CHRIS SEARLE on Mike Westbrook who died aged 90
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Lessons of individual development rather than collective or political consciousness
ANGUS REID reviews a book that is an important and comprehensive work of documentation
Gloria Abernethy sells the Black Panther newspaper while Tamara Lacey holds a sickle-cell anaemia poster at the Mayfair supermarket boycott in Oakland, California, 1971
[Stephen Shames]
STEVE JOHNSON speaks to JIM MORAY about an album that marks 25 years since his first
DENNIS BROE observes how cutbacks, mergers and AI create content detached from both reality and history itself
SAHAR MARANLOU explores a novella, newly translated and republished in English that tells the history of Iran through women’s bodies
DAVID NICHOLSON applauds the revival of a joyous production that deals with choirs, competitions and communism
New releases from Peruvian Ranil y Su Conjunto Tropical, Leve Leve: Sao Tome & Principe, and South African BCUC
Comrade Sisters: Women of the Black Panther Party
Photographs by Stephen Shames, text by Ericka Huggins
ACC Art Books £35
IT IS impossible not to be moved by Stephen Shames’s innocent and spontaneous documentation of the communal “‘survival programmes” that were inspired by the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s and 1970s.
He was 20 years old, an amateur, and he found himself in the middle of a defiant and self-organising mass movement that was addressing existential problems in the black community in a way that was without precedent in the history of the US.
Suddenly, all of it is interesting.
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