explored questions of mapping, space and subjectivity within a colonial and postcolonial context and issues of modernity and local agency, especially the nature and form of African inflections of the modern

The Chronic comprises of a 128-page multi-section broadsheet; the stand-alone 40 page Chronic Life Magazine; and the 96 page Chronic Book Review Magazine.

Get a copy:

• online via the Chimururenga Shop
• in South Africa through Chimurenga at select spaza shops in Cape Town and Jozi and bookshops countrywide;
• in West Africa through Cassava Republic Press;
• in East Africa through Kwani;
• in the USA and Europe through Idea Books.

Fore more on the Chimurenga Chronic and to view sample spreads & read excerpts, visit the Newsroom.

Chimurenga Magazine launches its new issue, the Chimurenga Chronic, a speculative newspaper set in May 2008, with a Chronic Library exhibition and a live music event in Johannesburg from 19-26 October 2011.

“The Forest and the Zoo” – a Blue Notes tribute concert on 21 October at the Drill Hall (14/15/16 Twist Street, Joubert Park, Johannesburg)

Under the direction of composer/trumpeter Marcus Wyatt, some of Johannesburg’s leading jazz musicians will explore Chimurenga Chronic themes such as history, exile and memory in their tribute to the freedom and prolific musical imagination of South African jazz legends, the Blue Notes on Friday, 21 October 2011, from 8pm. Chimurenga editor Ntone Edjabe and DJs Nok and Soul Diablo will be on the decks, selecting gems from the Blue Notes’ and Brotherhood of Breath’s discography and more. R20 at the gate.

The “Chronic Library” exhibition from 19-26 October at Goethe-Institut Gallery (119 Jan Smuts Ave, Parktown, Entrance on New Port Road).

The Chronic Library is an installation of posters, books, journals, music and films that trace the research and evolution of the Chimuenga Chronic. Presented as an interactive reading room, it provides background and context to the project by inviting visitors to create wide-ranging connections through diverse materials that both informed and respond to the newspaper. Journeying through time, the library features print materials alongside audio listening stations and screens for browsing the newspaper as well as online reading lists and resources.

For more information, visit the Chronic Newsroom.

It was February 19, 2011, shortly after midnight. In Karachi, at the edge of the desert where it never rains in this season, the heavens opened. Rain….”

Dominique Malaquais pays tribute to artist, friend, mentor, comrade Goddy Leye who recently passed away.

De l’art de vivre l’art

Dominique Malaquais

Chimurenga is honoured to receive the Prince Claus Fund’s 2011 Principal Award, and congratulates the 2011 laureates.  We thank the Prince Clause Fund for their recognition of our work over the past nine years, and are proud to join the list of previous winners.

Most of all, this award honours Chimurenga’s contributors and readers.

Congratulations Chimurenga People.