‘Race and history are essential twins’—Read an excerpt from Corinne A. Kratz’s award-winning book, Rhetorics of Value
The JRB presents an excerpt from Rhetorics of Value: Exhibition Design and Communication in Museums and Beyond by Corinne A….
Category: Art & Architecture
A rich history and a rapidly evolving industry—View photographs from Africa in Fashion: Luxury, Craft and Textile Heritage by Ken Kweku Nimo
The JRB presents an excerpt from Ken Kweku Nimo’s new book Africa in Fashion: Luxury, Craft and Textile Heritage. Africa…
‘Almost all of Africa’s ancient artistic heritage is now preserved in European countries’—Read an excerpt from Bénédicte Savoy’s Africa’s Struggle for Its Art
The JRB presents an excerpt from Africa’s Struggle for Its Art: History of a Postcolonial Defeat by Bénédicte Savoy. Africa’s…
[City Editor] ‘At first sight, Johannesburg is simultaneously welcoming and unwelcoming, familiar and unfamiliar’ by Lidudumalingani
There is something permanent about how Johannesburg reveals itself to anyone arriving in it, etching itself into the memory, even…
[The JRB Daily] 2022 Humanities and Social Sciences Awards winners announced—‘casting a celebratory light on those whose work often goes unnoticed’
Image: The 2022 HSS Awards winners. Back, from left: Aryan Kaganof, Natalia Molebatsi, Napjadi Letsoalo, Thulasizwe Simpson, Nthikeng Mohlele, Mandla…
[The JRB Daily] Winners of the inaugural Bank Windhoek Doek Literary Awards announced
The winners of the first ever Bank Windhoek Doek Literary Awards have been announced. The awards recognise Namibian writers, poets…
[City Editor] ‘At night, Jozi is dead, unless you are the killer’—11 observations about the city, by Lidudumalingani
Cities and mining Underneath Johannesburg, imagine hollow cities, stretching from Soweto all the way to Turffontein, and further. As the…
[City Editor] Re-mapping the city by suicide—Lidudumalingani on the hidden brutality of the Johannesburg skyline
Re-mapping the city by suicide. Tiny dots of what is left when we die etched into the urban cartography. Souls…
[City Editor] The people who stare at the city—Lidudumalingani recognises Joburg’s street vendors, our unacknowledged everyday archivists
The man at the bottom of Johannesburg Road in Highlands North, where Berkswell Road intersects it, punching it from the…
‘If I had power over the lexical landscape, I would get rid of the word immigrant’—Nana Oforiatta Ayim talks to Wamuwi Mbao about her debut novel The God Child
Nana Oforiatta Ayim is a Ghanaian writer, filmmaker and art historian. On a balmy traffic-clagged Cape Town morning, I meet…
[City Editor] Conjuring his images out of darkness—Lidudumalingani reflects on how the late Santu Mofokeng’s photographs are a kind of visual metaphor for Johannesburg
Johannesburg is a city that dances on the edges of elusive, and yet somehow Santu Mofokeng managed to contain it…
Introducing Yeoville—part of the mythology of transitional Johannesburg
The JRB presents an excerpt from Politics and Community-Based Research: Perspectives from Yeoville Studio, Johannesburg. Politics and Community-Based Research: Perspectives…
‘As we sleepwalk ever closer toward climate catastrophe’—An excerpt from Broken Land, the new photobook by Daylin Paul, winner of the Ernest Cole Award
Daylin Paul won the Ernest Cole Award, a photography prize for a prospective project, for his debut work Broken Land…
[The JRB exclusive] ‘PS. Everybody calls me Binyavanga these days.’ Read Binyavanga Wainaina’s letter to his late mother, from the 2016 exhibition Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison
In 2016, the late Binyavanga Wainaina contributed a piece of writing to a United Kingdom-based art project titled Inside: Artists and…
Wider than the Black Atlantic—Bongani Madondo listens in on Kwame Brathwaite’s visual sounds of Blackness, from the photo book Black Is Beautiful
Contributing Editor Bongani Madondo unmoors Kwame Brathwaite’s Black Is Beautiful from mono-dimensional notions of the Black Atlantic into a New African Globalism of…
‘I didn’t seem to exist. It felt easier that way’—Es’kia Mphahlele. Read an excerpt from Like Family: Domestic Workers in South African History and Literature
The JRB presents an extract from Like Family: Domestic Workers in South African History and Literature, by Ena Jansen. Like…
[Conversation Issue] ‘There is nothing I loathe more than the idea that a piece of writing is “experimental”’—Emmanuel Iduma in conversation with Lidudumalingani
As part of our January Conversation Issue, Emmanuel Iduma, author of A Stranger’s Pose, in conversation with writer and photographer Lidudumalingani….
How to write when the novel is dead: Jennifer Malec reviews Autumn and Winter—the first two books of Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet
Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet is a lesson in how to create novels that reflect the now in all its glory and…
[The JRB Daily] ‘None But Ourselves’—Percy Zvomuya charts the sonic cartography of a revolution in the new Chimurenga Chronic: ‘The Invention of Zimbabwe’
Image: Bob Marley performing at the Zimbabwe Independence celebration, Rufaro Stadium, Harare, 18 April 1980 The new issue of Chimurenga’s…
‘The argument between Beauty and, perhaps, War’: William Kentridge and Denis Hirson in conversation in Johannesburg
Artist William Kentridge and author Denis Hirson appeared in a public conversation at the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, in February, to…
Ben Okri demonstrates the value of dreams in a ramshackle world: Wamuwi Mbao reviews The Magic Lamp
Wamuwi Mbao reviews The Magic Lamp, a new collection of meditations and stories by Ben Okri, illustrated by Rosemary Clunie. The…
The JRB Vol. 1, Issue 6 cover image features a photograph from UP UP: Stories of Johannesburg’s Highrises
Main image: Mpho Mokgadi This month’s cover image comes from UP UP: Stories of Johannesburg’s Highrises. UP UP: Stories of Johannesburg’s…
Finding beauty under apartheid: Interview with Dan Magaziner, and excerpt from his book The Art of Life in South Africa
The Art of Life in South Africa Dan Magaziner UKZN Press, 2017 Main image: Ndaleni group shot, late 1970s, Ndaleni…