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Barbados Cultural Fact of the Day: Two nicknames for Barbados are “Bim” and “Little England.”
*I forgot to mention this, but I uploaded my BA Thesis, African Vibrations: The Percussive Approach in Hip Hop, to Academic.edu. Click on the link to take a look.
*Cultural Front’s “From Afrofuturism to Rap Genius: a timeline”
*NPR’s “Act Like You Know: Sun Ra”
*The State’s “High Priestess of Future Weird”
*M. Asli Dukan’s “Samuel R. Delany on Racism in SF” and Rosarium Publishing’s call for submissions for Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany.
*Art Net’s “The Yams, On the Whitney and White Supremacy:” The Yams Collective (HowDoYouSayYaminAfrican) interview where they talk about their collective, their film, Good Stock On The Dimension Floor, The Whitney Museum and confronting white-centered institutions.
*Oliver Hardt and Darius James’ film, The United States of Hoodoo is now on Hulu.
*Call for Submissions for Literary Orphans, a Chicago-based online literary magazine, “Black Thought” issue. “Named after the lead emcee of the Grammy Award-winning group The Roots, the “Black Thought” issue aims to capture the fluidity of African-American literature, as reflected by its creators.
This issue will publish literature from black people who identify as queer or transgender, or are stout atheists, or who deal daily with mental illness, or who love fantasy and science fiction and comic books, who struggle with their identities within the ‘black community.'”
*Jalada, a pan-africanist literary magazine, has a call for submissions for its anthology, Afrofuture. “Jalada seeks writing and visual art that is formally innovative, imaginatively daring, and centred on the genres of Afrofuturism and AfroSF. Writers are encouraged to deploy the tools and subvert the techniques of science fiction and speculative fiction. Writers might imagine (but should not be constrained by) African futures in the contexts of slavery, colonialism, liberation, race and ethnicity, imperialism, postcolonialism, globalisation, Empire, ecocritique, class struggle, and gender struggle.”
*The African American Studies and Research Center at Purdue University is calling for papers for its “Black to the Future: Black Culture Through Time and Space” symposium.
*The Guardian’s “Science fiction’s real-life war of the worlds:” “For many years, a very particular and very narrow set of authors has dominated SF. But battle for a broader fictional universe is under way.”
*Phenderson Djeli Clark on Media Diversified’s “The ‘N’ word through the ages: The madness of HP Lovecraft” : “I had come to believe that by now the racism of H.P. Lovecraft, the celebrated author of horror and fantasy, was a settled matter–like declaring Wrath of Khan the best film in the Star Trek franchise. Arguing against such a thing should be absurd. I certainly thought so after the matter was thrust into the spotlight in December 2011, when author Nnedi Okorafor won the esteemed World Fantasy Award–whose statuette is none other than H.P. Lovecraft’s disembodied head. Okorafor had been unaware of the depths of Lovecraft’s “issues,” until a friend sent her his 1912 poem, On the Creation of Niggers, where blacks are fashioned by the gods as ‘a beast . . . in semi-human figure.’ …
Yet many of Lovecraft’s modern-day fans seem unable, or perhaps unwilling, to deal with this ugly side of his life. A few years back I was on a forum where someone was discussing Lovecraft’s story The Rats in the Walls, where one of the characters is a cat called “Nigger Man.” It so happens that Lovecraft owned a “beloved” feline by the same name. Feeling the need to explain after dropping the N-bomb, the post made it clear that quite likely Lovecraft was just using some politically incorrect colloquialism “of his times,” and probably did not mean to demean anyone’s race. While acknowledging that Lovecraft had some “disturbing notions on race,” the post went on to state this was likely an unfortunate result of the author’s isolated upbringing.”
*NPR’s “Magic From The Margins In Long-Awaited ‘Long Hidden‘:” “As I was growing up, the fantasy worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis provided a way to escape a childhood I wasn’t quite sure I would survive. Myth is powerful stuff; it opened doorways to alternate realities that helped me see more clearly the twisted power lines that dictated my upbringing. But that was my childhood: the childhood of a white, middle class girl who could relate to middle class white hobbits and the Pevensie children and the icky evil they encountered (which, trust me, was very icky).”
*Google lacks diversity. Really?! I had no idea! I mean I would have never guessed at all even from the google images pages and searches!
*Shadow and Act’s “S&A’s Sergio Talks To Writer/Director Kevin Cooper Of The Powerful Short Film ‘The Painter‘”
http://vimeo.com/73383636%20w=680&h=400%20
*Art Begets Spirit Interviews United Vibrations:
*Vice’s Interview With Fhloston Paradigm (King Britt)
*Bitch Magazine’s “Sci-Fi YA Series Tankborn Imagines Caste, Class, and Skin Color in Dystopia”
*The Africa Report’s “Architecture: Africa in the Making:” Architect David Adjaye and his vision for African cities of the future.
*LeVar Burton had a successful Kickstarter campaign for the restart of Reading Rainbow, but did the raising of the money for it call into question who should fund a crowdfunding campaign?
*I saw this post on Black Art in America’s blog and the write gave me something to think about in terms of why certain art from black artist seems to gain more attraction than others in mainstream institutions. The writer centers on the work of Makode Linde and Kara Walker why the contemporary art world may favor their art more and treat their art like spectacle while also saying it is for a cause.
*Indiegogo campaign for Ligali-production Beauty Is, which is about confronting beauty ideals and the unhealthy and dangerous ways we try to fit into them.
*New Music:
-NPR’s first listen of Meshell N’degeocello’s Comet, Come to Me
-Bitch Magazine’s “BitchTapes: Gays in Space – A Stargayzer Festival Mixtape”
Sherese Francis: Futuristically Ancient 