Léopold Lambert met with Indigenous Lakota activists Madonna Thunder Hawk and Marcella Gilbert during their passage in France to present Christina D. King and Elizabeth A. Castle’s film Warrior Women that portrays their struggle over two generation — Madonna is Marcella’s mother. In this conversation, we talked about four episodes of Indigenous resistance in Turtle Island (North America): the occupations of Alcatraz (1969), Mount Rushmore (1971), Wounded Knee (1973) and Standing Rock (2016), all of which were experienced by Madonna. Madonna Thunder Hawk is an Oohenumpa Lakota. Born and raised across the Oceti Sakowin homelands, she first became active in the late 1960s ...

This fifth SDUK broadsheet examines the multifaceted meanings of ACCOUNTING in the age of climate change. This issue considers accounting in its colloquial sense, pertaining to investment and economics, but also moves beyond the ledger book to consider what remains uncounted, and what is consciously left out. Throughout this issue, we find slippery concepts, things, and actors that pose a challenge to accounting as a means of representation and understanding. Beginning with economics, one might ask: What are the basic tools and assumptions on which accounting is based? In his ongoing unsettling of fundamental economic concepts, D.T. Cochrane looks at how ...

Walter Mignolo (1941, Córdoba, Argentina) is a semiotician and professor at Duke University, who has published extensively on semiotics and literary theory, and worked on different aspects of the modern and colonial world, exploring concepts such as global coloniality, the geopolitics of knowledge, transmodernity, border thinking, and pluriversality. In “Enacting the Archives, Decentring the Muses,” Mignolo reads through the Museum of Islamic Art and of Asian Civilizations Museum, attempting to decolonize the single story of western museums by showing how de-westernization works. The author’s argument will be that the de-colonial story of western museums through the appropriation of the museum model ...

In May 2021, Mohamad Amer Meziane published his first book, Des empires sous la terre: Histoire écologique et raciale de la sécularisation (Subterranean Empires: Ecological and Racial History of Secularization). We speak with him about the ambitious work he develops in this book, linking European secularization (and Europe’s definition of what constitutes religion) with colonial extractivism from the first industrial revolution to the alteration of the world’s climate. Mohamad Amer Meziane holds a PhD in Philosophy from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. He is currently a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Religion Culture and Public and the Institute of African studies at Columbia ...

In this conversation, we talk about Harsha Walia’s new fantastic book, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (Haymarket, 2021), which draws an international map of the border imperialist regime in its geographic, historic, and legal complexities. We then proceed in trying to envision the various forms of internationalist solidarities that emerge in the struggle against this global regime, following in particular Indigenous and/or Black resistance. Harsha Walia is the award-winning author of Undoing Border Imperialism (2013). Trained in the law, she is a community organizer and campaigner in migrant justice, anti-capitalist, feminist, and anti-imperialist movements, ...

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 ...

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 ...

Napoléon was the first conqueror to “legalize” looting by forcing the vanquished to sign contracts surrendering historic art objects. The recent selling off and dispersal of the collection of Iraq Museum, was presented as the simple work of market forces, but it continues and extends Napoleonic forms of looting.

Previous episodes have focused on certain measures of conservation in fisheries, such as Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY), which were historically put in place to protect domestic industries rather than fish populations. These measures often reinforce legacies of pelagic extraction. This episode focuses on the situation from the perspective of Ghanian artisanal fisherfolk. Their testimonies are in conversation with Dr Epifania Amoo-Adare, an artist, ‘renegade’ architect, pedagogue and researcher based in Accra (Ghana) who is currently engaged in what she describes as the “art of unthinking.” In this episode, we join Amoo-Adare in the art of unthinking, where the very idea ...

Awkward Archives proposes a manual for academic teaching and learning contexts. An ethnographic research approach is confronted with the demands of archival research as both disciplines challenge their inner logics and epistemologies. Through fieldwork and ethnographic tools and methods, both analogue and digital, the editors take various contemporary archival sites in Berlin as case studies to elaborate on controversial concepts in Western thought. Presenting as such a modular curriculum on archives in their awkwardness—with the tensions, discomfort and antagonisms they pose. With case studies on Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the Hahne-Niehoff Archive and the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, among others.

This twelfth SDUK broadsheet examines the diverse means by which individuals and communities build lasting or fleeting bonds. Coinciding with the conclusion of Crossings: Itineraries of Encounter, the Blackwood’s 2021–22 lightbox series, this issue, BONDING, echoes themes seen throughout Crossings: migration, diaspora, borders, and archives. Where the lightbox exhibitions examine image-making practices, this SDUK issue engages print culture in new and recurring formats including visual storytelling, poetry, a letter exchange, and a recipe. Food is the source of many enduring cultural bonds, and thus one might be tempted to start from the gut: See Diasporic Dumplings (p. 27) for a site-responsive ...

The word “classic” in the title of this special issue of Selva might seem to some a misnomer. Rather than consistently use any of the rich traditions of the concept from various sub-discplines of art history—say, Mesoamerican or Chinese—or address the contested self-identification of the academic field of “Classics” itself, I have thought about the operational role of this word in all the different art histories I have worked with. (I was for a few years responsible for creating and managing a non-Eurocentric introductory art history course with the help of colleagues and collaborators. My level of engagement in various ...