This article offers a close reading of Achmat Dangor’s stories “Skin Costs Extra” and “Goodbye, Midnight” from the perspective of masculinity studies and affect theory. It argues that Dangor’s stories describe post-apartheid masculinities by exploring the lingering influence of patriarchal and hegemonic gender patterns on male-female relationships. Dangor’s male protagonists adopt these notions of masculinity in the hope that it will give them a sense of agency. Attached to the privileges of hegemonic masculinity, they also feel the confines of this gender formation, even if they do not express this awareness in an overt way. This sense of limitation imposed by their masculinities is analyzed on the level of affect and emotion. To that end, the article juxtaposes those two notions by referring to chosen critical perspectives on affect studies, including those by Brian Massumi, Todd Reeser, Lucas Gottzén, and others.

This article examines the work of two influential Black South African women—artist Gladys Nomfanekiso Mgudlandlu (1917–1979) and writer Miriam Tlali (1933–2017)—through the lens of decolonization. Focusing on Mgudlandlu’s Houses in the Township (1970) and Tlali’s Between Two Worlds (originally Muriel at Metropolitan), the article explores how both creators challenged dominant cultural narratives during apartheid. Mgudlandlu’s painting evokes Black township life through an aesthetic shaped by memory, spirituality, and everyday resilience, while Tlali’s novel critiques racial injustice and amplifies Black women’s lived experiences within oppressive urban and workplace structures. By situating these works within a decolonial framework, the study highlights how they unsettle colonial representational practices and foreground Black agency. Together, Mgudlandlu and Tlali offer alternative ways of seeing and imagining South Africa’s cultural landscape, underscoring the continued relevance of their contributions to discourses on resistance, identity, and transformative cultural change.

This essay explores the historical significance and modern ­relevance of Zambia’s national anthem, “Stand and Sing of Zambia,” as the nation marks 60 years of independence. It examines whether the anthem remains a “blueprint” for national development or has become an “illusion” that fails to reflect the current socio-economic reality.

This visual essay takes a haptic, multi-sensory approach to ethnographic witnessing to trace Mozambique’s nationwide wave of protest. The protests began with rapper Azagaia’s death in March 2023, intensified after the municipal elections later that year and erupted following the contested October 2024 general elections. The revolt coalesces around three overlapping strands: Azagaia’s ubiquitous legacy, the opposition politics of charismatic leader Venâncio Mondlane, and a broader decolonial popular revolt demanding an end to electoral fraud, police brutality, corruption, and Frelimo’s entrenched rule. Drawing on situational ethnography from Maputo, documentary photographs, news media, and street chants and protest music, this visual essay argues that these strands reinforce one another, reshaping political consciousness and exposing the limits of state legitimacy. The analysis shows how the revolt’s multiple, overlapping social and temporal layers – and their diverse visual, sonic, and affective practices – index a transformative moment in Mozambican politics.

The essay discusses how Africans, specifically Zambians, require new stories to claim ownership of the narrative about them.

This essay is an immersive exploration of how women's roles as professional musicians have altered as the political and cultural landscape in Zambia evolves. It charts the involvement of women in bands, as solo artists and as subjects of music from the historical pre-colonial, through to the political struggle for Independence, on to the emergence of a new nation and the ongoing settling into a distinct cultural identity.

In this interview, South African artist Sitaara Stodel speaks with researcher Julia Rensing about the shifting meanings of family photographs as they are relocated and recontextualized. Together, they explore the value of such images, how they can be reactivated, and made meaningful in unintended ways—particularly when they carry the weight of complex or troubling histories. Stodel links these themes to her experiences of displacement, uprootedness and the need for perpetual home-making in South Africa. The interview reflects on Santu Mofokeng’s conception of “home,” and Lebohang Kganye’s take on family photography and family identity to explore Stodel’s strategies of refining the meanings of home and family in her collages. Beyond personal concerns that inform her practice, the artist also addresses the notions of belonging and longing as universal preoccupations central to her work and engages with the ethical implications of refiguring family images.

From an African Diasporic lens and comparative study focused on the theoretical concepts of philosopher Alain L. Locke’s “New Negro” and the Renaissance aka “the Rebirth,” I will center on three themes of geography, vice, and jazz, which contributed to Black cultural production, artistic expression, and political revolution for the purpose of racial and physical liberation within the early to mid-20th century Harlem, New York and Sophiatown, Johannesburg neighborhoods. Building on the layers of the Maafa and the establishment of the double-consciousness, the New Negro was a consciousness essentially of owning Blackness - specifically Black expression within a racist society. W.E.B. DuBois believed that the double-consciousness of African-Americans, more specifically the hyphen between Africa and America. Wrestling with dual and conflictive identities involving whether their position in American society was African or the American; within South Africa, the double-consciousness contributed to experience(s) of having a colonized identity.

Set in Bantayan Island in southern Philippines, Martha Atienza’s film our islands11°16’58.4”N 123°45’07.0”E features a subaquatic fisher folk procession. This seemingly religious performance doubles as a protest memory-work for overarching advocacies on extra-judicial killings and climate emergency. The breathing tubes, imaginative costumes, and buoyant bodies of diver-performers simultaneously dramatize an ecological crisis which cinema can effectively disseminate. This essay, therefore, engages with the film’s ecocritical potential by situating seawater, not only as a trope, but as an actor whose agency shapes the movement and diegesis of the film. In doing so, this current reading looks into how water, with all its elemental physicality and presence, facilitates a collaborative memory-work between human and nonhuman agencies. At any rate, while this submerged procession summons an apocalyptic future, it alternatively unfolds a co-constituted memory borne out of, rather than besieged by, the tropics.