A Most Majestic Fly Whisk

Gorgeous example of bwami bwa kifebwe art - male elder mask with a powerful sorcerer's crest and pre-carnivalization coloring. Studied by Hersek "in the field" near Kikomo, now owned by a private collecting fuck from Venice Beach You don't have to be very familiar with the Northern Italian roots of microhistory (in the work of Ginzburg, Levi, Poni, Grendi, et al.) as a methodological approach to be aware of its products - classics like The Cheese and the Worms , The Return of Martin Guerre , and The Great Cat Massacre are still v popular both in and out of the classroom - or understand its dissatisfaction with Annales school longue durée analysis + grand narrative (Muir's " gigantification of historical scale ")...but it does help with blog posts! Channeling Marcia’s Freudposting on this one. Zooming In The microhistorical approach raises questions about selectivity and significance. By what criteria are names to be picked out and how representative of

The introduction of Soumaoro Kanté at 6:45 is one of the best things on YT, bro even has the human bone balafon.    "Mouminatou Camara, once a star dancer in Guinea’s national company Les Ballets Africains, walked to the front of a packed dance studio in Union Square, Manhattan, to begin her class. Before starting the warm-up, she turned to the drummers, stood up straight, and exclaimed with a wry smile, 'Prêt pour la Révolution!' (Ready for the Revolution!)—a political slogan and salutation in socialist Guinea. The remark was lost on American students, but the drummers—most of whom were also Guinean—smiled and responded in kind, 'Pour la Révolution, prêt!'" — Cohen's Infinite Repertoire: On Dance and Urban Possibility in Postsocialist Guinea "The demystification campaign is finished. The children have made themselves the educators of their mothers and fathers; they have broken in their hands those nefarious playthings and thrown them in the fire. Th

  Abdoulaye Konaté - Vert Pour Sidy How are y'all? At least OK, I hope - OK is about where I'm at myself. Kinda a weird vibe today; had to spend a couple hours in a disciplinary committee to try and keep a kid from getting suspended for throwing ink on people (makes no more sense in context), then keep myself from strangling a Ph.D student in my modern historiography seminar who seems hellbent on misinterpreting Trouillot in the most braindead of post-2015 Austin liberal ways (UHHH DOES THE RECORD OF SILENCES TAKE INTO ACCOUNT DIGITAL ARCHIVING STRATEGIES s2g gonna leave a record of violences on your face), but yesterday I got to meet Romanian darling of the litfic world Mircea Cărtărescu at a talk he gave on his cool new book Solenoid so the week is balancing out. Ramadan is def nailing me harder than I expected this year when combined with everything else. Slowly moving beyond the need to apologize for inactivity here but I will never get past allowing other people's p