Architecture has been a way to immortalise and to honour death. From the Egyptian pyramids to war memorials, architecture and design have forever been dedicated to death. But Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins sought to allow their inhabitants eternal life through their design.
Africa. Starvation and disease, mud-huts and lions. This is the image of an entire continent portrayed by Western society. This single-minded view of the rich and thriving culture that Africa really encompasses is woefully inadequate.
When it comes to celebrating Black History Month in the US, Black culture is a brilliant starting point. One topic of fascination for me is the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black cultural icons who fuelled it.
A diaspora, according to a definition given by the Dartmouth Library, is a ‘human population scattered beyond a home territory, although still interconnected’. By using the word ‘scattered’, a sense of detachment within a culture is created, giving connotations of a disorganised, and poorly planned community, that has sat passively, allowing themselves to become ‘scattered’ across the globe.
To an extent, this is true of the African diaspora. One of the largest diasporas globally, it refers to the many movements and mass dispersions of people of African descent throughout the world, as a result of previous historic events. Although in recent years, growing trends of globalisation and encouragement of international migration has led to a further expansion of the Black community globally, the diaspora is largely a result of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, as 12.5 million African people were torn from their homes as European and North American colonisation exploited African communities as a whole for long-term economic gain, leaving devastation, depopulation and under-development economically of many countries within the African continent.
Your Best American Girl by Japanese-American musician Mitski is, according to Pitchfork, one of the best songs of the last decade. An autobiographical, insightful look into self-acceptance and what it means to actually be American, the indie punk rock song stands out in her discography.
