This article traces and analyzes the missionary photography of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), the most important independent black American institution that began to operate in colonial South Africa at the onset of the politics of racial segregation in the 1890s. It argues that AME missionary photography presents a neglected archive, from which a history of black photographic encounters and a subaltern perspective on the dominant visual cultures of European imperialism and Christian missions in Africa can be retrieved. Focussing in particular on how AME missionaries deployed tropes of the culturally refined “New Negro” and the US South in their visual description of South Africa, this article demonstrates that photography was an important tool for black subjects to define their image beyond the representations of black inferiority that established visual traditions constructed.
In the first autumn of the COVID-19 pandemic, long-time theatre collaborators in two different cities in the US South discuss the future of an art form that has currently gone dark. Influenced by punk culture, twenty-first-century internet aesthetics, social justice movements and their pets, this decade-strong creative team reflects in a multimedia format on their past work and enumerates their priorities for the future of musical theatre: cheap, remote, inexperienced, local, radical and full of women and sexual/gender minorities.
Book Review: Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the US-Mexico Borderlands