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 ...

The second season of Overmorrow’s Library is dedicated to world-building, world-ending, and travel across worlds. Federico Campagna presents a new selection of books that might help us to appreciate the fragility of ‘worlds,’ and the art of creating new ones through a particular use of our imagination.

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 ...

It has often been noted that the collapse of the socialist system did not result in research activities that could be compared to postcolonial studies. As Ewa Thompson has observed, “Unlike Western colonies, which have increasingly talked back to their former masters, Russia’s colonies have by and large remained mute.” Instead, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, opinions have been expressed from within different research fields regarding the appropriateness of thinking of post-Soviet societies in terms of postcolonial studies. Nevertheless, asserting that postsocialism continues to remain a useful category for researchers, Caroline Humphrey notes the existence of a growing ...

This SDUK broadsheet takes COMMUTING as its theme. Alongside the most familiar usage of “commuting” (moving to and from work), the contributions in this issue touch on many aspects of circulation, migration, and change that are flowing across and rumbling below the surface of the Earth. As this publication platform traces the diffusion of knowledge, this issue in particular explores the shifts, displacements, and movements we must consider in an age of rapid global change in order to commute the Earth’s death sentence. We know you open this broadsheet with many questions, interests, and curiosities already formed, so here are ...

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. ...

In episode 4, Dr. Léuli Eshrāghi discusses “tagatavāsā,” a text centered on Eshrāghi’s grandmother’s art practice that interweaves Indigenous language with the vernacular of contemporary art. Eshrāghi works across visual arts, curatorial practice, and university research, “intervening in display territories to centre Indigenous kin constellations, sensual and spoken languages, and ceremonial-political practices.” In this intimate conversation with Lauren Wetmore, Eshrāghi  says, “I wonder how you can bring texts to be haunted by the absence of knowledge, or by the violence of the borders of today.” “tagatavāsā” was published in C Magazine in Winter 2019. Dr. Eshrāghi  contributes to growing international critical practice across ...

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, ...