Critical Interventions 9/10, Spring 2012 Fractals are patterns that repeat themselves at many scales. In the context of African art and design, that simple characterization takes on profound meanings that can move across disciplines and geographic boundaries. Fractal patterns can be found in African architecture, textiles, sculpture, music, and many other places. The means by which computers generate fractal graphics, recursive loops which allow structures to “unfold” or self-generate from an initial state, ind parallels in African cultural traditions that might seem distant from math or computing: stories of spiritual rebirth, trickster narratives, the social dynamics of communalism, the “repetition with revision” linking music with oral history, and other ineluctable aspects of lived experience. Rather than imposing an alien analysis from afar, the eclectic mix of contributions in this special issue allow the rich complexity of African culture, in all its global diversity, to enter into dialogue with nonlinear dynamics, complexity theory, and other mathematical and computational frameworks in which fractals occupy a central role. In her essay, textile artist Judy Bales examines the presence of fractal structure in certain traditions of African-American quilts. She begins by carefully answering critics who cast doubt on the hypothesis that these visual patterns show African cultural inluence: rather than propose direct mimetic relection—the dubious claim that these African-American quilts are reproducing speciic African textile designs—she proposes that the fractal structure is the result of the more subtle improvisational aesthetic outlined by Henry Louis Gates in his investigation of African and African-American communicative practices, found broadly across speech acts, visual forms, and music in global Africa. Bales’ investigation not only offers a new perspective for the analysis of cultural practices and the propagation of African culture, but brings up questions in computational mathematics, as well: what is the relation between this culturally specific form of improvisation and the formal structures of recursive scaling, self-organization, or other means of producing fractals in the technical realm? Linguist Abdul Bangura’s essay explores a question regarding Chinua Achebe’s famous book, Things Fall Apart: does an African fractal tradition inform the text’s understanding of what constitutes “randomness” or “noise?” In Achebe’s narrative, random tragic events—bad luck—befall the ambitious protagonist. But, deeper principles of the indigenous system keep him from utter despair; it is only in the context of a colonial encounter that he commits suicide, an event portrayed as “outside” the indigenous moral frame of reference. In other words, it is as if two different kinds of “disorder” are present: one tragic but comprehensible; the other beyond redemption. But, how to analyze this spectrum of chaotic variety? Starting with a “pluridisciplinary methodology” that he traces to Cheikh Anta Diop and Jean Vercoutter, Bangura makes a case for how the divide between the sciences and the humanities has been persistently questioned in (global) African intellectual traditions. Bringing that lesson back to Achebe, he then provides Guest Editors: Fractals in Global aFrica ron Eglash, rensselaer Polytechnic institute Audrey Bennett, rensselaer Polytechnic institute