Tag Archives: Africa

Southpaw launch–a new literary journal

South Paw Order Form

 

SOUTHPAW # 1

You are invited to the launch of a new literary journal
Southpaw: writing from the global south

To be launched by
Professor Stephen Knight
Wednesday 14th December
Arena Project Space
2 Kerr Street Fitzroy
6.30 pm

Refreshments

All welcome

Southpaw # 1 features writing from and about Australia, Africa, China, Philippines, South America and the Pacific around the theme of displacement. It includes essays on the idea of South, power shifts in East Arnhem Land, change and development in Philippines, UFOS in South America and displacement in Colombia fiction and creative non-fiction from Angola, Australia, China, New Zealand, South Africa and Suriname; reviews of Tamil pulp fiction, Indigenous graphic novels and documentaries from the Pacific. There’s an Ainu fable re-told, a radio play and poetry from many places in the global South, much of it in new translation.

Further information: 9416 0232 or 0418 304 500.

Fractals in Global Africa

Call For Papers: Critical Interventions Special Issue on Fractals in Global Africa – Spring 2012

Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art and History invites contributions for a special issue on Fractals in Global African Art to be published in Spring 2012.

As an arena for rethinking African arts and exploring the nature and value of African art/cultural knowledge, *Critical Interventions* is interested in how the recent work on fractal structures in African arts and culture can be extended, discussed, contested, and theorized in domains such as aesthetics, politics, philosophy and economics, as well as applied to practical matters such as education and design.

We are therefore interested in receiving proposals for substantial articles on all areas in which global African creativity–painting, sculpture, architecture, dance, film, and other cultural productions–intersects with fractals, networks, complexity, self-organization, and other nonlinear models. Locations could include any African-influenced culture around the globe as well as well as continental Africa.

Possible topics could include any of the following in relation to Africa or the African Diaspora:

  • Fractals in art
  • Fractals in design and education
  • Scaling and recursive patterns in the arts
  • Fractal routes/roots
  • Visual metaphors of branching (e.g. the Baobab, the arabesque)
  • Scaling or self-organization in traditional or contemporary architecture
  • Fractal social networks and the arts
  • Cycles within cycles in expressive media

We also welcome significant work by artists who work with fractals in classical formats or new media. We invite proposals to be submitted by February 28, 2011. The deadline for the final version of the paper is July 31, 2011. Articles should be based on original research, which has not been published before. Proposals should be no more than 500 words. Articles may be up to 7,500 words (not inclusive of the bibliography) and contain up to ten images. All rights for reproduction of images must be cleared in advance and submitted along with the article.

Proposals of no more than 500 words (or queries) should be sent to Audrey Bennett, Guest Co-Editor (bennett@rpi.edu) Associate Professor of Graphics Department of Language, Literature, and Communication School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 110 8th Street Troy, NY 12180-3590

Critical Interventions, a peer-reviewed journal, provides a forum for advanced research and writing on African and African Diaspora identities and cultural practices in the age of globalization.

Australia’s Re-engagement with Africa

The University of Sydney International Forum 

Australia’s Re-engagement with Africa

Friday, 19 March 2010, 9.30am – 12.30pm McLaurin Hall, Quadrangle

The University of Sydney is Australia’s first University, founded in 1850.The International Forum series brings together leaders and thinkers from around the world to present their views on strategic international issues and the way in which these issues may impact on Australia and the globe.

The next International Forum to be held on Friday, 19 March will focus on “Australia’s Re-engagement with Africa”.

The Hon Mr Stephen Smith will be one of keynote speakers at the International Forum.  This Forum will give the Foreign Minister and opportunity to discuss the Australian Government’s re-engagement initiatives in Africa.  A senior African diplomat will follow Mr Smith as the second keynote speaker.

An expert panel discussion including: The Hon Dr. Geoff Gallop, H.E. Mrs. Marie Rousetty (Dean of the Africa High Commissioners Group), an Australia Africa Business Council Representative and an African Government official will follow the two keynote speakers.  The audience will include prominent persons from government, business and academia.

We invite you to attend the International Forum on Friday March 19, 2010 at 9.30am in MacLaurin Hall, Main Quadrangle University of Sydney. Registration will be open from 9.00am. On conclusion of the Forum at 12:30pm lunch will be served in the Hall. Information on the location of the venue is included on the registration form.

To register for the International Forum please complete the attached form and return it via email: international@sydney.edu.au by Friday 5th March 2010 or via fax 02 9036 6047 As there are limited places for this important event and seats are reserved upon receipt of registration, please notify us as soon as possible if you are able to attend.

A Southern way of showing art?

There’s long been a hunger in Western art galleries for the creativity of the so-called ‘margins’. Whether its Picasso gazing at Dan African masks in the Trocadero or Jean-Hubert Martin curating outsider artists for Magiciens de la Terre, there has been fascination for the seeming more unconstrained, primitive creativity that emerges in distant continents like Africa.

Yet while the gaze of Western art extends well beyond its borders, the business of art itself seems very much confined to the metropolitan centres. There is an assumption for any culture to realise its potential in art that it will be manifested in spaces like the Venice Biennial, Tate Modern and the many museums of contemporary art throughout the transatlantic.

What if a community in that other world decided to host its own art event? Rather than spend millions setting up a satellite biennale, jetting in the art world, what if they sold tickets for a virtual presence? The outside audience would enable the event by their purchase, and in return obtain restricted information about the kind of world that emerges.

The Chilean architect Claudio Torres, who has been working in the Nairobi ghetto of Mathare, has developed a project with the locals to host a competition for a painted mural on a rented ghetto wall. You can see him explain the project here:

 

More than that, tickets are still available. They are limited, so book soon.

African Journal of History and Culture

The African Journal of History and Culture (AJHC) publishes high-quality solicited and unsolicited articles, in all areas of the subject. All articles published in (AJHC) will be peer-reviewed. The following types of papers are considered for publication:

  • Original articles in basic and applied research.
  • Critical reviews, surveys, opinions, commentaries and essays.

Our objective is to inform authors of the decision on their manuscript(s) within four weeks of submission. Following acceptance, a paper will normally be published in the next issue.

Instruction for authors and other details are available on our website www.academicjournals.org/AJHC. Prospective authors should send their manuscript(s) to African Journal of History and Culture (AJHC)

Open Access

One key request of researchers across the world is unrestricted access to research publications. AJHC is fully committed Open Access Initiative by providing free access to all articles (both abstract and full PDF text) as soon as they are published. We ask you to support this initiative by publishing your papers in this journal.

Invitation to Review

AJHC is seeking for qualified reviewers as members of the review board team. AJHC serves as a great resource for researchers and students across the globe. We ask you to support this initiative by joining our reviewer’s team. If you are interested in serving as a reviewer, kindly send us your resume to AJHC@acadjourn.org

Maghrebi Intellectual: Thinking Jacques Derrida as African Philosopher

The Transforming Cultures Research Centre is hosting a Public Lecture with Prof. Grant Farred (Cornell University)

Maghrebi Intellectual: Thinking Jacques Derrida as African Philosopher
Thursday, 23rd July, 6:00-8:00, UTS Building 2, Lecture room 4.11

Lecture Abstract

It was not "the Nazis, but Vichy France," Jacques Derrida insists in "Monolingualism and the Other," that disenfranchised him. This is the voice of the "young" Jacques Derrida, articulating his relationship, from north Africa, to Europe (and European fascism). Derrida’s relationship, or, more properly speaking, his thinking himself back into the Maghreb, that region from which his family came and where he grew up, to Africa can only, it seems, be thought philosophically. In relation to thought, to the thought of other philosophers, to his own too long delayed understanding of himself as something other than a French philosopher. This is the work that Derrida undertakes in "Monolingualism:" it is his engagement with Khatebi, another Maghrebian philosopher. Here is Derrida, trying to think the Other, but in the process locating himself, for the first time at length, in the place of violent origin: war time Algeria: that place where fascism, Jewish disenfranchisement, the question of language (why is it that Derrida does not, he asks, know Arabic, why is it the language denied him? This, the language of Khatebi.) and the act of writing the Self back into something that is not only forgotten but, it would appear, hardly known.

Biography

Professor Grant Farred is from Cornell University and before that from the Literature Program at Duke University, where he taught courses in literature and cultural studies. Prof. Farred earned his PhD. from Princeton University in 1997, and an MA from Columbia University in 1990 after a BA Honours from University of the Western Cape, in Cape Town, South Africa in 1988. He also taught at Williams College and Michigan University. He has served as General Editor of the prestigious journal of critical cultural studies, South Atlantic Quarterly (SAQ) since 2002.

He has published in a range of areas, including postcolonial theory, race, formation of intellectuals, sport’s theory, and cultural studies and literary studies.  His books include Midfielder’s Moment: Coloured Literature and Culture in Contemporary South Africa (Westview Press, 1999), What’s My Name? Black Vernacular Intellectuals (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), Phantom Calls: Race and the Globalization of the NBA (2006), and his most recent Long Distance Love: A Passion for Football, (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, published 2008). He is completing a fourth book manuscript entitled, Bodies in Motion, Bodies at Rest (forthcoming in from University of Minnesota Press, dedicated to thinking of the philosophy of athletic movement.) Prof. Farred also edited a volume entitled Rethinking CLR James (London: Blackwell Publishers, 1996) a collection of essays on the Caribbean intellectual written by major scholars in the field of history, literary criticism and cultural studies. He edited a special issue of SAQ (2004) entitled After the Thrill Is Gone: A Decade of Post-Apartheid South Africa, a serious appraisal of South African democracy, its failure and its successes, in the post-apartheid era. Prof. Farred joined the Africana Center in fall 2007.

Please RSVP to Lindi.Todd@uts.edu.au