Features

Issue 4: Spotlight

The features in this issue explore questions of proximal Blackness, specifically how Blackness is constructed and deconstructed in relation to whiteness. In our lead feature, Lindokuhe Nkosi reflects on the many ways geography impacts the experience of Blackness. In our second feature, South African musicologist Willemien Froneman introduces us to South Africa’s first Black boeremusiek star, Refentse Morake, and challenges the notion that music is inherently a great unifier.

Proximal Blackness
Zora Neale Hurston’s famous 1928 essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” brings into sharp focus the many ways geography impacts the experience of Blackness. In this lead feature, writer Lindokuhle Nkosi uses Hurston’s words to reflect on the Season 2 finale of our podcast, Race Beyond Borders, in which our outgoing host Sebabatso Manoeli-Lesame and incoming host Nigel Richard revisit the season’s sonic journey. Read more

Beyond a hollow account of musical interracialism
Touted as South Africa’s first Black boeremusiek star, Refentse Morake’s meteoric rise from Sebokeng, one of several townships established on the peripheries of Johannesburg by the apartheid state, to national pop-sensation has been heralded as a symbol of South Africa’s triumph over racism. But should his popularity, when considered in a broader historical context and examined more closely, be be considered an example of successful interracialism? Read more

Issue 3: Hindsight

The features in this issue explore the relationship between the past and present. By exploring moments in both the distant and the recent past, they serve as an invitation to sit today in the discomfort of the past’s unfinished business. Sometimes history precludes hindsight, as we remain within the continuum of dynamic relationships. The history of race is no different.

Cosmopolitan Africans, Before Colonialism
Have African relations with the wider (often whiter) world always been marked by subordination? Sebabatso C. Manoeli-Lesame and Christopher L. Brown uncover unexpected episodes in Africa’s past, prior to colonialism, in which African elites related with the world as cosmopolitans. They argue that histories of un-colonial power relations have the potential to unlock new decolonial ways of imagining the future. Read more.

After the Signs Come Down
The end of apartheid in South Africa was hailed as a closing of the chapter on the country’s troubled past. What unfolded instead has proven more complicated, prompting storyteller Sydelle Willow Smith to create a somewhat autoethnographic photographic series examining post-apartheid whiteness. Reflecting on the series, art historian Leslie M. Wilson posits that Smith’s work meaningfully poses more questions than it answers. Read more.

Issue 2: Insight

The second issue engages one of the lively debates of our time: can identity politics liberate the oppressed? By employing an explicitly transnational lens, Danielle Bowler has gone to the source of the term identity politics. Coined by the members of the Combahee River Collective in the nineteen-seventies, the concept represented a radical approach to making sense of interlocking oppressions. Since then, the term has become hotly contested across the political spectrum, and its meanings and political applications remain often obscured. Bowler’s piece offers both an understanding of Barbara Smith’s original intentions and her reflections on the current life of this idea in the world.

Identity Politics: Returning to the Source
A member of the Combahee River Collective—the Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist movement that conceptualised identity politics—Barbara Smith was born into struggle, a position from which she chose to create, organise and liberate herself and others. And now, at 75, the publisher, author and educator shows little desire to stop, writes Danielle Bowler.

In this feature, Smith and Bowler invite us into an intergenerational and transnational dialogue on race, sexuality, gender, and class in the United States, South Africa and beyond. They ask us to imagine, drawing on the work of the Collective, organising and politics that could be truly emancipatory. Read more.

Issue 1: Foresight

The features in this issue explore the most significant dynamics that will impact the wellbeing of Black people across the globe in the next 20 years, ranging from climate change to capital flows. This issue draws attention to some of these potentialities that receive insufficient attention, in the hopes of sparking new thought and action. These offerings are not the final word. They are invitations to a much larger conversation.

Debt that Remains
African countries are thriving in 2040 after unilaterally withholding repayments, nearly two decades earlier, of debt that limited their abilities to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic. Read more.

Homegoing in the 21st Century
Hostilities have been rising against waves of Black Americans who've resettled on the continent, raising familiar questions about racial solidarity in a system of global capitalism. Read more.