FICHTE, Hubert
The Black City

The Black City is a portrait of New York written by Hubert Fichte between 1978 and 1980. Fichte researched the city as the center of the African diaspora, conducting interviews and composing essays about syncretism in culture and the arts, material living conditions in the city, and political and individual struggles based on race, class, and sexuality. His interview partners include Michael Chisolm, arts educator and coordinator of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition; German émigré and artist Lil Picard; photographer Richard Avedon; Léopold Joseph, publisher of the exile newspaper Haiti Observateur; and Teiji Ito, composer and Vodou initiate. The book opens with notes on an exhibition of Haitian art at the Brooklyn Museum, and closes with a self-reflective literary analysis of Herodotus, the first white European to write extensively of his travels and (desirous) encounters in Africa. [publisher's note]

Includes a foreword from Diedrich Diederichsen and Anselm Franke, the artistic directors of the project “Hubert Fichte: Love and Ethnology” which, between others, facilitated the translation of this book.

Published by Sternberg Press, 2018
Essays / Postcolonial Studies / Conversations / Cultural Studies