Following our recent debate “Politics of Spatial Segregation” that shed light on racist Danish housing policies and the notion of structural discrimination co-hosted with CAMP – Center for Arts on Migration Politics in Copenhagen on 22 March, Margarida Waco from The Funambulist met with the two co-founders of the association Almen Modstand (Common Resistance), Fatma Tounsi and Marie Northroup, for a conversation about current legislation and the founding pillars of the association. The starting point of the conversation was a new strategy to rid Denmark of a parallel society by 2030 presented by the Danish Government in March 2018. To counteract ...

Invoking the global Black uprising, this conversation between Margarida Waco and Awa Konaté examines Anti-Blackness and the different ways in which institutional and structural violence against Black and Brown bodies is normalised and manifested across the Nordics, i.e. Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland in particular. The conversation draws upon Scandinavian colonial history and Denmark’s role in slave trading as frameworks allowing for a critical examination of the cultural and political languages and iconographies associated with the Nordic Paradigm in an attempt to challenge, and finally dismantle the concept of Nordic Exceptionalism. Awa Konaté is a London and Copenhagen based Danish-Ivorian writer ...

We have decided that the key notion emerging from this collection of texts should be political usefulness. Much more than convincing a liberal audience of the urgency of the political struggles showcased throughout these pages, our number one ambition consists in producing something useful, if not operative, for those who are fighting “on the ground.” This is why we tested this notion of usefulness by inviting twenty regular readers (many of whom are also contributors) of The Funambulist to pick one text in our first 22 issues that appears to them as being particularly politically useful, and to explain it ...

This conversation between Walter Bgoya and Margarida Waco reflects on the notion of progressive publishing in a post-colonial African context. Advocating for literature as a weapon of liberation, Bgoya examines three key moments in Tanzania’s modern history: colonialism, independency, and neoliberalism. In his account of the political framework, from the structural adjustments imposed by the World Bank and the IMF in the 80’s forcing the country on its knees, via the socialist policies deployed by the founding father of the Republic of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, to the struggles of ideas that emerged during independency and until today still perpetuate the ...