The Ontario Black History Society (OBHS) is soliciting papers for its upcoming publication both in honour of the UN International Year for People of African Descent and in commemoration of one of the earliest Black institutions in Canada - the Black Church. The book committee welcomes submissions for AME, BME, First Baptist: African-Canadians and the Church (working title) on any aspect of African Diasporic and African Canadian church history, however special preference will be given to submissions directly related to the suggested title of the proposed book.
The OBHS advocated for the historic designation of the African Methodist Episcopal Church then located on Soho Street in downtown Toronto. Since the congregation had moved to another location, the site was vacant and of interest to a developer. The OBHS advocated to have this site preserved and potentially reanimated as a museum/cultural centre. However, despite OBHS submissions to Neighbourhood Committee, OMB and Toronto City Council, it was decided that the church site would be demolished.
One outcome was the provision of a small donation by the developer, Wittington, to support the preservation of the church through the creation of a written document, a book, about the people of the AME and of the church as it is now as well as the former long-term site of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Toronto that was demolished. About the same time, the British Methodist Episcopal Church on Shaw Street was destroyed by arson. Hence the focus on the AME, BME and the other existing central Toronto Black church, First Baptist.
Proposals with a 200 word limit should be submitted to admin@blackhistorysociety.ca by September 30th, 2011 along with full contact information. Proposals from academics as well as church historians and community historians are welcome. Successful applicants will be notified before October 28, 2011 and their full submission would then be required by December 31, 2011. The book will be published in 2012.
Also, should you have archival materials related to this topic including minute books, hymnals, music, photographs, commemorative booklets or correspondence, please consider making this resource available to the OBHS for inclusion in our actual and virtual repositories.
$20,000 Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa
- Fourth Edition (Africa-wide)
Deadline: 20 November 2011
The Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa was established by The Lumina Foundation in 2005. It was conceived as a very prestigious prize in honour of Africa’s first Nobel Laureate in literature to celebrate excellence in all its cerebral grace, its liberating qualities, the honour and recognition it brings to a myriad of people, of diverse cultures and languages. This prize honours people who have used their talents well enough to affect others positively. It honours Africa’s great writers and causes their works to be appreciated. It celebrates excellent writing, promotes scholarship and makes books available and affordable by subsidizing the publication of books in the top list of the judges.
This is a pan African prize, viewed also as Africa’s NOBEL prize. It unifies Africans, celebrates Africa’s great minds, brings home Africa’s best intellectuals as judges, entertainers, great communicators and leaders in their own rights.
It was designed to be The African prize with a lot of artistic features symbolising the Soyinka personae, as a distinguished intellectual, a conscientious and sensitive writer, a lover of the arts and humanities and a stickler for excellence, good governance, equity and justice.
Rules:
Any excellently written book by an African in any genre may qualify for this award.
The book to be submitted must have been published within two years preceding the year of the prize being sought for but not during the year of the prize being sought for.
Ten copies of each eligible book should be submitted by the Publisher. Books can only be submitted by Publishers.
Only published works are eligible and can only be submitted in its published form.
For a book to be eligible, it must be written either in English or French.
The publisher must not submit more than three titles. This could be from either the same author or different authors.
The Publisher may submit either paperback or hard cover along with author's photo and resume.
Only African authors living in any part of the world are eligible for this prize. By African authors, we mean authors from African countries. We are adopting for the purpose of this prize, the geographical description of African countries and their boundaries. In other words, only citizens of African countries are considered eligible for this prize.
Books published anywhere in the world may qualify for this award provided that they are written by Africans.
Books that have won other awards are eligible for this prize.
Books that have been short listed for other awards may be submitted for this prize.
The Foundation began to receive entries for the 2012 edition of Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa on July 2011. The deadline for submission is November 20, 2011. All entries must be received at The Lumina secretariat, before November 20, 2011.
Entries must be accompanied with completed entry form, the author’s photwo (Portrait), author’s biodata and the Publisher’s resume
All entries should be sent to The Lumina Foundation, Blue House. No 19 Unilag Road, Akoka, Yaba Lagos, Nigeria.
The short listed books will be reproduced by The Lumina Foundation to make them more affordable and available.
First Prize: The First Place-Winner receives $1,000 cash, promotion in Writer’s Digest, $100 worth of Writer’s Digest Books and the 2012 Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market.
Second Prize: The Second Place-Winner receives $500 cash, promotion in Writer’s Digest, $100 worth of Writer’s Digest Books and the 2012 Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market.
Honorable Mention: Honorable Mentions will receive promotion in Writer’s Digest and the 2012 Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market.
Entry Deadline: September 15, 2011
How to Enter
Submit using our online entry form by clicking here (Recommended)
WD Thriller Competition 4700 East Galbraith Road Cincinnati, OH 45236
Entry Fee: All entries are $20.00. You may pay with a check or money order, Visa, Mastercard or American Express when you enter online or via regular mail.
Following the premiere of his new film The Nine Muses, director John Akomfrah, a founder member of the Black Audio Film Collective, talks to Daniel Trilling about the sound and music in his films.
Throughout his career, the director John Akomfrah has not only questioned the kind of stories we tell, but the way they are told. Since his earliest work with the Black Audio Film Collective, which he founded in 1982, Akomfrah has explored radical new forms of film-making in order to introduce voices and perspectives - notably those of black and Asian Britons - that have been shut out of official narratives.
The Nine Muses, which premiered at the London Film Festival this month (a shorter version, titled Mnemosyne, has been on display in art galleries throughout the year), is Akomfrah’s take on the story of mass migration in post-war Britain. Arising from a commission by the Made in England arts project, which gave Akomfrah unfettered access to the BBC’s television, sound and film archives, the film mixes footage of immigrant life in the West Midlands with haunting shots of a frozen Alaskan landscape. Just as remarkable, however, is its soundtrack, on which a series of actors read snatches of poetry, novels and philosophy, mingled with industrial noise, songs, and the synth-based compositions of Akomfrah’s collaborator Trevor Mathison.
Sound – music; effects; the tone and range of the narrative voice – has always been crucial to Akomfrah’s approach, perhaps more so than it is to many other directors. Our conversation focused on ‘The Nine Muses’, but also discussed are his films Handsworth Songs (1986), which applied the techniques of multiple narrative voices and an immersive soundtrack to an account of race riots in the West Midlands; and The Last Angel of History (1995), a documentary about the concept of Afrofuturism in music that explored in particular the influence of Lee “Scratch” Perry, George Clinton and Sun Ra.
Daniel Trilling: At what point in the film-making process do you start to think about the soundtrack?
John Akomfrah: One of the things I’ve tried to do in my work is to reconfigure the traditional relationship between a narrative piece, whether it’s documentary or fiction, and the sound. The traditional relationship is that you put your thing together and then at some point you score it. The assumption always is that the sound component either confirms or establishes something that’s already in place.
I’ve tried to seek a more dialogue-driven relationship between sound and image. The impulse for that comes from two distinct but interrelated sources. One is an abiding passion for the improvisatory gesture in jazz; the second is non-western musical forms, particularly Indian classical music. I’ve tried to see what happens if you bring those two together in some way; what kind of film making aesthetic that might suggest.
DT: It seems that you allow sound to set the mood, rhythm and pace of your narratives in a much more pervasive way than many conventional films do.
JA: In some ways The Nine Muses is the most successful of the attempts at trying to force this marriage. It starts with the recognition that the distinction between sound and music is of very little use for what we’re trying to do.
DT: That allows a dialogue not just between sound and image, but between different elements of the soundtrack itself. In The Nine Muses, the Leontyne Price spiritual ‘Motherless Child’, which marks an emotional peak in the narrative, fades off into echoes and grinding, metallic noise.
JA: I’m fond of trying to force apparently dissonant sounds to cohabit the same narrative space as non-dissonant sounds. Leontyne Price is singing about being motherless, but marrying her with post-Eno, post-Stockhausen type sounds that suggest another universe of openness and open possibilities, suddenly something really strange starts to happen which can’t be anticipated in advance of trying it.
DT: Your films often group together elements that have arisen from this improvisatory process in sequences that one could almost describe as “songs”. Indeed, that word featured in the title of your debut film, Handsworth Songs.
JA: The musical worlds of these films take the form they do also partly because I’ve worked for so long with [composer] Trevor Mathison. We’re both very interested in noise, for want of a better word: what Trevor at one point called the “post-soul noise”. These are sounds that take their cue from pre-existing black musics, be it dub or funk, but they’ve been defamiliarised, put through a sonic box that renders them strange and unusual.
DT: The Last Angel of History is a film about dub, funk, jazz and techno, yet the soundtrack features Mathison’s compositions, rather than any of the music discussed.
JA: The Last Angel of History is about these Black Atlantic sonic worlds that are palpably present in black cultures. They co-exist with the established, legitimate world, but function more like ghosts. It’s a bit like how dub functions with reggae: I am here, I may never quite be the thing everyone accepts as the real, but I am nevertheless essential to how the thing works.
I loved working on that film because, yes, it’s about dub and it’s about studio-based jazz and it’s about funk, but actually there are none of those tracks in the film! Last Angel proved conclusively to both me and Trevor that you could actually use your own sounds to bring [these worlds] into being.
DT: So you take the idea of creating alternate worlds from sound, but use sounds that tie in with a different set of experiences – for example, Britain’s history of immigration in The Nine Muses.
JA: I’ve always tried not to name too precisely what one could call the legitimate sound for any particular thing. One use of Indian music in The Nine Muses, for instance, is by two of my favourite Indian musicians, the Gundecha brothers, who sing dhrupad [a courtly form of vocal music based on chanting]. They would be as surprised as anyone that their music [in my film] signals the coming of migration, because it’s from a completely different universe. However the feel of dhrupad always seemed to me to be one that can suggest movement, so it worked in that way without necessarily being anthropologically precise.
I like music or sounds that suggest counterpoints to innocence. The fact that you’re black or Asian or whatever isn’t in itself enough. It’s trying to find sounds that might interrogate the implications of being those things. That’s really what I’ve been trying to do.
DT: You’ve written about your desire to create “new ruins” for people to wander in.
JA: I’ve been obsessed for a long time with something I read in Derek Walcott’s Omeros, where he talks about diasporic lives being characterised by an absence of ruins. There are no monuments that even as ruins attest to your existence, of your passing through a space. This then means that the intangibles, be they sound or words, become necessary building blocks. Lives that are not legitimised in the official monument can then be given a certain kind of legitimacy.
That’s very important in The Nine Muses. The very construction of it is about trying to say something of the migrant narrative. It’s not a completely foreign thing brought over and it’s not just from Britain, it’s an amalgam of these two things. And I wanted the soundtrack, broadly put, to mirror that. By that I mean not simply the “music” but also the words; the cadences and rhythm of words and exactly what sorts of words are seen to coexist with the music.
DT: That brings us on to the voices themselves. There seems to be something quite evocative in having patrician English male voices narrate the film.
JA: What seemed to me to be absolutely crucial when we started this film was to first banish that voice that you’re talking about – what people call the “voice of God” – and then bring it back again. Every single bit of archive used in the film would have [originally been narrated in] that voice, but the voice would have said something very different. It would have said: I know everything and everything I’m going to tell you is the absolute truth. Anything that isn’t what I’ve said is not true.
But if you could get that voice to recite poetry, for instance, which is a highly subjective reading of a situation, then that voice starts to resonate differently. It also seems to me that once you let the voice back in, be it male or female, then weirdly you start to see the range of it. Because as they [the various narrators] come in to speak partial truths you suddenly start to see the texture of each voice and what each voice does.
DT: You’re making quite a bold statement by quoting so many canonical authors in The Nine Muses: Milton, Dante, Beckett, James Joyce and Shakespeare, to name a few.
JA: Yes. It’s an argument with myself but also with a certain kind of position that people like me have traditionally been seen to champion, which is the deconstruction and the dethroning of the great patriarchal authors of yore. Again I would say that it’s all about trying to get plurality of voices.
When you actually go and read Paradise Lost again, for example, you realise that the whole piece is about this tension between being and becoming. Now, I am as interested in that question as Milton [was]. That seems to me to be not just a migrant narrative but the narrative of all lives. You start off in one place and the question is what will you become and what are the processes by which you go on to become this thing?
DT: So is this where sound comes into your films? Does it set up a space where questions like these can be asked – by a plurality of voices?
JA: Absolutely. And there’s no attempt to try and force a unity in the voices. This is only impossible for people who have not heard new music, or not heard Ornette Coleman. Ornette Coleman’s harmolodics said OK, we will agree to start here, and at that point you can fuck off where you want to go, alright? What’s important is what everyone’s making of this.
So the use of these voices in this way is tied to a certain conceptual understanding of how free jazz improvisational techniques have been working in music, certainly for the last 90 years. With The Nine Muses the idea was that you can apply that not just to the sound but to words.
I really like afro-futurist elements in steampunk design. I wanted to post some inspiration / design by artists Yinka Shonibare, Thandiswa Mazwai, handmade taureg metalwork, Ghanian DIY machinery, old african royalty, old photos and more!
**edit - sorry about the picture overload, fixed the cut :)
**2nd edit - good conversation in the comments. I also want to link back to here and here for good essays on steampunk, history, and race/culture.
by Yinka Shonibare:
Thandiswa Mazwai is a musician, but i think her looks are kinda afropunk / steampunkish :
check out their site, features an awesome guy who makes steel alligators out of junk using homemade welding machines which were also made from scratch.
Im also hugely impressed with metalwork done by taureg nomads:
taureg locks:
taureg 'swiss army knife' :
tools:
The Kings of Africa photographed by Daniel Laine : ( Between the years of 1988 and 1991, French photographer Daniel Laine spent about 12 months on the African continent tracking down and photographing figures of royalty, and leaders of kingdoms.)
Emporer Selassie, say what you want about the man, but he had fun style:
The designer Phyllis Taylor subverts Ghana's traditional prints and helps transform its dressmaking culture in the process
"Fabrics in Ghana can be very specific to the occasion," explains Phyllis Taylor, the designer behind the London-based clothing line, Sika. She sources traditional batik and wax print fabrics from her family's home country in West Africa and uses them to create ready-to-wear pieces in thoroughly Western silhouettes.
"We respect the fabric and wear it to places that are important. There's one style of fabric that the Ghanaian ladies would wear to church. And then another would be for weddings or funerals," she says. "But what I was doing, taking the prints and making them work for any occasion, was unheard of. In Ghana, they'd make funny comments about it," she adds.
But for every "tsk" and side eye Phyllis received in cities like Kumasi and Oda, she'd get even more looks of need-it-now lust from shoppers in London and New York who love her feminine, easy-to-wear dresses in '50s and '60s-reminiscent shapes.
Phyllis, a former music industry executive, started Sika four years ago out of a desire to export the bold sensibility of Ghana's traditional dress to the western world. "When I was younger, I'd go there every summer and see all the dressmakers around. I always thought that it was a shame that you could only see that in Ghana," she says.
So she went to the London College of Fashion, where she studied pattern cutting and dress making, and then back to Ghana where she hired local seamstresses to manufacture her work. As her business has grown (Sika has expanded into accessories and home interiors), theirs has too. "I wanted to give these dressmakers a chance to sew on a larger scale. The women I work with have been able to move into bigger buildings, buy new machines and hire more people," she says.
Phyllis hopes that Africa could one day be known within the fashion industry for its factories. "Ghana doesn't have the same history of dressmaking that Italy or India does but they're now learning new techniques and beginning to see that manufacturing traffic could be diverted to Africa. I don't know if we're ready for that just yet. But it's certainly possible."
I love sunsets. There is something about that limited time in the day when the blue sky turns orange and occasional hues of purple and scarlet emerge into something that only be described as awesome. These are a few of my attempts to capture the awesomeness of that golden hour. I keep updating these every time I do a new one. Kindly enjoy these and look at your world differently. We live in a beautiful country people. Appreciate that.
+++++++++++++++++++++++
Who is Mutua?
Mutua Matheka is an artist bred in Machakos and fine tuned by Nairobi, who draws, sketches, molds stuff, destroys stuff, occasionally creates stuff…. He has been drawing and sketching since his mother placed crayons in his hands at just 3 years of age. His art has since then morphed from Drawing, Illustration, Graphic art, Architectural Visualization to Photography, his latest obsession. When he is not being artistic, he loves to get his adrenaline pounding by riding motorbikes, mountain climbing, and (if he got a chance) para troop and ski. He is a graduate Architect masquerading as an Interior designer who moonlights as a photographer. He studied architecture in Jomo Kenyatta University in Kenya and is currently employed as an Interior designer at Image 360 designs.
He credits his creativity to The Creator, and his mom who put crayons in his hands when he was just 3 years old. Happily married to a beautiful woman who also doubles as a personal model.
His long term plan is to ride all around rural Kenya teaching kids art and taking photos to document and showcase his beautiful land, Kenya.
You can connect with him through any of the avenues listed below;
Since we chatted with him during last night’s podcast, I thought I’d reintroduce (or introduce those who haven’t yet seen) Seith Mann’s impressive 20-minute short film called 5 Deep Breaths - his NYU MFA thesis project in 2002, which helped launch Mann’s career, directing several notable television shows – notably episodes of HBO’s hit, The Wire.
Some of the short film’s accolades: premiered at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival; it was one of 4 American shorts selected to screen at the Cinefondation Competition at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival; It won the Best Narrative Short Film award at the 2003 Los Angeles IFP/West Film Festival.Filmmaker magazine named Mann one of their 25 new faces of independent film in 2003. And the IFP gave Mann the Gordon Parks Awards for Emerging African-American Filmmakers; and there’s a lot more.
Television producer Robert F. Colesberry saw Five Deep Breaths, and introduced the other producers of The Wire to it. The producers approached Mann and asked him to shadow their directors during production of the third season in 2004. And 2 years later, in 2006, Mann joined the directing crew of The Wire’s fourth season, and later went onto helm episodes of Grey’s Anatomy,Cold Case, Entourage, Friday Night Lights, Heroes, and many more shows.
Mann has been working on a feature film script titledCome Sunday, which would be his debut. The script won two development awards (the Emerging Narrative Screenwriting Award and the Gordon Parks Award for Screenwriting) from the IFP in 2004. Most recently, Seith was hired to adapt and direct the graphic novel MISS: Better Living Through Crime, which, as he told us, is still in the works, with a last draft of the script shipped off to the production company, which will be followed by the search for talent and financing. Spike Lee is executive producing that by the way.
So, watch 5 Deep Breaths below; it’s split up into 2 parts (we’ve featured it on the site twice in the last 2 years, so it shouldn’t be foreign to some of you. You’ll also recognize at least one of the faces in this (above), who went on to an acting career of his own.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=3){kind=small}
