In connection with Naminata Diabate’s Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa (Duke: 2020), this article enquiries how woman’s body, in its material and spiritual reality, becomes both a space and tool of resistance in the postcolonial time and space. Reflecting on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming-woman” developed in A Thousand Plateaus in 1980, as well as on the slow transformation of biopolitical logics towards necropolitical practices, this essay highlights the need for a deconstruction of domination dynamics deeply enshrined in the patriarchal and capitalist imaginary that legitimizes the appropriation and exploitation of territories and (female) bodies considered as resources and reified realities.

Naminata Diabate’s 2020 book, Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics, marks specifically how rhetorical performance coalesces in speech, action, and bodies, enacting political movement and mobilization in a type of performative assembly. Diabate offers a new theoretical framework of naked agency and the consequentiality of public protest, adaptable as a methodology to read defiant disrobing as a type of “unruly rhetoric” as conceived of by rhetoric scholars Jonathan Alexander and Susan Jarratt. Diabate's careful attention to tensive modalities and coexistence, even collision, of various meanings of uncivil nakedness helps us to read agency and invention in the new materialist turn, given its attention to the vibrant matter of materiality and distributive agency in Global Black Rhetorics.

The amaXhosa children’s rhyme songs, whether in their indigenous form or as adaptations or recontextualizations, remain downplayed in terms of scholarly scrutinization. Accordingly, this article aims to underline the roles, symbolisms, and significant meanings of three amaXhosa children’s rhyme songs. Purposive sampling is employed to recognize the three songs as a primary source of data. To address the aim, cultural anthropological theory is applied as one that unravels the roles, symbolisms, and significant meanings of these songs. Ultimately, three findings emerge. First, children’s rhyme songs serve as powerful vehicles for cultural transmission, cementing and continuing cultural identity, value systems, and traditions. Second, cultural anthropological interpretation unmasks that rhyming children’s songs plays a central role in advancing social cohesion, consciousness, and community bonding. Third, one uncovers the developmental impact and didactic value of children’s rhyme songs. In closing, these findings underscore the multifaceted role of children’s rhyme songs as cultural artifacts that transcend musical compositions, symbolizing the crux of human experience and community resilience through melody, rhythm, and tradition.

This paper revisits Neil Blomkamp’s 2009 science fiction hit District 9 in the light of recent publications on the rapid decline of insect numbers world-wide. In the film the aliens’ appearance as well as their nickname “prawn” draw attention to their resemblance to the African King Cricket, a species pervasive in Johannesburg, and colloquially known as “Parktown Prawns.” I argue that the film, while inviting viewers to engage at an intellectual level with the clues it places in the narrative, simultaneously engages the body through eliciting a visceral feeling of disgust. In creating its aliens in the image of insects, the film explores the boundaries of what might constitute unassimilable otherness. Taking the more-than-human world seriously and reading animals in cultural texts not simply as allegorical figures designed to illuminate something about human society reveals the film as engaging in a fascinating experiment in the bodily limits of political identification.

In this interview with Chibueze Darlington Anuonye, literary scholar and intellectual biographer Ezechi Onyerionwu shares the inspiration and aspiration of his coauthored book-length study of Adichie’s writings, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The Aesthetics of Commitment and Narrative, published in 2010, at a time when some critics and scholars of African literature thought Adichie was not yet ripe for such canonical initiative.