In this podcast, Renisa Mawani introduces her current work that uses the migrant ship Komagata Maru to address migration within its legal and temporal dimensions. We then continue this conversation by examining the arguments she made in the 2012 article “Law’s Archive,” which examines the available means to archive law within the collective narrative that the archive constitutes. The archive’s means are politically and physically determined in such a way that indigenous contributions—not always textual for instance—to this collective narrative cannot fully take part in it. This conversation therefore has a goal to challenge the way we commonly understand the notion of ...

Jazz Against Apartheid (Talk + DJ Mix) Atiyyah Khan is a journalist, researcher, selector, crate-digger, event organiser and archivist from Johannesburg, based in Cape Town. She currently freelances as an arts journalist, documenting visual arts, theatre, music, film and other forms of culture in South Africa. Atiyyah is also the co-founder of music collective Future Nostalgia, which hosts listening session around Cape Town celebrating the culture of records. As DJ El Corazon, her sets explore music beyond boundaries forming connections that link the global south to the rest of the world in order to evoke curiosity in the possibility of sound. ...

This conversation with Caren Kaplan introduces the work she has been conducting for her forthcoming book dedicated to a genealogy of aerial photography (and painting) and its militarization leading to the ‘age of the drone’ we currently experience. We begin with the development of the balloon, the progressive learning necessary to understand this new point of view on the world and the simultaneous success of panorama paintings. We then evoke the creation of the British Board of Ordinance and its survey of Scotland as part of the counter-insurrectionist effort to control the terrain against the Jacobites. We conclude the discussion in ...

Quito Swan’s forthcoming book Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anti-colonialism, and the African World (NYU Press, March 2022) beautifully encompasses the type of internationalist solidarity our 39th issue The Ocean… From the Black Atlantic to the Sea of Islands would like to convey. As such, this interview about the struggles of liberation in Melanesia (in particular West Papua, Kanaky, and Vanuatu) constitutes a cornerstone of the issue, for which we are deeply grateful to Quito. Hailing from the island of Bermuda, Quito Swan is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. An award-winning historian of Black internationalism, he ...

This conversation with Alondra Nelson focuses on the socio-historical descriptions of her book Body and Soul (University of Minnesota, 2011) that unfolds the work of the Black Panthers (late 1960s – 1970s) to resist against the highly discriminatory mechanisms of the politics of health in the United States. Following the structure of the book, we discuss the discrimination against the African American community, both in its negligence (inappropriate healthcare response to disease, prohibitive cost of care) and in its active medicalization of marginalized bodies (scientific research on convicts and women, experimental brain surgery). Against this systemic oppression, the Black Panther Party created its ...

This conversation with Adam Elliott-Cooper revolves around his book, Black Resistance to British Policing (2021). We talk about the colonial genealogy of British policing (in Ireland, Trinidad, Malaya, and Kenya in particular) and the construction of the figure (collective or individual) of the suspect as a legitimization of this policing. We also talk about Black resistance to it, the crucial role of women activists, the paradigm embodied by the 2011 police murder of Mark Duggan and the massive revolts that followed, as well as the possibilities of solidarity. Adam Elliott-Cooper is a lecturer in social and public policy, Queen Mary University of London. ...

Daniel and I had this conversation the day after the 2013 Goldsmiths Graduate Conference, where we were both participating in a panel suitably entitled “The Sea, Shores, Islands – Territory, Sovereignty and the State.” His paper “The Construction of the End,” given that day is the starting point of our discussion, in which we discuss the legal debates about the location of the shore line in Spain, the national claims of sovereignty of a given territory based on scientific and technological criteria, as well as the various circumventions of the law that provide a form of cabinet of architectural curiosities of which ...

In this interview, film-anthropologist Harjant Gill introduces the figure of the young rural Sikh man in Indian Punjab, who later migrates to the capital city, Chandigarh or abroad. We base our conversation both on Harjant’s thesis that presents a research about the (normative) notion of masculinity constructed within these young migrants’ imaginaries (through cinema for example), as well as on his film Roots of Love (see below), which introduces the bodily characteristics that a Sikh man must present continuously, in particular the unshorn hair and the turban covering it. Harjant and I thus talk about this particular object that enfolds within it ...

This podcast is the first one of a series of three recorded during a short residency at the Miami Rail. It addresses the on-going photographic series that artist Adler Guerrier constructs around the performativity of the flaneur. From the romantic figure described by Walter Benjamin in his writings about Charles Baudelaire, to its anti-capitalist offspring as defined by the Situationists, Adler explains how the action of flanerie (aimless walk) is a means to gather knowledge. He tells us how the body of the flaneur is a nameless solitary figure that the film noir’s amnesiac embodies the best, looking for markers ...

This conversation was recorded to be featured in our March-April 2021 issue “The Paris Commune and the World” for the 150th anniversary of the Commune. In 2016, Geo Maher published a book entitled Building the Commune (Verso & Jacobin) that describes the last ten years of communal councils’ existence in Venezuela during Hugo Chávez’s presidency. Inspired both by the Paris Commune and Indigenous and Maroon praxes, the Venezuelan communes constitute a key example of the political formations we are trying to analyse throughout this issue. Geo Maher is a Philadelphia-based writer, organizer, and educator. He is the author of three books: ...

This conversation with Francesca Russello Ammon is built around her book, Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape (2016), which retraces the political history of the bulldozer by the United States during World War II (used in the Pacific War by the SeaBees) and immediately following it in the massive engineering of the U.S. territory in cities and between them. This discussion can act as an addition to the contents featured in The Funambulist 17 (May-June 2018) “Weaponized Infrastructure.” Francesca Russello Ammon is a cultural historian of urban planning and the built environment. Her research focuses on the social, material, and cultural ...

This conversation is the first of three recorded in Cairo about Cairo. Beth Stryker and Omar Nagati, through the description of their research and design work, introduce us to the post-revolution city and its multiple forms of informal architectures. We begin by evoking the numerous passageways of Downtown and the work of CLUSTER to rehabilitate two of them. We then describe these forms of informality, the danger in romanticizing them—by systematically assuming that they advance the common good—and what can be learn from them. We then conclude by problematizing the act of cartographying what was not meant to be mapped, ...