Art is an essential part of life, whether we live it, consume it, or produce it. In the last decade or so, we have experienced the emergence of African and Afrodiasporic artists in different fields – music, visual arts, digital art, creative writing, performing arts, etc. And for most of us, the work of the artist is our gateway into their many different experiences, experiences we otherwise may have never been introduced to.
But what does it mean to be a creative or an artist?During the months of April, May, and June, we will explore what moves artists to create and express themselves in the ways that they do. We’ll use these conversations as an opportunity to grasp the challenges and/or benefits of being a creative in an age of digital media, and money driven businesses.
For a time during my adolescence, I considered conversion to Islam. The project of discovering myself almost mandated it. When my first cousins arrived from war-torn Liberia in the Fall of 1997, I was starting a new school, in a new world and perhaps I was clinging desperately to some foundational aspects of my being and enthusiastically proclaimed to my cousin that I wanted to study the Koran like he had. I recall peeling my eyes open sleepily at the crack of dawn, realizing my cousin had left the bottom bunk mattress we shared, snoozing as I watched my eldest cousin bend in prostration, wipe her face with both palms and open and close her hands repeatedly to the ceiling slowly catching the blessings showering her from above. Blessings that poured in through the dark morning air, penetrating our 20 floor housing building, and piercing the air molecules of our room.
My desire to convert to Islam was no doubt made more attractive by this intimate personal daily engagement I was privy to, which beat the Christianity my stepfather had decided to force feed us every Sunday morning. “We’re going to Church!” he would exclaim and the dread crept up even faster if the car wasn’t working (it often wasn’t) and church meant a 20 minute bus ride to a 40 minute train ride. Church, at all costs. In fact my mom’s excuses to not join us varied from wanting to have food ready for us when we returned from church (who could argue with that?), to declarations that she was “Muslim!” despite the folded up prayer mat that I had never seen her use.
In all the many aspects of my life I noticed a deep difference between the values and culture I find at home and the ones I find in school or work.
I was raised in a religious environment and most people I’ve known during my childhood have the same ideas and beliefs as my parents’, give or take. As I grew up, though, I started to realize that religion wasn’t a priority for many people and that most of them confuse religion with culture and think that they’re interchangeable.
Nowadays, most people I know are not religious. But, I noticed that they still swear by the Islamic beliefs and feel that it is necessary to follow certain aspects of the religion. Except when it contradicts their lifestyle.
About five months ago, I decided to take a leap of faith and relocate to the sweet sweet land of liberty, Liberia, West Africa. This opportunity and experience has been years in the making for me, and if it wasn’t one excuse it was another. So, I decided to embark on this journey because for me, I’ve always been a Liberian far away from home.While I was born in Brooklyn, my heritage in the motherland has never been taken for granted in my upbringing. At the age of four, the civil war in Liberia had begun and though far away, I remember being young enough to be perplexed but old enough to be afraid of what was ensuing in our homeland. I remember visiting family friends and the kids being ceremoniously ushered into a cousin’s bedroom to play while the adults sat in awe watching the rawest video footage from back home. I recall vaguely trying to sneak in to the living room during what I now know was video of a president’s brutal torture. I remember tearful renderings of friends & family members who had somehow escaped, speaking of things in this wonderland I couldn’t imagine. These stories coupled with my mom’s recollection of King Burger “y’all think y’all the only one with Fast Food options?”, or shopping on Waterside before going to visit her mother in the “countryside”. I’ve even had dreams riddled with anecdotes of her time on LU campus in Monrovia, the “country girl” that made it to college in the city.
I’d like to preface this review of the achievement, that is the film Moonlight, by briefly discussing Ghanaian photographer Eric Gyamfi’sSee Me, See You exhibition which I recently visited at the Nubuke Institute in Accra. It was an unforgettable experience with a power of transcendence which moved me, in a way that art never had before. Perhaps, the only other time I have felt such rapture was in reading Marie Howe’s The Gate; one of my favourite poems. The exhibition, which ended this week after an extended run, consisted of a collection of photographs which documented and projected queerness in Ghana by employing a muted and understated colour palette, enabling the characters to shine brightly. Their smiles are all the more visible, their intimacies more tender, their discomfort all too palpable, and their fates discomfortingly uncertain. This left the viewer to reflect on their own place in an unbalanced world. Moonlight strikes a note that is not dissimilar to what I have just described in relation to See Me, See You. I was just as drawn in – sitting cross legged a few inches from my TV – and again deeply moved.
Moonlight is the perfect film for our time. It consists of a very singular and tightly woven narrative split into three parts in which three actors, namely Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders and Trevante Rhodes each play the part of Chiron across various stages of his life, doing so with a strong sense of cohesiveness and seamless grace. This is especially curious when you find that the actors were not allowed to see each other’s performances. The structure allows for the film to track Chiron’s maturation as he grows up from a boy who is starkly made aware of his blackness and queerness from very early on in his life. This awareness doesn’t come to him as a result of a romanticised journey of self discovery, nor does it find him progressively. Whether it’s in relation to being black or queer, he is constantly told who he is by others, much in the same way a freight train might tell the stranger lost on its tracks to move out of the way. In fact, by the end of the film, it is still hard to tell if he knows who he truly is, or rather, if he knows what being the person he is means, since he has seemingly never had the opportunity to really reflect on this for himself.
I do believe in a higher power that guides me and ensures my well-being; a power that, through trials and tribulations, gives me a picture of who I can be. I often pray to God, a power that instils in me the ability to manifest love and be a decent person to others and for others. I, however, often wonder if this God is the same one I read about in the Bible.
The Bible has prescriptions that condemn people who do not follow the law and the precepts set forth. I have questions and no answers. As a social being, and as a person who wants the fulfillment of everyone’s idea of self, how do I negotiate a faith that tells me to renounce people I care about because of who they are? As a woman, how do I go about knowing that God created me in his image and equal to man, yet by the law of God the manifestation of my periodic biological flow of blood makes me unclean?
Without bias, it is safe to say that Northern Nigeria is significantly behind (socio-economically and educationally) in comparison to Southern Nigeria. To analyze how this difference in development between the two regions came about, one must start at the beginning, before British colonial imperialism. Northern Nigeria, due to it’s proximity with North Africa where Islam had spread from the middle east, first encountered Islam in the early 11th century. By the 16th century, Islam had spread from the north, into the middle belt. Prior to this, the predominant culture in northern Nigeria was the Nok culture. According to Wikipedia,
“The Nok culture appeared in Northern Nigeria around 1000 BC and vanished under unknown circumstances around 300 AD in the region of West Africa. Nok’s social system is thought to have been highly advanced. The Nok culture is considered to be the earliest sub-Saharan producer of life-sized Terracotta.
The refinement of this culture is attested to by the image of a Nok dignitaryat the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The dignitary is portrayed wearing a “crooked baton”. The dignitary is also portrayed sitting with flared nostrils, and an open mouth suggesting performance.”
This goes to show that religion has always been a dominant factor within African cultures. Earlier cultures had also been shaped based on the faiths they held on to at the time. According to O.U Kalu, on the question of the core aspect of culture,
“Religion dominates the roots of the culture areas of Nigeria… Little or no distinction existed between the profane and the sacred dimensions of life. Thus, all activities and instruments of governance and survival were clothed in religious ritual, language, and symbolism.”
North Nigerians are guided principally by religion. Marriage, sickness, morality, and social responsibilities are all enforced by religion. A person’s physical existence is strongly interwoven with religious doctrines, be it Islam, Christianity, or Traditional African religions.
The difference between a religion and a traditional belief may be an army. The Sawa are a group of coastal peoples in Cameroon. Across the border in Nigeria there are forty million Yoruba, many of who practice the Ifa religion. Ifa is definitely a big, ancient and well studied religion, that has spread across the world. It is almost unknown. Unlike the Yoruba Kingdoms, the Sawa are small groups organised into networks of clans and associations. Cameroon has no large or militarised pre-colonial religions. There are no large empires comparable to the ancient Yoruba in the area the Sawa occupy.
Religions with armies have greatly altered the relationship of Sawa to indigenous divinity. First the Islamic, and then the European colonial projects violently removed Sawa religions from their central organizing position in society. The attitude of religious colonists was that natives could not conceive of religion, a spiritual god, or moral laws. This belief by colonists and the colonised created a break in African cultural confidence and knowledge which has yet to be repaired. Everything related to the non-material world of Africans was destroyed or identified with evil. Sawa people are still trying to bring together their religious past and their current identity. While religion is one of the first narratives that cultures create, this article is hard to write because so little is known about pre-colonial Sawa religions. It’s not so clear that the Sawa would call their beliefs, religions.
In his work, Jacob Olupona, professor of African Religious Traditions and African and African American Studies, discusses the role of religion, culture, and society and how these structures permeate our every day lives. He argues in several publications that African indigenous religions have fallen out of favour to Christianity and Islam, with a fellowship of 40% against 10%.
Although it is difficult to gauge a definite number, presently, there are people moving from the religions of the Book - that is Christianity and Islam - toward indigenous religions. It appears that this movement and conversion of faith stems from a dissatisfaction and lacking of personal agency with religions like Christianity, and how it manifests itself within society.
This quarter we will discuss how culture informs our faith and how religion influences us on a personal level and as a larger society. More broadly, we’ll explore what our faiths mean to us and how can religion can be negotiated in a space where cultural and societal responsibilities intertwine.
In Ras Michael Brown’s African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry Brown wants to talk about the history of the cultural and spiritual practices of African descendants in the American south. To do this, he traces discusses the transport of central, western, and west-central African captives to South Carolina in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,finally, lightly touching on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Brown explores how these African peoples brought, maintained, and transmitted their understandings of spiritual relationships between the physical land of the living and the spiritual land of the dead, and from there how the notions of the African simbi spirits translated through a particular region of South Carolina.
In Kelly Oliver’s The Colonization of Psychic Space, she constructs and argues for a new theory of subjectivity and individuation—one predicated on a radical forgiveness born of interrelationality and reconciliation between self and culture. Oliver argues that we have neglected to fully explore exactly how sublimation functions in the creation of the self,saying that oppression leads to a unique form of alienation which never fully allows the oppressed to learn to sublimate—to translate their bodily impulses into articulated modes of communication—and so they cannot become a full individual, only ever struggling against their place in society, never fully reconciling with it.
These works are very different, so obviously, to achieve their goals, Brown and Oliver lean on distinct tools,methodologies, and sources. Brown focuses on the techniques of religious studies as he examines a religious history: historiography, anthropology, sociology, and linguistic and narrative analysis. He explores the written records and first person accounts of enslaved peoples and their captors, as well as the contextualizing historical documents of Black liberation theorists who were contemporary to the time frame he discusses. Oliver’s project is one of social psychology, and she explores it through the lenses of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis,social construction theory, Hegelian dialectic, and the works of Franz Fanon. She is looking to build psycho-social analysis that takes both the social and the individual into account, fundamentally asking the question “How do we belong to the social as singular?”
I fully expect this to be the one and only post I ever do about Amber Rose.
Occasionally, Amber Rose surfaces in pop-culture as a trending topic. I don’t look into her often, but when I do usually I understand where she’s coming from, if not agree with the point she’s trying to make.
Recently, Kanye West called her into a twitter-fight between himself and Wiz Khalifa–and she shut it down entirely. And as amusing as that is and no matter how much I identify with the things she said and does – there’s one thing about her that bothers me.
Yet she clearly appears to have features heavily associated with blackness: full lips, an olive complexion (relatively common in black people), a thick, very curvy body, and a large round butt. The icing on the cake: she has an African mom. She still says, “I’m not black.”
Many of the descriptors she uses for herself are nationalities that do not define her race. It’s as if stating countries which a possess white populations and/or have substantial European influence is a free pass on blackness – As if black people didn’t live in Portugal, Scotland, Ireland or Cape Verde. As if her mom didn’t wasn’t African.
But rest assured: her mother is African and she is brown-skinned.
Cape Verde, where Amber Rose’s mother is from, is an island off the coast of Western Africa. It’s an African Country. Africans have been there since the Portuguese trafficked African (black) slaves from the African continent in 1456.
And because of the heavy European influence and racial mixing in Cape Verde, they’re considered a mixed people – And According to Amber Rose, she views herself as Creole:
“With my family, they feel like they’re more superior or better than an African American because we’re Creole and we have culture and that’s something I battle with most of my life.” (source)
Amber Rose was born and raised in America. Her mother is a brown-skinned (black) African woman, she has a white father (Irish and Italian descent), and because she has light skin, she has people defending her as non-black.
In the United States (and many other places), any black ancestry easily qualifies a person as black – especially if that person is not white passing and especially if that person has an African mother. Amber Rose is not white passing. Her mother is African. She openly participates in black culture. And still, she hesitates to even use the descriptor “black” in reference to herself. In every interview I’ve found and every quote, she is quick to claim her white ancestry but does not even utter “black” or “African.”
She denies it.
I think it’s wild because one of my best friends @shakotancisco is Cape Verdean. My mans is PROUD of his heritage. How can Amber Rose be of such beautiful heritage and hate herself so much to deny her own blackness?
This is one of the reasons why I can’t ride with Amber Rose. I know a lot of my followers may take issue with this, but aside from her apparent love for her child, nearly everything else she does seems to be nothing more than her making herself feel comfortable about her own delusions and justifying her behavior in the process. To me, it seems like her anti slut-shaming and sexual liberation crusade is less about standing up for (primarily) women (but men too), is a matter of cleaning up her own public perception.
Amber Rose makes herself the “other,” or, “the exception.” It’s as if she’s saying, “I’m not really black, I’m just a perfect mixture of races,” and this further supports the fetishization of mixed women. You mentioned that her reality was that she may not see love first and that using men for her own personal gain was just what she had to do. I can see that and it makes sense. However, in her case, it seems like she revels in it, almost maliciously, until someone calls her on it and she reverts back to the anti slut-shaming argument.
Though problematic, I enjoy her clapbacks and I think she’s hilarious in her pettiness. I liked (past tense) that she was providing a voice to those who own their sexuality. I liked (also past tense) that she was making a point to create her own lane and challenge the notion that she was a ‘creation’ of Kanye West. And I really liked (yup, past tense again) that she handled herself through the nonsense and media slander with grace and dignity.
But then, she goes on to deny her blackness and it immediately makes me distrustful of her. Without her clapbacks, is she much different than Raven or Stacey Dash? Is she even worth taking seriously if she denies who she really is? Is her carefully crafted persona nothing more than armor that she wears to protect her own insecurities about her identity? I just don’t buy it.
As a non-sex worker–I do not critique sex work which includes dancing, stripping, partial and full services.
She has sold/possibly still sells sexual fantasy/services/sexual appeal as a living – and she’s gotten a lot of money for it. If she revels in it, she has a right to. If someone is rewarded with money or items for sex acts/sexual performance/sex appeal, then that becomes a justified connection. In this entire side of the house, it’s incredibly important to note that if she does have a particularly toxic view of using men for money, it did not happen in a vacuum.
“black” is literally a descriptor used to oppress people so it makes sense that some people would distance themselves from it–not to mention that this would have the additional trial of facing anti-blackness in everywhere they went.
You seem to be particularly upset by Amber Roses’s statement about using seductive skills on her significant others for cash, and that’s understandable.
Is it upsetting? Yes. Is it manipulative to seduce a man into financial gain? Also yes. Is it morally unsettling? Sure. Is that the nature of her work as a dancer? As it turns out, yes. Have her former lovers complained about using them? None that I can find.
Hello everyone! This past week our team dyed the Adire and yarns we have been preparing over the last month. All the hours of tying and stitching culminated with us dyeing using indigo and Guinea Corn leaves (Oka Baba). We were blessed with perfect weather and some beautifully dyed Items that will be incorporated into the final installation. The pieces incorporated dyeing techniques from all over west Africa including “Adire Alabere” (stitch resist) techniques from Nigeria. “Gara” kola nut and Indigo over dyeing techniques from Gambia and Sierra Leone and over dyed tie and dye handwoven textiles drawn from Dyula and Baule textiles from the Ivory coast. Stay tuned as our project continues to develop!
Elizabeth A Wilson’s Affect and Artificial Intelligence traces the history and development of the field of artificial intelligence (AI) in the West, from the 1950’s to the 1990’s and early 2000’s to argue that the key thing missing from all attempts to develop machine minds is a recognition of the role that affect plays in social and individual development. She directly engages many of the creators of the field of AI within their own lived historical context and uses Bruno Latour, Freudian Psychoanalysis, Alan Turning’s AI and computational theory, gender studies,cybernetics, Silvan Tomkins’ affect theory, and tools from STS to make her point. Using historical examples of embodied robots and programs, as well as some key instances in which social interactions caused rifts in the field,Wilson argues that crucial among all missing affects is shame, which functions from the social to the individual, and vice versa.
J.Lorand Matory’s The Fetish Revisited looks at a particular section of the history of European-Atlantic and Afro-Atlantic conceptual engagement, namely the place where Afro-Atlantic religious and spiritual practices were taken up and repackaged by white German men. Matory demonstrates that Marx and Freud took the notion of the Fetish and repurposed its meaning and intent, further arguing that this is a product of the both of the positionality of both of these men in their historical and social contexts. Both Marx and Freud, Matory says, Jewish men of potentially-indeterminate ethnicity who could have been read as “mulatto,” and whose work was designed to place them in the good graces of the white supremacist, or at least dominantly hierarchical power structure in which they lived.
Matory combines historiography,anthropology, ethnography, oral history, critical engagement Marxist and Freudian theory and, religious studies, and personal memoir to show that the Fetish is mutually a constituting category, one rendered out of the intersection of individuals, groups, places, needs, and objects. Further, he argues, by trying to use the fetish to mark out a category of “primitive savagery,” both Freud and Marx actually succeeded in making fetishes of their own theoretical frameworks, both in the original sense, and their own pejorative senses.
In Ras Michael Brown’s African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry Brown wants to talk about the history of the cultural and spiritual practices of African descendants in the American south. To do this, he traces discusses the transport of central, western, and west-central African captives to South Carolina in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,finally, lightly touching on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Brown explores how these African peoples brought, maintained, and transmitted their understandings of spiritual relationships between the physical land of the living and the spiritual land of the dead, and from there how the notions of the African simbi spirits translated through a particular region of South Carolina.
In Kelly Oliver’s The Colonization of Psychic Space, she constructs and argues for a new theory of subjectivity and individuation—one predicated on a radical forgiveness born of interrelationality and reconciliation between self and culture. Oliver argues that we have neglected to fully explore exactly how sublimation functions in the creation of the self,saying that oppression leads to a unique form of alienation which never fully allows the oppressed to learn to sublimate—to translate their bodily impulses into articulated modes of communication—and so they cannot become a full individual, only ever struggling against their place in society, never fully reconciling with it.
These works are very different, so obviously, to achieve their goals, Brown and Oliver lean on distinct tools,methodologies, and sources. Brown focuses on the techniques of religious studies as he examines a religious history: historiography, anthropology, sociology, and linguistic and narrative analysis. He explores the written records and first person accounts of enslaved peoples and their captors, as well as the contextualizing historical documents of Black liberation theorists who were contemporary to the time frame he discusses. Oliver’s project is one of social psychology, and she explores it through the lenses of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis,social construction theory, Hegelian dialectic, and the works of Franz Fanon. She is looking to build psycho-social analysis that takes both the social and the individual into account, fundamentally asking the question “How do we belong to the social as singular?”
(Cite as: Williams, Damien P. “SFF and STS: Teaching Science, Technology, and Society via Pop Culture,” talk given at the 2019 Conference for the Society for the Social Studies of Science, September 2019)
Thank you, everybody, for being here. I’m going to stand a bit far back from this mic and project, I’m also probably going to pace a little bit. So if you can’t hear me, just let me know. This mic has ridiculouslygood pickup, so I don’t think that’ll be a problem.
So the conversation that we’re going to be having today is titled as “SFF and STS: Teaching Science, Technology, and Society via Pop Culture.”
I’m using the term “SFF” to stand for “science fiction and fantasy,” but we’re going to be looking at pop culture more broadly, because ultimately, though science fiction and fantasy have some of the most obvious entrees into discussions of STS and how making doing culture, society can influence technology and the history of fictional worlds can help students understand the worlds that they’re currently living in, pop Culture more generally, is going to tie into the things that students are going to care about in a way that I think is going to be kind of pertinent to what we’re going to be talking about today.
So why we are doing this: Why are we teaching it with science fiction and fantasy? Why does this matter? I’ve been teaching off and on for 13 years, I’ve been teaching philosophy, I’ve been teaching religious studies, I’ve been teaching Science, Technology and Society. And I’ve been coming to understand as I’ve gone through my teaching process that not only do I like pop culture, my students do? Because they’re people and they’re embedded in culture. So that’s kind of shocking, I guess.
But what I’ve found is that one of the things that makes students care the absolute most about the things that you’re teaching them, especially when something can be as dry as logic, or can be as perhaps nebulous or unclear at first, I say engineering cultures, is that if you give them something to latch on to something that they are already from with, they will be more interested in it. If you can show to them at the outset, “hey, you’ve already been doing this, you’ve already been thinking about this, you’ve already encountered this, they will feel less reticent to engage with it.”
