INFO: New Items of Interest

Ger: To Be Separate

 

Hi guys

 

So my friend Ger is one of the most inspirational people i know, From acting to modeling he does it all. His new Documentary follows him on a Journey back to Sudan where we will see Ger's mission to "help rebuild his nation" unfold. 

 

 

Although there has been billions in aid to Africa i feel that the real issues has often been ignored or excessive focus has been applied on limited aspects. From guerrilla conflicts to civil war, Africa is in dire need of aid, Medics but most of all EDUCATION!!!!!!!!!! I believe in order to reduce poverty and create jobs, Africa must become economically competitive and that can AND WILL happen through youth initiative. 


Here are a few pics from the film opening.


But anyways i don't want to blab on and on. Just wanted to bring a little awareness to Ger's project and hopefully one day i can follow in his footsteps and go on a mission of my own. 

 



 

Directed by Kenyan Film Director Wanuri Kahiu

 

“Ger: To Be Separate document’s one man’s odyssey from child soldier to refugee to Hollywood actor and international top model, and his amazing journey back home as he votes for the first time for a new Sudan and celebrates its division.  The release of this documentary will mark the beginning of Ger’s mission to help rebuild his nation, bringing educational institutions and healthcare facilities to his home village.”

 

African and proud!
xoxo
Abby

 

 

 

 

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 Pages from a Black Radicals Notebook

“When I first came upon James Boggs's writings three decades ago, it changed my life. Poring over each of the essays collected here by the indefatigable Stephen Ward, I know why he had such an impact. His work was always incisive, clear, dialectical, and genuinely revolutionary. A visionary thinker, Boggs is as relevant now as he ever was.”

—Robin D. G. Kelley

Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook

A James Boggs Reader

 

Edited by Stephen M. Ward
 

Published February 2011
 

Size: 7 x 10, Pages: 424

 

Subjects: Africana Studies: Labor and PoliticsHistory: AmericanLabor and Urban Studies: Labor History

Series: African American Life Series

Paper - 9780814332566 
Price: $27.95s 

Order Book


Born in the rural American south, James Boggs lived nearly his entire adult life in Detroit and worked as a factory worker for twenty-eight years while immersing himself in the political struggles of the industrial urban north. During and after the years he spent in the auto industry, Boggs wrote two books, co-authored two others, and penned dozens of essays, pamphlets, reviews, manifestos, and newspaper columns to become known as a pioneering revolutionary theorist and community organizer. In Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook: A James Boggs Reader, editor Stephen M. Ward collects a diverse sampling of pieces by Boggs, spanning the entire length of his career from the 1950s to the early 1990s.

Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook is arranged in four chronological parts that document Boggs’s activism and writing. Part 1 presents columns from Correspondence newspaper written during the 1950s and early 1960s. Part 2 presents the complete text of Boggs’s first book, The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook, his most widely known work. In part 3, “Black Power—Promise, Pitfalls, and Legacies,” Ward collects essays, pamphlets, and speeches that reflect Boggs’s participation in and analysis of the origins, growth, and demise of the Black Power movement. Part 4 comprises pieces written in the last decade of Boggs’s life, during the 1980s through the early 1990s. An introduction by Ward provides a detailed overview of Boggs’s life and career, and an afterword by Grace Lee Boggs, James Boggs’s wife and political partner, concludes this volume.

Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook documents Boggs’s personal trajectory of political engagement and offers a unique perspective on radical social movements and the African American struggle for civil rights in the post–World War II years. Readers interested in political and ideological struggles of the twentieth century will find Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook to be fascinating reading.

Published by Wayne State University Press

>via: http://wsupress.wayne.edu/books/792/Pages-from-a-Black-Radicals-Notebook

 

 

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New Book: Afro-Cuba, Mystery and Magic of Afro-Cuban Spirituality

Afro-Cuba: Mystery and Magic of Afro-Cuban Spirituality (English and German hardcover edition; Benteli Verlag 2011) by photographer Anthony Caronia and art historian Ania Rodríguez Alonso, is a black-and-white photographic documentary exploring the world of Afro-Cuban religion.

Description: The purpose of this photographic project is to carefully report on a complex religion, its different ceremonies and rich folklore; a window into a magical world, a world where African spirits manifest their presence in everyday Cuban life.  Rodriguez Alonso provides a historical introduction chapter and descriptions of religious rites and beliefs for Caronia’s photos.

Anthony Caronia (1968, Rome) studied photography in New York and Rome. His photographic work focuses on world cultures; he has photographed (and lived in) countries such as Malta, Mexico, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United States, and now lives in Brazil.

Ania Rodríguez Alonso (1977, Havana) studied art history at the University of Havana and is currently a curator and an art critic.

 

 

 

 

 

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Toward Surrealist Renaissance


Freedom Dreams:

The Black Radical Imagination

by Robin D. G. Kelley

Surrealism stands for a continued rejection of a great many things, possibly giving it the lasting appeal it has had since its formation in inter-war France.  It can be broadly summarized as a rejection of western capitalist society and its values, a rejection of the intolerance, alienation and war that follow from its supposed rationality.  Robin D.G. Kelley’s book

 Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (found in the Provisions Library) includes a chapter arguing that through an affinity of European Surrealism, particularly its anti-colonial leanings, and the African diaspora. The poet and Statesman Aimé Césaire of Martinique claimed that non-whites ought to repossess their destroyed culture, and explore the spirituality offered outside of Anglo-European methods and religions. The Surrealist interest in spontaneity and rejection of classical rationalism translates directly into the genre of “jazz” music, which was already in full swing before the first Surrealist manifesto was even written, and Kelley describes Thelonious Monk as an unwitting surrealist in a comparison to the Comte de Lautréamont.

In this instance, the Surrealist search for “the marvellous” becomes a quest for a new spiritual identity for the colonized as part of a rejection of the superimposed culture of the colonizer.  Kelley advocates the influence of Surrealism in the Black Freedom movement as a positive, visionary source of revolutionary change.  It’s optimism and faith in the poetic as a medium for social change shines through in Kelley’s writing, and its force as an active proponent of a worldwide creative freedom makes it a powerful force for any anti-colonialist, or, perhaps more pertinently, anti-capitalist cause; and Kelly urges a re-examination of the Surreality of any such exploit.

>via: http://provisionslibrary.com/?p=12298