KIM CROSBY

<p>SPEAK: Kim's Story // insightproject.tv from The INSIGHT Project on Vimeo.</p>

 

Kim wasn’t one of those kids playing outside. She was inside in her room, voraciously reading and writing. Here, Kim created space in her imagination to, as she says, “be as big as I felt.” A deep hunger for learning drove Kim to university. She quickly realized this wasn’t the type of learning she was looking for. With the imagination and resiliency she fostered as a child, Kim carved her own path, using her voice to create spaces for others.

Watch more at insightproject.tv

 

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SWAY MAGAZINE:

Q&A with Kim Crosby

Sunday, April 15, 2012 

 

 Kim Crosby’s favourite quote is that of Audre Lorde, “My political obligations? I am a Black woman … in world that defines human as white and male for starters. Everything I do including survival is political.”

The passionate outspoken “queer survivor” tells Sway about her involvement with The People Project as well as the rare experience of working with the likes of d’bi young.

You describe The People Project, of which you are co-director and founder, as a “movement of queer and trans folks of colour and our allies, committed to individual and community empowerment through alternative education, activism and collaboration.”

We have two separate streams in the People Project. One that is around arts & leadership education for queer and trans youth, including our 8-month program OUTwords.

My stream works around institutional change; I train a lot of educators and service providers around race, gender, power and privilege and sexuality: the City Of Toronto Cultural Arts Division, elementary TDSB teachers, for example. I also speak at conferences, host workshops and facilitate events like the Queer As Black Folk dialogue with The Black Daddies Club.

I work as a consultant and strategic planner with organizations particularly providing support to other queer artists and activists, but also to other organizations including NIA, Beatz 2 Da Streetz, around funding and planning. I host curate events, exhibitions and community dialogues. And finally, I develop resources and teaching tools in partnership with community and educate in a few online spaces.

You have had the privilege of having a residency under the great d’bi young at the AnitAfrika Theatre. Tell us about your experience.

My residency with d’bi was the first time I wrote and spoke freely, the first time I understood what it meant to be accountable to my community, my ancestors, my future by telling the whole truth regardless of how it made certain people feel. I spoke about my experience of sexualized violence and street harassment and coming to terms with my queerness.

I spoke about love and healing as a womyn of color. I spoke about the cycle of violence in communities of colour, where hurt people hurt people. And in a lot of ways it underscores the way I speak and work now.

You have also been a student of the Buddies in Bad Times Young Creator’s Unit. That must have been a wonderful time.

Buddies was an opportunity to have rigorous support within an existing Queer institution that is traditionally very white and male. It was a learning experience for all of us and I am still connected many of the people I met there – the experience of being on a stage, having my first play be a part of an established festival. Having my mom come for the first time to anything I have ever done was really special. I remember looking down at her face from the stage even now.

Tell us about your one-womyn play, Hands In My Cunt.

Hands In My Cunt was a biomythographical coming of age story. For me, one of its important significances was to say, this is yet another way that black girls grow up. Living with a lot of violence while excelling at school, while experiencing the ways that young black girls are hyper sexualized, while coming out as a lesbian. Our experiences are rich and nuanced and what was amazing was how many womyn had the same experience. It was amazing to find more of us, to see ourselves reflected in each other and to finally learn how to love what we saw.

You have had much rich experience at such a young age. Where do you want to be in five years?

Five years? My work, my whole life has been dedicated to liberation. One of my favorite writers is Mia Mingus, who is also a ‘femme identified womyn of color’ who is a disability justice activist says, “To me, femme must include ending ableism, white supremacy, heterosexism, the gender binary, economic exploitation, sexual violence, population control, male supremacy, war and militarization, and ownership of children and land.” And that resonates with me so powerfully.

That is what I want to do. [I] want to create spaces to have challenging conversations, want to continue to challenge and affirm those who challenge the oppressive systems around us. I want to keep a lot of love in my life, a lot of art, knowledge and play. [I want to] continue traveling where I am invited and study so much of the history that doesn’t get held in the history books. I want to do more writing and finally settle in to write a few books. I want to keep finding ways to sustain the work and the lives of people who live these realities economically, emotionally, meaningfully.

My ‘work’ isn’t a job, I do these things because I think that they honour the lives of a lot of people who fought for me. I do this work because I care a lot about happiness and fairness. Bell Hooks says, “For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?”

This is what I do. I challenge us all (myself included) to be accountable with the faith that we can be transformed.

Connecting Incarcerated Moms

& their Children:

If Walls Could Talk…

 

Several months ago, I contributed to artist Katie Yamasaki’s Kickstarter project “If Walls Could Talk.” Katie describes the project below:

Children from the East Harlem Community and the greater NYC area worked to design a mural that I painted with the mothers inside of the women’s jail in Rikers Island. The women also created an image and message dedicated to their children and the East Harlem community. Last month, I worked with their children and other members of the East Harlem community to bring their message to life.

Below is the first video that I saw of Katie describing the project in her own words.

The project is now complete and there was a mural dedication celebration on September 14. Since I no longer live in NYC, I was unfortunately unable to attend. But thanks to the magic of technology, Katie shared photographs and regular updates about the progress of this project. Below are some photographs of the East Harlem mural:

 

Katie provided regular updates to all donors throughout the process. You can read those here. There was also some media coverage of project which can be found here and here

Long Forgotten,

16th Street Baptist Church

Bombing Survivor Speaks Out

 

 

by Tanya Ott

January 25, 2013 1:33 PM

fromWBHM

January 25, 2013

 

Listen to the Story

Download church_bombing_survivor.mp3

All Things Considered

  3 min 55 sec

• Playlist
• Download
• Transcript

 

Sarah Collins Rudolph was with her sister Addie Mae Collins when a bomb exploded in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. The 1963 bombing killed her sister and three other girls, and Collins Rudolph was seriously injured in the attack. / Frank Couch/AL.COM /Landov

 

Signs of 1963 are everywhere in Birmingham, Ala., these days. The city is commemorating the 50th anniversary of the landmark civil rights events of that year: the children who marched until police turned fire hoses and dogs on them; Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"; and the September bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church.

Planted by white supremacists, the bomb killed four young girls preparing to worship. It was an act of terrorism that shocked the country and propelled Congress to pass the historic 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Tuesday in Washington, a bipartisan group of lawmakers announced plans to pursue a Congressional Gold Medal for the girls, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, Denise McNair and Addie Mae Collins — the highest civilian honor Congress can bestow. But there was another victim that day — a fifth girl, who survived the attack.

That girl, Sarah Collins Rudolph, now lives in a modest ranch-style house just north of Birmingham. She remembers the bombing like it was yesterday.

Mourners outside funeral services for Carol Robertson, one of four girls killed in the 1963 bombing. / AP

"I was standing there, just standing there bleeding," Rudolph, now 62, recalls. "And somebody came and they just picked me up and took me out through the hole and put me in [an] ambulance."

Rudolph was just 12 when her older sister Addie Mae died in the blast. Rudolph was sprayed with glass, lost an eye and was hospitalized for months. Then, she says, she was told to put it all behind her — but she can't.

"I still shake. I still jump when I hear loud sounds," Collins says. "Every day I think about it, just looking in the mirror and seeing the scars on my face. I'm reminded of it every day."

The scars are physical, mental and financial. Medical bills that have mounted over the years as Collins worked in factories and cleaning houses — mostly without health insurance. She has insurance now through her husband, George, but there are still out-of-pocket medical expenses.

In October, Rudolph went before the Birmingham City Council to ask for help. Her husband says the city ignored her.

"If you look back at the people in the trade towers, each one of those victims got paid. The families, they got paid," George Rudolph says. "But my wife, she didn't get anything. She should get compensated."

Birmingham Mayor William Bell says he's not insensitive. He appreciates the trauma Sarah Rudolph has been through. But, he says, the city cannot just write her a check.

"When you say 'reparation,' that puts a whole different legal terminology in place that we're not capable — nor are we legally obligated — to do," Bell says.

Dorothy Inman-Johnson knows the dilemma from both sides. As a teenager, she participated in the children's marches in Birmingham. And as an adult, she became the first black female mayor of Tallahassee, Fla.

"But the city could have taken the lead in creating some kind of foundation or fund that other people could contribute to that would have helped her in some way," Inman-Johnson says. "It would have been an important statement."

But that hasn't happened — and it doesn't seem like it will. Over the past 50 years, Rudolph has been left out of many events commemorating the tragedy at 16th Street Baptist Church. Even many longtime Birmingham residents didn't know her story until recently.

As the eyes of the world are trained on Birmingham this year, Rudolph says she'll watch from the comfort of her home. It's all she feels up to, she says, after 50 years forgotten.

Black Think Tank Book Fair

Not Cancelled!

 

Contrary to published reports on Facebook and elsewhere, Dr. Nathan Hare's Black Think Tank Book Fair will happen on Friday, Feb 1, San Francisco Main Library, Koret auditorium, 3-5, pm. Free event.

Call 510-200-4164 for more information. Please spread the word to your lists.

Meet the Authors at the Black Think Tank Book Fair

 

 

The Hare Archives 

 

Dr. Nathan Hare and Dr. Julia Hare have appointed Marvin X to assemble their archives for acquisition. When assembled, the Hare archives will be offered to such institutions as the University of California, Berkeley, Bancroft Library, Stanford, Yale and the University of Chicago. As we know, Dr. Nathan Hare was fired from Howard University and later from San Francisco State University where his firing ignited the longest strike in American academic history to establish Black Studies. If you are an academic institution interested in the Hare Papers, please contact Marvin X: 510-2004164, jmarvinx@yahoo.com. 

 

 

‪Nathan Hare 

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

 

Nathan Hare (born April 9, 1933) was the first person hired to coordinate a black studies program in the United States,  at San Francisco State University in 1968.

Hare was born on a sharecropper’s farm near the Creek County town of Slick, Oklahoma on April 9, 1933. He attended the public schools of L’Ouverture (variously spelled "Louverture") Elementary School and L'Ouverture High School. The two schools were named after the Haitian Revolutionary and General Toussaint Louverture and were part of the so-called “Slick Separate Schools” in the segregated rural milieu of the late 1930s and 1940s. 

[edit]

 

Early life and education 

When Hare was eleven years old, his family migrated to San Diego, California, where his single mother took a civilian janitorial job with the Navy air station. As World War II ended and his mother was laid off, his family returned to Oklahoma. This put on hold his ambition to become a professional boxer, something he had picked up after adult neighbors in San Diego assured him that writers all starve to death. 

 

The direction of his life would change again when his English teacher at L'Ouverture High (later closed after the Brown vs Board of Education Supreme Court desegregaton decree, through consolidation into the all-white Slick High School, itself now also closed by consolidation) administered standardized tests to her ninth grade class in English Composition in the search for someone to represent the class at the annual statewide "Interscholastic Meet" of the black students held annually at Oklahoma’s Langston University. Hare represented L'Ouverture and won first prize with more prizes to come in ensuing years; and on that basis the L’Ouverture principal persuaded him to go to college after getting him a fulltime job working in the Langston University Dining Hall to pay his way. By his junior year Hare had moved up in his student employment to Dormitory Proctor of the University Men and Freshman Tutor in his senior year. 

 

When Hare enrolled at Langston University (now only "historically black"), Langston was the only college Black students could attend in the state of Oklahoma. Named for John Mercer Langston, one of only five African Americans elected to Congress from the South before the former Confederate states passed constitutions that essentially eliminated the black vote, the town was a product of the late nineteenth century black nationalist movement’s attempt to make the Oklahoma Territory an all-Black state. In fact, Langston, Oklahoma laid claim to being the first all-black town established in the United States. One of Hare’s professors, the poet Melvin B. Tolson, was mayor of the town for four terms, was named poet laureate of Liberia, and eventually his spectacular style of teaching would be portrayed in "The Great Debaters." Graduating from Langston with an AB in Sociology, Hare won a Danforth fellowship to continue his education and obtained an MA (1957) and PhD in Sociology (1962) from the University of Chicago. Hare received another PhD in Clinical Psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology in San Francisco, California (1975). 

[edit]

Black Studies 

Hare wrote the “Conceptual Proposal for a Department of Black Studies" and coined the term “ethnic studies” (which was being called “minority studies”) after he was recruited to San Francisco State in February 1968 by the Black Student Union leader Jimmy Garrett and the college’s liberal president, John Summerskill. Hare had just been dismissed from a six-year stint as a sociology professor at Howard University, after he wrote a letter to the campus newspaper, The Hilltop, in which he mocked Howard president James Nabrit’s plan (announced in the Washington Post on September 6, 1966) to make Howard “sixty per cent white by 1970.” James Nabrit had been one of the civil rights attorneys who successfully argued the 1954 “Brown vs. Board of Education” case before the U.S. Supreme Court. The “Black Power” cry had been issued just two month’s earlier by one of Hare’s former Howard students, Stokely Carmichael (another of Hare’s students at Howard was Claude Brown, author of Manchild in the Promised Land). Hare had taught sociology at Howard since 1961, the year before he obtained the Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago. 

On February 22, 1967, Hare stood at press conference, with a group of students calling themselves “The Black Power Committee,” and read “The Black University Manifesto,” which Hare had written with the input of the Black Power Committee. The manifesto expressly called for “the overthrow of the Negro college with white innards and to raise in its place a black university, relevant to the black community and its needs." Hare had previously published a book called The Black Anglo Saxons and coined the phrase “The Ebony Tower” to characterize Howard University. 

 

In the spring of 1967, he invited Muhammad Ali to speak at Howard and introduced him when the controversial heavyweight champion gave his popular “Black Is Best” speech to an impromptu crowd of 4,000 gathered at a moment’s notice outside the university’s Frederick Douglass Hall after the administration padlocked the Crampton Auditorium in the days leading up to Ali’s refusal of his military draft. Following Hare’s dismissal that June, he briefly resumed his own aborted professional boxing efforts, winning his last fight by a knockout in the first round in the Washington Coliseum on December 5, 1967. 

 

At San Francisco State, where the Black Student Union demanded an “autonomous Department of Black Studies,” Hare was soon involved in a five-month strike for black studies led by The Black Student Union, backed by the Third World Liberation Front and the local chapter of the American Federation of Teachers. Black, white, and Third World students and professors participated in the strike, which also included community leaders and the Black Faculty Union, headed by Hare. The late actor, Mel Stewart was a member of the Black Faculty Unon, but Hare was the only faculty member invited to become a "quasi-member" of the Central Committee of the Black Student Union, which included a student named Danny Glover, who would go on to become a successful Hollywood actor. One of the speakers almost daily at the noonday rallies of the strike was Ronald Dellums, who was later elected to the U.S. Congress and later Mayor of Oakland, California. 

 

After one San Francisco State College president (the late John Summerskill) was fired and another (Robert Smith) resigned, Smith was replaced by the general semanticist S.I. Hayakawa (who would later become a U.S. Senator). Hayakawa used a hard-line strategy to put down the five-month strike, declaring “martial law” and arresting a crowd of five hundred and fifty-seven rallying professors and students (the overwhelming majority of them white). Weeks later, on February 28, 1969, Hayakawa dismissed Dr. Nathan Hare as chairman of the newly formed black studies department, the first in the United States,“to become effective June 1, 1969.” Hare stayed on until June at the request of the Black Student Union and remained for many more months in an unofficial capacity of “Chairman in Exile.” 

 

Hare then teamed with Robert Chrisman and the late Allen Ross (a white printer and small businessman in Sausalito who had immigrated from Russia) to become the founding publisher of “The Black Scholar: A Journal of Black Studies and Research" in November 1969. The New York Times would soon call The Black Scholar “the most important journal devoted to black issues since ‘The Crisis.'” Ten years earlier, in 1959, Hare had briefly been a clerical assistant to the editor of the Journal of Asian Studies then being edited by Andrew Hacker, a white history professor at Northwestern University, where Hare developed a dream of someday editing a “Journal of Negro Studies” ("Negro" was the word still in fashion for blacks in 1959). In 1968, during a break in a television panel including Nathan Glazer, co-author of The Lonely Crowd, Glazer wrote a note to Hare on a white index card saying "Needed: a Black Scholar journal." Before starting The Black Scholar, Hare had written and published articles in magazines and periodicals that included: Ebony, Negro Digest,Black World, Phylon Review, Social Forces, Social Education, Newsweek, and The Times. 

 

After leaving The Black Scholar in 1975, in a dispute over the changing direction of the journal, and obtaining a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology, San Francisco, Nathan Hare began the private practice of psychotherapy, with offices in San Francisco and Oakland. He also focused on forming a movement for “A Better Black Family” (the title of a popular speaking out editorial he wrote for the February 1976 issue of Ebony magazine) shortly after completing a dissertation on “Black Male/Female Relations” at the California School of Professional Psychology. 

 

By 1979, in collaboration with his wife (Dr. Julia Hare, author of How to Find and Keep a BMW (Black Man Working), Hare formed The Black Think Tank, which published the journal of “Black Male/Female Relationships” for several years. After the journal folded, Hare went into the full-time practice of psychology and the development of the Black Think Tank. In 1985, a small book written by him and his wife ("Bringing the Black Boy to Manhood") was disseminated by The Black Think Tank, issuing the call and becoming the catalyst for the contemporary rites of passage movement for African-American boys that emerged as the Hares lectured and spread the idea of the rites of passage for black boys throughout the United States. 

[edit]

Publications 

In addition to dozens of articles in a number of scholarly journals and popular magazines, from The Black Scholar and Ebony to Newsweek, Saturday Review and The Times, Nathan Hare is the author of several books: 

•   The Black Anglo Saxons. New York: Marzani and Munsell, 1965; New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1970; Chicago: Third World Press edition, Chicago, 1990)0-88378-130-1.

Books in collaboration with his wife, Julia Hare (the former radio talk show host and television guest, who also is a graduate of Langston University) have been published and widely distributed by The Black Think Tank, headquartered in San Francisco. They include: 

•   The Endangered Black Family, San Francisco: The Black Think Tank, 1984, ISBN 0-9613086-0-5.

•   Bringing the Black Boy to Manhood: the Passage, San Francisco: The Black Think Tank, 1985, ISBN 0-9613086-1-3.

•   Crisis in Black Sexual Politics, San Francisco: The Black Think Tank, 1989, ISBN 0-9613086-2-1.

•   Fire on Mount Zion: An Autobiography of the Tulsa Race Riot, as told by Mabel B. Little. Langston: The Melvin B. Tolson Black Heritage Center, Langston University, 1990, ISBN 0-9613086-1-4

•   The Miseducation of the Black Child: The Hare Plan to Educate Every Black Man, Woman and Child, San Francisco: The Black Think Tank, 1991, ISBN 0-9613086-4-8.

•   The Black Agenda, San Francisco: The Black Think Tank, 2002, ISBN 0-9613086-9-9.

While publisher of The Black Scholar from 1969–75, Nathan Hare co-edied two books with Robert Chrisman: 

•   Contemporary Black Thought, Indianapolis: Bobs-Merrill, 1973, ISBN 0-672-51821-X.

•   Pan-Africanism, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974, ISBN 0-672-51869-4.

[edit]

References 

•   William M. Banks, Black Intellectuals (Foreword by John Hope Franklin), New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1996, pp. 163, 174, 184, 216, 171. ISBN 0-393-03989-7; ISBN 0-393-31674-pbk.

•   Richard Barksdale and Keneth Kinnamon (eds), Black Writers of America: A Comprehensive Anthology, New York: Macmillan, 1972, pp. 836–841 .ISBN 0-02-306080-8.

•   W. Augustus Low and Virgil A. Clift, eds,Encyclopedia of Black America, New York: Plenum, McGraw Hill, 1981, pp. 747, 803. ISBN 0-306-80221-X.

•   Sharon Malinowski, (ed), Black Writers, Detroit, Washington, D.C., London: Gale Research Inc., 1994, pp. 280–281. ISBN 0-8103-7788-8.

•   Maulana Karenga, Introduction to Black Studies. Los Angeles: The University of Sankore Press, 1993,passim. ISBN 0-943412-16-1.

•   Fabio Rojas, From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007, pp. 1, 30, 71-72, 85. ISBN 13:978-0-8018-8619-5; 10:0-8018-8619-8.

•   Nathaniel Norment, Jr, (ed),The African American Studies Reader, Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2001. pp. vii-xlii; 13-21. ISBN 0-89089-640-2.

•   James E. Blackwell and Morris Janowitz, (eds), Black Sociologists: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1974, pp. xvi, 202 218, 253-267, 280, 322, 355. ISBN 0-226-05565-5.

•   Ishmael Reed, MultiAmerica: Essays on Cultural Wars and Cultural Peace. New York: Viking Penguin, 1997, pp. 328–336.ISBN 0-670-86753-5.

Talmadge Anderson, Introduction to African American Studies, Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt, 1993, pp. 16, 17, 37, 38, 39, 41-44, 45, 120, 126, 133. ISBN 0-7872-3268-8.

Dr. Julia Hare

 

 

BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Julia Hare is widely regarded as one of the most dynamic motivational speakers on the major podiums today.

At the Congressional Black Caucus's 27th Annual Legislative Conference chaired by Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Dr. Hare was one of three speakers invited to address the Caucus's kickoff National Town Hall Meeting on Leadership Dimensions for the New Millennium. Her collaborators included distinguished historian, Dr. John Hope Franklin, Chair of President Clinton's Advisory Board on Race, and Dr. Cornel West, Harvard professor and author of the critically acclaimed Race Matters.

Dr. Hare has appeared on "Geraldo", "Sally Jesse Raphael", "Inside Edition", CNN and Company, "Talk Back Live", "News Talk", Black Entertainment Television (BET), "The Tavis Smiley Show", ABC's "Politically Incorrect", CSPAN, and major radio and television affiliated throughout Australia and America. Her commentaries, lectures and topics include: politics, education, religion, war, foreign and domestic affairs, sexual politics and contemporary events.

A prime innovator on issues affecting the black family and society as a whole, Dr. Hare is mentioned or quoted in national newspapers, including "The New York Times", "The Washington Post", "Sun Reporter", "San Francisco Chronicle", "Miami Herald", "Louisville Courier Journal" and "The Oklahoma Eagle" among others. She has appeared in "Ebony", "Jet", "Dollars and Sense", "Heart and Soul", "USA Today", "Today's Black Woman", "Essence" and other periodicals. She is co-author with her husband, Dr. Nathan Hare, of "The Endangered Black Family"; "Bringing the Black Boy to Manhood"; "The Passage"; "The Miseducation of the Black Child" and "Crisis in Black Sexual Politics". Her most recent best-selling book is "How to Find and Keep a BMW (Black Man Working)".

Her work has brought her many accolades and honors, including Educator of the Year for Washington, D.C. by the Junior Chamber of Commerce and the World Book Encyclopedia in coordination with American University; the Abe Lincoln Award for Outstanding Broadcasting, the Carter G. Woodson Education Award; the Marcus and Amy Garvey Award; the Association of Black Social Workers Harambee Award, Third World Publishers' Twentieth Anniversary Builders Award; Professional of the Year from "Dollars and Sense" magazine; Scholar of the Year from the Association of African Historians; Lifetime Achievement Award from the international Black Writers and Artists Union; as well as a presidential citation from the national Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education. Dr. Hare has also been inducted into the Booker T. Washington Hall of Fame.

 

 

Posted by Marvin X. Jackmon

 

"Synchro System"

by King Sunny Adé

& his African Beats

by Michel Vink

 

King Sunny Adé

This Is Africa invites you on a journey back to a time before Autotune with African Classics Radio, when singers recorded with live bands and real instruments, producing hits that we later came to refer to as "rare grooves" from the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s, vinyl copies of which now sometimes change hands for eye-watering amounts.

To enhance your experience, we will, from now on, also be writing about some of the seminal artists and albums that you can hear when you tune in. We hope you enjoy the journey.

Synchro System by Nigerian jùjú legend King Sunny Adé and his band the African Beats was the second of three albums released on the Island Records label. The album made it to number 91 on Billboard's Pop Albums list, though it was received with a little less enthusiasm than its predecessor Juju Music. That album, released in 1982, was rightly praised for its subtle and distinctive blend of West African dance rhythms and guitar work. The reviewers found that Synchro System rather resembled Juju Music, and that it missed the distinctive steel-guitar-sound they'd heard emphasised on the latter but that appeared to be less present on Synchro System. Nevertheless, Syncro System was highly admired for its enchanting sensitivity and emotion.

In the early eighties, Island Records was eager to find an African star to help them continue the success they'd had with the then recently-deceased reggae legend Bob Marley. The obvious thing would have been to offer Nigeria's Afrobeat master Fela Kuti a contract, but he'd already signed to Arista. Also Kuti had just started, with some difficulty, to make his long and political songs suitable for a Western audience. It was Fela's French manager Meissonier who came to Island's rescue. He remembered that when he was in Nigeria, he'd listened to a tape on which he heard a wild steel-guitar solo. It had reminded him of Jimi Hendrix and he found out that it had been a recording of another superstar from Lagos, King Sunny Adé, known locally as "The Chairman". He was already well known in Nigeria, and had recorded numerous albums since the sixties.

Meissonier made an appointment with him and arranged for Sunny and his band to sign with Island. The rest is history. Fela enjoyed worldwide celebrity during the 1980s, but King Sunny Adé was actually the first major successful West African artist outside of Africa.

Both Synchro System and Aura (1984) were produced by Meissonier. In my opinion, the tracks on the album Synchro System showcase Sunny Adé and his band at their best. It is an album that still sounds remarkable for its mix of light, subtle and persistent rhythms, further whipped up by a large number of impressive talking drum solos. Add to that the refined and almost shy sounding vocals by King Sunny Adé, and what you have is an enduring classic.

The title song became a hit in England and a dance club favourite, in large part due to the characteristic steel-guitar of Demola Adepojo. Furthermore, the track Maajo makes a subtle link between the harmonious vocal work and the more insistent rhythmic work. The album, along with its predecessor Juju Music and successor Aura, helped put African music firmly on the world map.

Today, the album is still hailed as one of the most important records from Africa. Sunny Adé earned a worldwide following and was originally billed as the "African Bob Marley" (facile, but that's marketing for you). He was the first to integrate steel guitar into Nigerian pop music, and he also introduced synthesizers, the clavinet, vibraphone and tenor guitar to his jùjú repertoire. His refusal to allow the people at Island Records to Europeanize or Americanize his music brought his relationship with the label to an end, but what a great set of albums that relationship gave us!

VanderMey Nonfiction Prize

Ruminate is thrilled to announce our third annual Ruminate Nonfiction Prize, and we are pleased to announce that the finalist judge is award-winning author, Brian Doyle.

The 2011 Nonfiction Prize winning piece Flexing, Texting, Flying by Josh MacIvor-Andersen and selected by judge Al Haley, appears in Ruminate’s Issue 20: Feasting.

The 2012 Nonfiction Prize winning piece “Father of Disorder” by Jessica Willbanks and selected by judge Leslie Leyland Fields appears in Ruminate’s Issue 24: Heirlooms.

We strongly recommend ordering a past copy of Ruminate to better understand the type of work we are looking for. PDF versions of the magazine issues mention above are available for $5 each.

Guidelines:

• The submission deadline for the prize has been extended to midnight February 15th, 2013.

• The entry fee is $15 (includes a free copy of the Summer 2013 Issue, which will include the winning piece).

• You may submit one nonfiction piece per entry and it must be 5500 words or less. There is no limit on the number of entries per person.

• $1000 and publication in the Summer 2013 Issue will be awarded to the winner. The runner-up will receive publication in the Summer 2013 Issue.

• A blind reading of all entries will be conducted by a panel of RUMINATE readers, who will select 10 nonfiction finalists.

• Close friends and students (current & former) of the finalist judge, Brian Doyle, are not eligible to compete, nor are close friends and family of the RUMINATE staff.

• All submissions must be submitted via our online submission manager. We will not accept mail or email submissions. We do not accept previously published entries.

• All submissions must be previously unpublished.

• You may enter simultaneously submitted work.

• You will pay the entry fee when you click below.

• You may submit any type of creative nonfiction–personal essay, short memoir, literary journalism, etc.

• Winners will be announced in the Summer Issue, June 2013.

• We will be notifying all entrants of submission status in mid April, 2013.

• Please remove your name, bio, and any contact info from the file that you submit.

SUBMIT TO RUMINATE

 

Please Note: Ruminate adheres to the following Contest Code of Ethics, as adopted by the Council of Literary Presses and Magazines, of which Ruminate is a proud member: “CLMP’s community of independent literary publishers believes that ethical contests serve our shared goal: to connect writers and readers by publishing exceptional writing. We believe that intent to act ethically, clarity of guidelines, and transparency of process form the foundation of an ethical contest. To that end, we agree to 1) conduct our contests as ethically as possible and to address any unethical behavior on the part of our readers, judges, or editors; 2) to provide clear and specific contest guidelines — defining conflict of interest for all parties involved; and 3) to make the mechanics of our selection process available to the public. This Code recognizes that different contest models produce different results, but that each model can be run ethically. We have adopted this Code to reinforce our integrity and dedication as a publishing community and to ensure that our contests contribute to a vibrant literary heritage.”

Ruminate Magazine sponsors four annual writing contests: our art contest, poetry contest, short story contest, and nonfiction contest. We are one of the only Christian-minded literary magazines to sponsor short story contests, poetry contests, and nonfiction contests, and art contests. And while our contests–just like our magazine–are not defined as Christian poetry contests or Christian fiction contests or Christian essay contests, we do strive to provide a forum for the conversation between art and faith to exist and continue. Past winners from the Ruminate Magazine writing contests have been recognized by Poets & Writers Magazine and have received notable mention awards in The Best American Short Stories anthology and The Best American Essays anthology. Past finalist judges of our contests include Mark Richard, Bret Lott, Leslie Leyland Fields, David James Duncan, Luci Shaw, Vito Aiuto, Greg Wolfe, Al Haley, Stephanie G’Schwind, Walter Wangerin, Jr., and Leif Enger. It is our hope that our writing contests provide a significant venue for our talented contributors to receive the support and recognition they deserve.

Call for papers for a special issue of

Social Dynamics:

A Journal of African Studies

 

  

Posted on January 25, 2013 by sociolingo

Call for papers for a special issue of Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies - African Photography: Realism and After

The place and meaning of photographs in Africa has shifted dramatically over time, from colonial and ethnographic practices to radical new forms of contemporary representation. Photographs circulate as documents, as remnants in the aftermath of violence and dislocation, as both public and private records of celebration, kinship and dwelling, and as artworks. Photography offers a suggestive surface for engagements with questions of both the imaginary and the real. This special issue of Social Dynamics invites papers that explore the history, theory and practice of photography across the continent.

Topics might include:

The role of portraits and family albums

Photographs of public figures

Photography and the history and memory of slavery

African photography and postcolonial modernity

Reading photographs as colonial documents

Photography and liberation struggles

Photography and national history

Local histories of photography

Art photography and imaginative transformation

 

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words by the 22 February 2013 to:
kyliethomas.south@gmail.com<mailto:kyliethomas.south@gmail.com>

Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies is a peer-reviewed journal that is published three times a year by Taylor & Francis in electronic and print format. The journal is based at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and is edited by Louise Green and Kylie Thomas.

For more information about the journal see:
http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rsdy20/current

H-AfrArts
H-Net Network for African Expressive Culture
E -Mail: H-AFRARTS@H-NET.MSU.EDU
http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~artsweb/