Tag
Colonialism
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Against Babel: Or, How to Talk to Strangers
Allegedly, some 45% of languages descend from one, ancient ”Proto-Indo-European“ tongue. But why focus on a hypothetical lost language, when we can work instead to hear one another today?
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When Nature Is Valued over Human Life
White South Africans used wildlife conservation to build a narrative as a race. Unfortunately, this pursuit came at the expense of Africans.
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Public Thinker: Chanda Prescod-Weinstein Looks to the Night Sky
“There are two ways of reading Black invisibility and one of them is futuristic.”
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When Martinique Cannibalized Colonialism
What to do with Confederate statues in the US South? Martinique didn’t just destroy its colonial-era statues—it rebuilt them into something else.
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The Never-Ending Frontier?
The US imperialist wars in the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan grew from US wars against Indigenous people in the 19th century.
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Opening the Anthropocene Archives
The Anthropocene has long been discussed in terms of hard science. What do the humanities have to teach about this human age?
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Museums as Monuments to White Supremacy
Millions of items looted from Africa during the colonial era remain housed in private collections and museums around the world.
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The Matter of Time
Versailles treated the people of Greater Syria and Iraq—Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike—as inferiors in need of “civilizational therapy.”
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Igiaba Scego on Writing between History and Literature
“I strongly lay claim to imagination, because to us Black women for a long time the possibility of imagination had been negated.”[none-for-homepage]
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Reimagining Italy through Black Women’s Eyes
Italy’s past, present, and future are no less marked by race than any other former colonial power. Acknowledging that is only the beginning.
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Pandemic Déjà Vu
The COVID-19 global pandemic has been described as an unprecedented global event. Yet for some, the virus arrives with uncanny familiarity.
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Public Thinker: Annette Joseph-Gabriel on Black Women, Frenchness, and Decolonization
“The women in my book really disrupted France’s ideas about citizenship, about who belongs. I’d like us to be similarly disruptive.”[none-for-homepage]
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For the Slow Work of Critique in Critical Times
With so many crises—environmental, humanitarian, racial, viral, and economic—the work of “critique” can seem to be a luxury. But is it?
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Settler Fantasies, Televised
House-hunting and home-improvement TV shows are premised on the settler fantasy of property ownership—and that fantasy’s relationship to whiteness.
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The Criminal’s City
In a recent French novel, an ordinary woman inadvertently becomes a drug kingpin—and does so by learning to see anew Paris’s urban landscape.
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“Parasite” and the Plurality of Empire
Bong Joon-ho’s critique in Parasite is less of “universal” capitalism than of the particular imperialisms that have shaped Korean life.
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Can Photography Be Decolonial?
Can the inherent contradictions of “whiteness” and the “decolonial” ever align with the reparative potential of photography?
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Public Thinker: Yarimar Bonilla on Decolonizing Decolonization
“Hurricane Maria ushered in a great deal of trauma and suffering, but it also allowed us to reassess the very nature of the political.” [none-for-homepage]
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Lessons from Haiti on Living and Dying
If he had to write The Black Jacobins again, C. L. R. James “would only give Toussaint [Louverture] a walk-on part.”
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Dead Cosmonauts, Space Cowboys
Heroes are in the skies. This was true for the Greeks, who named constellations for great hunters and queens; for First Nations astronomers, who told stories …
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Fathers of Empire
There is a moment early on in Hazel Carby’s Imperial Intimacies when she writes about the ways her mother Iris—as a Welsh woman—refused Englishness but still embraced Britishness. This is revealed in her mother’s dismay that …
