PROUD FLESH: EDITORIAL STATEMENT

PROUD FLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness (2010)

ISSN: 1543-0855

Sonjah Stanley Niaah

“[A repressive society produces]…some kind of gangrene within you…that eats your soul, that forces you to save your soul. I couldn’t really say that a repressive society would result in creative art, but somehow it does help, it is an ingredient...” (John Kani, South African Actor)

For the Afrikan world, there have been various sites of repression out of which creativity has sprung in the form of the plastic and performing arts, systems of memory, and fuel for becoming. I hear echoes of Stuart Hall in John Kani’s words reminding us that the black bodies have been our only canvasses on / from which to create our place in the world, our only canvasses of representation. Perhaps it is Soyinka, as an exiled citizen of Africa and a citizen of the Diaspora, whose active contemplation on the relationship between the children of the Diaspora and those on the continent that best calls into question the relationship between repression and rootlessness on the one hand, and creativity on the other. Soyinka posited that the way to achieve mammoth scale change for the Afrikan world in the new Millennium was through conferences, exhibitions, film, the performing arts, celebration, and the promotion of exchange.

PROUD FLESH is a terrain for promoting exchange, thinking, for igniting the common impulse to create, to perform, to interrogate in spite of the odds fuelled by repression and rootlessness.

PROUD FLESH promotes rigourous and insightful contributions on and or around Black Life, its culture, politics and consciousness. Its audience is beyond “All Over the World” Afrikans, especially those who are conscious of the world as a place that seeks to negate Black life. We aim to be youthful and old in perspective, both fresh and wise, from a variety of angles, sites and in creative forms. We are about creation, criticism, the corporeal and the everyday, as much as the sacred and the provocative.

PROUD FLESH is very interested in the interrelated themes of memory, materiality, performance and culture, appealing to scholars in a variety of fields including cultural studies, performance studies, gender studies, anthropology, history, archeology and musicology, among others. We invite scholarly or creative works in the form of prose or poetic writing on topics ranging from objectification, being and becoming; the use and management of sites, bodies, monuments and objects at the individual, local and global scales from different social spaces and sectors of societies such as houses, ritual spaces, museums, touristic scapes, ethnoscapes and nation-states; histories of or contemporary movements of nationalism; silenced constituencies and struggles over power; history of negotiations of race and ethnicity, identity and belonging; cultural preservation and cultural consumption; object and profit oriented capitalist material practices; to the politics of the production and/or erasure of memory about the past, present and future. In addition to particular case studies we are specifically interested in papers that address theoretical and methodological questions.

PROUD FLESH: proud, present, positioned, perceptive, and political! Be a part of the ongoing debate about the Afrikan presence in its varying dimensions across the globe.

Citation Format

Stanley Niaah, Sonjah (2010). PROUD FLESH: EDITORIAL STATEMENT. PROUD FLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness.