afrodiaspores:

Laura R. Gadson, ”Reception At Ibo Landing,” ca. 2011, a quilt shown in Mermaids and Merwomen in Black Folklore: A Fiber Arts Exhibition, 2012. Filmmaker and author Julie Dash told bell hooks,

The Ibo Landing myth – there are two myths and one reality…

Ibo captives, African captives of the Ibo [ethnic group, also spelled “Igbo”], when they were brought to the New World, they refused to live in slavery. There are accounts of them having walked into the water, and then on top of the water all the way back to Africa, you know, rather than live in slavery in chains. There are also myths of them having flown from the water, flown all the way back to Africa. And then there is the story – the truth or the myth – of them walking into the water and drowning themselves in front of the captors.

I was able, in my research [for “Daughters of the Dust”], to read some of the accounts from the sailors who were on the ship when supposedly it happened, and a lot of the shipmates, the sailors or other crew members, they had nervous breakdowns watching this. Watching the Ibo men and women and children in shackles, walking into the water and holding themselves under the water until they in fact drowned.

And then interestingly enough, in my research, I found that almost every Sea Island has a little inlet, or a little area where the people say, “This is Ibo Landing. This is where it happened. This is where this thing really happened.” And so, why is it that on every little island – and there are so many places – people say, “This is actually Ibo Landing”? It’s because that message is so strong, so powerful, so sustaining to the tradition of resistance, by any means possible, that every Gullah community embraces this myth. So I learned that myth is very important in the struggle to maintain a sense of self and to move forward into the future. 

(via poc-creators)

Much like Robert Huber’s self-indulgent missive on Philadelphia’s non-gentrified, predominantly black areas, the tours around the Bronx are a glaring example of ‘othering’, based on class and/or race, without any nuance for the structural reasons why people in the Bronx struggle and the ways they overcome their circumstances, no useful historical blurbs about the neighborhood, or sans any consideration for its community… but overtly more obnoxious and crude. 

Coffee Rhetoric: Ghetto Express: How ‘Real Bronx Tours’ Exploited a NYC Borough for Amusement

malesoulmakeup:

Michael Douglas and Matt Damon for Behind the Candelabra directed by Steven Soderbergh.

Homage to Liberace

(via neirenelafemme)

(Source: lostinurbanism)

(Source: lostinurbanism)

ghanailoveyou:

Kodwo Eshun is a British-Ghanaian writer, Afro-futurist theorist and film-maker. Eshun’s writing deals with cyberculture, science fiction and music and how they intersect with the African diaspora. Eshun’s book More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction was published in 1998, written a style that makes extensive use of neologism, re-appropriated jargon and compound words. The book explores the intersection of black music and science fiction from an afrofuturist viewpoint. In that book, Kodwo Eshun devised a unique page-numbering system, beginning in negative numbers (e.g.-01[-017]). In 2002, Eshun also co-founded The Otolith Group, an artist collective, with Anjalika Sagar.

Photo by Jan Sprij.

(via poc-creators)

thesmithian:

Set amidst the Nigerian crime scene in Woolwich (S.E. London) during the early noughties—the young Wale (who recently arrived in the UK from Lagos) is enticed into a life of ’419’ crime…Wale teams up with an old friend…and his ‘colleagues,’ and the fraudulent crew set about…a mission to achieve…wealth, gain notoriety and enjoy women…however they soon…realise some harsh truths about each another.

more.