THE COLLOQUIUM FOR UNPOPULAR CULTURE @ Draper presents:
PRINT ACTIVISM IN 21st-CENTURY AFRICA
WHEN: Thursday 1 December 2016, 6:45pm
WHERE: Draper Program, 14 University Place [at 8th Street]
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. Refreshments served.
Chaired by Michael C. Vazquez, this event shines a spotlight on pathways linking pivotal journals such as Transition, Drum, Black Images, Joe, Staffrider and Black Orpheus to current trends in African and African diasporic book publishing, pathways marked by an enduring fidelity to print – an expanded and increasingly hybrid entity – as a means of exchanging ideas.
At the same time, where bookshops and independent publishers such as New Beacon and Bogle L’Ouverture in London, Presence Africaine in Paris or Third World Press in Chicago once flourished as hubs for political and intellectual thought, the digital mediascape now provides unprecedented space and means – utilised by the likes of Chimurenga, Kwani?, Farafina, Brittle Paper and Jalada – to raise unpopular voices and form complex communities of writers and readers.
EMMANUEL IDUMA, born and raised in Nigeria, is a writer and art critic. He is the author of the novel The Sound of Things To Come and co-editor of Gambit: Newer African Writing. He has contributed essays on art and photography to a number of journals, magazines and exhibition catalogues, including Guernica, ARTNews, and The Trans-African. He co-founded and directs Saraba magazine.
MADHU KRISHNAN is Assistant Professor of 20th/ 21st-Century Postcolonial Writing at the University of Bristol, author of Contemporary African Literature in English: Global Locations, Postcolonial Identifications (2014), and has published – in journals such as Textual Practice and Comparative Literature Studies – a number of articles on the intersection between aesthetics, socio-political interventions and cultural materialism. She is guest editor of forthcoming issues of Research In African Literatures and Wasafiri.
SHAUN RANDOL is the publisher and editor in chief of The Mantle which he founded in 2009. He is also the co-editor of Gambit: Newer African Writing, a fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York City, and a member of the National Book Critics Circle and the PEN American Center.
MICHAEL C. VAZQUEZ is a Detroit-born, New York-based writer, editor and curator. Senior Editor at Bidoun: Art and Culture from the Middle East and former editor of Transition: An International Review, he is writing a book on, among other things, African print cultures of the Cold War era.
For more info: ss162@nyu.edu
Miller, author of more than 100 books on antique collecting, will utilize her latest publication Art Deco: Living with the Art Deco Style to explore the key collecting areas of Art Deco ceramics and how designers decorated traditional ceramic forms such as vases and bowls with Art Deco patterning, while others created innovative shapes on which to base their modern decoration. Miller will also highlight how designers used the new aesthetic mode to depict motifs including the human form and classical themes in a modern graphic way.
