“Police killings captured on cell-phone video or photographs have become the hallmark of United States visual culture in the twenty-first century. In this book, I examine this transformation of visual culture from the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in the summer of 2014 to the inauguration of Donald Trump in 2017. As a person designated “white” by the color line in the United States, I do so from the perspective of anti-antiblackness. I study the formation of the space of appearance, that space where we catch a glimpse of the society that is to come—the future commons or communism. ...

Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski listen to the post-colonial loudreaders of Puerto Rico; Louise Hickman takes stock of the devices and affective labor involved in flying while disabled; Evan Kleekamp browses the “impaired commodities” of Emily Barker’s art; Jen Rose Smith traces Native resistance to seasonal salmon fisheries in coastal Alaska in the summer of COVID-19; and Francisco Quiñones looks behind Luis Barragán’s walls to consider the role of domestic labor in shaping Mexican modernism.

In 1915, Kazimir Malevich painted his famous Red Square painting, more properly called Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions (1915). I think about how incendiary it must have been at the time, how arresting. How it prefigured the general collapse of figuration, of representation, into a single, glowing screen, an ultimate abstraction of life and death that is later taken up by PredPol, a predictive policing software company. How the Red Square is not even a square, but a slightly angled parallelogram. Particularly exciting is the way it, along with its sibling Black Square (1915), references Russian ...

Inspired by the scholars, activists, and everyday citizens who spoke out, marched, and protested against police killings of African-Americans, we present this collection of short essays that put Black lives at the center of our thinking about architecture and its history. Note to new readers: This project was published in early 2015, as a rapid response to the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. These articles are (sadly) sill relevant, and we hope they will be useful. We also wanted to direct readers to more recent texts that address the intersections of race, space, and activism.

This conversation with Adam Elliott-Cooper revolves around his book, Black Resistance to British Policing (2021). We talk about the colonial genealogy of British policing (in Ireland, Trinidad, Malaya, and Kenya in particular) and the construction of the figure (collective or individual) of the suspect as a legitimization of this policing. We also talk about Black resistance to it, the crucial role of women activists, the paradigm embodied by the 2011 police murder of Mark Duggan and the massive revolts that followed, as well as the possibilities of solidarity. Adam Elliott-Cooper is a lecturer in social and public policy, Queen Mary University of London. ...

This conversation with May al-Ibrashy is the last one of a series of twelve recorded in the Levant and Egypt. In it, we discuss the current political situation of Egypt after the 2011 revolution and the 2013 military coup d’état. As she writes, “my new motto [is] if you’re not confused, you’re stupid.” Trying not to fall into stupidity, we thus attempt to question the various problems that creates such a confusion, in particular when it comes to heritage. In this regard, the fire at the Institut d’Egypte that burned thousands of documents in December 2011 is exemplary of a political ...

Volume 07_Cruel Designs includes: Introduction: What Is Cruel Design? — Violence on the Body: A Manual for the French Police Escorting Illegal Immigrants — The Handcuffs of the Future — The Straightjacket & the Guillotine — The Thanatopolitics of Death Penalty — The Precise Design of Torture in Kafka’s Penal Colony — What Constitutes “the Act of Killing” — The Absolute Power of a Body over Another in Sade — The Corset: “A Body Press,” Paradigm of the Violence of Design on the Body — Carceral Treadmill — To Design a Prison, or Not to Design a Prison: What About ...

No person held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due. —United States Constitution, Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3: Fugitive Slave Clause

This conversation with Nacira Guénif-Souilamas was recorded at the University of Paris VIII (Saint-Denis) for The Funambulist Magazine 05 (May-June 2016): “Design & Racism.” It opens a series of conversations on Archipelago about this important topic. Nacira is an anthropologist and sociologist, author and editor of four books examining structural racism in France. Such a specific system of legal targeting, administrative discrimination, urbanistic discrimination, stigmatizing imaginaries, etc. is the topic of this conversation. Nacira Guénif-Souilamas is an anthropologist and sociologist, author and editor of four books examining structural racism in France:  Des « beurettes » aux descendantes d’immigrants nord-africains (Grasset, 2000), Des beurettes (Hachette Pluriel, 2003), Les féministes ...

As the series “Design & Racism” continues, it would be an omissive mistake not to address some of the numerous historical movements undertaken against structural racism. This is why, in this conversation, Donna Murch gives us an historical outline of the African American uprisings from Watts in Los Angeles in 1965 to Ferguson, MO in 2014 after the murder of Michael Brown by a police officer. We also discuss about the progressive militarization of the police accomplished in the historical context of the so-called “war on drugs” that had drastic consequences on the violent suppression of the Black Lives Matter movement ...

This conversation with Christina Heatherton and Jordan T. Camp evolves around the content of the recently published book that they edited, Policing the Planet. By evoking the numerous interviews and articles of/by intellectuals and activists, we address the inherent violence of policing, as well as its specific politics in the United States through the “broken windows” doctrine and the character of William Bratton for instance. We also discuss about the various forms of resistance organized against the structural racism that the police enforces, including the abolition of the police altogether. Christina Heatherton is an American Studies scholar and historian of antiracist social movements. Her work ...

When Paul Chan and Sven Lütticken proposed to gather a series of “reports” on the (mostly) recent rise of right-wing, populist movements for e-flux journal, it was immediately apparent that the urgency and complexity of the topic required its own special issue. As protests erupt throughout Europe in opposition to austerity measures being pushed through by right-wing governments and EU fiscal bodies, we are also now witnessing a phenomenon spreading throughout the Northern Hemisphere in which some of the most brazen hardline racist rhetoric emerges not only from politicians, but from the general populace as well. What is going on? ...