The Funambulist
@TheFunambulist_
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The Funambulist is a magazine and a podcast engaging with the politics of space and bodies.
Paris
Joined July 2011
💫 OUR NEW ISSUE IS OUT!. "The Night" (Jan–Feb 2025) contests the idea that the lack of sunlight characterizing the Night, means that we “see” less in darkness than we do in broad daylight. In fact, the refraction of sunlight in. ORDER YOUR COPY HERE:
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On May 28, 2022, Fusako Shigenobu will be released from the Japanese prison where she was forced to spend the last 21.5 years. To celebrate her commitment to the liberation of Palestine, we have placed the essay by May Shigenobu in open access. Read here:
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We are millions to feel powerless witnessing from afar the genocide currently unfolding against Palestinians of Gaza. Fighting this powerlessness means organizing for tomorrow to support, at our own scale, the Palestinian struggle for liberation.
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Now is the time to hold in our hearts the words of Mohammed al-Ardah who, after digging their freedom out of Gilboa Israeli prison with spoons in September 2021, said that he and his five comrades in struggle did it to show that the occupation is a mere illusion made of dust.
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This conversation between Christina Sharpe (@hystericalblkns) and Alexis Pauline Gumbs (@alexispauline) was a dream of ours for this issue. Both of their works engage with the Atlantic Ocean in relation to Blackness and, in the case of Alexis, marine mammals as well.
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💫 Pre-order our forthcoming issue "Forest Struggles" (May–Jun 2023), which thinks with the simultaneity of political struggles taking place in and for forests in Brazil, Colombia, Gabon, India, St. Vincent, West Papua, Europe, the U.S., and Palestine.
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"Algiers became the “Mecca of revolutionaries,” as described by Amílcar Cabral, founder of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde.". Here's a cartographic attempt at depicting Algiers as the capital of revolutionaries in the 1960s. (Map by Léopold)
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Today is the 63rd anniversary of a march that gathered 30,000 Algerians in the streets of Paris to defy colonial curfew imposed on them towards the end of the Algerian Revolution. It was met with murderous violence by the Parisian police who killed between 200 to 300 people.
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Far away from (sometimes unproductive) conversations about whether the transfer of concepts such as “apartheid,” “settler colonialism,” or “indigenous” is appropriate to describe the political conditions of Palestine, the terms nakba, sumud, and intifada, which refuse translation
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Pre-order our new issue "The Ocean… From the Black Atlantic to the Sea of Islands" (Jan–Feb 2022), which charts a gripping Political History of the Ocean, from Black Internationalism to the fight against nuclear colonialism. Official Release: Jan 4. 1/2.
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Mural honoring George Floyd in Gaza. / Photo by Ismael Mohamad/UPI (June 2020).
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In the Caribbean, forests remain the space of Maroons, who freed themselves from slavery and created societies in mountains’ woods resisting British, French, Dutch, and Spanish colonizers. In this text, with photographs by Nadia Huggins, Thabisile Griffin describes the.
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"As a foreigner trying to express solidarity with another people, my mother has always told me that her life as a revolutionary and as a mother has been a constant learning curve.". – @MayShigenobu .
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ON WATER, SALT, WHALES, AND THE BLACK ATLANTICS. A Conversation between @hystericalblkns Christina Sharpe and @alexispauline Gumbs in issue 39 THE OCEAN (Jan-Feb 2022) #TheFunambulistOpenAccess.
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⚡️ PRE-ORDER OUR NEW ISSUE: "Asian Imperialisms" (September–October 2024) examines Japanese, Chinese, Russian (and the Soviet Union), Indian, Pakistani, Iranian, and Turkish (alongside Azerbaijan) imperial and colonial formations. GET YOUR COPY HERE:
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Pre-order "The Subcontinent" (Jan–Feb 2023), edited by Shivangi Mariam Raj (@samariumisback) and Léopold Lambert, which thinks through the region shared by Pakistan, India, Kashmir, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, above and below nation-states.
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Pre-order "The Desert" (Nov–Dec 2022), which centers continental lives and anti-colonial struggles in the arid, plentiful lands of the Sahara, the Atacama, the Gibson, the Kgalagadi, the Dhofar, and the Taklimakan deserts. Official Release: November 2.
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This map by Moses März was produced in 2023 for a series of workshops to develop a concept for the memorialization of German colonialism in Berlin. The participatory process was coordinated by Ibou Diop, driven by civil society organizations
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⚡️Pre-order our new issue "Prison Uprisings" (Mar–Apr 2024), which focuses on the many ways through which prisoners invest the full extent of the agency they have within the walls to organize, resist, revolt, conquer the prison, or escape from it.
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⚡️ PRE-ORDER OUR NEW ISSUE: "Colonial Continuums," which is a space-time examination of the durability of colonial structures in western and northern European societies: Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, and Spain.
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We stand with our dear friends and comrades of London-based interdisciplinary design collective RESOLVE, who have decided to pull out their Barbican exhibition them’s the breaks. Read their statement here:
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Given the urgency of the conversations this powerful contribution by Rana Issa, titled 'Nakba, Sumud, Intifada: A Personal Lexicon of Palestinian Loss and Resistance,' can generate, we have decided to place this text from our new issue in open-access. 🇵🇸 .
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German national narrative around colonialism is one of minimization, if not of outright denial. Such minimization is supported by exceptionalization of the Shoah, and consensus around the idea that the German state has been making the proper amends around its genocidal history.
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We and Social Theory Centre at the University of Warwick (@STCsociowarwick) are honored to invite you to a conversation between Rose Miyonga (@RMiyonga) and Mohamad Junaid (@mjunaidr) that examines settler colonial land dispossession and extractivism in Kenya and Kashmir.
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This conversation with Adam Elliott-Cooper (@adamec87) revolves around his work documenting 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.
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💫 Pre-order our forthcoming issue, "Fifty Shades of White(ness)" (July–August 2023), which thinks against the U.S.-centric conception of racialization in the Caucasus, Eastern Europe, Mesoamerica, South Africa, Australia, and Polynesia.
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We are beyond excited to share that we are hosting the incredible Zoé Samudzi (@ztsamudzi) as the guest editor-in-chief for our forthcoming issue (September–October 2021). We are already looking forward to what promises to be a fascinating issue with her on board!
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💫 Issue 52 "Prison Uprisings" is OUT TODAY! If we are to believe that carceral power is one of the most ruthless forms of oppression, then liberation is never practiced as much as during prison uprisings. Resistance might be crushed, revolts might be suppressed, escapees might
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Since 1945, colonized deserts have been used by U.S., USSR, U.K., France, & Israel to “test” their nuclear arsenal. Samia Henni (@samiahenni) links Chihuahan, Mojave, Turkestan, Western Australian, Sahara, & Naqab deserts to unpack history of continental nuclear colonialism.
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⚡️Issue #39 "The Ocean… From the Black Atlantic to the Sea of Islands" is out today! It charts a gripping Political History of the Ocean, from Black Internationalism to the fight against nuclear colonialism. Order your copy here: 1/2
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⚡️Pre-order our new issue "Against Genocide" (Sep–Oct 2021) which constructs a dialogue between genocidal histories in Zimbabwe, Brazil, Ethiopia, Korea, Namibia, the U.S., Artsakh and more. Editor: Zoé Samudzi (@ztsamudzi).Official Release: September 2.
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⚡️ NEW ISSUE OUT! "Questioning Our Solidarities" gathers reflections over the blindspots and limitations of our solidarity practices across global struggles against colonialism, structural racism, and for internationalism and environmental justice. ORDER:
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Pre-order our new issue "Algerian Independence and Global Revolution 1962–2022" (Jul–Aug 2022), which celebrates the 60th anniversary of the Algerian Revolution and its internationalist solidarity with the Non-Aligned Movement. Official Release: July 4.
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💥OPEN ACCESS ALERT!. We are thrilled to share a new set of nine sold-out issues that will remain available on our website in full open-access — forever. Well, you can now read 32 out of our 42 issues published so far absolutely free!.
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Jacinta Kerketta (@JacintaKerkett2) highlights the political struggles of Adivasi communities in India, who have been fighting against state repression and extractivism for decades. With their rivers, forests, and land being stolen from them, Adivasis find their very existence.
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Pre-order our new issue "The Land… From Settler Colonial Property to LANDBACK" (Mar–Apr 2022), which looks at settler colonial land dispossession, extractivism, and property as well as envisions LANDBACK in several contexts. Official Release: Mar 1. 1/2.
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New episode of #TheFunambulistPodcast: Steven Salaita (@stevesalaita) reflects over Palestine by examining how settler colonial logics are coded within language — ranging from the limits of human rights framework to conditional solidarities.
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Pre-order our new issue "Decentering the U.S.: Thinking Through Blackness, Queerness, Brownness, Caste & Indigeneity from Elsewhere" (May–June 2022), which thinks pluriversally through other geographies than the United States. Official Release: May 3. 1/2
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💫 OUR NEW ISSUE IS OUT! . "Colonial Continuums" (Jul–Aug 2024) examines the durability of colonial structures in western and northern European societies: Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, Portugal and Italy. ORDER YOUR COPY HERE:
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Issue #41 "Decentering the U.S.: Thinking Through Blackness, Queerness, Brownness, Caste & Indigeneity from Elsewhere" is out today! It thinks pluriversally through other geographies than the United States. And it has our stunning new design!. Order here:
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⚡️ NEW ISSUE OUT! "Forest Struggles" seeks to think with political struggles taking place in and for forests in Brazil, Colombia, Gabon, India, St. Vincent, West Papua, Europe, the U.S., and Palestine. ORDER:
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Now is the time to think about our long-term commitment, not solely focusing on “the interruption of our programs.”
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⚡️NEW ISSUE OUT! "Schools of the Revolution," edited by Sónia Vaz Borges (@soniavazborges1) and Léopold Lambert, focuses on radical education initiatives in several geographies—across mangroves, prisons, streets, kitchen tables, and reading groups. ORDER:
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In this transcript of an episode of our podcast “A Moment of True Decolonization” originally published in April 2020, Ruth Wilson Gilmore guides us through the particular experience of a late 1980s reading group in southern California that engaged with Stuart Hall’s work.
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⚡️ PRE-ORDER OUR FORTHCOMING ISSUE: "Bulldozer Politics" (November–December 2024) examines the precise political order contained in the apparent chaos of rubble in Palestine, India, Colombia, Brazil, the US, France, Egypt, and Cambodia. GET YOUR COPY: .
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In a seminal text titled “Blinded by Bandung? Illumining West Papua, Senegal, and the Black Pacific” (2018), Quito Swan (@QuitoSwan) recognizes the anti-colonial spirit of the Conference, while urging us to observe how Sukarno’s Indonesia used its position as host to solidify.
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We remain willing to take time to think at our own scale with any collective or organization that wonders about their own role & about the way they can contribute to organize, mobilize, curate, publish, research, resist the growing censorship & criminalization of our engagement.
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⚡️NEW ISSUE OUT! "The Subcontinent," edited by Shivangi Mariam Raj (@samariumisback) and Léopold Lambert, thinks through the region shared by Pakistan, India, Kashmir, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, above and below nation-states. ORDER HERE:
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The Valley, Indian-Occupied Kashmir / Map by Yemberzal (2022) for The Funambulist 45 'The Subcontinent'. "These typologies are heavily walled-off zones, varying in size, density, function, morphology, intensity, authority, & activation—all concealed under the myth of normalcy."
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“Indigenous” is a complex and nuanced concept when applied to peoples who have intimate, sophisticated political relationships with the land and waters to whom they belong and whose lives are fraught with the violence of dispossession stemming from different forms of colonialism.
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Léopold talks with Harsha Walia (@HarshaWalia) about the research deployed in her book, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (Haymarket, 2021), which draws an international map of the border imperialist regime in its geographic,
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💫Pre-order our forthcoming issue "Questioning Our Solidarities" (Mar–Apr 2023), which gathers reflections over the blindspots and limitations of our solidarity practices in the form of a toolbox to help us introspect and move forward.
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The ETH Zurich has censored Léopold's talk on Palestine he was supposed to give tomorrow at the Department of Architecture. Here is a synthesis of the facts and a letter to the ETH executive board that you can sign in our support:.
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On July 5, 1962, a buoyant crowd celebrates Algerian Independence in the streets of Algiers. (Photo by Mohamed Kouaci. We thank Adel Ben Bella for selecting two photographs from the archives of Algerian photographer Mohamed Kouaci, and Safia Kouaci for publication permission.)
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🔑 OPEN-ACCESS: We are back with another set of sold-out issues that will remain available on our website in full open-access—forever!. Over the last eight years, our podcasts and editorial projects have been at our listeners' and readers' fingertips in the open-access format.
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IMPORTANT: 1,800 French military police are currently deployed in the colony of Mayotte in an operation aiming at destroying self-built villages and deport hundreds of Comorians outside of the island. A part of the French Left is rightfully outraged but seems unable to. (1/4)
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⭐️ We turn 50-issues-old with "Redefining Our Terms," which takes the shape of a glossary reflecting on our political concepts such as Indigenous, Intifada, Blackness, Ubuntu, Genocide, Decolonial, Queer, Violence, and Banlieues. Order your copy here:.
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When it comes to solidarity’s blindspots, a first step consists in transforming “unknown unknowns” into “known unknowns.” We commissioned Zoé Samudzi (@ztsamudzi) and Anaïs Duong-Pedica (@anaisduongp) to reflect on the limited consideration of Black Atlantic epistemologies.
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⚡️ Pre-order our new issue "Undocumented International" (Jan–Feb 2024), which examines the spaces of the border regime beyond the space of the border in the US, Dominican Republic, France, South Africa, Britain, Comoros, Fortress Europe, and elsewhere.
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In an issue dedicated to decentering the U.S. epistemology of whiteness, a contribution delineating the rather surprising conflation of the terms “white” and “Caucasian” felt necessary. Keto Gorgadze describes how such a conflation came to be, as well as the processes of.
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“No Nukes in the Pacific,” a poster created in Sydney by Pam Debenham and Tin Sheds in 1984.
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NEW PODCAST: KASHMIR AGAINST THE GRAIN OF NORMALCY. Shivangi Mariam Raj (@samariumisback) and Hafsa Kanjwal reflect on the affect and mythologies deployed by India to condense Kashmir into a landscape of desire, into a territory of control.
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⚡️NEW ISSUE OUT! "Fifty Shades of White(ness)" thinks against the U.S.-centric conception of racialization in the Caucasus, Eastern Europe, Mesoamerica, South Africa, Australia, and Polynesia. ORDER:
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Menna Agha (@MennaAgha) describes how “deserts”—a term inexistent in Nubian cosmology—constitute a political process of dispossession of Nubian land used both by European colonialists and the Egyptian state.
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NEW ISSUE OUT! #43 (Sep-Oct 2022) DIASPORAS Political Imaginaries of Afro-Diasporic, Indentured, Exiled, and Landless Communities. Narratives from the Cape Verdean, Korean, Indian, Vietnamese, Jewish, Eelam Tamil, Chinese, and the Black Atlantic diasporas.
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Whether forest struggles consist in the defense of the forest itself by Indigenous and/or ecological activists, or if these struggles reveal the reality that trees were meant to dissimulate, our latest issue showcases a few political movements occurring under sylvan canopies.
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Pre-order our new issue "Diasporas" (Sep–Oct 2022), which approaches the diasporic question through the political imaginaries of Afro-Diasporic, indentured, exiled, and landless communities. Official Release: September 1. Cover: Inès di Folco.
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⚡️ Pre-order our new issue "Redefining Our Terms" (November–December 2023), which takes the shape of a glossary reflecting on our political concepts such as Indigenous, Intifada, Blackness, Ubuntu, Genocide, Decolonial, Queer, Violence, and Banlieues.
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⚡️Issue #40 "The Land… From Settler Colonial Property to LANDBACK" is out today! It explores settler colonial land dispossession, extractivism, and property as well as envisions LANDBACK in several contexts. And it has a stunning new design!. Order here:
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💫 OUR NEW ISSUE IS OUT!. "Asian Imperialisms" examines processes of imperial and/or colonial domination by arguably ethnocratic Asian states, Japan, China, Russia (and the USSR), India, Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey (and Azerbaijan). ORDER YOUR COPY HERE:
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"Our dwelling [as Black people] is sometimes written off as a refusal to be in the present but it’s not that, it’s an insistence on moving, always, toward a bigger understanding of blackness (in life and death).".
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Quito Swan (@QuitoSwan) discusses liberation struggles in Melanesia (West Papua, Kanaky, and Vanuatu), thereby constituting the core of our current issue. "What does it mean to center the experience of people who are racialized and colonized as being Black in Oceania?"
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⚡️ EPISODE 153, #TheFunambulistPodcast. We talk with Adam Elliott-Cooper (@adamec87) about the colonial genealogy of British policing (in Ireland, Trinidad, Malaya, and Kenya) and construction of figure of the suspect as a legitimization of this policing.
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In this short text, Zoé Samudzi (@ztsamudzi) comes back to a question she had articulated in the issue she guest-edited for The Funambulist 37 (Sep-Oct 2021): who has the right to use the term “genocide,” and is it politically useful for us to hold on to it?
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💫 Pre-order our forthcoming issue, "Schools of the Revolution" (September–October 2023), edited by Sónia Vaz Borges and Léopold Lambert, which thinks with radical education initiatives in several geographies across the world.
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Education is central to the Mayan struggle, as formalized by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Chiapas. In this text, Raúl Romero Gallardo and Xavie Gálvez unfold the structure of self-governance created by the Zapatistas and how education takes its role within it.
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In many Afro-Caribbean families, it is elderly women who manage precious knowledge. What happens to the stories when their memory fades? Marny Garcia Mommertz recounts both the transmission (and lack thereof) of embodied memories that her Cuban grandmother has gifted her.
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⚡️OPEN ACCESS ALERT!. We are back with six more sold-out issues of our magazine now made available on our website in full open-access — forever!. Starting from May 2021, we have placed 23 out of our 40 issues in open access so far, and the response has been truly beautiful!. 1/5
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"The use of “border regime” is deliberate. It forces us to think of the border not as a line on a map, but rather, as a system that conditions most aspects of societies that have either implemented it or are complicit in its implementation.".
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Hajer Ben Boubaker's research on the history of Arab music in the Levant, the Maghreb, and within France’s immigration neighborhoods is crucial for many of us. Here, she provides a spatial and historical cartography of Maghrebi music labels in Barbès-Goutte d’Or and in Paris.
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The Funambulist 18 (July-August 2018) "Cartography & Power" considers the map as an instrument of (colonial, anticolonial, social, environmental. ) power in Iraq, Palestine, Libya, the United States, Japan, Algeria, Canada, and more:
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In this reflective text, Joao Gabriel (@JoaoGwadloup) analyzes the limits of both the universalizing form of Blackness that conceptualizes a world approached solely through the Black/non-Black binary, and multiracial alliances formed against capitalism that tends to minimize.
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This issue features a few of the multitude of political imaginaries of the region formed by Pakistan, India, Kashmir, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, above and below nation states. 💥FREE DIGITAL COPY IF YOU ARE BASED IN THE SUBCONTINENT!💥.
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In being able to gather and share only a few fragments from a region rich with millions of particularities, our ambition is for the several political movements and cosmologies described here—a handful of trees in an endless forest—to surge in our readers’ political imaginaries.
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When the colonial power builds railway, it does not only colonize space, it also colonizes time. Meryem-Bahia Arfaoui describes the relationship between time, space, the State, and law in this text that can be used as a toolbox for our issue "They Have Clocks, We Have Time.". 1/3
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This conversation between Millennials Are Killing Capitalism (@MAKCapitalism) and Orisanmi Burton (@orisanmi) highlights Orisanmi’s argument that “prison is war,” foundations of the Long Attica Revolt, the mindset of the rebels, as well as envisions an abolition internationalism.
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"What if it is also true that our Palestinianness continuously manifests itself in our suspended state of catastrophe? Might we understand ourselves as always in the process of becoming Palestinian?". – Sophia Azeb (@brownisthecolor).
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Anaïs Duong-Pedica (@anaisduongp) speaks to Maile Arvin about the research she conducted for her book 'Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawaiʻi and Oceania.' In it, she shows how Polynesians have been racialized by European and U.S. colonizers
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Citation is both an act of recognition and rigorous engagement with an author’s work. Using the example of M. NourbeSe Philip’s cycle poem, Zong!, Katherine McKittrick (@demonicground) invites us to think about the stakes of appropriating and reconfiguring black feminist work.
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For architecture students this means understanding the geography and architecture of Israeli settler colonialism to then be able to act upon this understanding. This teach-in by Léopold aims to introduce various architectural embodiments of settler colonialism in Palestine.
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