A POC/non-white/mixie nerd scrapbook. Because we’re awesome.
sweetlyenchains replied to your photo: Today’s library haul: Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City,…
do report back on Zoo City…
She just totally referenced Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. The chutzpah. Moxyland was a fun read and I think I’ll like this one too.
(For the uninformed, HDM did that people-toting-personal-magic-animals thing first.)
Zoo City (an adaptation of Lauren Beukes’s book), Tok Tokkie and The Windmill are all South African projects; I dunno about the Who Fears Death movie, which is based off a book by a Nigerian-American author, has an American producer and Kenyan director, and is set in far-future Sudan.
Via io9.
Aw this is coool!!!
Hey, Nnedi Okarafor is freaking awesome. Who Fears Death is gritty stuff.
What’s even more awesome - all the four mentioned stories are written by women.
Etienne Fourie’s a guy, but 3/4 still ain’t bad. I’m also impressed by the presence of women producers and directors, who are super rare in Hollywood.
Zoo City (an adaptation of Lauren Beukes’s book), Tok Tokkie and The Windmill are all South African projects; I dunno about the Who Fears Death movie, which is based off a book by a Nigerian-American author, has an American producer and Kenyan director, and is set in far-future Sudan.
Via io9.
Gundane said he hoped that his involvement with the song would turn him into an expert on British politics and economics in the same way ‘Do they know it’s Christmas’ had turned Geldof and Bono into the world’s leading experts on Africa.
“If I’m not sharing a platform with the Queen and David Cameron by this time next year; or headlining at Glastonbury, then I will have done something very wrong,” said Gundane.
Literally made my holiday season.
LULZ HAD.
Actual laughter was produced. Further lulz were induced by “Charles and Camilla to get full Mzansi experience”
“They have requested to be shown traditional crafts,” said a presidential spokesperson, “so we’re taking them to the office of this guy Mo in Midtown who’ll do you a legit-looking tender application for 2K”.
and “COP17 called off as new planet found to ruin”
The international climate change talks currently happening in Durban have been abruptly ended as the news broke that astronomers have discovered a new habitable planet, Kepler 22b. “What’s the point, really, now that we have a spare?” said one climate activist.
[snip photos]
This is offensive as fuck.
I wonder how many CFWF are going to reblog and say that it’s adorable and they want to recreate it.
Fucking white people man. I’m out.
Apparently, racism is not only “cool” again, it’s fashion smart. Insert vomit here.
You know, I could have forgiven all the furnishings.
UNTIL I GOT TO THE SHOT WITH THE BLACK PEOPLE STANDING AT THE BACK WITH FEZZES.
I have many questions about the wedding planner, the guests, the family, the staff…just so many questions. Not least being to wonder how they pitched this to the catering company.
so if you go to the source
look where they had the wedding
SOUTH AFRICA
Description: Cover of Zoo City by Lauren Beukes. Against the background of a red-purple cityscape are the golden-toned faces of Zinzi, a young black South African woman with a sloth peeking its head over her shoulder, and two guys (supporting characters? haven’t read the book) whose faces are melded with a beaky crow and a fluffy white dog respectively.
At fantasywithbite, inverarity (who also did the aforelinked Parable of the Sower review) has a review of Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City:
Zoo City is urban fantasy that actually earns that label: it’s fantasy in the gritty, urban environment of Johannesburg, South Africa. It’s set in our world — almost. Some time in the 1990s, the Zoo Plague, or “Acquired Aposymbiotic Familiarism,” manifested worldwide. The result of some unexplained mystic phenomenon, criminals now acquire tangible evidence of their sins at the moment of their crime: animal companions who are permanently bonded to them. Along with their animals, every “Zoo” also gains a unique magical talent, so it’s not all bad. In fact, you might think getting a semi-intelligent animal companion and a magic power would be kind of cool — except that since everyone knows that an animal companion means you’ve committed some sort of serious crime, and you have a possibly shady magical talent, “Zoos” are persecuted worldwide. In some countries, it’s social prejudice (predictably, in the U.S. it acquires a certain amount of gangsta cachet), in others, they’re forced into ghettos, and some countries, like China, simply summarily execute anyone who becomes animalled.
[…] The premise by itself would make Zoo City interesting enough to check out — somewhat reminiscent of Wild Cards or some other setting where you’ve got a subclass of randomly “empowered” individuals each with a unique ability — but this book is set in South Africa, the modern, upscale South Africa of glam clubs and pop superstars and wifi cafes, but also the grim South Africa still haunted by colonialism and Apartheid, afflicted with refugee camps, AIDS, and endemic poverty.
The main character, our first-person narrator, is Zinzi December, a black South African girl who had a privileged upbringing with affluent parents and a career as a freelance journalist, but somewhere along the way she got a nasty drug habit, went in and out of rehab until her parents cut her loose, and then one fatal night, she got her brother killed, acquired a Sloth, and went to prison. Now she’s out on parole, living in a Johannesburg ghetto known as “Zoo City,” and trying to get out from under her drug debts. Her mashavi (magical talent) is finding lost things. She tries to earn a living by tracking down missing items for a fee (“No missing persons,” she insists, so of course we know the plot will revolve around her trying to track down a missing person), but she supplements her income by running 419 scams for the criminal syndicate she owes money to.
Via the Carl Brandon Society on Twitter:
Chimurenga Magazine’s next publishing project is The Chimurenga Chronicle – a once-off, one-day-only edition of a speculative, future-forward newspaper that travels back in time to re-imagine the present.
Produced in collaboration with Nigeria’s Cassava Republic Press and Kenya’s Kwani?, it is a multi-section broadsheet with news, long-form journalism, comics, sport, art etc. and 100-page books magazine to be released in September 2011, in numerous African cities.
The current tools we have at our disposal, particularly in the area of knowledge production and dissemination, don’t help much to grasp contemporary reality. What we need is a Time Machine! A device that will allow us to understand the numerous different temporalities, dispersed entanglements and overlapping time-spaces that define today.
The Chimurenga Chronicle is one such machine. Back-dated to the week May 18-24 2008, it’s situated during the first week of the so-called xenophobic violence in South Africa, two years ago – but it focuses outward, covering the events, scenes and situations around the world during this period.
As part of the project we view the newspaper classifieds section as a literary and art platform; a public space that delights in prescience, precision, and provocation and uses wit as a formidable weapon against the tyranny of everyday banality. Yes, it sells out – it sells out big. It sells everything from undying love, to first editions of Fanon, from rhetorical job offers to shards of hope.
We therefore invite submission of nano-novels, micro-art works, flash poetry, philosophical aphorism, minima moralia, haikus of the heart, found objects and more, for sections including sales, wanted, services, jobs, personals and obituaries.
All classifieds submitted should be no longer than 50 words and should relate to the week May 18-24 2008.
Email chimurenga@panafrican.co.za for queries.
Description: Colourful stylized mock movie poster of Uhura at a console with a screwdriver in one hand and an iPhone-hologrammy-thing in the other. Part of a recruitment campaign by DSTV Online, a South African online media company.
Description: Colourful stylized mock movie poster of Geordi La Forge running down a starship corridor. Part of a recruitment campaign by DSTV Online, a South African online media company.
Oh, hey, I blogged! Futureland by Walter Mosley and Moxyland by Lauren Beukes.
A pair of grim post-cyberpunk dystopias, impressively fleshed out and featuring multiple narrators representative of near-future Cape Town and near-future black America, respectively. (Futureland, published in 2001, actually opens in 2004, but never feels dated. Moxyland, on the other hand, with its faintly twee fictional brandnames and references to BoingBoing, may not age as well…)
