“How do fictions give rise to nations and nationalities? How do they come to be understood as real and fundamental to identity?” An essay on fictional homelands, Potemkin nations, and wonders of the industrial world.

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 ...

At the OFF-Biennial, Fokus Grupa (Iva Kovač and Elvis Krstulović) presented different projects which, combined, made up an entirely new coherent whole. The basic premise of the gallery presentation has been to interpret public monuments in Croatia and question the power of national myths and mythical dimensions of established historical facts. Rather than representing a mere selection of the exist- ing works organised into a readable story, the exhibited projects have been brought together to form a dramaturgical arc that could be read as an exhibition with the classical elements of a Greek tragedy (the ancient Greek tragedy bore a ...

Cruel Fiction brings together new material with celebrated work published here for the first time in book form, including the provocative and charged “Brazilian Is Not a Race,” a sonnet sequence meditating on race, nation, and history seen from the author’s native Rio Grande Valley. This is a spectacular debut trying to puzzle though the insurgencies, context, and kinesis of our present, from the workplace to the pop charts but most of all to the politics of struggle.

Cairo, August 3, 2011 I lie in bed, my eyes wide-open in the darkness. The air is hot and heavy with humidity and dust. I try in the dimness to remember where I am. Sad memories emerging from the deep recesses of my mind inexplicably surface along with flashes of childish, mysterious joys. I fumble numbly for the lamp, but the electricity is cut off. Satellite communications were also shut down at one point, on the orders of his Excellency the Supreme President Mohamed Hosni Mubarak. This sacred military decision had been issued in secret. Fate was on his side; it helped ...

“Which is real, Yazygia or France, and to which of them are you lying?” A fiction about an amnesiac who must choose between two nations, two languages, two identities. Translated by Daria Chernysheva and excerpted from the eponymous novel, which was published in French in 2016.

In this issue of e-flux journal, deep glances at the past hope to make sense of the present by diving into history’s original abysses and early promises. Mi You brings us a refreshingly constructive analysis of this year’s documenta fifteen, its curators, its intended organizational structure, and its audiences. Olga Olina, Hallie Ayres, and Anton Vidokle chart suppressed, banned, and otherwise disappeared languages in a resource that sprawls over geography and time from 1367 to today, showing an ongoing process of erasure and survival that corresponds with the rise of nation-states… Editorial Editors What Politics? What Aesthetics?: Reflections on documenta fifteen Mi You The Catastrophe ...

Beyond performative resistance and melancholic complicity with the existing order, a crucial strategy emerged in the 1980s from a collective of artists in Yugoslavia who used complicity as its most lethal weapon. Inke Arns and Slavoj Žižek have respectively described the activities of NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) and its sub-groupings (the band Laibach and the artist collective IRWIN, and Scipion Našice Sisters Theatre, among others) variously in terms of over-identification or subversive affirmation, as performing the “hidden reverse” of state ideology. From Laibach’s nationalism in drag to the issuing of a passport for an imagined “NSK state,” NSK is perhaps ...

“I came to think of foreignness as a source of fellow feeling, even freedom, and as an antidote to the brutish nationalism of my grandfather, which allowed for equality only among soldiers.” An essay on the inheritance of fascism and the trials of becoming a “new man,” whether through violent subordination, personal reckoning, or political rebranding.

“I thought we’d wake the snipers / Thought we’d wake the birds / I thought we’d wake Allah himself and he’d come down to dance / Oh man, he did, he did, he did….” A suite of songs about a Syrian sculptor who carves stone, takes up arms, dances in the ruins of Homs, confesses on camera, and seeks official status, performed by Aliana de la Guardia and Ganavya Doraiswamy.

“The nation always poses the same question: who belongs? And the answer is always delivered with violence.” A conversation about the colonial roots of the nation-state, the fabrication of “timeless” identities, and the purging of minorities.

“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.