Mos Def x Robert Glasper –

Dilla tribute

LIVE in Ann Arbor (2008)

By DJRahdu

What better way to transition from LIVE audio week to Dilla tribute week and get y’all ready for Dilla Day 2010 than this Mos Def and Robert Glasper led tribute to J Dilla in Ann Arbor. Enjoy!

Tracklist
01. Black Radio
02. Fantastic
03. The $
04. Interlude
05. E=MC2
06. Jam
07. Ms. Fat Booty
08. The Look of Love
09. Players
10. Bass Solo
11. Jam
12. Interlude
13. Paint The World
14. Interlude
15. Stakes Is High
16. Fall In Love

Mos Def x Roberet Glasper – Dilla tribute LIVE in Ann Arbor (2008) ( Download)

Terra Foundation for American Art
International Essay Prize

Click here for a complete list of prize winners.

The Terra Foundation for American Art International Essay Prize recognizes excellent scholarship by a non-U.S. scholar in the field of historical American art (circa 1500–1980). The winning manuscript should advance understanding of American art and demonstrate new findings and original perspectives. It will be translated and published in American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum's scholarly journal, which will also cover the cost of image rights and reproductions, and the winner will receive a $500 award. This prize is supported by funding from the Terra Foundation for American Art.

The aim of the award is to stimulate and actively support non-U.S. scholars working on American art, foster international exchange of new ideas and create a broad, culturally comparative dialogue on American art. To be eligible, essays should focus on historical American painting, sculpture, prints, drawings, decorative arts, photography or visual culture. Preference will be given to studies that address American art within a cross-cultural context as well as new ways of thinking about American art. Manuscripts previously published in a foreign language are eligible if released within the last two years (please state the date and venue of the previous publication). For scholars from English-language countries, only unpublished manuscripts will be considered. Authors of eligible essays are invited to submit their own work for consideration. We urge scholars who know of eligible articles written by others to inform those authors of the prize.

The length of the essay (including endnotes) shall not exceed 8,500 words with approximately twelve to fourteen illustrations. The text of the essay should be submitted by e-mail as a Word file, accompanied by a PDF file containing all of the illustrations. A brief curriculum vitae should be included. Manuscripts submitted in foreign languages should also be accompanied by a detailed abstract in English. The submissions must be sent to TerraEssayPrize@si.edu by January 15, 2012.

For more information on American Art, please consult americanart.si.edu/research/journal. For details on the Terra Foundation for American Art, please visit terraamericanart.org.

Accepting Submissions:

The Caribbean Writer

 

Submission Guidelines

 

The Caribbean Writer is an international, referred, literary journal with a Caribbean focus. Issues unique to the Caribbean should be central in the work, or the work should reflect a Caribbean heritage, experience, or perspective.

 

Submit poems, short stories, personal essays, and one-act plays. Maximum length (for short stories and personal essays) is 3500 words or 10 pages. Only previously unpublished work will be accepted. (If previously self-published, give details.)

 

Now accepting submissions for Volume 26, to be published in 2012.

Deadline: October 15, 2011. 

THEME: Nature & Ecology 

This 26^th anniversary issue of The Caribbean Writer will be dedicated to the environment: nature and ecology.  As we move into the 21^st century we have to be mindful of our environment, how we care for it, what kinds of expansions (developments) we allow to take place, how do we preserve and maintain its pristine beaches, lush mountains and diverse, extraordinary bird/insect and animal life.

The Caribbean Writer seeks works that celebrate as well as explore our relationship to nature, how tourism and cruise ships impact our environment, the role nature plays in our lives, the names of our trees and flowers, the rich fauna, etc.

TCW will also celebrate women writers and welcome interviews, essays, personal narratives on Sylvia Wynter, Olive Senior, Paule Marshall, Claire Harris, Lorna Goodison, Nancy Morejon, Velma Pollard, Erna Bordber, and Zee Edgell.

Follow this procedure for submissions: List name, address, and title of submission on a separate sheet. Title only on submission. All submissions should be on a separate sheet.  Include brief biographical information and mention previous publications and Caribbean connection, if any. Type (double-spaced) all manuscripts.

All submissions are eligible for these prizes:

 

The Daily News Prize for best poetry ($300)

The Canute A. Brodhurst Prize for best short fiction ($400)

The David Hough Literary Prize to a Caribbean author ($500)

The Marguerite Cobb McKay Prize to a Virgin Island author ($200)

The Charlotte & Isidor Paiewonsky Prize for first-time publication ($250)

 

Book Reviews - Persons interested in reviewing books should contact the editor, indicating their areas of expertise. Include sample reviews if possible.

Snail mail submissions to address below or email submissions to submit@thecaribbeanwriter.org as attached Word or RTF files.

 

Submissions can also be made via “Submissions” page at www.thecaribbeanwriter.org

 

The Caribbean Writer

University of the Virgin Islands

RR 1, Box 10,000

Kingshill, St. Croix

U.S. Virgin Islands 00850-9781

 

Phone: 340-692-4152

Fax: 340-692-4026

Email: info@thecaribbeanwriter.org

Website: www.thecaribbeanwriter.org

 

 

Spectacle Publishing Media Group is offering a $100.00 prize in our inaugural publication fiction contest. All writers qualify! Experienced authors and new talent! We’re seeking fiction or creative non-fiction tales about “life changing events” for the better or for the worse. The collection is entitled “On The Brink…”

• 2,500-5,000 words
• character driven stories
• all genres

This contest continues until the 15^th of August. There is NO submission fee. That goes against everything we believe in.
Send your stories with a brief introduction to let us know if it’s a light or dark story to Submissions@spectaclepmg.com. Please be aware that by submitting your stories to SPMG you are granting consent for those materials to be published. Click here for more information about publishing with SPMG.

Afri-love on Etsy

- portrait edition

An overdue addition to the Etsy series – finds of all things Afri-love on the online community and marketplace. 

Top – Tuareg and Southern Nigerian Matryoshka art prints by AmyPerrotti; second row – magnets from Gypsydancers; third row – cards by Studio Flower Power; second last row –  and cut coin pendant by petsalad; bottom row – knitting bag craft apron by KOALACaddie.

July 16, 2011

West Africa:

Politics of Chocolate

 

Over at the Dublin Review of Books, David Ralph's penetrating review of former Reuters West Africa correspondent Órla Ryan's Bean To Bar - West Africa and the Politics of Chocolate.

Ryan, among other things, explains the cocoa roots of the recent political siege in Cote d'Ivoire. But we found two excerpts that double as commentary for 2 recent videos about cocoa posted online.

Ryan explains how West Africa is barely mentioned when you take the tour of the Cadbury museum in Bournville, England, even though two thirds of the cocoa in the company's chocolates come from West Africa:

Every day thousands of Britons and international visitors arrive to visit the small town where, [the Cadbury World, a themed museum] tour explains, in the late 1870s the Cadbury brothers began experimenting with strange, small brown beans in their shop’s tea rooms.... The story of chocolate told here is a pleasing one. But there is one glaring omission. The cocoa beans packed into the familiar brands within easy reach in every Spar shop and supermarket aisle do not come from South American jungles. More than two-thirds of global cocoa production comes from West Africa, with Ghana and Ivory Coast the world’s two biggest producers. And yet this corner of the world gets scarcely a mention from Cadbury – a company whose entire bean supply now comes almost exclusively from the two West African cocoa-producing nations.

Above, a German educational film shot in 1947 showing Ghanaian boatmen ferrying cargoes of cocoa out to sea and loading them unto a Dutch ship off the Holland West Afrika Lijn (H/T: Michael Rogge). Below, cue to 5:36 of the PBS report broadcast back in June on the economic future of Ghana. It mentions the inequality in cocoa trade with the West and one solution in the guise of Ghanaian cocoa co-ops like Kuapa selling to Fairtrade companies...

Ryan on the other hand argues that such Fairtrade narratives hide the far more complex cocoa reality on the ground facing the Kuapa co-operative:

Ryan is not satisfied with the simple story told by the celebrity backers. Visiting farmers on the ground, she discovered a muddier reality, as she arrived in cocoa villages at the height of the selling season in mid-September. She was surprised to find that, despite the premium paid by Kuapa, farmers sold beans to other buyers – buyers who did not explicitly invest in their communities. So why, asked Ryan, would farmers choose to sell to such buyers? And the
answer, it seems, is a complex one. “Several factors influence the farmers’ choice of buyer,” Ryan observes. “He may be indebted to one particular buyer and be obliged to give him his beans. He may choose to sell his cocoa to two or three buyers, spreading the risk that one may default on payment. His choice of buyer may also depend on who its agent is. He may be a relative or a friend. He may trust one more than another, the decision can be a personal as much as a financial one.” Besides, cash is king: like other buyers, Kuapa experiences cash flow problems, and may not always have ready cash to pay farmers for beans during the selling season. So whoever turns up with cash on the day will usually secure the beans. And in the rush to secure a share of the harvest every September, it can be difficult for Kuapa to have its voice heard at market. In one small village alone, Ryan met twenty-five buyers all competing for farmers’ cocoa. She concludes: “It is little wonder that, for all of Kuapa’s efforts, I met farmers who said they didn’t see much difference between it and other buyers.” But Fairtrade companies like Divine gloss over the nuanced trading games between farmers and buyers in the bush. To try and explain all this would, as Ryan observes, confuse the consumer message. As long as consumers in the West remain happy to pay the premium on ethically traded goods, then Fairtrade companies will continue to airbrush the complex reality of life for cocoa farmers in remote Ghanaian villages. “It seems clear that, whatever Chris Martin says, it will not make that big a difference to the farmer which bar of chocolate [the consumer] picks up.”

School's Out

July 26, 2011 

By Nathan Frandino

Inside the walls of Liceo de Aplicación, one of Santiago’s most esteemed all-boys high schools, the students stand guard. Chairs are piled ten feet high, legs sticking out in all directions. Desks hang from atop a 15-foot-tall black iron fence. Multi-colored posters denouncing Chile’s education system line the halls. Groups of uniformed teenagers in grey pants and black shoes patrol the front doors, preventing access by any non-students. Not even newly appointed Education Minister Felipe Bulnes or President Sebastián Piñera would be allowed to enter this school.

“We took over the school and we are in a peaceful toma,” said Freddy Fuentes, a junior at Liceo de Aplicación and the spokesperson for the student group Coordinadora Nacional de Estudiantes Secundarios (CONES). “We know that we can achieve a change, and we’re going to insist that the politicians listen to us.”

Liceo de Aplicación is “en toma”—taken over by its students, and has been since June 7.

For more than two months, thousands of Chilean students have taken to the streets with tomas, strikes, marches, collective staged suicides, and even kissing marathons to demand sweeping education reform. Demonstrations are popping up at a scale unseen since the end of authoritarian rule in 1990.

The students are demanding equal access to quality education; greater state support in terms of resources; and an end to the country’s municipalización system, which stipulates that Ministry of Education funding be distributed to municipalities before going to any municipal schools. Students say the only way to satisfy their demands is to alter Chile’s 1980 Constitution.

All across this Andean nation, high school students have been organizing for change; organizers estimate that a few early protests drew as many as 15,000 people. Late last month, a march in Santiago attracted an estimated 200,000.

To pay for the tomas, students have taken to the streets to ask for donations at public transportation and school entrances. Oscar Lavos, a 16-year-old junior at Liceo de Aplicación, collects donations to support the ongoing toma. The money goes to food, blankets, and other bed supplies and materials to create posters and distribute to the public.

When Chile’s dictator General Augusto Pinochet began statewide decentralization and opened Chile’s market to privatization in the 1980s, schools were not exempted. Pinochet allowed profit-driven private schools to be opened with state funds. He also created the now-controversial municipalización system, which disburses funds based on the number of students that attend a school and their attendance records. As a result, schools in rural or low-income areas—where many students abandon education or cannot attend regularly in order to work—have historically struggled to compete for funding with schools in urban areas such as Liceo de Aplicación, which is considered among the best public schools in the country.

“The poor administration of the municipality, the poor management of money, the poor management in general of the high schools makes it so education cannot be carried out as it should,” said Fuentes, the student leader. Due to this mismanagement, CONES is asking that the funding system return to the way it was before Pinochet, allowing funds to come directly from the Ministry of Education.

In the current system, the municipalities use the money to pay staff, operating, and administration costs, but with the Ministry allocating funds directly to the schools, principals would have more control of resources—resources that could pay for new technology in classrooms and help develop better curriculum programming, among other things.

Students—from within both secondary and higher education—have taken creative approaches to keeping the movement fresh. Groups have staged “mass suicides” on three separate occasions in cities across the country to symbolize the death of public education. They’ve made parody music videos and performances of songs like Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and “Summer Nights” from the movie Grease.

The tomas have gone on the longest: at Liceo de Aplicación, students have held the school for over seven weeks. During the day, they hold assemblies to vote on whether to continue the protest; discuss the movement’s progress; and plan meals, security, and sleeping arrangements.

Meanwhile, parents and professors have also joined student protesters. Parents fill in for the lunch staff, cooking meals for the students while professors serve as advisers. Some also offer tutoring while official classes are suspended.

Maritza Valdés, a philosophy teacher, said that students communicate with professors and students at other schools to coordinate the movement. She called the discussions a “proactive approach that everyone can learn from.”

“We professors have been in this toma since it began,” Valdés said. “We were in class when we all began reflecting about the problems in education. When the students discovered the big problem was the Constitution, we knew we had to support them.”

Despite this support, the government has not sat down with CONES to discuss reforms. Former Education Minister Joaquín Lavín and President Piñera have only met with the Council of Rectors (a group of 25 public university presidents) and the student leaders of the university-student federations. Those negotiations led Piñera to create a $4 billion education fund—an important achievement—but only for universities.

Furthermore, Matías Reeves, social director of Santiago-based advocacy group Educación 2020, said the high school students’ demand for constitutional reform is almost impossible to be met.

“We have a democratic system with a Parliament and Congress where they make the laws and regulate the country,” said Reeves. “But today it’s a Parliament that is completely separated, divided into two groups and some minorities, so constitutional reform is quite difficult.”

According to Reeves, the only way protests will stop is if the government listens to the students and directly reforms the education system without changing the constitution.

“The government should be able to negotiate,” Reeves said. “What they should do is propose a systemic education plan—a more global plan for the long term. As long as that doesn’t happen, the demonstrations are going to continue.”

*****

Nathan Frandino, a student at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism in New York, is currently a multimedia reporter for The Santiago Times.

[Photo courtesy of Flickr user francisco_osorio]

July 25, 2011

Donors’ Pledges to

Reconstruct Haiti

Come up Empty

 Penelope Chester

 

Back in March 2010, when the devastating earthquake in Haiti was still making headline news, UN member states pledged over $9 billion for Haiti’s reconstruction – including $5.3 billion for 2010-2011.

A couple of news outlets reported over the weekend that Haiti Reconstruction Fund had received only $352 million in promised funds from donors, of which $335 million had been transferred to the Interim Reconstruction Commission. Of that $335 million, $237 million has been disbursed for 14 reconstruction initiatives. In an operating environment defined by capacity constraint, with a government that struggles to establish its legitimacy, it can already be considered a success that nearly a quarter of a billion dollars has been disbursed.

That said, let’s focus on the funding side – what happened between March 2010 and the grandiloquent statements about not leaving Haiti behind, and the reality of meager disbursements? There is no mechanism – other than self-imposed ones – to ensure that donors fulfill their pledges. I raised this possibility last year in a post called “Haiti: A Donor Darling Today, But What About Tomorrow?“.

Since the earthquake in Haiti in January 2010, crisis after crisis has captured the world’s attention: the Arab Spring, a new war in Libya, the current famine in East Africa. Domestic politics have taken center stage in many places, including the United States, while Haiti’s tragedy fades into the background. The reconstruction of Haiti will require a multi-year commitment from UN member states, from international organizations, from NGOs. It will also require political leadership from the Haitian president, Michel Martelly.

On the same day that the Haiti Reconstruction Fund Annual Report was released, President Martelly announced plans to reform the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission, which oversees the disbursement of donor funds from the Fund. Martelly is struggling to strike a balance between Haitian ownership of reconstruction and proper administration and management of funds. A Martelly advisor said: “The IHRC itself has become this extra entity outside of the government, and that is what we need to fix.”

Whatever the capacity constraints are, donors have a responsibility to fulfill their pledges. Rewinding 18 months, I remember vividly former President Bill Clinton calling not just for Haitian reconstruction, but for a complete overhaul of that country, supported by the generosity of the international community. Today, we’re at the point where the release of the Haiti Reconstruction Funds’ Annual Report doesn’t make the news anymore – only a few outlets like the Financial Times and Relief Web posted items about it. The website for the HRC doesn’t even have a link to the report, not even a press release on the subject.

It’s too easy for the international community to repackage these pledges into pre-existing commitments, especially if no one is holding them to account. The world was genuinely hurting for Haiti last year in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake – let’s not forget our promise of a new dawn for Haiti and its people, and let’s hold to account our governments’ commitments to making it happen.

Photo credit: UNDP photo stream on Flickr

TEPCO via Reuters

An image taken by a gamma ray camera showing the bottom of a ventilation stack where radiation exceeding 10 sieverts per hour - seen here in red - was recorded.

Death in seconds:

Radiation pockets found at

Fukushima plant

'Leakage at the plant may have been contained or slowed

but it has not been sealed off completely,' expert says

 

<p style="font-size:11px; font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: #999; margin-top: 5px; background: transparent; text-align: center; width: 420px;">Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy</p>

 

TOKYO — Pockets of lethal levels of radiation have been detected at Japan's crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in a reminder of the risks faced by workers battling to contain the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.

Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) reported on Monday that radiation exceeding 10 sieverts (10,000 millisieverts) per hour was found at the bottom of a ventilation stack standing between two reactors.

Tepco said Tuesday it found another spot on the ventilation stack itself where radiation exceeded 10 sieverts per hour, a level that could lead to incapacitation or death after just several seconds of exposure.

Slideshow: Devastation in Japan after quake (on this page)

The company used equipment to measure radiation from a distance and was unable to ascertain the exact level because the device's maximum reading is 10 sieverts.

While Tepco said the readings would not hinder its goal of stabilizing the Fukushima reactors by January, experts warned that worker safety could be at risk if the operator prioritized hitting the deadline over radiation risks.

"Radiation leakage at the plant may have been contained or slowed but it has not been sealed off completely. The utility is likely to continue finding these spots of high radiation," said Kenji Sumita, a professor at Osaka University who specializes in nuclear engineering.

"Considering this, recovery work at the plant should not be rushed to meet schedules and goals as that could put workers in harm's way. We are past the immediate crisis phase and some delays should be permissible."

Workers at Daiichi are only allowed to be exposed to 250 millisieverts of radiation per year.

Tepco, which provides power to Tokyo and neighboring areas, said it had not detected a sharp rise in overall radiation levels at the compound.

"The high dose was discovered in an area that doesn't hamper recovery efforts at the plant," Tepco spokesman Junichi Matsumoto told reporters on Tuesday.

Although it is still investigating the matter, Tepco said the spots of high radiation could stem from debris left behind by emergency venting conducted days after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that crippled the plant.

Two workers at the plant died in the initial earthquake and tsunami disasters on March 11 and a third died from a heart attack on May 14 while working in a waste disposal building. All three deaths were unrelated to nuclear radiation.

Currently, 35 of Japan's 54 reactors are idle, causing electricity shortages amid sweltering heat. The government has ordered safety checks on all reactors.

Meanwhile, more than a dozen regional governments in Japan announced Monday that they would conduct tests to determine whether locally grown rice contains too much radioactive caesium.

Excessive levels of radiation have already been found in beef, vegetables, tea, milk, seafood and water.

 

 

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.