Charles Tonderai Mudede is a Zimbabwean writer, filmmaker, and leftwing cultural critic. Though born in Kwekwe, he spent much of his childhood in the United States, and returned to Zimbabwe shortly after independence. Between 1982 and 1988, his mother, Tracy Mudede, was a lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe, and his father, Ebenezer Mudede, was an economist for the Zimbabwe government. Between 1990 and 2001, his father worked as an economist for the Botswana government and his mother lectured at the University of Botswana. In 1989, he moved to the US to study literature, art history, and political philosophy. 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. Mudede is currently 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 now defunct SeattleResearch 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 has also published essays and articles with Nic Veroli, a French AmericanMarxist 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 Ctheory, which published one of his most popular pieces of writing, "The Turntable," a theory of the hip hop practice of scratching and sampling. Charles Mudede is also the writer of Zoo, a movie about the late Kenneth Pinyan and the Enumclaw stallion incident, and a writer on Robinson Devor's film You Can't Win, which stars Michael Pitt. Mudede played a priest in The Naked Proof, released in 2003.
