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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“No Future” Lexicon: Darkness
Darkness often appears as a solely obscure and secondary trait of modernity; but, in truth, darkness impregnates and bolsters so densely modernity’s creative powers.
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Are Species Timeless?: Talking with Bathsheba Demuth About the Arctic
“There was an interdependence that was very clear in the animal relationships in the Arctic.”
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Beyond the “Burden of Belief”: Pádraig Ó Tuama on Religious Trauma, Eros, and Poetry as Prayer
“I began to look for other verbs when it comes to my doubt and my rage and my yearning and my sadness.”
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Symbolic Sovereignty: Alvita Akiboh on the Materiality of Empire
“The US flag is always flying; if you buy something, the money is US money; and the stamps are US stamps.”
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To Counteract Apocalyptic Technoscience, We Need New Myths
If there is contentment on the artist’s face, it is because she knows that she has left Babylon behind and is on her way to Zion.
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The Pacific Islands: United by Ocean, Divided by Colonialism
“Deep in the Pacific, the impact of Western colonialism runs deep: it even shapes the way Pacific Islanders experience time.”
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The U.S. Has Never Forgiven Haiti
For Frederick Douglass, and for Black activists across the United States, there was no place more important to global Black freedom than Haiti.
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To Understand Aztecs, Listen to Them
Have we who study Indigenous languages only succeeded in making things worse? And if this has happened, is there any way out?
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Crossings into Indigenous Palestine
“If the olive trees knew the hands that planted them,” wrote Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, “Their oil would become tears.”
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Five Books on Labor and Ecology
Our scorching planetary age results from the conjoined forces of colonial extractivism, fossil capitalism, and postcolonial developmentalism.
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Whose Homeland? Whose Security?
American overseas imperialism functions most powerfully through its infrastructures—debt, education, bureaucracy, mobility—filtered through DHS.
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Ingrid Rojas Contreras on “The Man Who Could Move Clouds”
“I realized that if I was going to write a story about healers, I also had to write a story about healing.”
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The Seduction of Desert Spectacles: Talking “Arid Empire” with Natalie Koch and Andrew Curley
“You cannot divorce domestic empire from international empire. Those histories created one another.”
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A Forensic Level of Honesty: Aminatta Forna and Nicole Rizzuto
“There came a point in my life … where I realized that almost every narrative, whatever it came from, that dealt with an African country was pretty much a rewriting of ‘Heart of Darkness.’”
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Nostalgia’s Empire: A Conversation with Grafton Tanner and Johny Pitts
Nostalgia is both a threat and a refuge.
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A Detective Poet, and an Empire in Revolt
In 1857, the largest rebellion against the British East India Company took place. And famed poet Mirza Ghalib was there to witness it all.
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Public Thinker: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on How to Upend Settler Colonialism
“One of my objectives in writing the book was a plea to immigrants to not become settlers.”
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America’s “Land Grab” Universities: Robert Lee on Colonial Extraction by “Treaty-Like Agreements”
“It’s not about the land underneath campuses. It’s land at a distance, that can be sold or managed to raise funds for endowments.”
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Many into One, One into Many: George Lamming (1927–2022)
Lamming never lets readers forget that within that one man—as within all of us—is a boiling multitude.
