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 ...

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 ...

Today, many of us can remember the disappeared indigenous cosmologies as parts of ourselves, lost to colonialism, industrialization, communist revolutions, and capitalist wars. Many names have been given to ideological or historical grand narratives to soothe the pain of loss, to register those losses and render them searchable, but these memorializing mechanisms still fail to register the pain of losing something much larger that cannot be named—a deep relation to the world, to the cosmos, and to ourselves that gives us strength and sovereignty without need for any other earthly power of right or dominion. What if another kind of ...

This conversation with Hana Sleiman begins a series of several around the Palestinian question(s). After evoking her archiving work of historical Arabic comic books and their construction of a political imaginary, Hana and I talk about this important construction of a Palestinian Oral History Archive at the American University of Beirut. This archive comprises about a thousand hours of interview with Palestinian having experienced the 1948 Nakba and its evictive violence. We particularly insist on the embraced subjectivities of such narratives, stressing that what is remembered and how it is remembered is more important than the illusory ambition of an ...

This conversation with Wendy Matsumura is released along a short report about current movements of protest against the US army’s ubiquitous presence in Okinawa, published in The Funambulist blog. Wendy takes us through the chronology of domination that Ryukyuans (and subesquently Okinawans) have experienced since the 17th century and the various forms of resistance that were opposed to it. From the Satsuma Clan’s claim on the Ryukyu Kingdom, to the Japanese annexation of it, to the US army’s occupation, and finally the current situation of a US imperialism negotiated with the successive Japanese governments and their varying degree of nationalism, we try ...

“I copied Brazil, at least that part by which I wished to satirize Brazil through its own self.” An essay on Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma and the Brazilian nation as a mythic antihero born from colliding races, sagas, idioms, rites, and translations. With artworks by Jaider Esbell.

Without exception, everyone is called upon today to construct his/her patriotic identity as a response to the supreme imperative of our shared whiteness: ‘act as if the land were initially without owners’. For white Australia, this imperative is more primordial than the usual formulation of the call to patriotism: ‘be prepared to sacrifice yourself for your country’, since patriotic sacrifice presupposes that one already has a country to which one is devoted. The imperative of whiteness touches the depth of our ontology since it is from this that the white collective springs as the creator of the white Australian nation-state. ...

This conversation with Zoé Samudzi was recorded to operate as a complement to her text “Reparative Futurities: Thinking From the Ovaherero and Nama Colonial Genocide,” commissioned for and published in The Funambulist 30 (July-August 2020) “REPARATIONS.” Zoé begins by contextualizing the history of the first 20th century genocide, which was committed by the German settler colonial army against the Ovaherero and Nama nations in what is now Namibia. We then talks of the various forms of coalition settler colonial powers practice with each other, but also how the struggles against them can, in turn, form large solidarity fronts worldwide. Finally, ...

When, in October 2021, we interviewed Priya Ange and Anita Kittery for our francophone show “Diasporas et Imaginaires des Luttes” about the Tamil diaspora from Puducherry or Tamil Nadu at large in France, we relied a lot on the work of Jessica Namakkal, who dedicated a book to “the making and unmaking of French India.” We are therefore happy to provide you with an anglophone conversation with her about French colonialism on the Indian Subcontinent. This is part of a broader effort to render the complexity to the Subcontinent’s recent history, which is usually depicted under the sole and uniform ...

“I want Colston torn off the plinth and thrown into the river, if not smashed to bits.” An essay on living with—and witnessing the destruction of—monuments to the agents of colonization and enslavement. With artworks by Joiri Minaya.

“Ogoró! ogoró! ogoró!” A shape-shifting demigod visits an industrializing São Paulo, bathes in enchanted water, and meets a cannibal giant. “Piaimã the Giant” is an excerpt from a forthcoming translation of Macunaíma (New Directions, 2023) by Katrina Dodson.

As discussed in the previous conversation with Alejandro Grimson, Argentina is built on a myth of Europeanness, thus concealing its indigenity from its national narrative. This conversation with Axel Lazzari introduces us to the historical and current political situations of the indigenous populations in Argentina. We begin by addressing the very terminology we use and the power of naming as a means of control. Axel then provides us with a short account of the European colonization of the indigenous land, subsequently enforced by the mapping of the territory. We look at the three historical maps below to understand the controlled ...