Cyrus Kabiru is an artist based in Nairobi, Kenya best known for his C-Stunners,“an ongoing work where Cyrus creates and wears artistic bifocals. The work sits itself between fashion, wearable art, performance, and one of a kind commodity objects.”
I love the fact that Kabiru recycles found materials to create these futuristic pieces. His C-Stunners inspire so many visual connections, so whenever I see them I imagine different people wearing them—- for example Tina Turner in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Asha, the lead character in the post-apocalyptic African short film Pumzi, Janelle Monáe as Cindi Mayweather, Grace Jones in her video for Slave to the Rhythm as well as her Citroën commercial (directed by Jean-Paul Goude),Erykah Badu lost in a deserted landscape in her video for Didn’t Cha Know, or artist Karen Seneferu’s piece Techno Kisi. More HERE.
Beyond super duper cool.
This is my home sick poem. I have been in my current city for 5 years, the longest I have lived in any place since college. No matter how far I go , no matter how much time passes and even in the face of all the many conflicting feelings home brings ups…
Further To Fly: Black Women and the Politics of Empowerment
by Sheila Radford-Hill
How feminism has failed African American women and why they must fight back.
Amid the longest-running economic boom in American history and despite the emergence of a significant black middle class, the lot of low-income black people in general-and black women in particular-seems more troubling than ever. Their plight, Sheila Radford-Hill argues in this book, is directly related to the diminution of black women’s traditional power as culture bearers and community builders. A cogent critique of feminist theory and practice, Further to Fly identifies the failure of feminism to connect with the social realities it should seek to explain, in particular the decline of black women’s empowerment.
Further to Fly searches out the causes and effects of this decline, describing the ways in which, since the 1960s, black women have been stripped of their traditional status as agents of change in the community-and how, as a result, the black community has faltered. Radford-Hill explores the shortcomings of second-wave black and white feminism, revealing how their theoretical underpinnings have had unintended (and often unacknowledged) negative consequences for black women’s lives and their communities.
While acknowledging that African American women have made significant contributions to the black struggle for justice in America, Radford-Hill argues that more needs to be done. She combines social criticism and critical analysis to argue that black women must revive their legacy of activism and reclaim the tradition of nurturing in the black community, proposing specific tactics that can be used to revive the support networks that help determine the obligations of community members and guide how people interact on an everyday level.
As a deft account of genesis and effects of black women’s diminishing power, and as a sobering analysis of the devastating blunders of feminist theory and practice, this work makes a compelling argument for an “authentic feminism,” one that aggressively connects the realities of women’s experiences, needs, aspirations, and responsibilities.
Definitions, Apologies, and the Status Quo
Feminism and Abolition, public lecture by Professor Angela Y. Davis on Friday, May 3 @The…
