Category Archives: New Utopia

As threats to democracy everywhere seem to be increasing, the discussions surrounding the threats rarely offer practical solutions to the problems plaguing the system. A Therapy for Dying Democracies by Theodore C. Stathis is an impressive book offering insights as well as a plan of action for saving democracy which is especially timely at this particular moment in history.

The books description notes that the world economic crisis and the provocatively unjust distribution of wealth have exposed the real crisis, which is a political one. All the malfunctioning democracies that are gradually growing into oligarchic governments have become the main focus of many political experts.

Books about democracy including such titles as Are Democracies Dying? and How Democracies Die have reinvigorated global interest in ancient Greek democracy and even though many publications refer to it, they do not propose any functional and substantial solutions that keep up with the present; as a result, direct democracy is being rejected, not only by the enemies of this political system, but also by well-meaning prominent figures and public officials, who consider it as being nothing but a utopia, Stathis writes.

A Therapy for Dying Democracies contains a remedy for our modern malfunctioning democracies, which suffer from a lack of democracy. Actually, the dying democracies, one by one, are removing their democratic masks and reveal their real identity, which is oligarchic in nature, Stathis notes.

A Therapy for Dying Democracies is a unique proposal and shows how the operational difficulties of ancient Greek democracy can be bypassed, and presents for the first time worldwide an effective way that shows how true democratic governments can be established today.

Stathis has the equivalent of a B.Sc. degree from the Technical University in Vienna, as well as a M.Sc. and an Eng. Sc.D. degree from Columbia University, New York. He is president of the Foundation for Mediterranean Studies. He has worked as an assistant researcher at Columbia University and as an assistant professor at Manhattan College, New York, and at New York University, where he also worked as a researcher. He was a scientific expert, and later a lecturer, at the University of Patras, and a visiting professor at the University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki.

Stathis was president of Advanced Acoustical Research Inc. in New York, executive director of N.B.G. Bancassurance, president and executive director of National Capital S.A. (National Bank of Greece Subsidiaries), and Adviser to the Board of the National Bank of Greece, as well as president of the Musical and Educational Organization of Greece (Athens Camerata Friends of Music Orchestra).

He served for 15 years as a Member of the Greek Parliament, and as an Undersecretary for the Greek Ministry of Defense, as a Deputy Minister for the Greek Ministry of Culture, and as Minister of Agriculture.

He is the composer of four operas (three of which have been performed at the Athens Concert Hall- Megaron Mousikis): Antigone, based on the play by Sophocles (see excerpts on YouTube), Opus Elgin: The Destruction of the Parthenon, Alcestis based on the play by Euripides, and Theodora (set in the time of Justinian); he has also composed a number of quartets for strings, and numerous songs. As a writer, he has published several articles on science and politics, and is the author of National Defense and Its Achilles Heel, In Search of a Model for Democracy Today, and The Trojan Horse of Democracy.

A Therapy for Dying Democracies by Theodore C. Stathis is available online: https://bit.ly/3IuqhAG.

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Stathis' A Therapy for Dying Democracies - The National Herald

York Theatre Royal will be hosting Utopia Theatres production of Heres What She Said to Me on March 17 and March 18.

The production has been developed and will be directed by Mojisola Elufowoju who graduated from York St John with a degree in Theatre and Directing in 2011.

She said: I found almost that Id found myself when I did that particular course. I knew what I wanted to do. You just try your hand at something, and you just know that something about it feels within the skills youve already got.

Heres What She Said To Me was written by Oladipo Agboluaje after conversations with Mojisola Elufowoju.

The production will combine drama with music, poetry and more to tell a moving story.

Mojisola Elufowoju said: We are so excited to finally be able to take our production of Heres What She Said to Me on tour. Since its first staging in 2020, we always intended to bring the production to audiences across the country.

Tickets are available here, at the York Theatre Royal website.

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York Theatre Royal to host brand new show this March | York Press - York Press

Theres a lot of great science fiction, fantasy, and horror published every month by large presses. But indie presses are also publishing plenty of great worksome of which can go under the radar. With that in mind, heres a look at some notable books due out in March and April 2022 on independent presses. Its not everything, but it might point you in some unexpected directions with your spring reading.

As cryptids go, few are stranger than Mothman, a bizarre creature said to lurk in the woods of West Virginia. Its been the subject of prose nonfiction and ominous comics; theres even a Mothman riff in the game Fallout 76. And if the cover and Mountain State location are any indication, its also what Laurel Hightower is writing about in her new novel Below, about a woman whose drive through the mountains takes a sinister turn. (March 29, 2022; Perpetual Motion/Ghoulish Books)

What does it mean when youre not who you thought you were? Alternately: the categories of beauty queen and sleeper agent have, historically speaking, not had much overlap. Candace Wuehles forthcoming Monarch poses the question: what if someone could lay claim to both of those job descriptions? Throw in a touch of the occult and a bit of punk rock and you have an intriguing combination. (March 29, 2022; Soft Skull Press)

When it comes to John Elizabeth Stintzis novel My Volcano, a volcano bursting from the ground below Central Park manages to be one of the less weird aspects of the plot. Stinzis novel also includes time travel, folktales, and a character transforming into a being with a steadily growing hive mind. This is not a book that lacks ambition. (March 22, 2022; Two Dollar Radio)

For years, Jon Frankel has been at work on a series of novels set in a future United States devastated by climate change. A 2020 profile of Frankel described his work in bold terms: Its Shakespeare as a B movie, its the alienation of Chandlers Philip Marlow. The next part of his massive novel Isle of Dogs is due out this spring; the first part dealt with political intrigue in the U.S. circa 2500. (April 2022; Whiskey Tit)

Several of Yoko Tawadas novels have taken readers into strange corners of the future, including The Emissary. Next up for her in English translation is Scattered All Over the Earth, translated by Margaret Mitsutani. Its the first book in a trilogy, set in a near future where climate change abounds and Japan has vanished from the map. (March 1, 2022; New Directions)

Dystopian states can abound with magic just as easily as they can with science. In Eugen Bacons novel Mage of Fools, a dictator has made use of uncanny abilities to devastate the environment. The novels protagonist must find a way to end their reign using suppressed literature and the possibility of a better life for all. (March 15, 2022; Meerkat Press)

Blurbs dont always get my attention, but when both Vanessa Veselka and Paul Tremblay are raving about your book, thats bound to catch my eye. The book in question is Cara Hoffmans collection Ruin, which encompasses everything from talking animals to children making use of strange disguises. Turns out blending the sinister and the surreal makes for a compelling combination. (April 5, 2022; PM Press)

If you havent yet encountered John Langans fiction, 2022 is a great time for it. Langan writes emotionally resonant, formally brilliant stories that veer into the occult and the outright horrific. The spring, an expanded edition of his debut collection Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters will see print. Its an excellent introduction to a prodigiously talented writer. (March 2022; Word Horde)

Lets not forget that poetry can also transport readers into speculative, uncanny, or otherwise fantastical realms. In this case, Adrian Ernesto Cepedas We Are the Ones Possessed, a collection that cites both Carmen Maria Machado and Nick Cave as inspirations. These works promise to impart a sense of dread and fan out into the world of death. (March 2022; CLASH Books)

First and foremost, Chelsea Vowels Buffalo Is the New Buffalo has an astoundingly good title, one thats evocative and instantly memorable. That its described by the publisher as a work of Metis futurism is also very intriguing. Vowels collection takes familiar science fiction structures and charts new ground within them; its the anti-colonialist collection you didnt know you were waiting for. (April 26, 2022; Arsenal Pulp Press)

Richard Butner has been writing surreal, fantastical stories for a while now, and this year will see the publication of his debut collection. Its called The Adventurists, and it abounds with mysterious doorways, lost royalty, and lovelorn ghosts. The review at Publishers Weekly made comparisons to the unlikely trio of John Crowley, Ray Bradbury, and Sally Rooney which is certainly an attention-getting combination. (March 22, 2022; Small Beer Press)

You may well have read some of Vandana Singhs short fiction in these very (digital) pages. Now, she has a book due out as part of PM Presss excellent Outspoken Authors series. Utopias of the Third Kind brings together fiction and nonfiction that finds Singh exploring the notion of what a utopia could be and how we might get there. (March 22, 2022; PM Press)

Can old myths coexist with modern accounts of violence and isolation? Read Irene Sols When I Sing, Mountains Dance (translated by Mara Faye Lethem) and you may well have your answer. This is a novel where witches narrate part of the story, where ghosts are as central to the story as the living, and where the landscape itself takes on a massive stature. (March 15, 2022; Graywolf Press)

If youve read Catherynne M. Valentes novel Deathless, you may be familiar with the story of Koschei the Deathless. Valentes book juxtaposed this figure with one part of the history of the Soviet Union; Katya Kazbeks Little Foxes Took Up Matches also hearkens back to this folktale, but ventures into the waning days of the U.S.S.R., and addresses themes of identity and family as it does so. (April 5, 2022; Tin House)

How many stories have gotten your attention by recounting an account of something strange happening in nearby woods? Masatsugu Onos At the Edge of the Woods (translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter) tells the story of a family who arrive in a new home and find that the woods near their house are home to something uncanny. How does that change them in turn? Well, youll have to read it to find out. (April 12, 2022; Two Lines Press)

Tobias Carroll is the managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn. He is the author of the short story collection Transitory (Civil Coping Mechanisms) and the novel Reel (Rare Bird Books).

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Can't Miss Indie Press Speculative Fiction for March and April 2022 - tor.com

Had it been released at any point in the past few years, Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes would have been an important documentary; a feature-length blend of audio interviews and largely unseen archive footage that puts the 1986 disaster into horrifying new perspective. That it comes out now just days after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, including an attack on the Chernobyl site itself makes it as unmissable as it is harrowing.

Obviously, this timeliness was never the intention. Indeed, the film-maker James Jones had a different historical event in mind when he started work on it two years ago. I initially thought the relevance was Covid, he says. Like Chernobyl, the early days of the pandemic were marked with mysterious illnesses that the local government attempted to keep a lid on. I was interested in the idea that this invisible enemy was threatening us, he says. An authoritarian regime was lying about it, and Chinese citizens were starting to voice their disquiet publicly.

The seed of the documentary was planted when Jones read two books on the disaster during lockdown Not good for my mental state, he says in retrospect. But completely fascinating. One contained a footnote that caught his eye. It referenced footage that was shot in Pripyat [in northern Ukraine] the weekend after the accident, he says. Despite the fact that the worst nuclear disaster in history had happened down the road hours earlier, releasing 400 times more radioactive material into the atmosphere than the Hiroshima bomb, the footage showed residents milling about as if nothing had happened.

You can see mothers pushing babies around and kids playing football in the sand, says Jones. Then you start to see these white flashes on the film because of the insanely high level of radiation. It was so chilling. Nevertheless, the existence of this footage spurred him to seek out more. Via a wealth of sources national archives, propaganda films, collapsed Soviet documentary studios, western news reports, children and soldiers who happened to have video cameras at the time he began to piece together a blistering documentary that draws a straight line from the USSRs attempts to play down the disaster to the fall of the Soviet Union itself.

Although Chernobyl is one of those historical punctuation points on which everyone thinks they have a decent overview, not least due to Skys recent drama series, The Lost Tapes is studded with moments of footage so extraordinary that you are unlikely to forget them. A clean-up helicopter crashing to the ground over the explosion site. Searing footage of injuries and mutations to humans and animals. Wooden grave markers in an irradiated forest.

But perhaps the most unforgettable sequence is of the so-called liquidators; civil and military personnel who, after the robot designed to do the job became overloaded with radiation and malfunctioned, were tasked with clearing tons of contaminated material from the roof of the building by hand. We see them fashioning rudimentary PPE by tying lead sheets to their bodies, and joking nervously about vodka. Then there is one clip where a camera follows a group of liquidators up a ladder and out on to the roof itself. It is absolutely extraordinary, like being led by the hand into the mouth of hell. It was the most dangerous place on Earth at the time, Jones says. Many of them had no idea what they were doing.

Equally distressing is the footage shot around Pripyat before the disaster. The place looks like a utopia. Its clean and open, filled with so many children that a government official proudly opens the new wing of a maternity ward to cope with capacity. Jones admits that this footage has an air of Soviet propaganda to it, but it does seem a largely accurate reflection of how people who lived there felt about their town.

It just humanised the place, says Jones of this footage. I loved the drama series, but it is relentlessly grim. I think the only shot you see of the actual town is when a bird falls from the sky and dies. But this whole other reality existed, of people swimming in the sea and having ordinary lives. So when the tragedy does hit, you feel that this wasnt the distant world of grim Soviet citizens. It was a lively and joyous place.

One thread the documentary does share with the series, though, is Lyudmilla Ignatenko. Played by Jessie Buckley in the drama, she is a Ukrainian, pregnant at the time of the accident, whose husband died of severe radiation poisoning after trying to put out the blaze.

Ignatenko is one of the primary interviewees in The Lost Tapes. She displays similar emotional backbone here, providing an audio recollection of the horror she witnessed with remarkable clearheadedness. Lyudmilla has been through so much tragedy, says Jones, awestruck.

Some of the more homespun archive footage also helps remind us how relatively recent the disaster was. To watch the uniformed cast of the Chernobyl series or any official Soviet footage from that time, much of which was still shot on black and white film to save upgrading their kit you could be lulled into thinking all this took place in the 1950s or 60s. But Joness wealth of new video footage, with some startlingly era-appropriate fashion, helps to underline that in terms of history, this happened very recently.

It feels properly 80s, says Jones. Actually there was a great clip I really wanted to use where theres a really 80s disco, and just like flashing lights and DJs and stuff. But it felt slightly wrong tonally to include it.

For all the visceral horror of Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes, the thing that drags the film into the now is the torrent of disinformation that gushed out of the USSR in the wake of the tragedy. Despite the rest of the world reacting with justified alarm at the threat to life, the Soviet government clamped shut and refused to acknowledge anything that wasnt fully undeniable, regardless of evidence. Pripyat residents are evacuated, but told they will return in a matter of days. Patients dying of unimaginable radiation burns were brushed away as having no connection to Chernobyl. The documentary claims that 200,000 people are estimated to have died as a direct result of the disaster. The official Soviet tally remains at 13. To put it in modern terms, this was fake news on a colossal scale.

Eventually, people learned the truth and public anger at the cover-up was such that Ukrainian independence soon followed, as did the final collapse of the USSR. I ask Jones whether, in the age of the internet, something so big could be covered as easily.

You would think it would be impossible but then you look at Russia, at eastern Ukraine. If people are watching state television, particularly people at a certain age, you really can control what people think. I guess Putins tactic now is just to sow confusion everywhere so people feel they cant trust anything, whether its state TV or some conspiracy theory on Facebook. The actual truth is just one of many things running around. Youd like to think that, if people were dying from radiation or getting cancer or their hair was falling out, that it would be documented. But I dont know. My faith in the modern world has been shaken.

Securing all the footage was such an arduous job that it took him right up to the wire. It was scattered around Russia and Ukraine, and it was just a nightmare, he says. Soviet bureaucracy, the pandemic, sanctions. Our payments to Russia kept getting stopped by banks. It was laughable. Until two or three weeks ago, I thought there was no way we could deliver on time.

The documentary was finally handed in a week ago. Literally in the nick of time, says Jones. If the war had started earlier, the film wouldnt have been finished. That brings us to the subject that has cast a shadow over the interview, the documentary, and the world at large. Throughout our talk, Jones has spoken adoringly of his Ukrainian producers who helped to hunt down the archive footage, along with the crew and interview subjects from the area. Have they been in touch since the invasion? Pretty much all of them, yeah, he replies. How are they doing? They are all terrified, you know? Angry. They are all feeling pretty helpless.

And Lyudmilla Ignatenko? I texted yesterday saying, you know, I hope youre OK. I always talk to her in Russian when we text, he says. This time, she replied in Ukrainian.

Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes is on Sky Documentaries tonight at 9pm.

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Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes stunning TV that is suddenly unmissable - The Guardian

This story is part of our manual, "The Great Resignation." Read more here.

The pandemic sent shockwaves through the market for tech talent. Desirable candidates have so many options now that the entire industry is rethinking how to hire them and how to get them to stay.

The days of Im so lucky to have a job are now a case of We are so lucky to have these employees, said Rhys Hughes, executive talent partner at GV. Organizations are going to have to be incredibly careful even those that have experienced unrivaled levels of success in the last four to five years that they really, truly do understand that this is a candidates market.

Not everyone agrees that hiring is so much harder than it used to be. Jay Parikh, the co-CEO of the cybersecurity company Lacework, said that hiring great people in tech has always been tough. Its now just a different difficult, thanks to the competitive market and how geographically distributed the talent market has become. Recruiting over Zoom brings its own set of challenges.

Hiring has continued steadily at startups and big tech companies alike. And while remote work has opened up new local talent markets to employers, it also means the best candidates now have more options than ever. Most critically, this pandemic-tested generation of tech talent now prizes flexibility, work-life balance and a sense of mission at work.

Employees are realizing and reevaluating what they want from their jobs, said Meagan Gregorczyk, senior director of Performance and Talent Management at ServiceNow. They certainly dont want to chase a performance rating. Thats not what meaning means anymore. They want to become the next incredible version of themselves.

Professionals are reevaluating how work fits into their life. Having time to walk the kids to the bus stop in the morning is a far more attractive perk than a ping pong table or a kombucha station at the office, Gregorczyk said.

In this environment, compensation is only one of several important recruiting levers. Many companies are throwing money at candidates in the hopes of outdoing other offers, but smart leaders will take a more holistic approach. (Some companies are also rethinking the way they give out bonuses to avoid losing employees who waited until bonus season to jump ship.)

Compensation is always an arms race, said Chris French, executive vice president of Customer Strategy at Workhuman. There will be winners and losers in that. But for a lot of companies, that cant be your only strategy. You can compete on flexibility, but most tech companies are going to be flexible.

Executive candidates in particular arent necessarily looking to be wooed by more money upfront, Hughes said.

A lot of the executives I speak to want to do things that are way more mission-driven, said Hughes, whos seeing that some are now more willing to take a pay cut to join a promising startup. Theyre prepared to take cash or equity that may not be as significant as where theyre at today, but may have way more upside in the future.

For leaders feeling worried about attrition, think twice before simply throwing raises and equity increases at the problem. Some founders make this mistake as their companies grow and naturally see more turnover, but there are other ways to retain at this stage, Hughes said.

High-growth companies will naturally see higher attrition at 100 employees than they did as a scrappy 10-person startup. Its around that 100-employee mark that the critical pace of learning is so retentive, Hughes said. First-line managers, engineers and salespeople are all hungry for learning and development opportunities.

That doesnt just apply to startups: As large tech companies grow, they need to find ways to support employees learning and development, especially when it comes to training new managers. ServiceNows solution has been to offer six months of external coaching to its new people managers, and to offer extra sets of training wheels to new managers whose direct reports are also new to the company.

Most companies recruiting processes have room for improvement. In a candidates market, making a great first impression is crucial.

Irrespective of the outcome, you almost want that individual to go home and tell their friends and family what a great experience it was, Hughes said.

Some of GVs portfolio companies put their own unique spin on the process to stand out, like mailing swag or sending the candidate a video from the hiring manager. But Hughes recommends doing the basics exceptionally well. Its best to engage candidates by leading with general curiosity about their background, excitement about the opportunity and even more excitement about the company trajectory, he said.

Communicating the importance of the company mission is a favorite recruiting strategy of Parikh. If done effectively, all kinds of candidates not just security geeks can see themselves in Laceworks mission, he said.

And hiring leaders need to own the process rather than relying on HR or talent acquisition teams, Hughes said.

But Parikh cautioned leaders from solely relying on hiring managers to make the final call.

There are a bunch of biases that arent protected [against] well if you leave the hiring decision to just be done by the hiring manager, Parikh said. Thats a very normal way to hire in tech, Parikh said, but it can allow biases to creep in and hurt companies that are trying to hire the best.

Realistically, the recruiting process starts long before the job is available, so leaders should spend 10% to 15% of their time networking in order to build a candidate pipeline, Hughes said.

Theres that saying, the moment you open a job description, youre already late, Hughes said. Utopia is: You dont have to open a job description because youve committed to a cohort of talent 18 months before you need them.

What goes up must come down, and it wont be a candidates market forever. But theres no obvious way to know when that shift will happen, so companies need to evaluate how theyre differentiating themselves from the competition. And those conversations need to start at the top of the company.

The experience of hiring is no longer an HR function. Its now becoming the C-suite function, Hughes said.

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Why hiring is so hard right now and how to fix it - Protocol

Here, at the height of apartheid, two movements were to emerge that began a journey that was eventually to bring apartheid to its knees. In the words of veteran political scientist Mahmood Mamdani (written in 2001):

The most important force for this change was not the armed struggle, nor exile politics, nor the international boycott movement. The force that began to bring apartheid to its knees, Mamdani argues, was provided by student activists of all colours and by migrant and township labour.

These two movements, the black consciousness movement and the workers movement, together dramatically shifted, he argues, the locus of struggle from exiled professional revolutionaries to the communities of South Africa.

It could be argued that Mamdani overstates the significance of the Durban moment but in bringing the struggle back home a vision re-emerged in the giant textile mills of Pinetown and the campuses of the University of Natal, of a non-racial and egalitarian society.

Of course there were deep divisions; but we are gathered here today to remember Rick Turner, the man who captured that vision in his remarkable book, The Eye of the Needle. Six years later, the Durban security police attempted to kill that vision with a cowardly assassins bullet.

Turners vision gave opponents of apartheid a sense of hope at a time of deep pessimism about the future of South Africa. He did this by successfully combining a radical vision of the future with an argument for the strategic use of power.

Let me illustrate.

The first point to make about this vision is that it is a moral vision, where the reader is invited to make a choice between capitalist values where people are treated as things and a society in which people are its central value. He refers to this as participatory democracy, or democratic socialism. I remember Rick saying if it is not democratic, it is not socialism.

The second point to make is that his vision of a future South African society was a radical one there was to be a fundamental redistribution of wealth and power, workers would control industry and agriculture, and the economy would be run along democratic lines.

South Africas problem, he argued, is not only racial; its roots lie in deep social and economic inequalities. A traditional free market solution will never work because, he argued, it would only co-opt a few black people into the elite, while leaving intact the real mechanism of oppression, the structures of South Africas racial capitalism. Traditional liberals, in other words, were unrealistic what he referred to as the impracticality of realism.

It may be worth noting here that Turners vision of participatory democracy was typical of the new left rather than the traditional left. As a result, he looked to workers self management in Yugoslavia or the Ujamaa village schemes of Julius Nyereres Tanzania as the best examples of participatory democracy. He did not look to the Soviet Union, which he firmly rejected in The Eye of the Needle as a large, inefficient, and undemocratic state bureaucracy.

Thirdly this vision, he believed, needs to be utopian. What he meant by the word utopian is that we need to develop realistic alternatives to the current institutions and social structures ideas that are grounded in the real potential for social change. What some have called Real Utopias a belief that what is pragmatically possible is not fixed independently of our imaginations, but is itself shaped by our vision.

We see this notion of utopia in the strategic side of Turners thinking in his postscript to The Eye of the Needle, The present as history (written in 1973).

Here he explores the organisational possibilities for change. He makes it clear that he rejects armed struggle as unrealistic, and economic sanctions as counterproductive, arguing instead that there is only one sphere in which Africans do have potential power and in which their power potential is in fact growing: this is within the economy.

It is important to note here that Turner explored favourably the possibility of using the institutions of separate development (especially Chief Buthelezi) as a platform through which a link could be made to the potential power of the urban working class and thereby develop a coherent and powerful black political movement in South Africa. However this suggestion needs to be placed in its context at this time the ANC in exile had links with Buthelezi and it was only in 1979 that these two national movements Inkatha and the African National Congress began to take diametrically opposed paths.

Let me conclude by asking the question: what relevance does Turners vision have for us today?

The answer, I trust, is now clear: Turner provided a generation disillusioned by the repression of the 60s and the challenge of Black Consciousness, with a vision a vision of what a new non-racial, ecologically sensitive and egalitarian South Africa could become. And he provided a strategy for how we could begin to reach it.

Much has changed in the world of politics and the world of work over the last 50 years. But to honour the enduring legacy of Rick Turner, and indeed to defy the assassins bullet, we must continue to raise the critical questions that defined his intellectual project. Above all, we need to take forward the moral vision that underlies his writings. DM/MC

This is the fourth of a short series of articles reflecting on Rick Turners life and writing. The first by Chris Desmond and Ben Roberts is here. The second by Halton Cheadle is here. The third by David Hemson is here. The articles are published in honour of the 50th anniversary of Turners book, The Eye of the Needle, and the relevance of his forward-thinking philosophy to the present day.

Edward Webster was a colleague and friend of Rick Turner and his partnerFoszia Turner-Stylianouat the University of Natal (Durban) in the early 1970s. They established the Institute of Industrial Education and the South African Labour Bulletin. In December 1975 Eddie was arrested under the Suppression of Communism Act and acquitted a year later for, inter alia, calling for the release of Nelson Mandela.

He is the Distinguished Research Professor at the Southern Centre of Inequality Studies and the founder and past director of the Society, Work and Politics Institute (SWOP) at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is the author of seven books and more than 120 academic articles. He was a Senior Fulbright Scholar at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) and the first Ela Bhatt Professor at the International Centre for Development and Decent Work (ICDD) at Kassel University in Germany. His co-authored volume, Grounding Globalisation: Labour in the Age of Insecurity, was awarded the American Sociological Association award for the best scholarly monograph published on labour. He is currently completing a manuscript titled In the Shadow of the Digital Age; Work and the Future of Labour.

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EYE OF THE NEEDLE: Remembering Rick Turner Real utopias and the 'Impracticality of Realism' - Daily Maverick

FREEDOM How We Lose It and How We Fight BackBy Nathan Law with Evan Fowler240 pp. The Experiment. Paper, $15.95.

The dismantling of Hong Kong has long been one of the most painful disasters in East Asia. In the past few years, the city has effectively gone up in flames: booksellers kidnapped, student protesters beaten, the free press smothered, election law amended to make sure only patriots can run for office. As 2021 closed out and Beijing hawks took control of the legislature, statues commemorating the Tiananmen Square massacre were being hauled off university campuses. How did Asias most liberal, open and cosmopolitan city change so fundamentally? the activist Law asks in this philosophical memoir, written from exile in London. How was a flourishing and free society undermined from within?

Never an especially political child, Law remembers attending his first vigil as a teenager and weeping over the pamphlets. By the time of the famous Umbrella Movement protests in 2014, Law was a student activist, organizing peacefully for electoral reform; three years later, having won office by sweeping margins at 23, he was retroactively disqualified and thrown in prison. Back in 2014, Law writes, riot police were deployed against a generation in Hong Kong who knew no violence; by 2019, the year of Hong Kongs largest protests to date, some demonstrators carried farewell notes to their families in case they were beaten to death. Law left the next year. Today every organizer of the Umbrella Movement has been imprisoned or fled abroad, saying Free Hong Kong is a criminal offense and people are being arrested for the possession of stickers.

Half memoir, half stump speech, the book often dissolves into vague encomiums to the flame of freedom and textbook bullet points on the rule of law. Freedom could have been stronger had it explored Hong Kong through the lens of Laws own history. In the 90s, his father crossed from Guangdong into Hong Kong on a flat-bottomed boat; the rest of his family followed two years after the 1997 handover. Since 2014 I have regularly been arrested, Law writes calmly at one point, an understated illustration of how much has changed in the city, and might still.

HOW I SURVIVED A CHINESE REEDUCATION CAMPA Uyghur Womans StoryBy Gulbahar Haitiwaji and Rozenn MorgatTranslated by Edward Gauvin 256 pp. Seven Stories. $26.95.

Haitiwaji should never have been back in Xinjiang to begin with. She left her homeland in 2006, seeking asylum in France three years before riots in Urumqi triggered an infamous crackdown. Undermined and subjected to surveillance in China, the family flourished in Boulogne. What brings Haitiwaji back, in 2016, is a mysterious phone call asking that she return to sort out her pension. Despite everyones reservations, she does.

Hours after she lands, the police confront her with a photo of her daughter Gulhumar at a Uyghur separatist demonstration in Paris. With that, Haitiwaji a mother in her 50s is accused of fraternizing with terrorists and sent to a re-education camp. One fellow detainee was accused of selling banned religious CDs, Haitiwaji recalls. Still others had attended a wedding where no alcohol had been served. The women are stowed away in cells, fed cornstarch thinned with water and sent to classes where trembling old women and teenage girls on the brink of tears are taught glorifying propaganda and slapped across the face. Back in France, Gulhumar mobilizes politicians and reporters. In 2019, two years into a seven-year sentence, Haitiwaji is flown back to Paris.

Haitiwaji recited her story to the Figaro journalist Morgat, who takes certain liberties fleshing out a first-person memoir. (One doubts that Haitiwaji told her that laughter mingled with the clink of dishes, a boisterous symphony playing over the melodies of lutes, or that two organizations saw their incumbent directors terms renewed in 2018 for three and four years, respectively.) The book is most valuable as testimony. For Uyghurs, Haitiwaji explains, the camps are a kind of urban legend, made mythic by silence: If no one talks about them, then the camps arent real. Her memoir, dedicated to all those who didnt make it out, contributes to a rich and painful body of memory-keeping that grows all the time.

THE SUBPLOTWhat China Is Reading and Why It Matters By Megan Walsh136 pp. Columbia Global Reports. Paper, $16.

Freedom of expression and, in less lofty terms, the freedom to make juicy fiction has long warred with the regimes exhortation to tell Chinas story well, something Xi Jinping has urged on both artists and diplomats. As the writer Han Dong shrugs in a poem, describing flowers squinted at through smog: Even if I see them I dont remember them / Even if I remember them I cant write about them.

Banned in China is too often the baseline for what is and isnt worth reading, the journalist Walsh observes in this lively, lucid survey of contemporary Chinese fiction. What Walsh calls this intrusive relationship between grand and personal narratives can reduce reading, particularly among Western audiences, to its least interesting question: Is this for or against the party? OK, but what about the characters or the plot? Walsh promises us a glimpse of something deeper: a confusing and intricate tapestry that offers a beguiling impression of Chinese society itself.

Walsh covers the basics in passages on Yan Lianke, Yu Hua, Can Xue, Su Tong and other titans of the past 20 years in mainland fiction. Known for nightmarish, often lurid parables, these writers make dreamscapes where remembering is, at its worst, a prosecutable offense in Su Tongs Shadow of the Hunter, an old man is institutionalized for digging up the streets in search of his ancestors bones or simply tiresome, a point Yan Lianke mocks in a novel where a teenager compares his work to deserted graves. But the reach of Chinese fiction is broad, and so, gamely, is Walshs. She explores alt-comics; martial arts fiction (banned in Maos time: How could there be vigilante warriors in a Communist utopia?); the poetry of migrant factory workers (after it happened she / didnt cry and didnt / scream she just grabbed her finger / and left); online fantasy sagas (their heroes shameless and borderline sociopathic, Walsh notes dryly) devoured by half a billion readers; and Chinas increasingly exportable sci-fi. Walsh delivers a wry cornucopia, inviting for general readers who dont know Mo Yan from Han Han.

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The Varieties of Chinese Repression - The New York Times

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This article was contributed by Louis B. Rosenberg, Ph.D., CEO of Unanimous AI.

The concept of land ownership is so ingrained in our culture, its easy to forget that the practice has only been pervasive in North America for a few hundred years. For 10,000 years before that, the millions of people who lived on this continent felt no reason to think of land as something a person could own.

Why mention this in a piece about the metaverse?

Because land ownership, like many of the social norms that govern our lives, is a cultural choice, not an inherent requirement of a well-functioning society. And yet it is quickly becoming a central element of many metaverse worlds.

Is this the right approach? Maybe, but its worth noting that land ownership has driven inequality throughout history, concentrating wealth and power within small groups of elites to the detriment of everyone else.And yet metaverse developers, who have the power to invent totally new worlds from scratch, have seized upon this old-world norm by selling NFT real estate. In fact, numerous developers have made the sale of virtual real estate a key premise of their platforms.

This is ironic because many of the land-selling platforms are forward-thinking Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) that aim to distribute power to their members rather than centralize power in a corporate hierarchy. I am a big fan of DAOs and their goal of flattening organizations, but the recent craze over virtual real estate is likely to centralize power in the metaverse, not decentralize it.

And if were honest virtual land speculation is not a particularly good fit for the metaverse. Consider these three points about land in virtual worlds:

In other words, land speculation isnt a natural fit for the metaverse and yet developers have been rushing this old-world idea into our virtual future.

Im not writing this to pick on real estate NFTs.

Instead, I use this as an example of a larger principle the metaverse gives us the ability to conceive and create totally new worlds and yet were quickly adopting old-world models. Are developers even stopping to ask themselves if they really want landlords and building permits and property taxes and zoning regulations in the metaverse? Because I fear thats where were headed.

To me, its a failure of imagination.

The way I see it, this is one of the few times in history when we can experiment with the basic workings of fresh new worlds. And its not just the invention of VR and AR that give us this ability its blockchain and Web3 and DAOs and other distributed technologies. These innovations point us towards exciting new ways of thinking about society, which is why its lazy to simply replicate current practices in the metaverse.

When I tell people this, they look at me like some kind of utopian. In truth, I dont expect a digital utopia, but I am afraid of a metaverse dystopia.

In fact, I spent a year imagining such a dystopia in 2008 when writing Upgrade, a graphic novel that explores the dangers of a corporate-controlled metaverse. What terrifies me is that over the 14 years since, more and more of that dystopian future keeps coming true, pushing us towards a society where corporations own every inch of our reality, both real and virtual, and use that power to track not just where we click, but where we go, what we do, what we look at, how long our gaze lingers, even the speed of our gait and the emotion on our faces.

To address this, aggressive regulation of the metaverse is likely needed to protect consumers from the worst abuses. But regulation will only prevent corporations from exploiting the power of their platforms to manipulate users it will not point us towards new ways of structuring virtual societies. Doing that requires real creativity on the part of metaverse developers. And that means questioning the impulse to simply replicate old ideas in virtual new realms.

One interesting example of a metaverse designed to overcome old-world norms was Virtual Burn, which came to life when the real-world Burning Man was canceled because of the COVID pandemic. This unique metaverse followed the 10 Principles of Burning Man which promote a culture of inclusion and creativity rather than consumerism and commercialism.

In the words of Athena Demos, co-producer of the BRCvr virtual world at Burning Man, de-commodified spaces where we are all welcome to come, collaborate and share ideas without any transactions or sponsorships is essential for a healthy metaverse. I very much agree.

Of course, Im not saying that metaverse developers need to push for a culture of bohemian self-expression like Burning Man. Im simply pointing out that the current rush to install old-school materialism into our new immaterial world could limit the true potential of the metaverse. Instead, we should celebrate radically new business models that arent possible in the real worldmodels that leverage the unique capabilities of VR, AR, and Web3.

In other words, we should think bigger.

Louis Rosenberg, PhDis a technology pioneer in the fields of VR, AR, and AI. Thirty years ago, he developed the first functional augmented reality system at Air Force Research Laboratory (the Virtual Fixtures platform). He then founded the early VR company Immersion Corporation (1993) and the early AR company Outland Research (2004). He is currently CEO of Unanimous AI, a company that amplifies group intelligence in decentralized environments. Rosenberg earned his PhD from Stanford University, was a professor at California State University, and has been awarded over 300 patents worldwide for VR, AR, and AI technologies.

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With all the natural disasters and what appears to be World War Three breaking out, the search is on for other hospitable planets. Joe Kitchen writes that there is an option that is much closer to home than we think.

These last two weeks have not been a good time for planet Earth.

Starting on 18 February last week, gale-force winds started rocking the United Kingdom and Europe. We all saw the devastation on YouTube. Trees crashing down on cars, church steeples being destroyed, thousands of people left destitute after their roofs blew off and power supplies failed.

In the days following, more natural calamities spread across the globe:

And as if that was not bad enough, the Third World War started on Thursday, when Russia invaded Ukraine!

Sketch of Vladimir Putin (Joe Kitchen)

It's as if everything and everybody suddenly went completely crazy.

Perhaps it's a good thing the James Webb telescope has finally been assembled, and now we are ready to start hunting for other hospitable planets in outer space.

No-one is hunting for aliens anymore

Yes, that's actually HOW bad things are. Nobody's hunting for aliens anymore. We want to find out if there is a place we can flee to when life on Earth becomes unbearable.

I'm not quite sure if Mars is an option - much as I love arid desert landscapes like the south of Namibia or the desolate stretches of the Great Karoo. I don't think I'm quite ready yet to accept Elon Musks' offer of a one-way ticket to the Red Planet. I simply can't imagine spending five minutes in that hellhole, never mind the rest of my life!

But, hey, there IS another solution. And it's right under our noses!

A perfect world is already available.

A world with no disease, or accidents, or war, or climate change.

READ |Metaverse goes mainstream as Microsoft muscles in on the first wave

A world where you can hide out with your friends and just never leave. A world where, every morning, you can get up and look your best and never pick up weight, never have a bad hair day, not ever.

No need to get on any spaceship. No need to travel light years into the great beyond.

All you need is a pair of headphones, your special goggles, and Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse is all yours!

Sketch of Mark Zuckerberg (Joe Kitchen)

Well, Zuckerberg said it's on its way. It's getting better all the time, he promised. He sounds pretty sure of himself, despite his dropping share prices. It should be ready sometime next week, if one can believe him.

Virtual Utopia

The virtual Utopia. The ultimate getaway. The La-La Land we have all been dreaming about.

I'm not quite convinced, though.

Okay, okay, agreed, all these wonderful new technologies will have their uses. It will do great things for education. There's a myriad of creative possibilities. We will all have our virtual office spaces, and we'll end up saving a hell of a lot of petrol. The only people who won't be able to work from cyberspace will, of course, be people like plumbers, farmers and pharmacists, because those guys will somehow have to keep us alive while the rest of us gallivant around in the new Facebook, and completely lose touch with...

With what? Fresh air? Sunshine? The singing of real birds outside a real window on a real morning?

READ |Living in the future via virtual reality

There's a little movie in my head, like a short video-clip. It's a future fantasy of what life might be like one day, years from now

Imagine a world where just about everyone is online -all the time.

People are no longer able to distinguish fantasy from reality. Commercial breaks and flickering imagery punctuate your daily existence. You, and millions of other people, have become prisoners of cyberspace. You never touch base with everyday life as people used to know it. It's been years since you've opened a car door to open a farm gate on a gravel road.

Everything is fake. Sex has been reduced to holographic videogames. Love and emotions are nothing more than a series of amazingly designed emoji's.

Until, one day, one person decides to remove his headphones

And, out of the blue, he experiences the most astonishing peace of mind.

Imagine you are this person. You have taken off your IT gear. You get up. You walk outside. You smell the sea. There are no cars, no traffic, no fumes. Everything is eerily quiet.

"It's amaaaazing!" you think. "Where am I? This is the best website I ever discovered!"

Rediscovering our humanity

Is this how humanity will rediscover the world in the distant future?

After years of being cooped up in dingy little rooms wearing nothing but T-shirts and tracksuit pants (except for the plumbers, farmers and pharmacists, of course), will we one day wake up to find out that nothing we had experienced had even been remotely real?

In a way, I kind of like this idea. Maybe we should give Mark Zuckerberg some credit! If he can create a false reality, perhaps we should allow everyone to take all their crap over there. All the hostility, the drama, the war, the wastage, the neuroses, the ego stuff, the collective insanity.

Yes, please! Go away, everyone! Take all your problems, go away, and leave us alone to enjoy our planet by ourselves! I want to stay here with the plumbers and the farmers and the pharmacists!

We want to be able to burrow our toes in the sand, walk our dogs, and never ever again will we have to worry about stuff like getting enough "likes", avoiding trolls, and having enough data.

Our lives will no longer depend on a constant energy supply to charge our batteries!

We will have this whole, wonderful, free website to ourselves.

What a life!

- Joe Kitchen is a South African musician, singer, songwriter and writer who sometimes goes by the name of Koos Kombuis, Andr Letoit and/or Andr le Roux du Toit.

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Joe Kitchen | Can Facebook save us from the end of the world? - News24

Seneca Steplight-Tillet purses her shiny lips and gives the air a kiss in a selfie video.

The 8-year-old then swings her phone around and points it at a mirror inside a makeup case. In its reflection are tubes of lip gloss, but she is still the focus.

Steplight-Tillet stares back in the mirror, holding the phone and modeling a shade of vibrant magenta gloss. She simultaneously appears in miniature on the phone screen, framed by the purple makeup case. And smaller still, inside the reflected image of the phone.

The infinite mirror effect isnt just an optical trick it speaks to both the gravity and joy of Picturing Black Girlhood: Moments of Possibility, a new art exhibition on display now through July 2 at Express Newark.

Newarks Steplight-Tillet is the dominant image in every frame and every reflection. Shes in control.

Now 9, she is the youngest artist in the exhibition, and shes in good company. Tillets 38-second video, titled Make Up Time, is displayed next to well-known photos from renowned artist Carrie Mae Weems, 68.

"Untitled (Woman and Daughter with Make Up)," a 1990 photograph by Carrie Mae Weems.Carrie Mae Weems/Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

In Weems 1990 black-and-white photo, Untitled (Woman and Daughter with Make Up), she is the mother applying lipstick at a kitchen table next to a daughter who does the same. The image is part of her iconic Kitchen Table Series of photographs.

Conversations between Black girls across generations both as subjects and artists are the strong foundation of the exhibition at Express Newark, the 50,000-square-foot gallery space in the Hahne & Co. building that is part of Rutgers-Newark.

Whats so unique about this show is that Black girls themselves are able to tell their own story, which is really important, says co-curator Scheherazade Tillet, Steplight-Tillets aunt.

More than half the artists in the show are under 18 years old, their photos and films displayed alongside prominent images and work from older and established Black artists and photographers.

At left, Doris Derby's "Rural Family Girlhoood, Mileston, Mississippi," taken in 1968. At right, ngelina Cofer's self-portrait "Nineteen," taken in 2021. The images are in conversation with each other at Express Newark's "Picturing Black Girlhood" exhibition.Doris Derby; ngelina Cofer

This dialogue between images spans more than 170 works across three floors, putting todays Black girls in focus while linking intergenerational experiences.

The exhibitions two signature images were taken 53 years apart.

Black Lives Matter and #MeToo activist ngelina Cofers Nineteen, a self-portrait of the artist sitting on a bed last year in an orange dress, is positioned next to Rural Family Girlhood, Mileston, Mississippi, civil rights activist Doris Derbys black-and-white portrait of a girl leaning on a bed frame in 1968.

In this particular moment, the focus on Black girlhood is so important, co-curator Zoraida Lopez-Diago tells NJ Advance Media. When you think of COVID, when you think of the racial uprising that happened in this country, Black girls are often forgotten. Really shining a light on their experiences and the whole dynamism of what a Black girl is was such an incredible opportunity.

Zoraida Lopez-Diago, at left, and Scheherazade Tillet, co-curators of "Picturing Black Girlhood: Moments of Possibility," in front of Cousins, Daufuskie Island, SC, a photo taken by Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe in 1979.Terrence C. Jennings

The work in Picturing Black Girlhood comes from more than 80 Black girls, women and genderqueer artists between 9 and 93 years old.

At an exhibition preview and artist reception Feb. 16, Seneca Steplight-Tillet milled around with more senior artists like Lola Flash, 63. The New York photographer, who grew up in Montclair, has had work displayed in the Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

I love this kind of juxtaposition of the emerging artists and established artists, Flash tells NJ Advance Media especially in the name of Black joy, in direct opposition to invisibility. I feel like theyre breaking rules here that need to be broken.

Tenzin, Flashs 2008 portrait of a young boy holding a feathered fan, taken from the artists Surmise series about gender and the way queer people are perceived, is included in the show. The photo is displayed across from photos by Carrie Mae Weems, another of Flashs subjects.

I feel very much at home somehow, says Flash, an artist and activist who was a member of ACT UP the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power during the height of the AIDS epidemic and featured in the 1989 Kissing Doesnt Kill poster.

"Tenzin," a 2008 portrait by Lola Flash, an artist and activist who grew up in Montclair.Lola Flash

Steplight-Tillet, whose video plays just paces away from Flashs photo, started with a simple desire to document her makeup kit, a birthday gift.

I really wanted to record it, she says. She had no idea that her perspective would be included in the show.

The clip conveys the feeling of experimentation, discovery and self-reflection that is a rite of passage for so many girls and children.

Scheherazade Tillet says the interjection of her nieces video into a narrative with Carrie Mae Weems images, which have grounded the work of so many Black photographers, delivers a modern-day moment of selfie and affirmation and agency shes telling her own story.

An artist herself, Tillets work is included in the show. Her curation of Picturing Black Girlhood is part of her two-year residency at Shine Portrait Studio (also in the Hahne & Co. building) and Express Newark, where her sister Salamishah Tillet Steplight-Tillets mother is director.

Scheherazade Tillet, 43, also has a solo art show, Black Girl Play, that opened in January and runs through March 13 at Project for Empty Space in Newark (800 Broad St.). The artist, who was born in Boston and grew up between Port of Spain, Trinidad, Newark and Orange, created the photo exhibition centered around Black girls, joy and play from several series over five years in Port of Spain, Newark and Chicago.

"Black Girls, Good Friday Morning, Westside Chicago, Illinois," a 2016 photograph by Scheherazade Tillet and the artist's response to the 1941 Russell Lee photograph Negro Boys on Easter Morning. Southside, Chicago, Illinois.Scheherazade Tillet

She runs the Chicago-based national nonprofit A Long Walk Home, which she co-founded with Salamishah in 2003, where the mission is to use art to end violence against women and girls. Scheherazades multimedia project Story of a Rape Survivor, which she started in the late 90s, chronicles Salamishahs journey after being raped twice when she was a college student.

A sizable portion of the photography in Picturing Black Girlhood comes from girls who have worked with A Long Walk Home.

One of Scheherazades photographs in the show, Black Girls, Good Friday Morning, Westside Chicago, Illinois (2016), is an emphatic response to the 1941 Russell Lee photograph Negro Boys on Easter Morning. Southside, Chicago, Illinois.

The Tillet sisters have together played a huge role in creating space for Black girls in Newarks art scene.

Salamishah Tillet, director of Express Newark, is a Rutgers professor of African American studies and creative writing as well as director of New Arts Justice, a Rutgers-Newark arts incubator at Express Newark.

Co-curator Scheherazade Tillet, Express Newark director Salamishah Tillet and co-curator Zoraida Lopez-Diago at "Picturing Black Girlhood: Moments of Possibility."Terrence C. Jennings

The initiative has produced public art installations like Will You Be My Monument, a work from the Tillets and designer Chantal Fischzang and inspired by the removal of Newarks Columbus statue from Washington Park in 2020. Scheherazades photo of FaaTina, a Black girl who celebrated her 8th birthday in the park, can be seen on the mirrored installation across the facade of a four-story building.

What I want to leave behind in Newark is the understanding and the depth and the breadth of Black girlhood, Scheherazade Tillet says. She looks at the three floors of art at Express Newark and says they could have kept going.

Tillet anticipates the exhibition will see visits from school groups.

This is bigger than all of us, she says. This is American history.

Both Picturing Black Girlhood and Black Girl Play were presented Feb. 17 to 19 alongside the Black Portraiture[s] VII: Play & Performance conference. The three-day event was a livestreamed edition of the Black Portraiture[s] Conference that started as a colloquium on African American art at Harvard University and had its first event in Paris in 2013.

Picturing Back Girlhood began as part of the 2016 Black Girl Movement Conference at Columbia University. At the time, the selection of art, which is mostly photography but also includes video and textiles, was smaller and fixated on Black girls in public spaces and the outdoors (the exhibition opened with double dutch performers and a DJ).

This year were thinking about the interiority of Black girls, says Lopez-Diago, 41. Each floor of Express Newark is tagged to a different theme. The first is centered around access and collaboration How do Black girls work with each other? she says. Whats the special relationship between Black women photographers and Black girl photographers?

Tawny Chatmon's "The Burden Was Never Yours To Carry" (2020) is showcased in a section of the exhibition dedicated to Black royalty.Tawny Chatmon/Zuhairah Washington/Galerie Myrtis

That exploration also includes mothers and daughters, sisters and friends. Other parts of the exhibition address grief and protest, including the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. Elsewhere, spaces are devoted to freedom, care and beauty, where hair is its own art and joy. One interactive display invites visitors to create their own braid sculpture. Scheherazade Tillets twerk mirror comes with a scannable playlist so people can try out dance moves.

The examination of beauty also includes Kiri Laurelle Davis 7-minute documentary A Girl Like Me, which was made in 2005 at the dawn of the YouTube age. The film went viral for taking on the destructive influence of white beauty standards and for its recreation of the 1940s doll test experiments. In the original prompts, which played a role in Brown v. Board of Education, psychologists Kenneth Clark and Mamie Phipps Clark asked Black children to choose between Black and white dolls. Most chose the white dolls. When Davis, then 17, tried the experiment more than half a century later, most children still chose the white doll.

Part of the exhibition is dedicated to Black girls as royalty invoking mythology and refusing pathology in regal works like Tawny Chatmons Best and The Burden Was Never Yours To Carry (both 2020), which channel the work of Gustav Klimt in their intricate use of gold leaf to adorn and exalt photographs of Black girls.

Ayana V. Jackson, an international artist from South Orange, appears in a 2016 self-portrait as Sarah Forbes Bonetta, who was born in West Africa and thought to be from a royal family of Yoruba descent. As a girl, Forbes Bonetta was enslaved in a war, then given to Captain Frederick Forbes of the British Royal Navy as a gift for Queen Victoria and brought to England, where she became the queens goddaughter. Jackson reimagines existing photo portraits of Forbes Bonetta (then Sarah Davies) from the 1860s, positioning her as someone granted self-determination.

I love her because she talks about fighting photography with photography, says Lopez-Diago, who also has work in the show.

In Jacksons Dear Sarah series, the photographer poses as Sarah wearing jewels, a white dress and black boots, but standing with her knees bent and feet turned out, eyes closed, a meditative expression on her face. British artist Heather Agyepongs 2015 photos, displayed alongside Jacksons work, also reimagine staid images of Sarah.

What does it look like when Black girls are just free and have a moment of respite? Lopez-Diago says, pointing to Black Utopia, a green space of a box gallery furnished with bright, hand-woven lawn chairs created by Newark artist Kim Hill and Nydia Blas 2016 photograph Group #2 from her series The Girls Who Spun Gold, which pictures four young women and a baby outside in a leisure scene.

Nydia Blas' 2016 photograph "Group #2" from the series "The Girls Who Spun Gold" is featured in a "Black Utopia" box gallery within the exhibition.Nydia Blas

A separate display case spotlights a series of dresses that represent coming-of-age events like proms, debutante balls, quinceaeras and pageants, including Miss Newark USA.

One white gown has a large red stain down the middle, a statement on violence against Black trans women and girls. The dress, worn by Mya Mirari, came from a 2021 kiki ballroom competition that was a fundraiser for LGBTQ+ youth.

A dotted Swiss and lace dress in the same display case belongs to the oldest artist in the exhibition Elizabeth Moore Wheeler.

Moore Wheeler, who will turn 94 on March 1, made the dress in 1942, in her home economics class for her eighth grade graduation from Newarks Morton Street School. Four years earlier, she moved north from Georgia with her mother as part of the Great Migration.

A photo of Moore Wheeler wearing the dress as a girl is included in the display. So is a White Dress Narratives video from her daughter, artist Adrienne Wheeler, that shows the same dress outside, blowing in the wind.

Elizabeth Moore Wheeler's dress for her eighth grade graduation from Newark's Morton Street School in 1942 is on display at "Picturing Black Girlhood."Graduation photo courtesy of Elizabeth Moore Wheeler; Dress photo by Amy Kuperinsky NJ Adance Media for NJ.com

It fits perfectly when you look at the evolution of young girls life to womanhood, says Wheeler, 64, of her mothers contribution to the intergenerational exhibition. She also appreciates that in the middle of all the dresses, theres a suit from a prom.

Paloma Boyewa-Osborne, 15, has three photographs in the show, including a self-portrait, which were previously on display at the Bronx Documentary Center. But seeing her images in a show with veteran artists?

Its pretty crazy, the New Yorker says. Ive seen the work in other museums.

Alliyah Allen, who grew up in Newark, is an assistant curator of the exhibition. Allen, 25, found Express Newark when she was looking for space to feel seen, to feel comfortable, she says.

Her own work, a striking portrait titled Shaleia, was taken in 2018, when she was a student at Haverford College in Pennsylvania discovering her perspective as a photographer.

Im just really excited to be able to exhibit this back here at home, she says. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, really, to be able to show this.

Picturing Black Girlhood: Moments of Possibility is on display through July 2 at Express Newark, 54 Halsey St. (second floor of the Hahne & Co. building) in Newark; admission free. Exhibition hours are noon to 5 p.m. Monday through Wednesday; noon to 8 p.m. Thursday and noon to 5 p.m. Saturday. Visitors 12 years and older must be vaccinated against COVID-19, and visitors 2 and older must wear a mask. Photo ID and proof of vaccination or negative PCR test test taken no more than 72 hours prior must be presented upon entry.

Thank you for relying on us to provide the journalism you can trust. Please consider supporting NJ.com with a subscription.

Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com and followed at @AmyKup on Twitter.

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Black girls in focus, from 9 to 93, at Newark art exhibition - NJ.com