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In April 1966 thousands of artists, musicians, performers, and writers from across Africa and its diaspora gathered in the Senegalese capital, Dakar, to take part in the First World Festival of Black and African Culture (Premier Festival Mondial des arts nègres). The festival constituted a highly symbolic moment both in the era of decolonization and the push for civil rights for African Americans in the United States. In essence, the festival sought to perform an emerging Pan-African culture, to give concrete cultural expression to the ties that would bind the African “homeland” to black people in the diaspora. On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1966 event, the editors of this special issue held a conference at Florida State University that sought to examine the festival and its multiple legacies, with the aim of promoting a better understanding of both the utopianism of the period following World War II and the “festivalization” of Africa that has occurred in recent decades.

This essay takes its cue from Louis Chude-Sokei's The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics . Chude-Sokei's specific Caribbean matrix of technologically oriented poetics of the human is extended to African and African American texts, illustrating how blackness registers across distinctive histories. Following Chude-Sokei's engagement with Sylvia Wynter, the essay begins with the centrality of women's engagements with technologies for mobility featured in African popular print magazines in the era of independence. Turning to a contemporaneous publication, Langston Hughes's Ask Your Mama , the essay then examines media and transportation technologies as vehicles for transnational black solidarity and its attendant static, a form of Glissantian opacity. The essay closes with a comparative reading of Aime Cesaire and Gwendolyn Brooks, proposing parallels in the way their poetics of blackness formed a "miraculous weapon." The essay demonstrates that solidarity and dissent need not be mutually exclusive and that poetics maintains space for complexity.

I. At Independence Hall In the amber light, the heat bottoms out below ground level. This khaki-clad woman guidesus: one day, she says, we will all look back on fossil fuels the same way....

In this introduction to this special issue, “Genre and Africa,” Jaji and Saint theorize genre from the perspective of the African continent to explore how such an orientation necessarily interrogates and transforms previous understandings of genre. After a brief review of pivotal work in genre studies, the authors turn to Africa’s particular colonial and postcolonial predicaments to theorize the specific interventions to genre theory that such a vantage point affords. Interwoven are summaries and commentary upon the six essays included in the issue. The introduction then concludes by highlighting several new directions of genre study occasioned by this issue’s contents, including the rise of new media and renewed interest in the intersections of popular forms and affect studies.

In any culture, festive events are often far more than simple opportunities to feast and celebrate. They can also be focal points for political or cultural movements, a chance to speak and act in ways that may be forbidden or limited in non-festive times. In the Caribbean, with its particular history of slavery and cross-cultural encounter, festivities were often highly policed, explosive points in the calendar. Slave dances were breaks in the repetitive routine of the plantation, and chances to breach temporarily the strict colonial authority, in which the threat of retributive violence was ever fused with the equally strong need to escape the rigours of every-day life through festive activities.

This paper puts African-American film-maker William Greaves's two films Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1971) and Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2½ (2003) in conversation with each other to consider the possibilities for self-reflexive improvization at two distinct moments, influenced by historical context, medium and generation. Using film footage shot in 1968 (with additional video footage shot with a new crew and returning cast members in Take 2½), Greaves allows the social ecology of a film in production to generate its own order to the consternation of his crew. In Take 2½, many aspects of Greaves' instigative process are no longer as mysterious, nor is the politics of production in a post-9/11 world open in the ways it seemed in 1968. Just as the screen-test dialogues in both Takes explore (hetereonormative) reproduction, we consider how the films taken together play with ‘improvisation’ – can it be revisited, reproduced, represented and under what conditions? Our discussion's theoretical archive draw...

On the occasion of the ANC’s centenary this article analyzes the musical contributions of founding president, John Langalibalele Dube and his first wife, Nokutela Dube. Through an analysis of the sonic metaphors the Dubes used in their speeches and letter-writing I show that the idea of transcribing music was essential to imagining freedom, modernity, and a relation to transnational black struggles. Close readings of their collection of secular songs, Zulu Songbook, and John Dube’s novel UJeqe reveal how their political and educational endeavors informed their writing, as well as the continuities and disjunctures between their intellectual labor and that of contemporaries such as Solomon Plaatje, Pixely ka Isaka Seme, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington.

There is a long history of cultural affi nities between African Americans with their roots in slavery and Jim Crow and South African peoples who suffered from apartheid and its precursors. While the differences between their respec- tive situations were never obscured, the sense of a shared political project was perhaps most marked during the 1960s and 70s when numerous South African exiles in the United States encountered the civil rights movement and cultural nationalism which followed in its wake, most notably in the Black Arts Movement. The question arises, to what extent did the interest in African-American culture and politics translate into distinct aesthetic strategies on the part of South African writers? One answer emerges from an analysis of the poetry of Keorapetse Kgositsile, currently poet laureate of South Africa, and in particular the synaesthesisa that marks his blend of poetry and the African-American musical styles of jazz and soul. As a South African writer who published the bulk of his work in the United States during and after his exile in the United States as an African National Congress (ANC) activist, Kgositsile was closely involved with the Black Arts Movement, and shared its commitment to music as a generative source of politicized aesthetics. Through citations of specifi c musicians, compositions and performance venues, and transcriptions of rhythmic and improvisatory performance practices, Kgositsile allows the aural sensory mode of listening to music to structure visual, haptic, and other metaphors as part of a gen- eralized strategy of synaesthesia in his poetry. Just as synaesthesia relies on producing identifi cation between different sensory modes—to see a sound, or hear a haptic touch—so it can be extended as a metaphor for solidarity