Charles Mudede

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Charles Mudede (2007)

Charles Tonderai Mudede (born February 8, 1969) is a writer and cultural critic. Born into an Rhodesian family, he spent much of his childhood in the United States, only to return 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 Robert Mugabe. Between 1990 and 2001, his father worked as an economist for the Botswanan government and his mother lectured at the University of Botswana. Mudede's teen years were spent in Chisipite, an affluent neighborhood in the capital of Harare. In 1989, he moved to the US to study literature, art history, and political philosophy. He has 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).

Mudede is presently Associate Editor for the Seattle-based weekly The Stranger, as well as lecturer in English Humanities at Pacific Lutheran University near Tacoma, Washington. His Police Beat column was turned into a film of the same name in 2004. The movie was selected for competition at the Sundance Film Festival 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, 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. He and the 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.