Charles Mudede
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A writer and leftist culture critic, Charles Tonderai Mudede was born into an educated family in Rhodesia on February 8, 1969. He spent much of his childhood in the United States and returned to the newly independent Zimbabwe in 1981. Between 1982 and 1988, his mother, Tracy Mudede, was a lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe, and his father, Ebenezer Mudede, served as an economic advisor to the then-democratically elected Zimbabwean leader, Robert Mugabe (he has been a dictator since 1987). Between 1990 and 2001, his father worked as an economist for the Botswana government and his mother lectured at the University of Botswana. Charles Mudede is related to Tobaiwa Mudede (cousin to Ebenezer) who served, until recently, as the Registrar-General, and chief elections officer charged with ensuring Mugabe's government maintains political power[1]. Charles' teen years were spent in Chisipite, an affluent Harare neighborhood. In 1989 he moved to the US to study literature, art history, and political philosophy. He never returned to Zimbabwe and his parents moved to the US, from Botswana, in 2002 for medical reasons. The Mudedes are Manicas and were once close to Bishop Abel Tendekayi Muzorewa, the prime minister of the short-lived coalition government called Zimbabwe Rhodesia (1979-1980).
Charles Mudede is presently the Associate Editor for the Seattle-based weekly The Stranger as well as lecturer in English Humanities at the Pacific Lutherian University, located near Tacoma, Washington. The column he writes in that paper, "Police Beat," was turned into a film of the same name in 2004. Police Beat the movie was selected for competition at Sundance 2005. In 2003, Mudede published a short book called Last Seen with Diana George. Mudede was also a member of the defunct Seattle Research Institute, a Marxist circle inspired by the Frankfurt School and the work of Hardt and Negri. SRI published two books, "Politics Without The State" and "Experimental Theology." (Mudede and George edited the former.) Mudede has also published essays and articles with Nic Veroli, a French American Marxist philosopher, and is on the editorial board for Arcade, an architectural journal.
Mudede's work has appeared in the New York Times, The Village Voice, The LA Weekly, and C Theory, which published one of his most popular pieces of writing, "The Turntable," a theory of the hiphop practice of scratching and sampling. Charles Mudede is also the writer of Zoo, a movie about the Enumclaw Horse Case, and he played a priest in The Naked Proof, released in 2003. Charles Mudede and the film director Robinson Devor run a film company called The Cook Ding Institute of Imagination which is presently producing The Cloud Room, a movie about a society of cloud lovers.
