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 Thunderhawk is an Oohenumpa Lakota. Born and raised across the Oceti Sakowin homelands, she first became active in the late 1960s as a ...

Proverbs for Decolonized Consciences Ali Jimale Ahmed is a Somali poet, cultural critic, short-story writer, and scholar. He is Professor and former chair of Comparative Literature at Queens College of the City University of New York, where he also teaches for the Africana Studies Program and the Department of Classical, Middle Eastern, and Asian Languages and Cultures; he is also on the Comparative Literature faculty at the CUNY Graduate center. His books include The Invention of Somalia (1995), Daybreak Is Near: Literature, Clans, and the Nation-State in Somalia (1996), Fear Is a Cow (2002), Diaspora Blues (2005), The Road Less Traveled: ...

Aboroginal Women’s Presence Amy McQuire is a Darumbal and South Sea Islander journalist and writer with 12 years experience in Aboriginal and independent media. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland looking at media représentations of violence against Aboriginal women.

The House of Students of the Empire Ana Naomi de Sousa is a documentary filmmaker and writer, who works on spatial politics, identity, history and resistance.

Cultural and Land-Based Palestinian Resistance Chandni Desai is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on anti-colonial practices of resistance against settler colonial capitalist imperialism and genocide specifically focusing on Palestinian resistance. Chandni is working on a book tentatively titled Revolutionary Circuits of Liberation: The Radical Tradition of Palestinian Cultural Resistance and Internationalism. She recently co-edited a special issue on Decolonization and Palestine for the journal Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society. She has also been involved in the Palestinian solidarity organizing for over a decade. Special thanks to Deborah Cowen for putting us in touch.

In this conversation recorded in our office, Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn answers Léopold Lambert’s questions about the way she interprets or/and constructs various kinds of archives through her artistic work. The first part of the conversation addresses diasporic archives through her project The Making of an Archive (2014-now), which undertakes to digitize photographs from immigrant families in Canada and Sweden. They then proceed to interrogate the colonial archives in Jacqueline’s work following her 2015 residency in the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm that led to the exhibition Black Atlas (2016). Through phrases such as “How did the world came to Europe” ...

The Haitian Proclamation of Independence (January 1, 1804) Fania Noël is a Haitian-born, French Afrofeminist organizer, thinker, and writer. She is an experienced organizer in grassroots movements against racism, specifically anti-Blackness and Black feminism in France. In addition to being part of the Mwasi Afrofeminist Collective, she is the co-creator of the Decolonial Summer Camp, a five-day anti-racism training course in France. In 2014, she founded AssiégéEs (Besieged), a political publishing project led by women, queer and trans people of color.

Author and activist Andrew Ross surveys the contributions of Palestinian labor to the building of Israel.

Indigenous Island Time Writer, musician and visual artist Coco Solid is Jessica Hansell, a Māori/Sāmoan/German artist from Auckland. Hansell started out making her own zines/comics and musically came up through underground punk and rap. She went on to form groups Parallel Dance Ensemble (Permanent Vacation, Germany), Badd Energy (Flying Nun, NZ) and 9-member rap collective Fanau Spa. Hansell also runs projects like Kuini Qontrol (an online hub for podcasts, music and club nights) and Equalise My Vocals (amplifying creative women, LGBTQI and decolonising voices in the Pacific). Hansell is the first woman to direct and write an adult cartoon in New ...

Three Decolonial Moments of Guadeloupean History Joao Gabriel is a Guadeloupean writer, panafricanist and phd student in history. He is author of Le Blog de Joao that addresses issues regarding colonialism and the African diaspora, especially in the Caribbean. He is currently working on the history of prison in relation to the French abolition of slavery in the 19th century. He is the author of two texts in The Funambulist.

Power, Knowledge, and Being on the African Continent Joy Mboya is the Executive Director of The GoDown Arts Centre, a leading non-profit multidisciplinary arts facility in Nairobi, Kenya. As a trained architect, performer and cultural activist, Joy has led The GoDown Arts Centre’s development as a site for artistic experimentation, cross-sector partnerships and creative collaboration. In addition, she has led various ambitious cultural programs in Kenya, among others, the annual Nairobi-wide festival Nai Ni Who that connects culture and city. Joy’s strong dedication to the development of the creative economy in Kenya has been widely recognized and awarded for her outstanding ...

Lakota Economy of Giving Kite aka Suzanne Kite is an Oglala Lakota performance artist, visual artist, composer, and a PhD candidate at Concordia University. She is currently a Research Assistant for the Initiative for Indigenous Futures and her research is concerned with contemporary Lakota philosophies through research-creation, computational media, and performance practice.

Decolonial and Accompanying Practices in Hawai’i Laurel Mei-Singh is assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Hawai’i Mānoa. She is developing a book on military fences and grassroots struggles for land and livelihood in Wai‘anae, a rural and heavily militarized region of the island of O’ahu in Hawai’i. She is the author of “The Year of the Shark: Recognizing Those Who Reterritorialize Hawai’i,” in The Funambulist 13 Queers, Feminists, and Interiors (September-October 2017).

Priority to Indigenous Pleasures Léuli Eshrāghi, Sāmoan is an artist, a curator and a researcher, who intervenes in display territories to centre Indigenous presence and power, sensual and spoken languages, and ceremonial-political practices. Through performance, moving image, writing and installation, ia engages with Indigenous possibility as haunted by ongoing militourist and missionary violences that erase faʻafafine-faʻatama from kinship structures. Ia contributes to growing international critical practice across the Great Ocean and North America through residencies, exhibitions, publications, teaching and rights advocacy.

Imagining New Worlds with the Zapatistas Linda Quiquivix is a geographer and seed saver based in California. She places her university training at the service of under-resourced communities in the US, Mexico, and Palestine who seek clean water, land, and tools to build and strengthen their collective autonomies.

Navajo Decolonial Grief & Rage for Loreal Tsingine Melanie K. Yazzie (Diné) is an Assistant Professor of Native American Studies and American Studies at the University of New Mexico. She is also the 2019-2020 Cultural Desk for The Red Nation, a grassroots organization committed to the liberation of Indigenous people from colonialism and capitalism. She is also the guest editor (along with Nick Estes) of The Funambulist 20 (November-December 2019) Settler Colonialism in Turtle Island.

The Nubian House Won’t Die Silently Menna Agha is an Egyptian Nubian Architect and researcher, and a visiting spatial justice fellow at the University of Oregon. She is a third generation displaced Faddicha Nubian, Her research interests include the questions of gender, space, territory, and displacement.

The Exotic Other Miriam Hillawi Abraham is a multi-disciplinary designer who hails from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Her work advocates for social justice through afrofuturism and intersectional feminism by creating playful dialogue, immersive experiences, mining artefacts from the future and constructing alternative realities.

Post-Apartheid Spatial Futurities Mpho Matsipa received her PhD in Architecture from UC Berkeley. She is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at Columbia GSAPP and faculty in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. She is a researcher at WiSER and co-investigator on an Andrew Mellon research grant on Urban Mobilities. She has written critical essays on art and architecture and curated several exhibitions and discursive platforms, including the South Africa Pavilion at the 11th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice Biennale (2008), African Mobilities at the Architecture Museum, Pinakotheque Moderne in Munich (2018),which ...

ASHLEY DAWSON talks about extreme cities, or urban densities like New York City, where social inequalities and uneven effects of colonial violence and capitalist development are increasingly exacerbated by extreme weather and environmental degradation. He calls on the power of storytelling and the need to collectively imagine different futures. Dawson works across the fields of postcolonial studies, environmental humanities, and climate justice. He is professor of English at CUNY Graduate Center and College of Staten Island, and leads a Climate Action Lab.

Decolonial Fairy Tales & Object-Oriented Pedagogy Nay Saysourinho is a writer and literary critic. She was the first recipient of the Adina Talve-Goodman Fellowship from One Story Magazine. She is a regular contributor to the Ploughshares Blog. The daughter of Lao refugees, she was raised in the province of Québec and spent several years in Saskatchewan. Her writing explores food, nature and colonialism. She is currently working on her first novel —a modern fairy tale set in Southeast Asia— and an art project on Asian portraiture. She writes in French and English, and is based in Connecticut.

The Djabwurrung Embassy in Aboriginal Country Nish is a community organizer, sports coach and writer based on Kulin Nation territory in so called Melbourne of so-called Australia. He is a settler to these lands with a family history rooted in India and Fiji. He has been organizing with the collective Anti-Colonial Asian Alliance since early 2019 and volunteers with RISE: Refugees, Survivors and eX-detainees. His writing is featured in New Matilda and Junkee.

Decolonizing the Screen Omar Berrada is a writer, translator and curator, and the director of Dar al-Ma’mûn, a library and artists residency in Marrakech. His work focuses on the politics of translation and intergenerational transmission. He has edited several books, most recently The Africans (Kulte Editions, Rabat), a volume on migration and racial dynamics in Morocco. Among his recent exhibitions are Station Point with Saba Innab at ifa-Gallery Berlin and The Power of Two Suns with Yto Barrada and Bettina at LMCC on Governors Island, NY. His writing is included in The University of California Book of North African Literature and ...

This podcast episode is a bit different from the ones we usually publish — and not just because of our new opening credits edited by Andrei Popoviciu! Taking advantage of his visit in Chicago, Léopold talked with our past contributor Imran Mohammad. In November 2017, he wrote a text for us about the Rohingya genocide that he fled while he was living his fourth year of detention in an Australian camp detaining hundreds of exiled people on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. A few weeks later and while many detainees organized forms of revolt, the camp ceased to operate and ...

In this interview by Léopold Lambert, Mpho Matsipa describes the spirit and contents of the exhibition she curated in 2018. Entitled “African Mobilities: This is not a Refugee Camp Exhibition,” this powerfully-curated gathering of artworks provides the bases of a conversation about the notions of mobilities and temporalities in the context of the African continent, from the mind-expanding maps of the Chimurenga Library and the cartographic entanglements by Dana Whariba, Thembinkosi Goniwe and Nolan Oswald Dennis to the futurist vision of Olalekan Jeyifous and Wale Lawal. Mpho Matsipa received her PhD in Architecture from UC Berkeley. She is Adjunct Assistant Professor ...