Category: news

Queer African Reader

Sokari Ekine, Hakima Abbas (Eds.)

As increasing homophobia and transphobia across Africa threatens to silence the voices of African Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex (LGBTI) people, the Queer African Reader brings together a collection of writings, analysis and artistic works that engage with the struggle for LGBTI liberation and inform sexual orientation and gender variance.

The book aims to engage a primarily African audience and focuses on intersectionality while including experiences from a variety of contexts including rural communities, from exile, from conflict and post-conflict situations as well as diverse religious and cultural contexts. Contributions from across the continent explore issues such as identity, tactics for activism, international solidarity, homophobia and global politics, intersections with the broader social justice movement in Africa, the feminist movement and LGBTI rights, religion and culture, reconciling the personal with the political.

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Anti-racism is a struggle from below

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Post date July 7, 2014
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by David Theo Goldberg

In the age of the post-racial – of colourblindness and post-apartheid, an Obama presidency and majority rule – racist expression continues to proliferate. How is it that citizens of modern states, sometimes as agents of the state themselves, so readily engage in racist expression and practice?

One response is this, inspired by Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the Eichmann trial: racisms constitute thoughtlessness in the Arendtian sense of failing to exercise (self-)reflective critical judgment.

Those expressing themselves in racist ways and engaging in racist acts lack critical and indeed self-critical imagination, refusing or failing to take account of the other as having equal standing; they are an ignorant or arrogant refusal to consider conditions beyond one’s own.

Racisms, it could be said, are narcissisms: nihilistic self-regard of especially extreme kinds.

There is, to follow Arendt’s line, a banality to much racism, the shocking ordinariness of its everyday occurrences and the ordinariness with which its culture of shock has come to be received, to the point of oversight, neglect, a shrug. The shocking quality is buried in the ordinary, everyday, unresisting acceptance of the reduction of people to data points in the schedule of instrumental operation.[…]

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Archives of the Non-Racial: A Mobile Workshop in South Africa

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Post date June 27, 2014
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Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory IX / The Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism
29 June – 11 July 2014

The Programme
The 2014 programme will span two intensive weeks of lectures, seminars, public events, exhibitions and performances. The idea behind the planning of this mobile Workshop is to travel to significant critical sites in the history of South Africa’s notorious racial project in order to open the question of the “non-racial” both in South Africa and in its manifestation in other parts of the world. Workshop participants will travel by bus from Johannesburg to Swaziland, Durban, Mandela’s grave at Qunu, Steve Biko’s Ginsberg, and conclude in Cape Town. At each site, the Workshop will convene conversations that explore the histories and legacies of racisms in these particular places, posing these histories in relation to broader conversations about the post-, non-, and anti-racisms across relational global contexts. Lectures, panel discussions and performances will draw on research from the African continent, China, Australia, the Middle East, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Euro-America, as well as on some of the oceans that connect them.

Speakers and Performers
The 2014 Session will feature a range of local and international speakers and performers. These include: Ackbar Abbas, Ruha Benjamin, Keith Breckenridge, Mwelela Cele, Sharad Chari, Angela Davis, Gina Dent, Philomena Essed, David Theo Goldberg, Siba Grovogui, Ghassan Hage, Salah Hassan, Isabel Hofmeyr, Premesh Lalu, Liu Sola, Achille Mbembe, Dilip Menon, Neo Muyanga, Sarah Nuttall, Deborah Thomas, Francoise Verges.

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14J. Acció el CIE al centre de Barcelona

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Post date June 18, 2014

En el marc de la setmana de lluita contra els Centres d’Internament d’Estrangers, les fronteres, les batudes racistes i vols de deportació a tot l’Estat Espanyol, la Campanya Tanquem els CIEs de Barcelona ha realitzat dues accions.

Al matí hem portat el CIE al centre de Barcelona dibuixant el plànol del CIE a la Plaça del Àngels (davant del MACBA). L’objectiu de “Portem el CIE al centre” ha estat fer visible allò invisible i donar a conèixer a la ciutadania altres cares de la marca “Barcelona”. Així, s’ha reiterat que el CIE de Barcelona és part de la ciutat i que, en sí mateix, vulnera els drets de les persones que hi són internades […]

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12J. Acció vols de la vergonya + Roda de premsa

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Post date June 13, 2014

En el marc de la setmana contra els CIEs, les fronteres, batudes i els vols de la vergonya, des de la Campanya pel Tancament dels CIEs de Barcelona hem ocupat una oficina de viatges Ecuador que forma part del Grup Globalia, situada al Carrer Balmes número 10 de Barcelona.

Aquesta acció vol assenyalar la complicitat existent entre la companyia Air Europa, part del grup Globalia, i l’Estat Espanyol en les deportacions de persones sense papers. Aquesta empresa es lucra a través de la pràctica sistemàtica de deportacions forçades denunciades per vulnerar els drets humans. Cal recordar, que Air Europa ha signat un conveni amb l’Estat Espanyol, per valor de 24.000€ en període 2013-2015 […]