THE FUNAMBULIST

Politics of Space and Bodies

N°41
May—June 2022
THINKING THROUGH BLACKNESS,
QUEERNESS, BROWNNESS,

DECENTERING THE U.S. CASTE & INDIGENEITY

FROM ELSEWHERE
THE FUNAMBULIST BEHIND
THE SCENES
(available in the “Editorials” section of our website)
showing the weaponized architecture of 12 police
barracks in the North, and we will soon release a
conversation with Robbie McVeigh and Bill Rolston,
Dear subscribers, dear readers, authors of the great book ‘Anois ar theacht an
tSamhraidh’ Ireland, Colonialism and the Unfin-
Welcome to this issue, whether it’s the first or the ished Revolution (2021).
41st you read from us! It is a particularly ambitious
one because of its precise and deliberate editorial Now back to this issue, for which I wish you to learn
line. However, we’ve been blessed working with as much as we did while making it!
amazing contributors, some of whom are friends
we’ve worked with several times (you might recog- Léopold Lambert
nize their names); others with whom we worked Paris on April 5, 2022
for the first time. I am also grateful to have had
regular conversations with Zoé Samudzi, Michaëla
Danjé, Karim Kattan, and Dubravka Sekulic about
some aspects of this editorial line, which have been
extremely helpful and insightful.

Meanwhile, the feedback we received from readers

about the new graphic design and layout, designed

N°41 by Walid Bouchouchi (Studio Akakir) in Marseille,

has been fantastic! We still have quite a bit of stock
of this issue and might have been a bit too optimistic
about how successful it would be, but we’re hoping
for many people to order it as a back issue.

We’ve had two interns during the past couple of

months: Sarah Merabet and Aurélie Li, both from
the Institut Catholique of Paris, which requires their
undergraduate students to do a one-week internship
in a company. One week is ridiculously short, but
regardless, this gave us the idea of encouraging more
BRO observation internships of the kind for students to
WNNTHINKIN come have a look at the way we work at the office and
ESS G
, CAS THROU engage with the magazine’s current and past content.
TE & G
INDI H BLAC During these past two months, we have also released
GEN K
EITY NESS, Q
six more issues in open-access, being faithful to our
commitment to unlock the issue we run out of print.
THE ISSUE’S
FRO U
M EL EERNE
SEW SS,
Besides the joy of making issues available to all, these
six allowed us to go through a threshold as more
COVER EXPLAINED
HER than half of our 41 issues are now in open-access on Untitled (2022) is a commissioned artwork by Mi-
E our website. We are still very happy of this win-win chael DeForge, who works as a cartoonist in Toron-
principle and look forward to unlocking more of them to, Ontario. His published works include Heaven No
(a few more orders of Against Genocide, Kids of the Hell, Leaving Richard’s Valley, Familiar Face and
World, Unite!, Self-Defense, Toxic Atmospheres, Ra- Brat. We had included his “Cops Aren’t Workers:
cialized Incarceration, and Carceral Environments, No Police Unions, No Cops in Labour” artwork in
and those too will be made available). our 33rd issue (Jan-Feb 2021) The Space of Labor, to
accompany the text “No More Death Work: We Must
Finally, a small word on my short trip to the North Abolish Prison Unions” by fellow Ontarian Fathima
of Ireland, which allowed me to visit numerous sites Cader. We’ve been meaning to work with him on an
of the historical Republican resistance to British original piece for several years now (after encounter-
colonialism and Irish global solidarity, as well as ing his work through Ryan Sands’s Youth in Decline
meet with future contributors to the magazine. Be- publication series), and we’re happy that it finally
fore that, it materialized in a series of photographs happened for this issue.

DECENTERING THE U.S.

COVER 40. .20
UNTITLED JOURNEY FROM “THE CENTER
Michael DeForge OF THE WORLD”: ON U.S. .12
EXCEPTIONALISM AND DISGUST .6
6. Zoé Samudzi
TAIWAN, BEYOND THE PEOPLE’S
REPUBLIC OF CHINA AND 44.
THE REPUBLIC OF CHINA THE WEIGHT WORDS CARRY:
Szu-Han Ho (何·思涵) and Meng-Yao Chuang ON “BROWN,” “BIPOC,” AND
OTHER TRANSFUSED LABELS
12. Sinthujan Varatharajah
FUSAKO SHIGENOBU, .58
AN OPEN-ENDED REVOLUTION 50.
May Shigenobu INTERLUDE: A MUSICAL
PLURIVERSALITY
16. The Funambulist
A LETTER TO MY GRANDFATHER:
CAMEROON IN CRISIS 20 YEARS ON 52.
Ethel-Ruth Tawe NAMING, A COMING HOME:
LATINIDAD AND INDIGENEITY
20. IN THE SETTLER COLONY
WHAT IS LEFT OF US? THE LIVING Floridalma Boj Lopez
STORY OF THE AINU IN JAPAN
Kanako Uzawa 58. 74. 66.
ON DALIT DREAMING 52.
24. AND REBELLIOUS JOY
OS OLHOS FALAM Vijeta Kumar and Shaista Patel
Kellem Monteiro 24.
66.
26. THINKING THROUGH QUEERNESS
DECENTERING THE U.S.: IN A PLURIVERSAL GLOBAL SOUTH .16
INTRODUCTION Rahul Rao 30.
Léopold Lambert 40.
74.
30. ON NAMING AND
INTERLUDE: ANTHOLOGIE TRANSLATING IN PALESTINE COVER.
DE LA POÉSIE DU TOUT-MONDE Bekriah Mawasi
Édouard Glissant
26.
32. .32
BLACK AMERICA AND US 44.
Cases Rebelles .50

2 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41

NEWS FROM Nº41
THE FRONTS

Green Island. The island held political prisoners for 36 years under
the KMT in facilities built by the Japanese to detain homeless people.
Photo by Julia Ho (2019)

4 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41 NEWS FROM THE FRONTS 5

 TAIWAN, BEYOND THE PEOPLE’S However, I still feel the legacy of the authoritari-
an era in every aspect of my life, especially when
This weak social consensus is also something that
the PRC tries to manipulate in its information war.

REPUBLIC OF CHINA AND

my family and I argue about whether we are The convenience of a common language makes
Taiwanese or Chinese. I feel connected with the Taiwan vulnerable to information warfare from
land of Taiwan as a Taiwanese person, but the the PRC. PRC agents spread fake news or support

THE REPUBLIC OF CHINA disagreements in my family extend to identity

SZU-HAN HO (何·思涵）AND MENG-YAO CHUANG
This text was written by two cousins who identify as Taiwanese
with mixed Han settler ancestry. Szu-Han Ho lives in Tiwa lands
(Albuquerque, New Mexico) in the United States. Meng-Yao
Chuang lives in Tainan, Taiwan. They offer us a third perspec-
on a national scale: the 23+ million people of this
island cannot even come to an agreement on what
pro-China policies, leading to an erosion of trust
and a sense of chaos and panic in Taiwan, espe-
cially around election time. From the PRC author-
we call ourselves as a nation: Taiwan, Republic of ities’ perspective, the goal of the war is to help
China, or something else. Taiwanese candidates from the pro-China faction
be elected, so that they can secretly assist them to
The PRC has taken advantage of this to impose support policies beneficial to the PRC in Taiwan.
further draconian controls. Hong Kong activists
have fled by boat to Taiwan, and Taiwanese activ-
ists have harbored those who have made it to the

Sun ss move ements

tive on the future of Taiwan far from the two Republics of island.

Indige
ma e agre
flow
China’s continental claim: one that centers Taiwanese people

trad

er M ment to with Ch

nous p
themselves, in particular the Indigenous peoples of the island. Taiwan is a self-governing nation with a long

first off les of Taiwa

Presid
ovem
and complex history under multiple colonial pow-

eop

ure
icial ap
ent: rotest K a

ent Ts gy to

, Yü penk’e land
SZU-HAN: As a person of the Taiwanese diaspora ers, both European and Asian. Living in the so-

50000 BCE
Fi

Cult
n
rs

ng
Stud

link ence o f huma

Ch st n

p
td

Cult d to Ta n the is
watching the events of Hong Kong over the last called United States and watching from afar, I am

fir

ai give
ire

han
en on-

lo
ct

ent-le T
Sh KM
de

ans
pre ence o
several years (the Umbrella Movement in 2014 fearful. My relatives in Taiwan have lived with m

ui- T p

2022
oc

s
M

n 201
bia re

in

d 20
ra
and the 2019 Uprising) I have been deeply stirred. the threat of a PRC takeover for their entire adult tic

n e sid
op

Evid

ure

CE
po An pr

s
lec ent

e
es

14
sit ti-p

6
200
I have been riveted by the meaning, as well as the lives. With the most recent events of the Russian ion ol id

ted

0B
Fir en

20 4
st c ice

20 2
tia

8
all

06
ful u
aesthetics, of the mass uprising in Hong Kong. invasion in Ukraine, many people have been ask- i p le

20

00
l le ng ri

0
20
gis fo ing s le

0
ct

30
lat rd s io

00
ive
ing me directly about the implications for Taiwan. em an n

19
ele oc d s 19

98
cti
on r at ud t 96 an’s , p
The movement understands and capitalizes on the This comes as a surprise because I had assumed ss
inc
i c ele nt-e aiw and grou
of T he isl age
e1 cti led e t
c gu
power of the image, the power of performance. most people around me had little to no knowledge 94
7
on
s id e n
Ev oples sian
o n l a n
Ma 19 CE e ne
It understands aesthetics and turns everyday of Taiwan or its history; many Taiwanese people 38 rtial la
yea w li
91 0 B us p stro
400 igeno e Au
rs a f
nd ted aft 19 Ind t of th
objects into tools of resistance. It poses an active might say the same, as the history that they have 2m
ont r
e 89
par
hs 1 0
987
resistance to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) been taught in schools has been written from the 110
government takeover of local politics and its perspective of the Han Chinese and (until recent-
violent crackdown on dissent. For many Taiwan- ly) from the perspective of the ruling Kuoming- ups of Chine
se are
“White Terro Scattered gro ants and
ese people watching, it is a foreboding unfolding tang (KMT) or People’s Nationalist Party. tens of thous r”: thousands
ands arrested killed, present in Ta
iwan; merch
main island
and
by the KMT pirates use the y stopover.
of events. The Chinese government’s position on sm all er isla nd s as temporar

Taiwan is clear: its goal is euphemistically known MENG-YAO: The history that my parents learned
as “re-unification.” in school was a history of China from the KMT
Chinese nationalist viewpoint, and this has made inese 1949 1624
ses Ch
hina) lo s to Taiwan
them favor Chinese culture more. Their genera- lic of C
For some of us, watching the events tion were never taught a history of Taiwan itself,
e p u b
KMT (R l war and eva
civi
cu a te

194
8 162
6
Taiw -1642
in Hong Kong confirms that closer and they were punished if they spoke the local
gs
isin . 94
7
an u Spa
ntil in
they occup
dialects. By contrast, my grandparents grew up in upr ule 1
Th
Ta e Du
are ie
exp s north
ties with the PRC will bring a similar Japanese-run schools under the Japanese occu- ide
n t a nd MT r 000
s st K
in
inc aga , ove he K
0
r 2 MT
,
19
46
i
to wan tch E
of cultiv and ast
its ate bri Ind
elle
d by ern
the
Dut
ch.
pation of Taiwan, which gave them an affinity 228 island osed d by t
fate to Taiwan. Whether this is
glo n i
e p r e 16 ba rice gs H a Co
45
t h i m c l tr an an mp
w ssa
to Japanese culture. Their parents’ generation oss l la a 62 ad d s
acr artia se m
19 e n ug Chin any
etw arc es occ

ile era hi ., T All n is thro e fro no-

M ane
accomplished through soft power or was part of the anti-colonial movement to oppose ork an e se upi

the ba l C nes aiw ied a c ugh m

w
Tai

i
ea

an r G f th e U ed aiw cur tan e S

e

Ch ttling hian e K an forc olon out

.
s p ttlers s

se civil Kai omin tran s. Af of

Mi he s Mi Qin
me nde ds o of th omb II, T e oc resis er th

Co wa Sh tan sfe ter

art
the Japanese and fight for local Taiwanese rule.

by tore the
c

un Ch Th KM d

ng ng ng g D
military occupation, it will translate

res pose
mm r in ek. g ( rre
ist ina e K T)

Z
-Zh C
ft

op
Pa ag MT
ha help d is g W peop onia an a
I grew up in the era of Taiwan’s transition from

(C st
e

en hen yna nas

).
s

rty ain

1895
CP

1683
ol iw

g P gg sty ty o
l
authoritarian rule to democracy.
to the loss of autonomy for the

surpassing Indigenous population.

(Zhang, Quan, Hakka) settle in Taiwan,
people from three main ethnic groups
Qing Dynasty Rule: Han Chinese
to II, w an a . Dur nou nti-c y Ta

s
a

eri ong ru n m
i

od
p

D
WW J islan Indi war. occu

: T (Ko in T ainl
wh en e C .S by

u
Taiwanese.

he xin ai and
W
A
in s
the n an nese nese

y
I come from a generation that began

Du ga) wan C
g

tch wh to hin
ge

le
Ha Jap Japa

are o
to learn a lot about the island’s unique

n
d
d

ex
ine

pe
The COVID-19 pandemic effectively ended the

lle
p
the ith
n
a
history, distinct from the history of

d
fight in the streets of Hong Kong, as the region Fig.1

a.
went under lockdown with the rest of China.
China that my parents studied.

is
6 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41 NEWS FROM THE FRONTS 7
In this context, fact-checking has become my daily
routine, especially in the run-up to elections, when
the information war intensifies. Almost every elec-
tion causes a tear between generations or ethnic
groups. My elders and I have completely different
political views on China, and in the time leading
up to elections, we often clash; this has become a
cyclical issue. I try to remember that they grew up
under an authoritarian government.
The profound fear of authoritarianism is deeply
rooted in their hearts, and they often warn me
and those of my generation not to be overly in-
volved in political activities.
SZU-HAN: Taiwan’s colonial history began in the
17th century as part of the European “Age of
Discovery,” because of the strategic significance of
its geographical position. Colonial powers have come
and gone. The island has experienced occupation
by the Dutch, the Spanish, the Ming-Zheng dynasty,
the Qing dynasty, the Japanese, and the Republic of
China (ROC). With U.S. support and military aid, the
ROC established itself in Taiwan after being defeated
by the Chinese Communist Party and fleeing
mainland China in 1949, under General Chiang Kai
Shek and his party, the Kuomingtang. When the
KMT arrived, Taiwan was a mix of many ethnic
groups, including the Han Chinese (Minnan and
Hakka), the diverse Indigenous tribal people, and
those with mixed Han and Indigenous ancestry.
The KMT in Taiwan proceeded to
massacre tens of thousands of
Taiwanese, also establishing martial
law, and controlling the government
under single-party authoritarian rule
for over 40 years.
The current government of Taiwan is still known
as the Republic of China, which contributes to the
confusion surrounding national identity and ongoing
conflict with the People’s Republic of China.
MENG-YAO: Under the various occupations by the
Dutch, the Chinese, the Japanese, and within
the existing legacy of the KMT and PRC conflict,
colonial powers have especially attempted to
subjugate, ignore, and erase the First Peoples
of this island. The Indigenous people of Taiwan
are Austronesian peoples, who have linguistic
ties to Native peoples across Southeast Asia, the
Pacific Islands, Madagascar, and Easter Island.
8 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41
Historians and researchers claim that the majority
of Taiwanese have Indigenous ancestry, due to
the fact that Han Chinese immigrants to Taiwan
during the Ming and Qing Dynasties were mainly
men who intermarried with Indigenous (Pingpu)
women. Most people whose families have been
in Taiwan for generations choose to identify
as Han Chinese, but only a few of us recognize
that we have Indigenous ancestry. I personally
don’t claim indigeneity or speak on behalf of
Indigenous people, but I support the movement for
cultural revitalization and Indigenous autonomy.
Indigenous history is Taiwanese history. As the
authoritarian period of the KMT came to an end in
the 1990s, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP),
a pro-Taiwanese independence party, introduced
transitional justice to the political discourse. In 2016,
President Tsai Ing-wen of the DPP, whose paternal
grandmother is from the Paiwan tribe, gave the
first formal apology on behalf of the government
to the Indigenous people of Taiwan and established
the Indigenous Historical Justice and Transitional
Justice Committee, which aims to address the
mistreatment of Taiwan’s Indigenous people over
the past 400 years.
However, not all Indigenous people accept the
actions of President Tsai. Compared to the KMT,
the DPP has fewer supporters from Indigenous
tribes. This trend dates back to the end of
Japanese occupation, when the KMT took over
all the resources from the Japanese government,
including the police substations (chūzaisho) in the
mountainous areas built to subjugate Indigenous
people. The KMT has taken advantage of the
proximity and infrastructure to cultivate closer ties
to many Indigenous people. A legislator, Kao Chin
Su-Mei, who is a descendant of a KMT veteran and
an Indigenous (Atayal) woman, regards herself as
Chinese and even accepts the PRC claim that she is
a Chinese ethnic minority instead of a Taiwanese
Indigenous person. This example represents a
vulnerability that the PRC tries to exploit: their
logic is that if the original people of Taiwan come to
identify as Chinese, the Taiwanese who came to the
island later will also “realize” that they are Chinese.
Of course, the majority of Indigenous activists
reject unification with China and are working
day-and-night to fight for their rights. Plains
Indigenous people (Pingpu) are fighting the notion
that their cultures have been fully assimilated or
extinguished by Han culture, and are battling to Fig.2
gain official tribal recognition. The Siraya, Taivoan,
and Makatao have been recognized by local
governments, and aim -to be officially recognized
by the ROC government. However, the fact that
NEWS FROM THE FRONTS 9
they must present evidence and seek recognition
by the ROC government is proof of the ongoing
colonial relationship. Officially recognized tribes,
such as the Truku, are fighting for the return
of their land from the Asia Cement Corporation.
Without land, Indigenous tribes cannot realize
Indigenous autonomy as their ultimate political
goal. Indigenous people have suffered dispossession,
genocide, cultural appropriation, environmental
racism, and forced assimilation. The struggles of
Indigenous people in Taiwan are parallel to the
struggles of Indigenous people all over the world.
While the conflict between Taiwan
and the PRC does receive some in-
ternational media attention, stories of
the Indigenous movement in Taiwan
or the complexity surrounding ethnic
identities get drowned out by the leg-
acy of Cold War era geo-politics and
present-day imperialisms.
BOTH: Although Taiwan is very small in comparison
with its neighbors, it is sandwiched between various
powers in international politics, especially in Sino-
U.S. relations. How to confront and distinguish
the endless ideological attacks and accelerate the
deepening of democracy is an everyday issue for
Taiwanese people. We grew up with stories of
elders who were disappeared as part of the White
Terror, the era of martial law under the KMT. The
promise of transitional justice is to draw lessons
from history so that we don’t repeat these horrors,
that we deepen our sense of collective identity,
that we honor Indigenous land rights and self-
determination, and that we protect Taiwan’s fragile
democracy and freedom. Tragically, Taiwan holds
the world record for the longest period of martial
law—38 years under the KMT. As historian George
Katsiafikas has pointed out, Chiang Kai Shek
ruled more than twice as long as Pinochet over
Chile, and longer than Franco’s regime in Spain.
Taiwan’s first non-KMT president was elected
in 2000, just over 20 years ago. Today, we don’t
take our freedom to be in the streets for granted,
because those of our parents’, grandparents’, and
previous generations resisted, even under the
threat of death, imprisonment, or persecution.
Even though we don’t face the same level of threat,
we know that Taiwan could slip backwards into
10
authoritarianism. Throughout a long history of
colonial presence, fierce uprisings and resistance
battles have been led by the many ethnic groups
of Taiwan, including Indigenous, Minnan, and
Hakka peoples. “Every three years an uprising,
every five years a rebellion,” became a Qing
dynasty saying about Taiwan. A history written
from the Indigenous perspective would require us
to reconsider the narratives of these rebellions—and
the entire history of the island—which has largely
been written from the lens of Han supremacy. ■
Szu-Han Ho is an artist and political organizer living in Tiwa
territory (Albuquerque, New Mexico). Her/their work in
performance, sound, and installation explores the relationship
between bodies and sites of memory. Recent projects
include “MIGRANT SONGS,” a choral performance art piece
incorporating stories and songs of human and nonhuman
migration; “BORDER TO BAGHDAD,” an exchange between
artists from the US-Mexico border and Baghdad, Iraq; and
“Shelter in Place,” a sculptural installation and performance
inspired by her family’s history in Taiwan. She is a founding
member of the fronteristxs collective and granadina.coop,
and is currently an associate professor in Art & Ecology at the
University of New Mexico.
Meng-Yao Chuang lives in Tainan, the first city where
Europeans (Dutch) encountered Indigenous people (the Siraya
tribe) on the island of Taiwan. With various history resources of
the city and her passion, she learns a lot of stories absent from
textbooks and deepens the connection with her motherland,
Taiwan. After participating in the Sunflower Student Movement
in 2014, and observing the 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests,
she became more radical to oppose the re-unification of the
PRC, and even joined fact-checking NGO activities to counter Fig.3
the information war from the PRC and protect freedom and
democracy in Taiwan.
Fig.1 Brief timeline of Taiwanese history. / Data by Szu-Han Ho and Meng-Yao
Chuang. Cartography by Léopold Lambert (2022).
Fig.2 Jing-Mei White Terror Memorial in Taipei, Taiwan. Former detention center for
political dissidents. / Photo by Julia Ho (2019).
Fig.3 Prison for political dissidents at Green Island. The facade translates to “May
the Republic of China last for 10,000 years” (left) and “May the Three Principles last
for 10,000 years” (right). / Photo by Julia Ho (2019).
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41 DECENTERING THE U.S. 11
 FUSAKO SHIGENOBU,
AN OPEN-ENDED REVOLUTION
MAY SHIGENOBU
One month before the release of Fusako Shigenobu after she
spent the last 21.5 years in a Japanese prison, we asked May
Shigenobu to draw a political portrait of her mother as an hom-
age to the incarnate example of internationalist solidarity. She
describes Fusako’s early year of activism leading her to take
high responsibilities in the Japanese Red Army before relo-
cating to Beirut in order to play an active role in the Palestinian
liberation struggle.
The morning of November 8, 2000 was cold yet sun-
ny. I was chatting with my friends at the university
in Beirut, preparing to attend my first class of the
day, when my phone rang. “Is your family okay?”,
the caller—a familiar voice—asked in a coded man-
ner. I was suddenly made aware that something had
happened to someone in my secret Japanese com-
munity, my family. I was no longer focused on my
friends› conversations, nor on my classes, no matter
how hard I tried. Finally, I gave in to my anxiety
and headed back home to see if I could glean any
information about what happened from the news.
I was glued to the TV, flipping through
satellite news channels for over an
hour before I saw the image I feared
most: my mother, the leader of the
Japanese Red Army, was being
arrested.
In the span of less than a month, while my mother
was being detained and interrogated by the Japa-
nese government, she wrote a 200-page report de-
scribing our clandestine life as mother and daugh-
ter, on the floor of her detention cell. Thanks to this,
I finally obtained my Japanese citizenship after 27
years of living as an undocumented and stateless
person. The report was later published as a book,
entitled I Gave Birth to You Under an Apple Tree
(2001). It was the first of several books she would
publish from prison.
Fusako Shigenobu was born in Setagaya, Tokyo,
on September 28, 1945, the same month Japan
formally signed the surrender to U.S. armed forces
12
at the end of World War II. Fusako’s childhood and
early life in post-war Japan was nothing out of the
ordinary. She was the third of four children born in
a poverty-stricken Japan to educated and previous-
ly privileged parents. Her father had worked as a
volunteer teacher in Buddhist temple schools after
World War I, and was later conscripted to join the
Japanese Imperial Army. There, he joined a group
of nationalist officers in order to rebel against the
political elite, who were profiting off Japan’s impe-
rialist wars of expansion in Asia. For his participa-
tion in this group, he was punished and exiled to
Manchuria, which was under Japanese colonial rule
at the time. For much of her early life, Fusako was
overshadowed by her nationalist activist father, and
remained apolitical.
After graduating from high school Fusako began
working at a multinational corporation called
Kikkoman. This was an elite, white collar job that
would have put her on a steady path toward life-
time employment and thus membership in Japan’s
economic elite. However, her motivation for working
at Kikkoman was primarily to put herself through
college. After years of working evening shifts, she
would eventually earn a dual degree in Political
Economy and History.
The normalcy in her life stopped on her first day of
attending Meiji University, when she joined a student
sit-in protesting tuition hikes at the university, an
issue that directly affected her as a working student.
From that day on, she was awakened to the world of
student activism by Zengakuren, a league of stu-
dent associations that was initially concerned with
campus issues, workers rights, and poverty, but later
evolved to the radical New-Left activism of anti-Vi-
etnam war, anti-AMPO security pact between Japan
and the U.S., as well as anti-capitalism and global an-
ti-imperialism. In 1969, Fusako joined the radical Red
Army Faction (RAF) and rose up its ranks to finally
become head of the International Relations Bureau.
In 1970, at a time when international attention was
focused on the U.S. war in Vietnam, Fusako was
introduced to an Arabist in Japan and started to
learn about the Palestinian struggle against Israeli
settler colonialism and occupation. This changed
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41
everything. From then on, she decided to dedicate
her life to the Palestinian struggle. She forged
bonds of solidarity with the Palestinians in Leba-
non, calling on her fellow activists back in Japan
to join in the act of solidarity in whatever field they
were skilled at.
The Japanese Red Army (JRA) is mostly known in
Japan and elsewhere for its armed struggle and
military operations against capitalist and imperialist
interests around the world, which often took the
form of hijacks and hostage-taking. However, it is
much lesser known that the JRA undertook con-
sistent and effective solidarity with the Palestinian
people through humanitarian, artistic, and grass-
roots efforts.
Fusako had initially worked at Al Hadaf magazine,
the public relations office of the Popular Front for
the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), alongside its
editor-in-chief Ghassan Kanafani. Her role there
strengthened Japanese support for the Palestinian
cause by keeping Japanese leftist activists informed
of what was happening on the ground in Lebanon.
She also provided logistical support to Japanese
volunteers who arrived, connecting them to related
Palestinian partners.
Some Japanese medics went to Lebanon to open
clinics in refugee camps, or to train people in
acupuncture; artists contributed artwork or co-pro-
NEWS FROM THE FRONTS
Fig.1 Fig.2
duced plays, while writers wrote about or translat-
ed the writings of prominent Palestinians such as
Kanafani. For decades, the JRA performed the kind
of work that NGOs have taken on. The only differ-
ence was its ideological framework and the fact that
they were volunteers.
Even after they were forced to go
into hiding, many Japanese people
continued either covertly or overtly
supporting the work of the JRA and
its revolutionary solidarity work in the
fields of medicine, arts, culture, me-
dia, and literature.
Fusako was forced into underground life shortly after
the 1972 PFLP operation on Lydd airport in historic
Palestine/Israel, because one of the three Japanese
who took part in the attack was arrested. It became
known to the Israeli settler government that Japanese
activists were now taking part in the PFLP armed op-
erations led by Wadie Haddad. As such, they became
potential assassination targets for the Israeli State.
Fusako Shigenobu’s arrest warrant was issued by
the Interpol, after one of the hostages at the French
13
embassy in The Hague (another one of PFLP Exter-
nal Operations with Japanese volunteers in 1974) in-
itially falsely identified her as amongst the hostage
takers. This false testimony was later retracted but
the Interpol warrant remained.
However, when she was arrested in Japan, Fusako
was first charged with two counts of passport
forgery. The prosecution then brought her “Hague
operation involvement” to the forefront, to insure
a longer jail term. Throughout her six-year court
hearings (2001-2006), the prosecution could not
present any concrete evidence, but instead based
their accusations on statements taken from inter-
rogations of former JRA members (of whom two
witnesses stated on the stand that they were either
coerced or blackmailed to sign).
My mother was sentenced to 20 years (but really
spent 21.5 years in prison) for an operation she had
no hand in directly or indirectly, even according to
prosecutors› witnesses and others that came to testi-
fy such as Leila Khaled (who worked with Haddad
at that time). The fact that there was no concrete
evidence of her involvement in the event did not
stop the judge from handing down “attempted
manslaughter.” with the reasoning of possibility and
likelihood of conspiring with Japanese commandos.
After attending most of the six years of court hear-
ings and seeing extensive press presence in court, I
observed very little content coverage in the media.
When Fusako was accused of “possibly conspiring,”
I realized that it was mostly a political prosecution
masquerading as “democratic justice”.
The moment I emerged from hiding also marked
the beginning of my journey with countering
decades of state-sponsored propaganda about my
mother, along with her revolutionary leftist organi-
zation, the Japanese Red Army, and their dedication
to Palestine’s liberation.
Placed on a pedestal that required me to condemn
my own mother’s actions, my life’s work was de-
termined the moment I disclosed my identity.
Although millions around the world may believe
the state-sponsored propaganda that labels her a
“terrorist,” as her daughter, I know who Fusako
Shigenobu really is.
I experienced firsthand the love and dedication she
had not just for me, but for all people and especially
those who are oppressed. I know her true motiva-
tions and what she sacrificed for, ideals that few
cling to in a world that is driven too often by power,
14
money, and greed. She taught me not only to be May Shigenobu is a journalist, political commentator, writer,
kind, or that all discrimination is unjusbut that we and media specialist focusing on Middle Eastern and Media
must work to end such injustices. Literacy issues. She is a media consultant and producer of
programs and documentaries for Japanese and Middle Eastern
As a foreigner trying to express solidarity with TV channels. She is the author of Unveiling the ‘Arab Spring’;
another people, my mother has always told me that democratic revolutions orchestrated by the West and the Media
her life as a revolutionary and as a mother has been (2012 Japanese), From the Ghettos of the Middle East (2003
a constant learning curve. Ultimately, she found Japanese) and an autobiography Secrets: From Palestine to
that ideology was not enough, and that family, love, the Country of Cherry Trees, 28 years with My Mother (2002
camaraderie, and solidarity were equally important Japanese).
elements of a revolutionary struggle.
Love is a shared foundation… Our comrades are family.
(From I Decided to Give Birth to You Under the Apple Tree)
As a zealous political activist firmly backed by leftist
anticolonial and anti-imperialist ideological back-
ground, my mother became someone who under-
stands that revolution is not limited to an ideological
framework, and that it has to be lived and practiced
with others through inclusive life experiences.
As much as she might have changed, the world has
also changed with how activism is practiced. Alli-
ances have shifted, new grassroots movement tools
have been created… The only constant between
then and now is the Israeli settler colonisation of
Palestine, its aggression and discrimination against
the Palestinian people, and the need to fight against
this injustice with all forms of solidarity.
Fig.3
My mother, Fusako, will be released
on May 28, 2022 at the age of 77
years old. She has spent 28 years un-
derground and 21.5 years in captivity.
She has only lived 26 years in Japan, half a cen-
tury ago. It will be a lot to get used to, and much
to catch up with, along with many friends, places,
and memories to revisit. Many of her friends and
acquaintances have unfortunately passed away, and
I do worry about her safety and the cruelty that she
might face in Japanese society, where she is still
perceived as a “terrorist.” However, I do look for-
ward to the time, at long-last, I will have with her to
explore together her homeland that she really loves.
I anticipate that we will have many long hours of
discussing politics as we used to, and engage in
many informative humanitarian projects to continue
our solidarity work to fight oppression, inequality,
Fig.1 Fusako Shigenobu holding her newborn daughter, May, in March 1973.
and injustice around the world. ■ Fig.2 Fusako Shigenobu alongside Ghassan Kanafani at Al Hadaf magazine office
where she worked in 1972.
Fig.3 Fusako and May Shigenobu in 1976.
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41 NEWS FROM THE FRONTS 15
 A LETTER TO MY GRANDFATHER:
CAMEROON IN CRISIS 20 YEARS ON
ETHEL-RUTH TAWE
Mining for memories of her grandfather and his commitment
to decolonization in Cameroon, Ethel-Ruth Tawe gives a
poignant testimony on the ongoing violent conflict that
opposes Anglophone and Francophone Cameroonians,
finding its source in the structural inequalities fermented
by German, French, and British colonial control, which an
unachieved decolonization process (in the midst of French
neo-colonialism) never succeeded in addressing.
Beneath the facade of a legitimate bilingual and
multicultural state, lies a history of authoritari-
an crackdowns and assimilation by a hegemonic
government, among other tribulations. In moments
of despair and reckoning with the state of affairs
today, I recall how Tar’kfu illustrated both the joy
and pain in our lineage. I remember lessons in hope
and steadfastness, anchored in faith.

Blooming only once a year, the Queen of the Night
is a night-flowering cactus with a “great sense of
drama,” not solely in her aesthetic quality but in
the scent that flushes through the winds she rides.
She hides in plain sight, only revealing her spec-
tacular performance for those lucky enough to bear
witness. I have no visual memory of her, but with
a nostalgic inhale, I time travel back to my grand-
father’s garden, driving up a steep hill and around
the ring road that encircled his home. We ate papa-
ya with lime for breakfast, as he recounted stories
from his travels to strange sounding lands like Ab-
erystwyth and Geneva. I called him Tar’kfu, loosely
translated as “father of household” or “grandfather”
from my mother tongue. Most memories I have of
him are elusive, but deeply sensorial. He exuded
grace and candor, but was equally forthright on
matters of justice, especially in Cameroon.
Tar’kfu instigated in me a curiosity for critical
engagement with inequity. There was a mystery
around his work in human rights that gripped me.
My young artistic mind viewed it as a window of
possibility, a space for world-building much like the
ones I often depicted in my sketchbooks. I believe
his life was divinely orchestrated, but that came
with much trial.
Tar’kfu witnessed the invention of our
homeland, Cameroon, an immensely
diverse region with a complex history
of arbitrary colonial borders and
challenges facing Africa at large in
regards to negotiating citizenship.
What does it truly mean to remember? How do
we remember? Twenty years ago to date, Tar’kfu
transitioned when I was only about seven years old.
I reconnect with him through family heirlooms and
the many photographs he captured in his garden,
with friends, families, and strangers. His open
house policy meant young ones, and friends of their
friends, made the most of the flora that ‘bouquet-
ed’ the compound. Memory requires sensory input,
attention and a process of rehearsal that encodes
into our long term conscience. However, ancestral
memory disrupts this linearity. It is an embodied
memory, a genetic memory, of unrehearsed his-
tories carried forward. It may include trauma, an
experience familiar to those of us who come from
what was formerly known as Southern Cameroons,
a former British colony which forged the “Anglo-
phone” identity in the country.
It has been over 100 years since the League of
Nations conferred Trust Territory status on Cam-
eroon, transferring rule from Germany to France
(80%) and Britain (20%). Despite independence in
1960, the federal system in 1961, and the creation
of a “unitary state” in 1972, the vestiges of colonial
domination linger on. It continues to fuel what has
been coined as a long-standing “Anglophone prob-
lem,” into the ongoing civil war. Over time, Came-
roon bifurcated into two separate societal cantons
of “Anglophones” and “Francophones,” polarized,
unequal and now hostile towards one another.
Anglophone separatists argue that this has always
been the case; their region being governed by the
capital as a mere colony. However, the origin of
these identities are fundamentally political, based
on colonial constructs and maintained by postcoloni-
al regionalism. Cameroon is not a nation-state. Nu-
merous ethnicities and cultures widely overlap and
ambiguate. A significant Anglophone population
has settled in the Francophone regions for decades.
Some Francophones have undergone Anglophone
education, and vice versa. While language is the
most pronounced distinction, it often masks decades
of state-pioneered contention between the groups.
It now seems near impossible to divorce these
lived-realities from the social imaginary. For the
minority Anglophone population, this has equated
to precarity in their sense of belonging and sparked
an increase in secessionist tendencies, from an
emergent consciousness of their marginality. These
political identities are a consequence of fragmented
state-building. The country’s political history has
been riddled with nepotism and new constitutions
without constitutionalism.
Tar’kfu dedicated his life to the struggle for human
rights. I often wonder: what would he think of the
state of Cameroon today? He is recalled as an “ar-
chitect of reunification,” taking the stance that our
beloved nation would find strength in unity. In early
years, education was his weapon of choice, with
decolonizing the curriculum being a top agenda
against epistemic injustices and colonial legacies.
Fig.1
Ironically, this became the impetus for the current
moment of uprising in the country. Despite its mixed
constitution, Cameroon’s government has main-
tained systematic repression of the Common Law
system by dominating the legal sphere with Franco-
phone practitioners; an offense that ignited protests
by Anglophone lawyers in 2016. The crisis escalated
when teachers went on strike in Bamenda, followed
by “Operation Ghost Town,” which garnered atten-
tion through curfews, closure of schools and com-
mercial spaces, bringing public life to a halt in some
places to date. Reported armed secessionist groups
could be aggregated into two categories. The first
comprises rebel militias like the Southern Came-
roons Defence Forces (SOCADEF) and the Amba-
zonia Defence Forces (ADF). The second category
consists of splinter groups and smaller rebel net-
works colloquially known as “Amba Boys.” While
many youths are joining armed militia, others are
mobilizing online. The Anglophone diaspora—the
displaced, exiled, and economic migrants—have
also used cyberspace to activate, fund and champion
the cause. While some dissemination of information
online has built consciousness, a plethora of

16 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41 NEWS FROM THE FRONTS 17

nebulous concepts and untruths surrounding events
are rampantly reaching audiences and fueling vi-
olence. There remains concern over strategies that
bring old fields to the ground without planting new
seeds.
This was not the same Cameroon I
appeared to grow up in. I witnessed
privilege in a country where some yards
were green while others were bare
and red—a red soil that now masked
bloodshed in one of the Continent’s
most silent wars. This was also not
the Cameroon Tar’kfu witnessed from
the frontlines during independence.
So whose Cameroon is this?
At the onset of the independence era, pan-African
theorists used a blueprint for a “united Africa” to
foster emancipation, self-sufficiency, and develop-
ment, contending that the “balkanization” of the
Continent essentially perpetuates the global periph-
eral positioning of African states. Examining the
utility of pan-Africanism as a tool to resolve state
fragmentation, paradoxes emerge in the critical
case of Cameroon and its government. The lan-
guage of pan-Africanism has been co-opted by
hegemons to validate their actions. They contin-
ue to personalize power and subvert those in the
margins with impunity, often leaving them at the
politically-driven hands of international interven-
tion. However, pan-Africanism has simultaneously
inspired class struggle and the reimagining of state-
hood for Africa’s insurgent movements. There is a
contradiction between its ideological expansion and
the persistence of intra-African conflict. It is part
of the postcolonial dilemma of addressing the past
without reproducing it. In Cameroon’s case, little
to no pan-African solidarity has met the baseline
demands of marginalized cries. West African states
have particularly tended to find solidarity based
more on a common colonial history than on geogra-
phy, and the crisis has been notoriously minimized
by the international community.
In October 2017, Anglophone separatists declared an
independent state known as Ambazonia—a neolo-
gism derived from the region’s Ambas bay—situat-
ed within the borders of former British Southern
18
Cameroons. In this unprecedented moment, when
secessionist rhetoric and anti-regime violence has
re-erupted, the crisis cannot be resolved through
cosmetic change. Polarized grievances, politics
of recognition, and the reimagining of statehood
are amongst pertinent concerns for the future of
Cameroon’s divided population centering themselves
against contentious odds. The revolution must foster
conscious resistance against colonial legacies, neo-
colonialism, and state coercion of citizens to con-
sent to their marginalization. It must give voice to
alternative accounts of politics beyond election polls,
where select demographics are disenfranchised by
the constructs of law and order. Electoral processes
have become a facade, creating a culture of despair
amongst citizens. They fuel insurgency, sustain
performative politics and the installment of elite
puppets who remain loyal in this case to the French
state and its neo-colonial project in West and Cen-
tral Africa—Cameroon’s currency itself is the Franc
CFA, indexed on the Euro.
An immense sense of pride for my Tar’kfu’s con-
tributions is often marred by the setbacks I have
witnessed in my own lifetime. His line of work was
under scrutiny within a state that repeatedly failed
to fully serve its people, and continues to do so.
Tar’kfu was a complex, yet simple man. He was like
his garden; tender, with a great sense of drama. He
remained dedicated to exposing impending crises, Fig.2
even when detained or silenced by political actors.
But what did it mean for him to operate internally
towards disrupting a system? How did he cope with
identifying abuses without actionable antidotes by
the government he served? Would he still hold the
same stances today? What does it mean to come
from this lineage? As I pass time in the diaspora,
away from the insecurities of home, my memory
shifts onto a different axis, longing to return to
a peaceful home. A home where I can someday
witness the spectacle of the Queen of the Night. To
return from these strange lands Tar’kfu once told
stories about. ■
Ethel-Ruth Tawe (b. Yaoundé, Cameroon) is an imagemaker,
storyteller, and time traveler exploring visual and sonic
archives, memory, and identity in Africa and its diaspora.
Using collage, pigments, words, still and moving images,
Ethel examines time and space often from a magical realist
lens. She holds an MSc Development Studies from SOAS,
University of London.
Fig.1 Their Tears and Blood and Sweat Their Soil Did Water (2022) by Ethel-Ruth
Tawe. / Digital décollage, archival photograph.
Fig.2 Tar’kfu (2022) by Ethel-Ruth Tawe. / Digital décollage, archival photograph.
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41 NEWS FROM THE FRONTS 19
 WHAT IS LEFT OF US? THE LIVING
STORY OF THE AINU IN JAPAN
KANAKO UZAWA
Indigenous to the coastal areas and archipelagos of the Sea
of Okhotsk, the Ainu have been facing Russian and Japanese
colonialisms for over two centuries. In this essay and its two
associated poems, Kanako Uzawa describes the ongoing polit-
ical and cultural efforts to assert Ainu self-determination rights,
in particular in Hokkaido.
A Story That Was Never Being Told ///
Releasing anger of the past helps us to move for-
ward in our life journey
We dance and sing for this moment to be together
The togetherness reminds us who we are
Joy of dance
Tundra of music that runs through our body
Our moment together
Voices from the past that echoes within ourselves
Clinging on our back, trying to get back to a pres-
ent time and life
Breath that comes back to a body
Rusted and cold bones filled with the smell of blood
A last drop of the blood sings to our heart
Clinging to each other
Finally, warm blood running through a body
Searching for the joy of life, which we once had and
lost
Getting life back isn’t easy
Trying to remember how it was to breathe, laugh,
and cry
My present life seems different from how I remember
20
Throughout the late 19th to 20th centuries, Ainu peo-
ple were targeted as a fascinating research object
within a Japanese academic landscape influenced
by Western frameworks of race and Social Darwin-
ism. Much academic colonialism was done to the
Ainu in Hokkaido during this length of time by Jap-
anese scientists. Today, collections of Ainu remains
are still housed in Japanese universities.
As Richard Siddle discusses in Race, Resistance
and the Ainu of Japan (1996), as Indigenous peo-
ple of northern Japan, the Ainu were perceived
as a “dying race” around the turn of the 20th cen-
tury, becoming an accessible research object used
in the development of anthropology, archaeology,
and linguistics in Japan. One of the earliest areas
of Ainu Studies was physical anthropology. What
were described as unique physical features of the
Ainu were appealing not only to the Japanese, but
also to Western scholars and travelers. In European
Studies on Ainu Language and Culture (1993), Jo-
seph Kreiner states: “European scholar-visitors had
earlier claimed Ainu to be distant ‘Caucasian’ breth-
ren residing in Asia at the close of the 19th century.”
While this theory did not find ground to stand on,
the myth continued triggering many scholars and
travelers to conduct research on the Ainu through-
out the 20th century.
As a result, over a thousand Ainu
skeletons were stolen for research
purposes and Ainu artifacts bought
and collected. They are now
spread across the world, stored,
or showcased at museums and
universities.
In the last decade, the issue of academic colonial-
ism on the Ainu drew more attention to the general
public in Japan. The most recent repatriation of
Ainu human remains in the 21st century took place
in Urakawa, Hokkaido in the summer of 2016. After
a court-mediated settlement, 16 Ainu human remains
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41
that had been excavated 85 years earlier for re-
search purposes, were returned by Hokkaido Univer-
sity to Urakawa, Hokkaido. This event created much
momentum, pushing the issue of Ainu remains to a
global scale in the following year. After an investiga-
tion, it was found that 17 Ainu human remains were
held in Germany. One of them was returned to the
representatives of the Ainu Association of Hokkaido
and the Japanese government from a German aca-
demic society in Berlin in 2017. The body had been
stolen in 1879 by a German tourist in Sapporo.
In 2021, 142 years after the incident in Sapporo, the
story of Ainu human remains was showcased as part
of an Ainu exhibition at the Rautenstrauch-Joest
Museum – Cultures of the World in Cologne, Germa-
ny. The exhibition, A Soul in Everything. Encounters
with Ainu from the north of Japan, was designed
in collaboration with scholars, Ainu artists, and
activists with a focus on the current revival move-
ment, the contemporary life of the Ainu, presenting
material culture as well as the museum collection.
What was significant about this exhibition was the
Ainu presence both in the process and the display.
For instance, I was one of the Ainu artists and activ-
ists who contributed an Ainu contemporary dance
video, and another about Ainu human remains and
identity. In addition, I provided a short text on Ainu
cloth-making from the eyes and voices of Ainu wom-
en. This type of the exhibition is contrary to a colo-
nial history where the Ainu were once showcased as
living objects in Japan, the U.S., and Europe, where
colonial exhibitions were referred to as human zoos.
The exhibition was very well received, for many vis-
itors it opened up further discussion on how we all
can contribute to a decolonization process.
The Ainu have lived in a wide range of areas cover-
ing southern Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, Hokkaido,
and parts of northern Honshu. Changing agree-
ments and diplomatic relations between Russia and
Japan have impacted Ainu people through forced
relocations, setting the stage for contemporary as-
sumptions that Hokkaido is the only Ainu homeland.
For example, in The Indigenous Ainu of Japan
at the Time of the Aland Settlement (2009), Scott
Harrison describes relocation of Sakhalin Ainu to
Hokkaido in 1875, and that Kuril Ainu were moved
to a small island unsuitable for their livelihood. In
1906, many Sakhalin Ainu were able to move back
but were again forced to Hokkaido after World War
II. Related hardships for Sakhalin and Kuril Ainu
included adapting to new environments, forced la-
bor, disease, as well as inadequate food and housing.
Sakhalin and Kuril Ainu had distinct cultural and
linguistic differences from Hokkaido Ainu.
NEWS FROM THE FRONTS
The island previously called Ezochi was renamed
as Hokkaido in 1869 by the Japanese government.
In 1899, the Ainu were legally categorized by the
Japanese government as former aborigines under
the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act
(HFAPA). The Ainu were considered as vulnerable
people who needed help to become “Japanese.” This
assimilation law, HFAPA, was designed to trans-
form the Ainu into agriculturalists. This resulted in
many Ainu suffering severe economic, social, and
cultural hardships, until even today. Later in 1901, a
segregated education system designed to ‘Japanize’
the Ainu was established under the HFAPA and the
Kyūdojin Jidō Kyōiku Kitei (Regulations for the Edu-
cation of Former Native Children). This resulted in a
significant decline of Ainu native speakers.
In the present day, it is believed
that there are no longer any native
speakers of the Ainu language.
Surprisingly, the HFAPA remained until 1997 when
it was replaced with the first multicultural legis-
lation in Japan; the Ainu Cultural Promotion Act
(ACPA), or in full, the Law for the Promotion of the
Ainu Culture and for the Dissemination and Advoca-
cy for the Traditions of the Ainu and the Ainu Cul-
ture. Although the repeal of HFAPA was welcomed
by some, the ACPA received much criticism at the
grassroots level because of its main focus on Ainu
culture; it failed to recognize the right to self-deter-
mination and collective rights of the Ainu as Indige-
nous people of Japan.
In 2008, the Ainu were officially recognized as
Indigenous people of Japan. However, many Ainu
people criticized the way this decision was made,
since the Japanese government did not recognize
the Ainu Indigenous rights as stipulated by the U.N.
Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,
which Japan ratified one year earlier. Nearly ten
years later, in May 2019, the Act on the Promotion
of Measures to Realize a Society Where the Pride
of Ainu Is Respected (or Ainu Policy Promotion Act)
came into force (Ministry of Internal Affairs and
Communications, 2021). While some Ainu people
take this as a step forward, considering that this
law applies nationwide as opposed to the ACPA with
a focus on Hokkaido only, other Ainu groups crit-
icized the law for falling short in not recognizing
Ainu Indigenous rights according to the standards
met by international law. Overall, what comes to the
core issue of the Ainu political landscape is that the
Japanese government has not yet apologized to the
Ainu for their wrongdoings in the past.
21
 To Be Ainu Is to be Discriminated Against ///
Tokyo lined with concrete skyscrapers
No one notices of me
There is such freedom
Keep walking without worrying about anyone
Are you also an Ainu?
You do not look like Ainu at all?
Do you know anything about the Ainu?
No, I don’t know at all
“Marry a Japanese man. That would lead you to a
happier life.” These are words I received from an
Ainu elder when I was 19 years old. A word that
made me think about what it means to be an Ainu
woman. To live as an Ainu woman was more com-
plex than I had initially thought. Many of my Ainu
female friends were afraid that their hairy legs or
physical features would be noticed by other Japa-
nese friends and colleagues. They were afraid that
someone might notice that they are Ainu, and that
they would be subjected to discrimination and rac-
ism. I, on the other hand, look Japanese. No one no-
tices that I am Ainu unless I tell them so. During my
teenage years, it took a long time to tell my friends
that I am Ainu. It took even more courage and time
to say “I am proud to be Ainu.” It required courage
to say it, because I never knew how people would
react, which could be either positive or negative.
Ainu area (green) prior This Japanese mask of mine created ambivalent
to 1945. No Ainu have
been registered
feelings. It is precisely because I look Japanese that
officially in Russia I want to be recognized and acknowledged as Ainu;
after 1945. there have been so many Ainu people who gave me
inspiration in life. Having a Japanese mask meant
that I needed to deliberately work on my presence
as an Ainu woman. Having grown-up in both Jap-
anese and Ainu cultures, I cherish both. As I grew
older, I started appreciating the ambivalence I have
about looking Japanese, as it gave me an opportu-
nity to challenge my own capacity to say who I am
and who I want to become.
Present Ainu
population in
Hokkaido (Japan)
Historical and present distribution of Ainu in Japan and the Russian Federation.
Data by Kanako Uzawa and Winfried K. Dallmann. Cartography by Winkfried K. Dallmann (2007).
22 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41 NEWS FROM THE FRONTS
In the 21st century, we Ainu are all intertwined with
Japanese culture and language. We practice Japa-
nese cultural practices while we also practice Ainu
culture.
Many researchers come to document
what is left of us; Ainu culture,
language, and day-to-day practices.
Many say it is urgent because we are
losing our culture and language. Is it
really so?
I see it differently. We may have lost much of the
tradition and language under the assimilation
policy. However, what cannot be taken away is our
inspiration and passion for our culture and lan-
guage. What we need is free space and the ability
to exercise our cultural rights; self-determination is
what will allow us to decide how we want to learn
and develop our culture. It should be done by our
own initiative and we should be key decision-mak-
ers. This is especially applicable for the manage-
ment of natural resources.The Ainu’s long-standing
relationship and knowledge about our land and
waters need to be respected in any discussion of sus-
tainable development and human rights. ■
Dr. Kanako Uzawa is a Norway-based Ainu scholar,
advocate, and artist. She is an affiliated researcher at the
Research Faculty of Media and Communication at Hokkaido
University. She contributes to collaborative research and
Ainu performing art on the multifaceted articulations of
Indigenous knowledge. She also engages with the ArCSII
(Arctic Challenge for Sustainability) as a research collaborator,
where she contributes her expertise on both the Sámi and Ainu
issues. She is an editorial board member of AlterNative: an
International Journal of Indigenous Peoples in New Zealand,
Aotearoa. Her current work is a curatorial project on the Ainu
exhibition in collaboration with the University of Michigan
Museum of Art.
23
24
THINKING THROUGH BLACKNESS, QUEERNESS,
BROWNNESS, CASTE & INDIGENEITY FROM ELSEWHERE

N°41
THE FUNAMBULIST

THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41

DECENTERING THE U.S.

Os olhos falam (Eyes Speak) by Kellem Monteiro

25
THE U.S.
DECENTERING

(model: Maria Teixeira, 2020).

 DECENTERING THE U.S.:
INTRODUCTION
LÉOPOLD LAMBERT
Welcome to the 41st issue of The Funambulist. Some
of our issues’ editorial lines are deliberately left a
little bit looser (cf. Politics of Food, Music and the
Revolution, etc.) to allow for a more open-ended
approach to their respective topics. On the other
hand, some of our other editorial lines try to be as
precise as possible in order to make a point. This is
most definitely the case for this present issue. The
question that motivates it is simple: how come so
many of us outside the settler colony called the Unit-
ed States of America, are so deeply influenced by
and interpret our own contexts through the political
‘software’—an odd word perhaps, but a more direct
one than “epistemology”—created by U.S.-based aca-
demics and activists?
In my own context, a country that still has not
accepted its ever growing irrelevance at the global
scale, asking this question could be interpreted as
adopting the protofascist rhetoric of the govern-
ment. Indeed, the Macron administration has re-
peatedly accused the antiracist movement in France
to have been contaminated by U.S. “wokeness” (a
term emerged from U.S. Blackness that they have
learned to misappropriate), which supposedly essen-
tializes racialized communities in opposition to the
sacrosanct French (white) universalism. Facing this
demagoguery, we have three possible responses.
The first one consists of denying such an influence.
Given the ubiquity of the U.S. cultural infrastructure
in our lives, and the local media’s daily treatment
of U.S.-based events as if they were happening next
door, it seems a rather disingenuous claim to make.
The second possible response—the most common
one—consists in accepting this influence and de-
scribing the United States as a society where antira-
cist speeches and other intellectual productions are
more easily facilitated than they are in France. This
spans from social media commentaries that suggest
“never in France would we see cops taking a knee
for Black Lives Matter,” to more sophisticated argu-
ments perceiving U.S. universities as a land of milk
26
and honey for academic research on antiracism and
anticolonialism. This claim not only fall into every
trap of “greener grass” arguments that invisibilizes
the relentless settler colonial and structurally racist
violence that so many people in the United States
are up against, it also develops a unicentric system
of ideas meant to be applied to all situations.
A third option is to not let nationalist actors mo-
nopolize this question and (as we propose to do in
this issue) re-appropriate it for ourselves, for it was
never theirs to begin with. Our perspective on the
U.S. should also be radically different from theirs in
the strict separation they imply between Europe and
the United States. The latter is nothing more than
a West European settler colony, which could not
possibly be considered independently from its gen-
itor continent. As such, this issue almost took the
name “Provincializing the U.S.,” as a continuation of
Dipesh Chakrabarty’s classic essay Provincializing
Europe (2000).
The goal here is less to disqualify the U.S. political
software, than to demonstrate that the successful
ways through which it analyzes its own context may
not be as useful when analyzing other situations.
Take whiteness for instance. In the context of 21st
century U.S. settler colonialism, there does not exist
50 shades of whiteness to qualify the political tra-
jectories of settler citizens. The transatlantic trans-
formation of a people like Irish Americans, from the
anticolonial struggle against British occupation to
the ranks of the New York Police Department—at
the risk of being caricatural—is a stunning example
of this (cf. Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became
White, 1995). Nevertheless, the recent interpreta-
tions by many North American and other Western
activists on the treatment of Ukrainian refugees,
perceived as absolutely and definitively white, is
evidence that the monolith we’ve made of white-
ness has become inadequate to analyze this specific
situation.
A cartographic attempt at pluriversality.
Map by Léopold Lambert (2022).
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41 DECENTERING THE U.S. 27
The U.S.-produced equivalence of whiteness with
epidermic paleness is indeed flattening the many
layers of racialization at work on the very Continent
that birthed colonial whiteness. Dismantling this
equivalence does not in any way mean disqualifying
colorism—a system that recognizes a higher intensi-
ty of racist violence towards bodies in closer prox-
imity to Black skin tones. In this regard, the exam-
ple of the Indian Subcontinent is an enlightening
one. On the Subcontinent coexists on the one hand
a colorist hierarchy of people (in particular between
the North and the South) and, on the other hand,
a dreadful daily colonial violence against the most
northern people: Kashmiris. Seeing an unsolvable
contradiction in this coexistence of two oppressive
systems (colorism and colonialism) is tantamount to
intellectual laziness.
If we go back to Europe, it is also
crucial to recognize that just because
the political history of Polish, Irish,
Portuguese, Sami, Bosniaks, Greek,
Ashkenazis, Danes, Basques,
Albanians, and French people (to
cite only a few and, importantly,
understanding these identities as
ethnic groups over nationalities)
place them on very distinct shades
of whiteness, does not mean that any
of them escapes the structures of
anti-Blackness or those of systematic
racism against Roma people.
Those take different forms and different degrees of
structural violence, which relate to contexts’ specific
histories, but it is undeniable that they relentlessly
operate everywhere in Europe.
Blackness too, tends to be understood almost ex-
clusively from intellectual and cultural production
emerging from the U.S.. Césaire, Fanon, and Glissant
—all Martinicans—may provide counter-examples, but
they do not fundamentally alter an understanding of
Blackness exclusively centered on North Atlantic
history, ignoring the myriad of Black cosmologies
from South America, the interior of the African
Continent, the Indian Ocean, and Melanesia—in
28
this regard, I highly recommend reading our
conversation with Quito Swan about Black inter-
nationalism in Vanuatu, West Papua, and Kanaky
in our 39th issue about the Ocean. Once again a
clarification may be needed here. The problem we
are pointing to is this issue of universalizing one
paradigm; not necessarily the paradigm itself. For
instance, the relationship African Americans have
with the concept of citizenship—the very adoption
of the term “Americans” in this identifier that makes
this relationship particularly explicit—as pointed out
by Cases Rebelles in their contribution, is certain-
ly not on trial in this issue. However the idea that
Angolans in Portugal, Cameronians in France, or
Kenyans in Britain (to cite only a few) should have
a similar relationship with Portuguese, French, or
British citizenship (whether they have access to this
citizenship or not) would transpose a U.S.-centric
history of civil right struggles over those organized
against European colonialism on the African conti-
nent and subsequent anti-racist diasporic struggles
in Europe.
Although I have said earlier that what’s critiqued in
this issue is less the U.S. political software itself and
more so its application elsewhere, we did also want
to humbly suggest that this model has room for
growth even within the United States itself. This is
how, in their contribution, Sinthujan Varatharajah
questions the usefulness of the political concept of
“brownness” in the way it flattens and makes uni-
form the violence within relationships of power be-
tween the many diasporas from the Indian Subcon-
tinent and Sri Lanka-Eelam. This critique operates
in dialogue with the conversation between Shaista
Aziz Patel and Vijeta Kumar about this paradigm’s
lack of consideration for the way caste operates not
only on the Subcontinent itself, but also for diaspo-
ras living in the U.S..
Another concept forged in the United States that
appears to us as worth questioning, despite its own
productive political appropriation, is the Latinx
identity grouping. Beyond the very name that
immediately situates it in a eurocentric imaginary
(Latin being the antic language of the Roman re-
public/empire that later gave birth to Italian, Roma-
nian, French, Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish),
the idea that a Maya indigenous person living in the
U.S. would have more in common with a white Ar-
gentinian descendant of Italian settlers, than with
a member of one of the many Indigenous nations
dispossessed by the U.S. settler colony is questiona-
ble at best, as Floridalma Boj Lopez describes (with
a higher sense of nuance) in her contribution.
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41
A final point. Decentering the U.S., importantly, Léopold Lambert is the editor-in-chief of The Funambulist.
also means refusing to make the United States the Trained as an architect, he is the author of four books analyzing
source of all imperialist projects in the world. As Zoé the political instrumentalization of architecture’s inherent
Samudzi writes in this issue, the phrase “the U.S. violence in various contexts (Palestine, France’s banlieues,
is the worst” is not that different from “the U.S. is Algeria...). They include Weaponized Architecture (2012),
the best”; in both cases, there is no imagination for Politics of Bulldozer: The Palestinian Ruin as an Israeli Project
a world where the United States is not at the very (2016) and States of Emergency: A Spatial History of the French
center. Besides this narcissistic vision, this also leads Colonial Continuum (2021).
to “Leftist” excuses for other imperialist projects: the
empires that the Popular Republic of China and the
Russian Federation embody (even before their polit-
ical and military ‘external’ incursions), but also the
renewed imperialist ambitions of Turkey, India, Iran,
Ethiopia, and many others at a regional level.
This introduction may read as judgmental, if not
angry. Furthermore, the issue might be falling in
the trap of recentering the object it advocates to
decenter in analyzing it, rather than, say, ignoring
it altogether. It is however crucial to say that this
group of contributions presented here is not meant
to focus on a specific critique, as my words may
have suggested until now.
In our commitment to
internationalism, we want to
humbly contribute a response to
the universalization of the U.S.
political software by encouraging a
pluriversalization of our influences.
This does not mean, of course, that we should part
from the crucial work done by many in the United
States (in our conversation, Rahul Rao, reminds
us what we owe to Black U.S. feminist authors for
instance), but rather, consider how these works
can constitute one of many fragments within our
political imaginary. This issue might provide a few
other fragments informed in Maya, Guadeloupean,
Cameroonian, Eela Tamil, Ugandan, Dalit, Pales-
tinian, and Southern African sensibilities, to cite
only a few of the many sensitivities our contributors
generously brought to this issue following their own
life trajectories, as well as the pluriversal influenc-
es they have themselves received and cultivated. I
sincerely hope that this attempt at pluriversality will
resonate with you and the potential frustration you
might be experiencing in relation to the way strug-
gles are approached in your specific context. This
is only the beginning of laying out many questions
whose answers we would never claim to have. I
wish you an excellent read. ■
DECENTERING THE U.S. 29
ANTHOLOGIE
ABEL MEEROPOL, STRANGE FRUITS /// FRANÇOIS VILLON, BALLADE DES PENDUS /// DANTE, DIVINA COMMEDIA
/// GILLES DELEUZE, LE PLI. LEIBNIZ ET LE BAROQUE /// GILLES DELEUZE, FRANCIS BACON. LOGIQUE DE LA
SENSATION /// GILLES DELEUZE, L’ORDRE PHILOSOPHIQUE /// DIOGENE, ENCOUNTER WITH ALEXANDER ///
SNORRI STURLUSON, GYLFAGINNING /// FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLIN, DER ARCHIPELAGUS /// FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLIN,
PATMOS /// LI BAI (李白), 春日醉起言志 /// LI BAI (李白), 秋浦歌 /// LI BAI (李白), 長干行 /// JOHN MILTON, PARADISE
LOST /// ARTHUR RIMBAUD, LES ASSIS /// RENÉ MÉNIL, TROPIQUES /// WILLIAM BLAKE, EARTH’S ANSWER ///
WILLIAM BLAKE, MAD SONG /// FRIEDRICH HEGEL, PHÄNOMENOLOGIE DES GEISTES /// MVOM EKO /// SIGMUND
FREUD, ZUR PSYCHOLOGIE DES GYMNASIASTEN /// PABLO NERUDA, UNIDAD /// PABLO NERUDA, RITUAL DE MIS
PIERNAS /// PABLO NERUDA, V LA ISLA /// SISSOKO KABINÈ, L’EPOPÉE BAMBARA /// NORTH AMERICAN NATIVES’
DE LA POÉSIE
POEMS AND SONGS /// ANTONIO MACHADO, PENSAR DESDE LA HETEROGENEIDAD /// LYCOPHRON, ALEXANDRA
/// SAINT-JOHN PERSE, ANABASE /// SAINT-JOHN PERSE, EXIL /// SERGE PEY, LA LANGUE DES CHIENS /// NICOLÁS
GUILLÉN, BALADA DE LOS DOS ABUELOS /// NICOLÁS GUILLÉN, ARTE POÉTICO /// NELSON ROLIHLAHLA
MANDELA, INAUGURATION SPEECH /// FERNANDA PESSOA, ODE MARÍTIMA /// NICOLAS DE CONDORCET,
REFLEXIONS SUR L’ESCLAVAGE DES NÈGRES /// ABDELWAHAB MEDDEB, L’EXIL OCCIDENTAL /// NIERIKA OR THE
PHYSICAL POEMS OF THE FIFTH FIRE VISION /// MAHMOUD DARWICH (� ‫)محمود درو� ي ش‬, PSAUME CLI /// MAHMOUD
‫ش‬ ‫ح‬ ‫م‬
DARWICH (�‫) مود درو�ي‬, THE ANDALUSIAN EPILOGUE /// MAHMOUD DARWICH (� ‫)محمود درو� ي ش‬, POETIC DISPOSITION
/// ESCHYLE, LES PERSES /// JORGE LUIS BORGES, INFERNO /// JORGE LUIS BORGES, EVERYTHING AND
NOTHING /// JORGE LUIS BORGES, PARÁBOLA DE CERVANTES Y DE QUIJOTE /// JORGE LUIS BORGES, LA LUNA
/// JORGE LUIS BORGES, ARIOSTO Y LOS ARABES /// JORGE LUIS BORGES, ELOGIO DE LA SOMBRA /// PABLO
PICASSO, PROPOS SUR L’ART /// LOUISE LABÉ, XVI /// RAYMOND LULLE, LIVRE DE L’AMI ET DE L’AIMÉ /// SOCRATE,
PLATON. L’APOLOGIE DE SOCRATE /// SONGS OF ANCIENT MEXICO /// THOR VILHJÁLMSSON, TVÍLÝSI ///
HERACLITE, FRAGMENTS /// ALBERT CAMUS, NOCES A TIPASA /// GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE, LA JOLIE ROUSSE
DU TOUT-
/// NAZIM HIKMET, KAR YAĞIYOR ŞIIRI /// WALT WHITMAN, THE ROAD NOT TAKEN /// WALT WHITMAN, THE FIRE
IN ALL THINGS /// WALT WHITMAN, PROUD MUSIC OF THE STORM /// BHAGAVAD GITA /// O.V. DE L. MILOSZ,
CANTIQUES DU PRINTEMPS /// AGRIPPA D’AUBIGNÉ, LES TRAGIQUES /// VIRGIL, AENEID /// VIRGINIA WOOLF,
THE WAVES /// GABRIELA MISTRAL, FRAGMENT /// NOVALIS, DIE LEHRLINGE ZU SAIS /// HERMAN MELVILLE,
MOBY DICK /// GOETHE, GEDICHT /// RAINER MARIA RILKE, DUINESER ELEGIEN /// CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, LES
FENÊTRES /// CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, LES FOULES /// CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, L’ÉTRANGER /// TOUSSAINT
LOUVERTURE, DISCOURS LORS DE SON ARRESTATION /// VICTOR SEGALEN, EQUIPÉE /// VICTOR SEGALEN,
LES TROIS HYMNES PRIMITIFS /// VICTOR SEGALEN, DÉPART /// VICTOR SEGALEN, CONSEILS AU BON
VOYAGEUR /// VICTOR SEGALEN, CACHÉ /// AIMÉ CÉSAIRE, CAHIER D’UN RETOUR AU PAYS NATAL /// WILLIAM
FAULKNER, LECTURE AT OXFORD UNIVERSITY /// TRADITIONAL MALAGASY HAIN-TENY, BAKOLY DOMENICHINI-
RAMIARANAMANANA /// MATTA, CATALOGUE OF THE EXHIBITION COMME ELLE EST VIERGE MA FORÊT ///
GASTON BACHELARD, LA POÉTIQUE DE LA RÊVERIE /// GASTON BACHELARD, LA TERRE ET LES RÊVERIES DE
MONDE
LA VOLONTÉ /// MICHEL LEIRIS, DU COEUR À L’ABSOLU /// PIERRE OSTER, POUR UNE JEUNE FILLE /// PIERRE
OSTER, PREMIER POÈME /// JOSÉ LEZAMA LIMA, PARADISO /// FLANERY O’CONNOR, A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO
FIND /// ANDRÉ ET SIMONE SCHWARZ-BART, UN PLAT DE PORC AUX BANANES VERTES /// CLAUDE SIMON,
ARCHIPEL /// ANTONIO TABUCCHI, TRISTANO MUORE /// FELIX TCHICAYA U’TAMSI, POÈMES /// LANGSTON
HUGHES, AFRAID /// LANGSTON HUGHES, OUR LAND /// GASTON MIRON, LE DAMNED CANUCK /// GASTON
MIRON, EN UNE SEULE PHRASE NOMBREUSE /// GASTON MIRON, EN OUTAOUAIS /// T.E. LAWRENCE, SEVEN
PILLARS OF WISDOM /// NANCY MOREJÓN, MUJER NEGRA /// ÁLVARO MUTI, CARAVANSARY /// GIUSEPPE
TOMASI DI LAMPEDUSA, IL GATTOPARDO /// RENÉ DEPESTRE, ODE AU VINGTIÈME SIÈCLE /// WIFREDO LAM,
CAHIER D’ART /// HONORÉ DE BALZAC, UNE PASSION DANS LE DÉSERT /// KALEWALA, FIRST RUNE /// LÉO
FROBÉNIUS, DIE GEHEIMBÜNDE AFRIKAS /// GABRIEL GARCIA MÁRQUEZ, CIEN AÑOS DE SOLEDAD /// JULIO
CORTÁZAR, RAYUELA /// FRANTZ FANON, PEAUX NOIRES, MASQUE BLANCS /// OVID, METAMORPHOSES ///
EZRA POUND, THE CANTOS /// MARTIN LUTHER KING, WASHINGTON DC SPEECH /// VICTOR HUGO, LA PITIÉ
SUPRÊME /// VINCENT VAN GOGH, LETTRE À SON FRÈRE THÉO /// VINCENT VAN GOGH, LETTRE À PAUL GAUGUIN
/// ARTHUR RIMBAUD, L’ÉCLAIR /// ALEJO CARPENTIER, LOS PASOS PERDIDOS /// ALEJO CARPENTIER, GUERRA
DEL TIEMPO /// CLAUDIO MAGRIS, DANUBIO /// EDWARD GIBBON, THE HISTORY OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF
THE ROMAN EMPIRE /// ANDRÉ BRETON, XÉNOPHILES /// MALCOM X, ON AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY ///
MAHABHARATA /// LUÍS VAZ DE CAMÕES, OS LUSÍADAS /// GŌZŌ YOSHIMASU ‫أ‬ (吉増 剛造), LA BOCA MURMURAIT
/// EDWARD W. SAID, CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM /// ABY NUWAS (‫)��بو �نواس‬, THE SWIMMER /// RAYMOND ROUSSEL,
IMPRESSIONS D’AFRIQUE /// HAFEZ DE CHIRAZ, GHAZAL 469 /// SAINT AUGUSTIN, LES CONFESSIONS ///
CHATEAUBRIAND, VOYAGE EN AMÉRIQUE /// GILLES DELEUZE & FÉLIX GUATTARI, RHIZOME /// ANDRÉ VELTER,
POUR N’EN PLUS REVENIR /// GASTON BACHELARD, LA PSYCHANALYSE DU FEU /// GASTON BACHELARD, L’EAU
ET LES RÊVES /// GASTON BACHELARD, LA TERRE ET LES RÊVERIES DU REPOS /// PARMÉNIDE (ΠΑΡΜΕΝΊΔΗΣ),
ΠΕΡΊ ΦΎΣΕΩΣ /// JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, LES MOTS /// ALEXANDRE POUCHKINE (АЛЕКСАНДР ПУШКИН), ПОЭЗИЯ ///
MAURICE SCÈVE, DELIE, OBJECT DE PLUS HAULTE VERTU /// INCA GARCILASO DE LA VEGA, COMENTARIOS
REALES DE LOS INCAS /// PAUL ÉLUARD, L’AMOUR LA POÉSIE /// SONY LABOU TANSI, LES SEPT SOLITUDES DE
LORSA LOPEZ /// DORA TEITELBOIM, ‫ דער ווינט‬/// DINO CAMPANA, IL RITORNO /// MIQUEL BARCELO,
CUADERNOS DE ÁFRICA /// SAIGYŌ HŌSHI (西行 法師), VERS LE VIDE /// VLADIMIR MAYAKOVSKY (ВЛАДИ́МИР
МАЯКО́ВСКИЙ), ОБЛАКО В ШТАНАХ /// GIACOMO LEOPARDI, POESIE /// ANDRÉ DHÔTEL, LE VILLAGE PATHÉTIQUE
30 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41
/// WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, OTHELLO /// OMAR KHAYYAM, RBAYAT /// SAPPHO, FRAGMENTS /// RENÉ CHAR,
LES TRANSPARENTS /// RENÉ CHAR, LES LICHENS /// RENÉ CHAR, TRANSIR /// RENÉ CHAR, VENT TOMBÉ ///
RENÉ CHAR, LE DOS TOURNÉ /// AUGUST STRINDBERG, TJÄNSTEKVINNANS SON /// LÉOPOLD SÉDAR
SENGHOR, ELÉGIE DE CARTHAGE /// PAUL NIGER, INITIATIONS /// LINTEAU KWESI JOHNSON, MEKKIN HISTRI ///
CYRANO DE BERGERAC, VOYAGE COMIQUE DANS LES ÉTATS ET EMPIRES DE LA LUNE /// MUHAMMAD ALI, I
AUN’T GOT NOTHIN’ AGAINST THEM VIET CONG /// GEORGES CASTERA, NOUS SOMMES DES ÉCRITURES ///
GEORGES CASTERA, CAR NOTRE AMOUR /// GEORGES CASTERA, SCENARIO /// GEORGES CASTERA,
DESHÉRENCES /// FRANKÉTIENNE, FRAGMENTAIRES /// DEERHOOF, DESAPARECERÉ /// DEERHOOF, THE
TEARS AND MUSIC OF LOVE /// BLACK ELK, PRAYOR TO HARNEY PEAK IN THE BLACK HILLS /// MICHEL BUTOR,
LE GRAND COUTURIER /// MICHEL BUTOR, BOOMERANG /// EUGÈNE DELACROIX, JOURNAL /// HENRI
PICHETTE, À VOUS À NOUS À TOUS /// HENRI PICHETTE, LES ÉPIPHANIES /// SIMÓN BOLÍVAR, CARTA A PABLO
MORILLO “EL PACIFICADOR” /// ITALO CALVINO, LE CITTÀ INVISIBILI /// CÉSAR VALLEJO, ESPAÑA, APARTA DE MÍ
ESTE CÁLIZ /// ERNESTO CHE GUEVARA, MENSAJE A LA TRICONTINENTALE /// LIVAUNUK, BARE FEET ON THE
SACRED EARTH /// LAUTRÉAMONT, LES CHANTS DE MALDOROR /// IBN RABAI /// MORISSEAU-LEROY,
DIACOUTE, PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI /// KARL MARX, DAS KAPITAL /// PAUL CLAUDEL, LA MUSE QUI EST LA GRÂCE
/// PAUL CLAUDEL, LA MAISON FERMÉE /// ELIE FAURE, SUR NIETZSCHE /// MAGLOIRE-SAINT-AUDE, TABOU ///
MAGLOIRE-SAINT-AUDE, TALISMANS /// MICHEL DEGUY, EST-CE MANQUÉ /// BLAISE CENDRARS, PROSE DU
TRANSSIBÉRIEN ET DE LA PETITE JEANNE DE FRANCE /// AMADOU HAMPÂTÉ BÂ, UNESCO /// BERTOLD BRECHT,
MAHAGONNY-SONGSPIEL /// MALCOLM DE CHAZAL, SENS PLASTIQUE /// PATRICK CHAMOISEAU, TEXACO ///
LÉON GONTRAN DAMAS, BLACK-LABEL /// HENRI CORBIN, PLONGÉE AU GRÉ DES DEUILS /// JAYNE CORTEZ,
OKRA /// JAYNE CORTEZ, GOMBO /// MONCHOACHI, L’ESPÈRE-GESTE /// CHICO SCIENCE & NAÇÃO ZUMBI, DA
LAMA AO CAOS /// CHICO SCIENCE & NAÇÃO ZUMBI, RIOS, PONTES & OVERDRIVES /// AIMÉ CÉSAIRE,
VISITATIONS /// DENIS DIDEROT, DE LA VIE HEUREUSE /// THOMAS MOFOLO, CHAKA ///ARTHUR RIMBAUD, GÉNIE
/// WILLIAM FAULKER, THE BEAR /// WILLIAM FAULKER, AUGUST LIGHT /// ANTOINE RAYBAUD, ULYSSE TOUT-
MONDE /// MANTHIA DIAWARA, BAMAKO PARIS NEW YORK /// ILAN HALÉVI (‫)�إ�يلا� ن هال�ي�ف� ي ִאילָ ן ַהלֵ וִ י‬, ALLERS-RETOURS
/// JOSEPH POLIUS, 25, RUE BAYARDIN /// BENOIT CONORT, AU-DELÀ DES CERCLES /// MIGUEL DE CERVENTÈS,
EL INGENIOSO HIDALGO DON QUIJOTE DE LA MANCHA /// FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, ECCE HOMO /// FRIEDRICH
NIETZSCHE, EIN BUCH FÜR FREIE GEISTER /// FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, ALSO SPRACH ZARATHUSTRA /// HENRI
MICHAUX, UN HOMME PAISIBLE /// KATEB YACINE, LE CERCLE DES REPRÉSAILLES /// JAMES JOYCE, DUBLINERS
/// STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ, SES PURS ONGLES TRÈS HAUT DÉDIANT LEUR ONYX /// BASHO (芭蕉), 立石寺 ///
POÉSIE PEULE, LA FEMME, LA VACHE, LA FOI /// HOMER, ODYSSEY /// THE UPANISHADS, BRIHADARANYAKA
UPANISHAD /// THE UPANISHADS, YCA UPANISHAD /// SALAH STÉTIÉ (‫)صلاح س�� ت� ي�تي� ة‬, EN ATTENDANT /// MIGUEL
ÁNGEL ASTURIAS, LEYENDA DEL TESORO DEL PAÍS FLORIDO /// MIGUEL ÁNGEL ASTURIAS, LOS BRUJOS DE LA
TORMENTA PRIMAVERAL /// AVERROES (‫)ا�ب� ن ر�شد‬, DECISIVE SPEECH /// MAIMONIDE (‫)הרב משה בן מימון موسى �ب� نم�يمو� ن‬,
EPISTLE TO YEMEN /// MARGUERITE YOURCENAR, MÉMOIRES D’HADRIEN /// IBN KHALDUN (‫)�ب� ن �خلدو � ن‬, THE
BOOK OF EXAMPLES /// LAFCADIO HEARN, CHITA /// JEAN GIONO, LE CHANT DU MONDE /// PAUL VALÉRY,
CIMETIÈRE MARIN /// JEAN LAUDE, LES SAISONS DE LA MER /// YVES BONNEFOY, VRAI NOM /// ARTO
PAASILINNA, UKKOSENJUMALAN POIKA /// YANNAI (‫)נא‬, ANTHEM FROM THE SKY /// ALAIN BORER, MONOLOGUE
DE LA COMÈTE /// BRULY BOUABRÉ, L’INVENTION DE L’ALPHABET BÉTÉ EN CÔTE-D’IVOIRE /// ALLEN GINSBERG,
AYERS ROCK/ULURU SONG /// ALLEN GINSBERG, THROW OUT THE YELLOW JOURNALISTS OF BAD GRAMMAR
& TERRIBLE MANNER /// VICTOR MARTINEZ, BARAQUEMENTS À RIVESALTES /// FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA,
JUEGO Y TEORÍA DEL DUENDE /// FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA, CIUDAD SIN SUEÑO /// FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA,
SI MIS MANOS PUDIERAN DESHOJAR /// OCTAVIO PAZ, APARIENCIA /// ANTONIN ARTAUD, VAN GOGH, LE SUICIDÉ
DE LA SOCIÉTÉ /// ANTONIN ARTAUD, LE RETOUR D’ARTAUD LE MOMO /// RABELAIS, GARGANTUA ///
MONTAIGNE, LES ESSAIS /// ROGER GIROUX, L’ARBRE LE TEMPS /// PAUL MAYER, LA ROUE DES CORPS /// PAUL
MAYER, CENDRE MÉMOIRE DU FEU /// MAURICE ROCHE, COMPACT /// GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS, POEMS ///
ROBERT DESNOS, LE RÉVEIL /// PIERRE REVERDY, TOUJOURS LÀ /// PIERRE REVERDY, CLARTÉS TERRESTRES
/// PIERRE REVERDY, ENTRE DEUX MONDES /// PIERRE REVERDY, COUVRE-FEU /// PIERRE REVERDY, LE FLOT-
BERCEUR /// GEORGES SCHÉHADÉ, LES POÉSIES /// ALAIN LÉVÊQUE, PAYSAGE POUR UN AVEUGLE /// ERNEST
PÉPIN, DIT DE LA ROCHE GRAVÉE /// YVES MABIN CHENNEVIÈRE, VARIATIONS DU SENSIBLE /// ANDREA
ZANZOTTO, AL MONDO /// GIORGIO CAPRONI, VERSI QUASI ECOLOGICI /// GIORGIO CAPRONI, L’USCITA
MATTUTINA /// JEAN-PIERRE VERNANT, LA TRAVERSÉE DES FRONTIÈRES /// CARLOS DRUMMOND DE
ANDRADE, SENTIMENTO DO MUNDO /// JACQUES CHARPIER, CONNAISSEZ-VOUS L’ÉCOLIÈRE? /// JACQUES
CHARPIER, LE PRINTEMPS /// JULES SUPERVIELLE, DERRIÈRE CE CIEL ÉTEINT /// JULES SUPERVIELLE, LES
VIEUX HORIZONS /// JULES SUPERVIELLE, GRENADE /// JULES SUPERVIELLE, ALARME /// RUTEBEUF, LA
COMPLAINTE DE RUTEBEUF /// GILBERT GRATIANT, COMPLAINTE CRÉOLE DU POISSON MÉDAILLE /// GEORGES
BRASSENS, PAUVRE MARTIN /// LAS LLAMAS LLEGAN AL CIELO (TARANTA), ‫ أ‬CANTE FLAMENCO /// GÉRARD DE
NERVAL, SYLVIE /// JULIEN GRACQ, AU CHÂTEAU D’ARGOL /// ADONIS (‫)�دو��نيس‬, JE VOUS AI DIT /// TAHA MUHAMMAD
ALI (‫)طه حمد عل� ي‬, ‫ نبيذ أمسيات الأحزان المعتقة‬/// ESTHER NIRINA, RIEN QUE LUNE /// MICHAEL SMITH, ME CYAAN BELIEVE IT
‫م‬ L
/// ÉDOUARD GLISSANT, D’UN TRAITÉ DU TOUT-MONDE ///
WORKS CITED BY ÉDOUARD GLISSANT IN LA TERRE, LE FEU, L’EAU ET LES VENTS. ANTHOLOGIE DE LA POÉSIE DU TOUT-MONDE.
ÉDITIONS GALAADE, 2010. COLLECTED FROM THE BOOK AND ARRANGED BY LÉOPOLD LAMBERT (2022).
DECENTERING THE U.S. 31
 BLACK AMERICA AND US
CASES REBELLES
This issue is built on conversations started a few years ago
with some of our contributors. Cases Rebelles are one of them.
In their contribution, they describe how an exclusive focus on
an African American understanding of Blackness invisibilizes
the global Pan-African struggle and allows colonial states
like France to distract us from its own anti-Blackness both in
France and in its colonial dominions.
Sur la Terre, un coin de paradis.
“Paris, Paris, Paris,” Josephine Baker ///
The grimacing ghost of Josephine Baker heads
towards the Parisian Pantheon with songs of praise
and the blessings of a deeply reactionary govern-
ment. She is the ideal, the parangon, the poster
child for the type of Black people French white
supremacy loves to extol. The crowning of a career
built mainly on cliché-laden performances, as well
as racist erotization, explicitly shows the kind of ex-
pectations that power as well as a large part of pub-
lic opinion harbor. Nothing in Baker’s ‘work’ chal-
lenged the racial order that was in place in France
(and territories under French rule). On the contrary,
it reinforced that very order, and it is no wonder
that all her gesticulating and flailing resulted in her
starring in colonial duds like Princesse Tam Tam
(1935) or in singing the horrific La petite Tonki-
noise (1930). It makes sense then that she would be
the first Black woman to join the “great men” that
the nation honors, at a time of Europe’s historic
fascistization and by the grace of a government
which infamously pursued extremely repressive
and anti-social policies. Ours is also a time when the
representation of Black people is used ad nauseam
for variegated whitewashing purposes. This cere-
mony marks a climax in the ritual that consists in
putting Black bodies on display, as seen in 2018 in
a voguing event hosted at the French Presidential
Palace or in the selfies taken by president Macron
with two shirtless young Black men in the Caribbe-
an island of Saint Martin.
Josephine Baker is without a doubt the most
renowned and consensual representative of the
class of Black exiles from the U.S finding sanctu-
ary here. Some of these spectacular Black people,
“les Blacks,” were the showcase to French people’s
relation to the Other while being at the same time
the object of an astounding fetishisization which,
according to scholar Tyler Stovall, reveals a
32
broader obsession with “America and American-
ness” that benefited African Americans, a “kind of
model minority,” supposedly embodying the most
advanced stage of Blackness.
Whether they be artists, athletes, intellectuals, they
were all objects of entertainment. And it was all
the much easier to gush about those Black people
insofar as they were not the bearers of any colonial
conflictuality capable of disturbing the French im-
perialist project. On the contrary, welcoming them
in Hexagonal France enabled an extremely critical
discourse at times (notably in the press) on the most
spectacular aspect of the U.S. racist system: seg-
regation. France was salving its conscience while
enforcing the same kind of racial segregation and
imposing forced labor in its colonies.
The centering of one diaspora was
built against other Blacknesses,
the threatening descendants of the
French colonial empire. This distant
Blackness could hold a mirror to
France that was favorable, reassuring,
and rewarding.
Combative at home—Baker, for instance, worked
with the NAACP—fetishized in France, some Afri-
can American artists in Paris helped (willingly or
not) to cement the idea that no battle needed to be
fought against French white supremacy, that the
belly of the beast was the United States. In doing so,
they were ignoring the fact that the beast of white
supremacy was a many headed one. From the 1910s
and 1920s on, globalized African American culture
helped establish them as the bearer of the most
evolved form of Blackness and a terrifyingly effi-
cient tool of depoliticization. By clinging to Baker,
to those Black people reduced to their bodies and
ability to entertain, the French state resolutely turns
its back to a mature and responsible understanding
of its racial and colonial history and shuns any kind
of accountability.
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41
The Most Advanced Diaspora ///
At the turn of the 20th century, during the 1900
Paris Exposition, a Black U.S. delegation had
played to a tee their role of the vanguard, of the
most civilized Black people, of the most advanced
diaspora with the prize-winning “L’Exposition des
Nègres d’Amérique” (“The American Negro Ex-
hibit”), whose curator was none other than sociol-
ogist W.E.B. Du Bois. Paradoxically, while the first
pan-African conference was held on April 23-25,
1900 (Du Bois was in attendance), The American
Negro Exhibit would allow African Americans to
differentiate themselves from other Black people.
Format-wise, Du Bois and Atlanta University stu-
dents offered an absolutely unprecedented vision of
the living conditions of African Americans 37 years
after emancipation, and chose to put together a
most factual representation of them. Statistics on ed-
ucation, property, mortality, poverty were translated
into hand-colored artistic graphics of surprising
and unexpected shapes which enabled the visuali-
zation of the spectacular “progress” made by Afri-
can Americans within the span of a few decades.
Du Bois gave the audience food for thought and
cleverly placed the social sciences at the heart of a Fig.1
counter-photographic project. The exhibition was
also accompanied by hundreds of photos, including
monochromatic portraits and photographs of Black
people going about their daily lives, a collection of
newspapers, 200 books written by Black people as
well as a bibliography of 1,400 titles and 350 patents
filed by Black scientists.
Despite the bold quality of Du Bois’ design, we
ought to trace back the root of the presence of the
U.S. Black delegation to understand the political
aims of the project. The creation of the exhibit was
the result of a collective effort at the behest of the
educator, entrepreneur, and founder of the Tuske-
gee Institute, Booker T. Washington, an advocate
for the development and economic emancipation
of Black people through work and industry, rather
than through the fight for civil and social rights. His
active lobbying for a separate exhibition devoted to
African Americans led to the appointment of Thom-
as J. Calloway, a lawyer who was (tellingly) working
for the U.S. Department of War, to set up the project.
“Calloway argued, the current European invasion
into Africa (as represented by the Fashoda Incident
and the Boer War) would only bring European and
African peoples into closer proximity. America, es-
pecially as exemplified in the achievements, could
furnish Europe with such ‘evidences’ of the Negro’s
DECENTERING THE U.S. 33
 value as a laborer, a producer, and a citizen that
the statecraft of the Old World will be wiser in
the shaping of its African policies. Second, the
progress and development of ten million former
slaves in thirty-five years would silence criticism
of America’s presence in the Philippines, Cuba, and
other nations where there were dark-skinned peo-
ple. In other words, the American Negro Exhibit
was tantamount to a justification for American im-
perialism and speaks volumes about the accommo-
dationist and assimilationist rhetoric at the heart of
the exhibition.” (Marcus Bruce, “The New Negro in
Paris,” in T. Stovall, T. D. Sharpley-Whiting, and T.
D. Keaton (eds), Black France / France Noire, 2012.)
People colonized by Europeans, subjected in par-
ticular to the various human zoos regularly set up
during the World Fairs, did not enjoy the same kind
of agency that year. In the colonial group of Paris’s
Trocadéro, each colony (Sudan, Dahomey, Marti-
nique, Guadeloupe, etc.) was represented through
its buildings, products, plantations and... inhabit-
ants, including a living diorama of Madagascar (as
general Galliéni was ending a colonial war there
and a bloody repression); a type of representation
that justified their subjugation under the guise of
civilizing them. The advancement, progress, and
Fig.2
34
perfectibility paradigm bolstered a eurocentric,
evolutionist conception of Blackness that positioned
other Blacknesses as uncivilized, waiting to be con-
quered thus rationalizing colonial domination. The
U.S. Black diaspora secured its place as the most
modern one globally through an explicitly expan-
sionist and imperialist agenda. The idea of the most
advanced diaspora is identical to the “évolués” (the
“evolved” ones) category applied in colonial territo-
ries; it does single out a class of people amongst the
subaltern, of which the center can profit while it
keeps expanding.
Cultural Battleground ///
The regime of the exhibition engenders the con-
stant desire to respond, to correct, to amend. This
impulse to resist dehumanization by controlling
and mastering the production of one’s own image,
representation and public narrative had made Fred-
erick Douglass the most photographed American of
the 19th century. In captivity, the defeated King of
Dahomey Behanzin appropriated little by little photo
sessions (for which he was forced to sit), in order
to regain dignity and agency. The underlying idea Fig.3
behind these dynamics is that the relevant response
to systemic violence and domination produced by Black crew founded in the late 1970s—when asked French Black Panthers were die-hard fans of Black
regimes of representation turns out to be organiz- about their fascination with the United States. The rock’n’roll from the 1950s, and their concrete activ-
ing, creating and massively disseminating our own American Dream has a specific way of resonating ism was a reaction to the French anti-Blackness of
representation. Yet, it also entails submitting to the with Black people: it creates and fosters the de- the Rebels, a white crew whose members sported
regime of proof, to the neverending escalation in sire to migrate, to move and settle over there or at the dixie flag. They were fighting each other in a
proving to the dominant group the value and the least the desire to mimic, emulate—a desire built on foreign language and with U.S. references.
possibility of redemption for Black people according clashing, contradictory elements.
to white criteria. The idea of a resistance embed- Indeed, to fully grasp the extent of the cultural clout
ded in the refusal of exposure, of the image, of the In spite of its authenticity, African American cultur- of U.S. Blackness, we can focus on a most peculiar
spectacle, in absconding from this mechanism to al and creative vitality is central to the apparatus and telling semantic shift: in everyday conversation,
the margin existed—a number of colonial photos of standardized production manufactured in the ser- the English word “Black” came to replace at some
testify to this—but this seemed like a fight in vain in vice of capitalist domination. What starts as a local point the French word “Noir” to talk about Black
the face of the fast-paced industrial development of trend, emerging organically from living conditions people. This shift from “les Noirs” to “les Blacks”
photography as a weapon of domination. and very specific social contexts turns into an artis- occurred in the late 1970s and 1980s, with the
tic phenomenon prescribed to the whole world. development of disco, funk, and hip-hop culture in
In the wake of World War II, the United States France. Its use culminated after the French foot-
emerged as an economic superpower and domesti- ball team’s victory at the 1998 World Cup, the vapid
cally saw the breathtaking development of a con- Even if appropriation, catchphrase “Black-Blanc-Beur” encapsulating the
sumer society. The emergence of a youth class sped reinterpretation, and thus spirit of a winning multicultural team (devoid of
up the rise of pop culture, of cultural products made any Asian presence), as much as the illusion of a
for mass consumption through movie and musical creolization, is obviously bound to pacified and proudly diverse nation, in which all ra-
icons notably. This trend spread throughout the cial tensions had been resolved overnight. Why the
West, promoting a triumphant vision of the Ameri-
happen in the process of reception, use of English then? What kind of distance does this
can way of life. “That’s what we get to see, what we the result is still a move towards a create? What kind of derealization does this bring
love is the image of the U.S. that we get. Are there about for Black people here? “Black” was a linguis-
any little Blackos in France who wouldn’t dream of global, homogenous Black culture tic import linked to the new, youth culture coming
being American?” was the answer of Grand Jack, a
founding member of Black Panthers in France (the
disproportionately informed by from the U.S.: the word itself and the people to
whom it referred were cooler, more modern, more
name was kept in English)—a pioneer antifascist African American culture. palatable, less threatening. Concurrently,
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41 DECENTERING THE U.S. 35
in 1980s France, anti-Black violence was rampant
and grassroot, autonomous anti-racist struggles
were being brazenly and patronizingly appropriated
and rebranded by the Socialist Party. This linguistic
erasure relegated us to a kind of non-existence, a
non-space, to a paradoxical state of invisibility and
symbolic displacement.
New technologies like television, and later the
internet played a major part in this dynamic and
forcibly enrolled us in the wrong war: we were
craving to see reflections of ourselves. For decades
in France, Black representation was so messed
up that one would welcome and praise any Black
character or artist who would appear on the screen.
Unsurprisingly, they were mostly appearing in
U.S. productions, movies, or tv shows. Our expecta-
tions, as Black people living in France, were very
low. Generations after generations we have been
programmed to desire a confused mix of so-called
“America” and “Black America.” Original sins, beau-
tiful nonetheless, such as music, dance, and sports
became the systematic tool of a cultural imperialism
that was both alienating and liberating for us.
Hip hop is a case in point. In contemporary history,
the hip-hop show hosted on French TV by Sidney is
an essential and inescapable milestone. Sidney Du-
teil was the first Black TV show host in France and,
while he was spreading the Gospel of a complex,
rich culture, what he offered was the image of a
funny, slightly clownish Black man, reminiscent of
Joséphine Baker. Consequently, he quickly became
the object of caricature. The fact that it was the first
TV show in the world dedicated to hip hop—it did
not even exist in the U.S., the very cradle of this
culture—illustrates the kind of reassuring and mol-
lified dynamics between France and the U.S. as far
as U.S. Black culture is concerned. Furthermore, the
TV channel’s cancellation of the show, after it had
been on air for less than a year, demonstrates how
trends are just that: exciting and disposable.
Zouk and reggae, two musical genres coming from
the Caribbean, never benefited from the same kind
of exposure in the media despite being an unprec-
edented global phenomenon. But zouk was direct-
ly connected to French colonial history and here
probably lies the problem. When in 1980, the Guade-
loupean band Kassav’ was singing “lagé mwen,” a
colonial helmet featured on the album cover, it was
difficult for French media to get past the confron-
tational stance. Hip-hop seemed like a fresh, young,
brand new culture coming from a nation that was,
most of the times, not understood as colonial and
born out of genocide.
36
Deferred Struggles /// During the movement, the victims’ families (with the strongest generates this kind of
the notable exception of Assa Traoré, Adama
In the protests following the murder of George Floyd Traoré’s sister) were strictly kept out of the media flawed moment that ultimately does
we witnessed an impressive international show of
Black solidarity and questioning of global anti-Black-
spotlight in favor of so-called experts or star activ-
ists called upon to talk about racism and engage
nothing to harm the coloniality of the
ness. Yet, many occurrences of imitation were trou- in the fruitless, pointless effort of comparing the French state.
bling. The massive reenacting of Colin Kaepernick’s levels of racism between France and the U.S.. Of
famous protest gesture (an unambiguous expression course, the Afro-descendant populations, heirs of Furthermore, this simplistic binary cartography of
of a visual culture that was invasive down to bodily French slavery (from Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, the Atlantic world blithely ignores the reality of a
expression) was a significant example of that. The Guiana, Reunion), are never invited to this ‘game,’ country like Brazil, where about 40 to 45% of de-
demonstrators, a majority of Black and non-white whereas the condition of Afro-descendants in the ported Africans were sent: most Black people living
young people, were rallying under the slogan “Black U.S. derives from the same type of trajectory, name- in France would be incapable of naming Brazilian
Lives Matter” (in English), and were most of the ly, kidnapping and deportation. The fact that these victims of state violence even though the annual
time demanding justice for George Floyd without populations were deported to territories far from numbers are staggering.
really learning the name of the many people killed the colonial metropolis allows their erasure. The at-
by French police year after year, whose family and tack in Martinique against two statues of abolitionist The complexity of Afro-diasporic lives suffers
friends were still waiting for the justice system to Victor Schœlcher, a symbol of the abolitionist tale, from the acceleration of the absolutist influence of
show a modicum of respect to them ; except for which had preceded the worlwide wave of protest the United States especially through social media
Adama Traoré, THE french victim. These instanc- following Floyd’s murder was never mentioned. platforms. It is thus extremely difficult to resist the
es of mimicry left the French police state relatively injunctions of the news cycle, the economy of atten-
unscathed since neither neo-colonial politics in Africa, tion, language, concepts, epistemologies sweeping
nor criminal European migration policies killing That the United States should be through virtual highways and crushing everything
Black Africans on a daily basis, or the imprisonment deemed both the poison and the in their path. No matter how accurate and apt they
of migrants in immigration detention centers were may be, the theories, concepts, etc. forged elsewhere
included on this conversation about global anti-Black- antidote, that is to say the space will never have the foundation and the relevance
ness, despite them being the most radical expressions of the material built from a strong connection with
of disdain for Black lives.
where racism, white supremacy are ground work, the struggles, and dialogue, which
supposedly the most brutal and the establish a power relationship. The adoption of
A lot of people took this opportunity to deploy an concepts by way of translation, with the U.S. source
anti-racist paradigm grounded in liberalism, asking place where the resistances are being wielded as an argument of authority (as if
for more inclusivity in the name of citizenship, to the the work of conflicting creativity in situ could be
power-structure of the French nation-state —to hell
with the non-citizens! Some capitalist or institutional
structures issued solemn statements or promised to
donate money. A fashion magazine we had never
heard of even announced on social media that they
would be giving Cases Rebelles a certain amount of
money without getting in touch with us first... In fact,
over the last few years we had to refuse several times
to participate in some events organized by activists,
but funded through capitalist channels—the organiz-
ers did not seem to have a problem with this, nor felt
the need to warn us beforehand. Connections with the
United States have undeniably normalized collusion
with capitalism. The past years, the microfocus on on-
line agitation and the mainstream media coupled with
the culture of representation, happening, individual
promotion, star activism made a highly visible me-
dia-compatible intelligentsia rise to fame, while con-
solidating our powerlessness, our inability to disturb,
start strikes, blockades, occupations, etc. It is hardly a
surprise since those are dynamics closer to branding
and career development than to time-tested modes of
organizing in the traditional labor movement, in the
autonomous immigration movements or the anti-im-
perialist organizations/pro-independence movements. Fig.4
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41 DECENTERING THE U.S. 37
sidestepped), leads thought into a dead end and
generates incomplete understandings. As far as the
academic world is concerned, the U.S. university is
also a juggernaut. Its centripetal force stems from
its economic power, its ability to digest counter-dis-
courses, to cultivate avant-garde knowledge and to
welcome radical thinkers within it, thus attracting
students and researchers from all over the Black
diaspora. France is no exception. Attending a U.S.
university is often a necessary step in an academic
career. Also, while the past decade has witnessed
some changes, we still hear many stories of students
who have to go to North America to work on topics
related to Black communities. This ability to draw
people in is also unfortunately a facet of the U.S. soft
power and all the solemn land acknowledgments
about occupying unceded Indigenous can’t change
the fact that the settler colonial project is being rein-
forced in the end.
As the academy is a locus of power, the outflow of
students and professors to U.S. universities undeni-
ably prevents struggles on the ground from being
waged from within against the stiffness of French
institutions and plays on the power relationship
there—or lack thereof. Black Studies or Ethnic
Studies in the U.S. were institutionalized through
struggles led by students parallel to the Civil Rights
movement and the Black Power movement. It was
articulated to a demand from the communities
themselves. The dynamic is significantly different
in France. The critical tools and thoughts forged by
Black people are often discredited here, the subject
of gross caricature, suspicion (as a U.S. import),
when they are not outright ignored. If these con-
cepts and theoretical tools do enter the French
university, they are sometimes misunderstood
altogether. Moreover, they are often latched on by
white researchers who already occupy a comforta-
ble position in the academy. We witness therefore a
depoliticized appropriation-transmission, which is
done in a radically vertical way and simultaneous-
ly a deterritorialization of knowledge, cut off from
subaltern communities and activist spheres.
In Praise of Radical Diasporism ///
Against the crushing power of the nation-state and
the exclusionary politics of citizenship, we believe in
radical diasporism and transnational connections. Our
fate, as people of Black African descent, dispersed
time and time again in the world through deportation
and exile, must be used as a tool to disrupt the power
that the state, its representatives, and its armed wing
continuously exercise on individuals.
38
The focus on U.S. Blackness creates
a simplistic bipolar dynamic that
constitutes a breach in Panafrica.
French coloniality unfolds in many situations that
the parallel with the United States makes invisible.
Moreover, as people living in France, we must not
only fight against what affects us, but also fight
the actions of our so-called elected representatives
and France-based companies that affect many
other populations, against their imperialist power
to cause great harm. France still owns colonies
such as Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guiana, Réunion,
etc. where descendants of slaves and indentured
workers live and are owed justice, reparations, and
independence. Its policy of conquest goes on since
it recently annexed the island of Mayotte, stolen
away from Comoros and has been sabotaging the
decolonization process in Kanaky, which finds itself
facing typical settler colonial endurance.
Fig.5
As far as historical justice is concerned, France
was never held accountable for numerous colo-
nial massacres and crimes against humanity in
Saint-Domingue, for the Voulet-Chanoine mission These are the circumstances, the
in Tchad, in Algeria, Thiaroye, Madagascar, Came-
roon are but a few examples. France’s steadfast sup- people against whom we can act.
port of authoritarian regimes made it complicit with
the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda. Its ecocidal
Stories we need to know. Battles we
policies stretch from Guadeloupe, Martinique, Poly- have to fight. Doggedly turning our
nesia to its domestic nomadic populations submitted
to systemic environmental racism.
gaze towards the U.S. means averting
our eyes from Africa, its complexities
French imperialism is also evident in its military
presence in Africa and all of its Françafrique policy and the battles to be fought there.
on which a political organization like Survie has
been doing outstanding work for decades—an We have to constantly rethink the dynamics of iden-
organization that doesn’t draw a lot of Black peo- tification and solidarity with other populations in
ple’s attention. France is also the third biggest arms order to become truly threatening diasporas for all
exporter in the world, which makes it an active our local power-structures, from here to the Unit-
participant in all the ensuing slaughters and blood- ed States, but also to the Congo, Senegal,the Ivory
shed. A staunch internationalism must make this Coast, Brazil, Sudan, or Guadeloupe, and many
reality unacceptable to us and keep us away from other places. It is a broad but imperative fight. ■
all narrow, petty demands for inclusion, representa-
tion or diversity. Companies like Bolloré, Bouygues, Collectif Cases Rebelles is a France-based, anti-authoritarian,
or Total have been involved for decades in collusion panafrorevolutionary, Black political collective fighting
with authoritarian regimes. against all forms of oppression. On their website, they publish
a monthly podcast, political essays, interviews, reviews and
articles on Black cultures and struggles across the world. Fig.1 & 2 Charts and graphs showing the condition of African Americans at the turn
In 2017, they wrote 100 portraits contre l’état policier, and in of the century exhibited at the 1900 Paris Exposition. / Material prepared by W.E.B
2018, they released the film Dire à Lamine. They also edited Du Bois.
Fig.3 Let’s Break, by Sidney, 12”, 45 RPM, Maxi-Single, released in 1984.
and translated the first French translation of Assata: An Photo by Cases Rebelles.
Autobiography by Assata Shakur (PMN, 2018). In 2020, they Fig.4 & 5 Victims of state violence drawn by Xonanji, member of Cases Rebelles for
launched their small press. their book 100 Portraits contre l’État policier, 2017.
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41 DECENTERING THE U.S. 39
 JOURNEY FROM “THE CENTER
OF THE WORLD”: ON U.S.
EXCEPTIONALISM AND DISGUST
ZOÉ SAMUDZI
With this new contribution by Zoé Samudzi, we continue the
dialogue we have been loving having with her for the past few
years. Writing from the United States itself, she analyzes the
logics and psyche of the particular form of U.S. exceptionalism
that a leftist critique solely focused on U.S. imperialism
produces. In doing so, she shows us how adoration and disgust
of the U.S. are the two sides of the same Americentric coin.
The ending of the Cold War, the collapse (and defeat)
of the Soviet Union (and so, in a way, communist
statecraft), brought about a relative unipolarity of
political power. The years that followed were shaped
by theorists and pundits scrambling to forecast the
political epoch that would fill the vacuum previously
inhabited by tense superpower conflict. Validly crit-
icized for a laundry list of reasons, Francis Fukuy-
ama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992)
claimed that Western liberal democracy was the
“end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution,” and
that its “universalization” would be “the final form of
human government.” Four years later and in direct
response to his former student, Samuel P. Hunting-
ton advanced his Kulturekampf-ian theory of civili-
zational clash: that the post-Cold War political arena
would be defined by cultural conflict, represented in
their highest developmental form by the civilization.
Per his thesis, Western civilization, naturally led by
the United States, would be increasingly at odds with
the rest of the world cordoned into civilizational clus-
ters. Major contestations (clashes) would come from
“Sinic” civilizations (i.e. China), and threats presented
by increasingly destabilizing fundamentalist Islam.
In “The Clash of Ignorance,” an essay published after
the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Edward Said
rightfully criticized Huntington’s central implication
that it is necessary to strengthen the United States
such that it sufficiently eliminates any challenge that
might undermine its naturalized claim to unfettered
hegemonic power.
This thesis of civilizational clash, Said writes, is far
more a justification for and reinforcement of jin-
goism than an analytic that offers any real insight
into the global interdependence of allegedly discrete
civilizational entities and the temporalities in which
40
they are allegedly situated (e.g. the oft repeated be-
lief in the antithesis between Islam and modernity).
Most left analyses in the United States fortunately
do not generally take cues from the kind of Orien-
talism, xenophobia, and perpetual preparation for
war that constitutes its foreign policy. But they are
nevertheless entangled in U.S. exceptionalisms of
another kind.
Traditionally, U.S. exceptionalism is defined by
perceptions of the uniqueness of the U.S.’s political
system and culture stemming from a distinct collec-
tion of liberal humanist ideologies emerging after
the renegade breakaway colony’s revolutionary war
for independence from a tyrannical British crown.
This definition, per the mythos, entitles and even
demands that the U.S. duly inhabits a unique role
as global moral-political arbiter no matter the cost
to the many peoples upon whom U.S.-style “democ-
racy” is being and has been bestowed. Parodic and
rejectable as this position and imposition may be,
its attendant complementary parts are particular-
ly commonplace in many spaces where this crass
justification for the matrix of brutalities known as
nation-building—referring to some combination of
diplomatic alienation, neoliberal economic policy,
military intervention, and/or political sanctions—is
not so acceptable.
As U.S. citizens, or at least people
living within the boundaries of the U.S.
empire, our most readily accessible
set of political associations are those
crafted within and by its borders, and but it is often a rendering of the phenomenon that These impositions of U.S. social and political phe-
can fail to move beyond an anti-blackness structured nomenologies enable a particular overdetermination
so are immediately recognizable to us. by trans-Atlantic slavery: one that can often neglects of global politics through those U.S. frames. Racism,
structuring of Blackness on the African continent for example, is broadly constituted (i.e. internation-
Despite how this analysis might potentially be ahis- (including Blackness in relation to the trans-Saha- ally dispersed and territorialized via Euroamerican
torical, we, for example, tend to export or analogize ran slave trade), as well as in the Pacific, whether and the racializing structures and hierarchies of
domestic patterns of racial formation or state politics Aboriginal Australian or Indonesia-occupied West other modes of colonial domination) but still geospe-
to make sense of racecraft or other political events Papua or other Melanesian people who self-identify cific in its epidermalization of criminalizing patholo-
abroad. “Anti-blackness is global” goes one maxim, as Black and have been racialized thusly. gies, allocations of resources, and even designations
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41 DECENTERING THE U.S. 41
of humanity itself. Because of the particularities of
these processes, as well as their temporal shifts (e.g.
certain ethnicities and nationalities migrating to
the United States and “becoming” white), it stands
that the U.S.’s racial assemblage cannot and should
not be globally universalizible despite its analyti-
cal functionality. But the explanatory power of a
social-political framework is not and should not be
to ascribe a universality. Because if racecraft is in-
timately tethered to a geography and the material-
ities therein, then it is, more forcefully, nonsensical
to attempt to globalize this frame despite commonal-
ities that may emerge elsewhere. This political over-
reliance, a particular fixation on this frame and all
it has structured domestically, also exists in another
form: as a kind of adamant disavowal.
In her book The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004),
Sara Ahmed writes about disgust noting that it “brings
the body perilously close to an object only then to
pull away from the object in the registering of the
proximity as an offense.” In other words, a pendulat-
ed response to classic U.S. exceptionalism is to reasona-
bly conceptualize the U.S.’s unnecessary and excessive
political overextension as racist, colonial, and unethi-
cal. The pendulum swings to the seemingly opposite
end: a new overdetermination of political phenomenon
or outcome that centralizes the primary badness of
the U.S. government no matter the location of the
conflict or political crisis and other players involved.
Even as disgust reasonably manifests as rejection,
an ambiguity is produced that further mystifies the
object of the strong feelings that are elicited. Ahmed
writes that this “ambiguity relates to the necessity of
the designation of that which is threatening”: that a
border has to be disturbed in order to be maintained.
Paradoxically, then, the stronger the disgust, the more
emphatic this border: despite the international perva-
siveness of U.S. imperial involvements, its interests and
participation becomes a central starting point for
the synthesis of any global conflict.
A politics animated by this disdain alone, no mat-
ter its political saliency, is not an anti-imperialist
position in itself. In fact, a reactionary and almost
singularly Americentric anti-imperialism that quick-
ly centers U.S. culpability to the exclusion of other
violent nation-state wrongdoers is, itself, a variation
of U.S. exceptionalism.
“The U.S. is the worst” bears little
functional difference to “the U.S.
is the best” in its attribution of
omnipotence and omnipresence.
42
In his critique of famed linguist and political theo-
rist Noam Chomsky, Syrian writer and former po-
litical prisoner Yassin al-Haj Saleh took aim at what
he described as Chomsky’s analogical treatment of
“a provincial Americentrism [as] a sort of theolo-
gy, where the U.S. occupies the pale of God, albeit
a malign one, the only mover and shaker.” This is
a perspective, al-Haj Saleh continues, that “tends
systematically to minimize the crime of states that
are opposed to the U.S.” as though opposition to the
U.S. constitutes its own anti-coloniality: as though
there cannot be civilian opposition to a national
government in absentia of the U.S.’s agitation of
existent (or non-existent) political unrest; as though
a people’s own government cannot act brutally or
reprehensibly without NATO’s intervention serving
as the only viably de-escalating political strategy;
as though Lenin’s century-old definition of impe-
rialism can sufficiently contend with geopolitical
machinations and transformations in the present.
Kenyan scholar-critic Keguro Macharia recently
tweeted that “war swallows imagination”: that “what
has become…unbearable or less bearable, unsayable
or less sayable, undoable or less doable because of
what war—past and present—teaches us to imagine
and unimagine.”
Macharia’s evergreen provocation came two weeks
after Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, a military
overture whose historical foundations have been
heavily eclipsed in the U.S. by the intermingling of
Cold War echoes. In many ways, the U.S. has, not
wrongfully, come to be synonymic with a global
military imaginary. For the majority of the world,
it exists as the superpower that drives a geopoliti-
cal agenda that forcefully furthers its own political
and economic interests (put lightly) and possesses
a disproportionately large arsenal of weaponry
including a huge nuclear arsenal that it has twice
utilized in a show of unnecessary war-ending (and
Cold War-commencing) might. On the day that
Russia began its invasion, the Transnational Social
Strike, an online political platform for global soli-
darity-building, usefully called on us to reject the
binaristic and always seductive calls of nationalism
that compel support for either “Russian imperial-
ism or with NATO expansionism.” Both forces, they
write, weaponize borders and exploit the vulnera-
bilities of certain kinds of migrants and refugees
while selectively protecting others.
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41
And yet, militarism and imperial
imaginaries exist beyond (and
sometimes in antagonistic relation to)
the U.S.’s own aspirations, even in the
globalization of its politics.
Drawing on Zygmaunt Bauman’s idea of “liquid mo-
dernity”—a continuation of the political conditions
of modernity rather than a rupture and transition
into a successor era of postmodernity—al-Haj Saleh
describes the Syrian political situation since 2011 as
one of “liquid imperialism.” Rather than the classical
frame of one imperial power dominating some other
state, there are five relatively powerful states with
varied global reaches (Russia, Iran, Israel, Saudi
Arabia, and, of course, the U.S.) operating with-
in a single relatively small country, as well as the
presence of aspiring imperialists with neither state
nor empire among many other forces. This liquid
imperialism, too, offers an opportunity for critical
expanse: for time and space-specific considerations
of popular uprising and the specific histories of the
Syrian state’s dynastic leadership, as well as the
ideologies and political machinations of a given ag-
gressor state beyond nostalgias and official histories
that pinion actions and rhetorics to the long-missed
mid-century moments of global decolonization.
Complementary to the borders reinscribed by dis-
gust, Ahmed describes the ambivalence of hatred—
its affective bedfellow—by “consider[ing] hatred as
a form of intimacy.” As is obviously the case with
living in an empire whose entrenchment and ten-
drilic reach can feel inescapable, this hyper-focused
disdain inadvertently reveals an investment in a
concept not rooted in a desire for it, but related to
the aforementioned stunting of the political imagi-
nary of war. While it undoubtedly aspires towards
an end to U.S. hegemony, what would the contours
of an Americentric anti-imperialist imaginary look
like in the absence of the entity that coheres it?
This deployment of and reliance on the familiar
yields a legibility that engenders a political solidarity
by making conflict recognizable. But it is a qualified
solidarity predicated on, to quote Édouard Glissant,
a “transparency aimed at ‘grasping’”—a solidarity
proceeding through “a gesture of enclosure” that
DECENTERING THE U.S.
may, in fact, reject consideration of the political
trajectories and materialities of the place in question.
This overextension of U.S. frames, the chauvinistic
transmutation of some Other into one’s own familiar
image, has, per Glissant, resulted from “the worst
pretensions and the greatest magnanimities on the
part of the West.”
Beyond a clinging to versions of the exceptionalism
it purports to reject, this Americentric anti-imperial-
ism nurtures a political incuriousness that actively
undercuts the possibilities for sustained and multi-
plicitous political solidarities on people’s own terms.
Instead, we can approach geopolitics from more
dynamic and varied analytical starting points. Al-
though billions of U.S. citizens’ tax dollars sustain the
Israeli security apparatus, our prefabricated opinions
on the viability of a one- or two-state solution matter
far less than attending to the diversity of politics ar-
ticulated by the Palestinian communities and political
formations that have been dispossessed and subjugat-
ed by Israeli settler colonialism since the beginning
of the ongoing Nakba. Similarly, there are an array
of leftists in the Ukraine and the former Soviet Union
whose simultaneous considerations and critiques
of Russian statecraft and European intergovern-
mental organizations ought to be far more than
footnotes in our own attempts to understand Putin’s
regional aspirations. Protests in West Papua cannot
be approached primarily through concerns about
U.S. military incursions in the South China Sea, but
rather also through a recognition of ongoing Pap-
uan struggles for sovereignty and self-determination
against Indonesia’s colonial military occupation and
the preceding structuring violence of Dutch impe-
rialism. There are scores of other struggles across
the globe that become less legible if we are not able
to easily situate them in relation to U.S. interests,
and memorizing them all is an unwieldy possibility.
But the least we might do in learning about these
struggles is to assume that the United States does not
inhabit the centers of their worlds in the same way
that it is the center of ours. ■
Zoé Samudzi is a writer and an associate editor of Parapraxis
Magazine. She is a Research Associate at the Center for
the Study of Race, Gender, and Class at the University of
Johannesburg, and she researches German colonialism and
the Ovaherero and Nama and San genocide. She was the guest
editor-in-chief of The Funambulist 37 (Sep-Oct. 2021) Against
Genocide.
43
 THE WEIGHT WORDS CARRY:
ON “BROWN,” “BIPOC,” AND
OTHER TRANSFUSED LABELS
SINTHUJAN VARATHARAJAH
As many of our regular readers can observe, we cannot get
enough of Sinthujan Varatharajah’s words in the magazine—
provided that we are able to ask them a different question
each time. In this specific contribution, they address the
unquestioned transfusion of U.S.-forged labels, namely
“brown,” and “BIPOC” (Black, Indigenous, and people of color),
and their failure to aptly and usefully describe the political
reality of other contexts— in Sinthujan’s case, Germany.
One day, I found myself in the midst of a space
that was designed as a “brown space.” It was spe-
cifically designed for people who were considered
from the region usually named “South Asia.” Most
of us who were present were to different degrees
brown-skinned. Some others, however, were rath-
er beige-skinned, calling into question different
understandings of what “brown” really means for
different people, in different places and different
times. Depending on our place of origin in the large
region stretching from the Indian Ocean all the
way to the Himalayan region, our melanin levels
differed vastly. These differences didn’t seem to
matter in this space though and how it was political-
ly and geographically framed. We were supposedly
all “brown” here. This communality was more than
just a political idea, it also translated into a feeling.
At first glance most people seemed cheerful and
happy to see one another here, in a white European
country.
Despite looking, at least to my eye,
greatly different, most of us sat
there, unified by an idea of not just
being from a particular region of this
Earth, but also of sharing a particular
identity and culture in the West.
All of it was summarized by the term: brown.
This “brown space” was part of a larger queer event
in Berlin. This event was specifically addressing
44
what they called “queer BIPOCs” (the label was kept
and pronounced in English). It was an event for
people who collectively yearned to create a safer
community space for people who didn’t just share
queerness, but also non-whiteness. The latter was
summarized under an English-language acronym
that was foreign to the country the event was tak-
ing place in: BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and peo-
ple of color). The term originates from the settler
colonial and post-plantation/enslavement context of
the United States, but has been used by racialized
activists for the last few years in Germany, too. While
it was first imported as POC (people of color), and
shyly made its way into the anti-racist vernacular
of the country in the mid 2010s, it grew into BPOC
shortly after, adding on the “B” for “Black,” when
anti-Blackness was given more prominence in local
anti-racist debates (similary shaped by discourses in
the United States). In 2019 finally, the “I” for “Indig-
enous” miraculously arrived in Germany, too. How
precisely wasn’t really clear to me, since there was
no similar event that was covered in German media
on an Indigenous people-related issue in the U.S. at
the time. And yet it was somehow here. Within a few
years, the term wasn’t just used by a finge segment
of anti-racist activists, but had to a certain degree at
least even been successfully mainstreamed, so much
so that some white Germans even use it today.
By way of it, it didn’t just mirror the evolution of the
terms in the United States to address a U.S.-centric
lived reality, but mimicked it somewhere else. In oth-
er words, the adjustment was made towards realities
that were specific to the United States, not Germany.
These two countries however not only differ in their
specific historic context, but also in their languages,
cultures, economics, and demographics. So how does
a U.S. term live on outside its place of origin?
B | What Black means in Germany and Europe is
commonly undisputed. It mainly refers to people
of African descent, grouping millions of people of
vast cultures, histories and areas under a single
term on the premise of descendance from a shared Fig.1
continent. The fault lines however become palpable
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41 DECENTERING THE U.S. 45
when a melanin-rich person of non-African descent
comes into the picture. It also runs into tensions
when non-Black North Africans claim Blackness
by way of their shared geographic claims to the
African Continent. However, since Germany is very
scarce in melanin, potential ruptures as such rarely
occur in the public realm, and never in such ways
that they lead to a wider public reckoning of the
limits and trappings of these colonial vocabularies.
I | Indigenous is an umbrella term which, in the
United States and the wider Americas, refers to
populations and nations that lived on the continent
prior to the arrival of European settlers. It is a de-
scriptor that speaks towards a relationship towards
land and time. However, with time, it has also
become an active identity marker that unites differ-
ent Indigenous nations in their struggles against
European settler colonialism. But can indigeneity
function without further explanation outside of that
specific land and history it refers to? Particularly
outside a traditional/known settler colonial context?
And outside of the Americas?
Although settler colonialism and indigeneity are not
unique to the Americas, the way the term has been
established in the English language is in reference
to different phases of colonization in the Americas.
But how is it measured, demarcated, and named
elsewhere? Can there be other claims to the same
word in the same language from other people in
different places of the world too? How much mean-
ing can a single word carry?
Furthermore, if we use Indigenous as a synonym
for a racialized person, what happens to Indigenous
people who are “white-looking” (in our eyes), like
the Sami people in Northern Europe? In Germany,
for instance, there are currently five ethnic minor-
ity groups who are legally considered Indigenous
communities with specific legislative rights: Danes,
Frieses, German Sinti and Roma, as well as Sorbs.
Besides Sinti and Roma, they are globally speaking
all considered as white (by non-whites). Are they
only locally Indigenous? Or can they be considered
Indigenous at a global scale too? The issue becomes
even more complex when in different parts of
Europe, the concept of indigeneity is appropriated
by fascist individuals, groups, and organizations
vis-a-vis non-white refugees and immigrants to
stoke fears of “white genocides” and “population
replacement.” In Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Myan-
mar, similarly, the concept of indigeneity has been
appropriated by majoritarian populations to assert
supremacist systems of laws and governance.
46
POC | In the United States, the label POC is used for
people who are neither Black nor Indigenous. This
includes a wide range of people who trace roots in
places that are neither in Africa or Europe. Unless
they are descendants of white settlers from South
America who falsely claim to be people of color in
the U.S., POC are usually phenotypically differentia-
ble from people of European descent.
The term “people of color,” however,
is vague and includes millions of
people whose geographies, histories
and cultures are so vastly different
that it begs the question of the
usefulness and complicities we
partake in when flattening such vastly
diverse populations by throwing them
all within the same category—not
for better analysis, but for ease in
speech.
POC isn’t a static term. The color line in the United
States has become blurrier since the September 11,
2001 attacks, and the rise of Islamophobia there.
This, in turn, led to different West Asian and North
African groups questioning their positions in the
racial order of the European settler colony. The for-
mer had traditionally been considered as white by
racist United States immigration and civil laws and,
as such, had enjoyed privileged access and mobility
in compared to groups that were considered non-
white, in particular Black descendants of enslaved
people and Indigenous people. Since 9/11 and the
rise of attacks against Muslims in the United States,
however, they have started arguing for a separate
census category, trying to make sense of their new
social and political reality by distancing themselves
from whiteness and entering and claiming a posi-
tion within the vague category of people of color.
This movement doesn’t come without consequences.
It shifts not only the position of concerned groups,
but also that of all others, including those who now
have to ‘make space’ within the large category of
people of color.
In Germany, POC is used in a similar way than in
the U.S.. Bluntly put, it includes anyone who is not
of African and European descent. Since the largest Fig.2
non-ethnic German groups today comprise populations
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41 DECENTERING THE U.S. 47
from in and around the Mediterranean and other
parts of West Asia, the term person of color is also
mainly claimed, used, and occupied in Germany by
people from these regions: people who actually lack
what color is made of, i.e. melanin. Most racialized
people in Germany are in fact racialized rather by
their hair color than any difference in skin tone to
Europeans. This roots back in how understandings
of race and whiteness are still deeply tied to Nazi
beliefs in Aryanness. In practical terms this means
that, in Germany, the term people of hair color
would be a more apt descriptor of the dominant
demographic groups besides ethnic Germans.
This lack of nuance and shift in subjects has a lot
to do with the actual quality of racial diversity in
Germany. The country is, in fact, rather ethnically
diverse than racially. Yet, in its own insularity, it
mistakes its ethnic diversity as racial diversity. This
means that phenotypical differences are usually
discussed on a rather small provincial scale. The
pace of racial discussions in Germany thus often
lacks depth, nuance, and geographic scope. It is
slow and incredibly limited, thus even more depend-
ent on contexts, where an actual racial diversity
exists and creates rich bodies of knowledge and
work. These then get borrowed, or rather stolen, to
be transplanted in contexts where they do not make
sense unless you bend them until they make sense.
Another significant difference is that non-whiteness
in Germany is often confused with non-ethnic Ger-
manness. This opens pathways for other European
minorities, such as Poles, Albanians, Greeks, and
others to make claims to being part of the wider
spectrum of POC here, as it sometimes happens
here. It is even considered a plausible argument by
some, confirming the quality of discussions within
the country’s wider society.
In Germany, BIPOC has within a short period of
time become a widely used way of framing and
articulating racial inequalities. But, critically, it has
actively morphed into becoming an identity marker
that substitutes and overwrites other pre-existing
identities, such as ethnic, cultural, religious, and
other identity markers. This has arguably taken
much faster and intense roots anin German-speak-
ing contexts, such as in Germany, Switzerland, and
Austria, than in different English-speaking contexts.
Much of it has to do with language: the fact that the
acronym BIPOC doesn’t just have a foreign origin,
but is also used in a local language with a foreign
word.Itisn’tpronouncedas[beːˈˈiːˈpeːˈoːˈtseː],using
the local pronunciation of letters, but as [bi:aɪ:pi:oʊ:si:]
the U.S. English one.
48
Using words in a foreign language,
particularly (U.S.) English as the
result of U.S. political and cultural
imperialism, changes the emotional
relationships to such words.
It can lead to inaccurate and wrong usages of these,
more so than it would most likely be the case if
these words were coming from (or at least be trans-
lated into) a language closer to home; a language
used with more care and sensitivity from within a
specific context. Another side effect of using words
from another language and in that language but
outside of this very language context is that it
separates concerned groups and their lived realities
from the vocabulary used by those at the forefront
of the struggles to make sense of these realities.
Most racialized people in Germany still do not know
the BIPOC or POC, their meanings and histories,
and how it relates back to them, and yet it is used
in a top down way, assuming there is no value in
communicating around this language, its vocabu-
lary, and its framing. It therefore reinforces class,
education, language proficiency as well as mobility
differences and inequalities, and becomes a signaler
for a particular social and often also economic locus
when being used.
If the argument is that the German language has
not evolved as a language to accommodate the real-
ities of racialized people as much as English did, it
brackets another history: how the English language
has been shaped and forced to change over time by
the very people who have been subjugated by this
language and its European speakers. This should
serve as a reminder that no language changes or
accommodates its social fringes unless the fring-
es claim their space within a language instead of
exiting it completely. The responsibility then lies in
the non-ethnic German German language speakers
to push the language to its supposed boundaries and
break it where it needs to be broken, instead of tak-
ing the much easier road of importing vocabularies
that do not just come from a different language, but
also also speak and reflect to different realities.
These “dilemmas” in speech,
thought, and framing bring us to the
more obvious questions we need to
ask ourselves: can local words hold
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41
global weights? Can we fill them with
more and different meanings from
elsewhere (other histories) without
necessary adaptations or changes to
these very words?
Can they live unchanged elsewhere without distort-
ing the places they arrive in as well as the places
and histories they leave behind? Can we overburden
words? Can we put so much meaning into them that
they would implode? Can we put so much weight
on them that they would explode? Can we stretch
them to the extent that they become meaningless
and therefore no more than empty shells? Can we
tear them to the extent that they start breaking?
That the B secedes from the I and the P from the O
and C?
And can the U.S. be a template for the world? In
other words, can U.S.-centric vocabularies, devel-
oped in a settler colonial language to make sense
of this settler colony really help us make sense of
realities outside of it? Are they sufficient to explain
the world outside of the U.S.? Are they even suffi-
cient to explain the situation in the settler colony
itself? Can they be useful words to make us speak
to different places, people, times, and histories? Can
they survive their own exportation, implantation,
and appropriation? Fall victims to the imperialism
that has given birth to them? And does solidarity
and coalition-building have to look this way?
DECENTERING THE U.S.
Does it have to depend on the flattening and erasure
of differences, or on the appropriation of colonial
vocabularies? Can we rely on an alphabetic order
made out of five letters to describe more than eight
billion people on this planet? Can solidarity be sol-
idarity when built on and dependent on reductive
frameworks? What happens when one reality can
be universalized whilst others cannot and must not
be? How does it weigh on our word counts to ex-
plain our words? Can we speak about a place, in all
its complexities, nuances, and contradictions with-
out needing to seek validation from more dominant
places? Can we speak without having to constantly
accommodate others, to mirror others? Without
needing to do forced comparisons and measure-
ments?
In our quest to render the complexities of this world
better translatable, to limit our own word counts
and essentially shorten explanations, to be better
heard and understood globally, we have ironically
come to follow a very imperial logic: creating and
adopting a normatized and standardized vocab-
ulary, thought and speech pattern. But we can’t
force the entire word to fit into a vocabulary that
is already considered reductive in its very place of
origin and, as such, constantly renegotiated and
challenged. ■
Sinthujan Varatharajah is a political geographer, essayist, and
researcher based in Berlin. Their work focuses on geographies
of displacement and statelessness. They are a regular
contributor to The Funambulist.
Fig.1 & 2 In mobilizing various formats to articulate ideas, Sinthujan Varatharajah often
relies on Instagram stories. These stories unpack and articulate reflections on the
past and present political reality of Tamil refugees (around the world, or specifically
in Germany) or on the Tamil struggle for liberation in Eelam. In doing so, Sinthujan’s
concise and precise words are read by a few dozens of thousands of people, many
of whom are explicitly grateful for their insights and for sharing them on a somewhat
accessible medium. Sinthujan’s words, which often describe violence, terror, and
trauma, are deliberately contrasted with reassuring background photos taken from
the soothing aspects of their daily life in Berlin. For this reason, we asked them to
send us some of these photos, which purposely come in a standard Instagram story
format to reproduce this contrast, as well as to pay homage to this particular way of
disseminating knowledge. / All photos by Sinthujan Varatharajah.
49
A MU
S
Interlude: a ‘pluriversal’ musical playlist

PLUR ICAL
that invites simultaneous listening sessions
between The Funambulist office and where you
are reading us from.

IVER
SA L I
SONS OF KEMET, ENVISION YOURSELF LEVITATING
ASHER GAMEDZE, SIYABULELA
SCH, LOUP NOIR
TINARIWEN, ISWEGH ATTAY
TY TONY LIMA, AMÍLCAR CABRAL
ZIAD RAHBANI, PRELUDE THEME FROM MAIS AL RIM
PARK HYE JIN, CALL ME
GIL SCOTT-HERON, ME AND THE DEVIL
RAVI SHANKAR AND ANOUSHKA SHANKAR, BANGALORE KHAMAJ VOLTA JAZZ, DJOUGOU TORO
ALI FARKA TOURÉ, SAVANE SEVANA, JAZ ELISE, LILA IKÈ AND NAOMI COWAN, ROCK & GROOVE RIDDIM FREESTYLE
BJORK, THE FULL FLAME OF DESIRE PHAROAH SANDERS, ZAKIR HUSSAIN & JOACHIM KÜHN, JAZZ À LA VILLETTE
ROSALÍA, SI TÚ SUPIERAS COMPAÑERO ODDISEE (FEAT. TRANQUIL), WORSE BEFORE BETTER
TONY ALLEN, ASIKO SUPER MAMA DJOMBO, ASSALARIADO
JOÃO GILBERTO, UNDIU FRANK OCEAN, SWIM GOOD
DHANANJAY KAUL & RAHUL PANDIT, KARSA MYON NYAY ANDAY RADIOHEAD, 4 MINUTES WARNING
MULATU ASTATKE & BLACK JESUS EXPERIENCE, KULUN MANKWALESHI JAMES BLAKE, OVERGROWN
CASEY, TRAGÉDIE D’UNE TRAJECTOIRE ORCHESTRA BAOBAB, ADUNA DIAROUL NIAWO
LITTLE SIMZ, THE BELLS AMBROSE AKINMUSIRE, A BLOOMING BLOODFRUIT IN A HOODIE
AKOFA AKOUSSAH, I TCHO TCHASS JACQUES BREL, ORLY
FAIRUZ, ‫اﻟﺒﻮﺳﻄﺔ‬ ROCÉ, AUX NOMADES DE L’INTÉRIEUR
LAL CHAND YAMLA JATT, DAS MAIN KI PYAR WICHON SHING02, 400
AWORI, RANAVALONA AMANAZ, KALE
MARO & MANUEL ROCHA, IRMÃO JOHN COLTRANE, A LOVE SUPREME
ICHIKO AOBA, いきのこり　ばくら LA RUMEUR, L’OMBRE SUR LA MESURE
SEUN KUTI, AFRICAN DREAMS CHEB HASNI, ‫ﺷﻴﺮا ﻟﻲ ﻧﺒﻐﻬﺎ‬
DUA SALEH, CAT SCRATCH SONA JOBARTEH, MAMAKÉ
NAISSAM JALAL, OSLOOB, AL AKHAREEN, QALOU THE SCORPIOS, EUJOAIDEEN
YOUSSEF SWATT’S, PEUT-ÊTRE NEIL YOUNG, CORTEZ THE KILLER
JANET KAY, SILLY GAMES NINA SIMONE, 22ND CENTURY

50 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41 DECENTERING THE U.S. 51

 NAMING, A COMING HOME: eliminate us as Indigenous subjects, by classifying
us as Guatemalans, and therefore as “Latinos,” they

LATINIDAD AND INDIGENEITY

are redeploying an elimination that they perfected
as they conquered what is now the Southwest of
their national territory. In this third colonial struc-

IN THE SETTLER COLONY ture—Spanish and Mexican colonization had already

begun the process of land theft and Native elimina-
tion—it makes sense to make us illegitimate sub-
FLORIDALMA BOJ LOPEZ jects by denying the fact that we have traveled this
continent for much longer than these countries have
existed.

In this powerful text, Floridalma Boj Lopez describes how the
identity concepts of Latinx and Indigenous are forged in the
relation with the U.S. settler colony. As such, they often obscure
and flatten the particularities of Indigenous nations from
the south of the U.S. colonial border, as well as their specific
relationship with the specific settler states that dispossessed
them. Far from an absolutist account however, Floridalma
invites us to adopt an “extensive gaze,” that of the Kab’awil.
In 2007, I started doing return trips from Los
Angeles, where I have lived most of my life, to my
home place of Quetzaltenango in Guatemala. Quet-
zaltenango has taught me so much since then. Quet-
zaltenango taught me about having a double view,
usually anchored in the entity of the Kab’awil. The
Kab’awil is most often represented by a two-headed
bird where the heads do not face each other but,
instead, look out to the universe. According to my
elders, including literary critic Gloria Chacón who
uses the Kab’awil as a framework for her work, this
bird/concept is about expanding our possibility to
see the complexity of life and recognize that the nat-
ural order of things is complementary multiplicity,
not singularity. Growing up, I knew Quetzaltenan-
go simply as “Xela.” I never questioned why it had
two names and why one existed on official maps
and the other existed in our everyday conversations
and stories. It wasn’t until many years later on one
of my return trips that my elders explained that
Xela is short for “Xe Lajuj’ Noj” (the ten wise ones),
and refers to the mountain range that surrounds
the valley my family has lived in for as long as we
can remember. In other words, my family practiced
this double gaze in its own naming practices that
continued in the diaspora after we were displaced
multiple times first to Guatemala City and, later, to
occupied Tongva territory.
In 2019, I traveled to Xela while leading a group of
Guatemalan high school girls living in Los Ange-
les. We connected with a migrant-led organization
that had a community center/café in my hometown.
As we toured the space and the lead organizer
explained why he had left Guatemala and then
returned years later to create a space for returned
migrants, I thought over and over about my own
dad who had been deported by the U.S. Immigration
and Naturalization Service (INS) in the 1970s. Here
was a space dedicated to deportees and returned
migrants that sought to be a gentler landing place,
where returnees could discuss the hardships they
faced as migrants, where they could express their
fear and heartache, and get support if they had
been child migrants that didn’t have family in Gua-
temala anymore. I thought about how much grief
one small piece of land that had two names could
hold. I thought about the loss returnees felt at losing
their status as undocumented immigrants. I thought
about how criminalized they were both for leaving
Guatemala and for returning. I thought about my
father and how his return was not cushioned, there
was no gentle landing place, and those years when
he was a deportee who formed a family after his
deportation are lost to us now. We, I, don’t know
what that was like for him because he passed away
while I was an undocumented child in Los Angeles.
In 1993, when I was seven years old, my dad joined
the ancestors.
For the past several years, I have
worked to have my students
understand that Latinidad and
Indigeneity are not just categories of
identification: they are relationships
to the settler state, to power, to
history.
Indigenous as a category is only a result of the
colonial wound that began the enduring devastation
of our communities. Yet, we use it to bind us to each
other and to all our relatives. Migration, however,
changes the meaning of what we call ourselves.
When settler countries like the United States
It is this relationship to mobility and country that
make Indigeneity and Latinidad stand at odds with
each other. Latinidad is too often a subjectivity
that centers the crossing of settler borders from
a country of citizenship in Latin America to the
U.S. Latinidad articulates a marginalization in the
United States, but obscures the racial and settler
colonial hierarchies embedded in countries of Latin
America. Collapsing and flattening the racial hi-
erarchy of our own countries by counting us as Lati-
nos, however, does nothing to address the fact that
racial understandings travel with migrants and are
reproduced in the diaspora. Sometimes these racist
notions or actions are direct/overt, and some not so
much. Regardless, Latinidad is a settler concept to
designate those of us from south of the Mexico bor-
der. In Guatemala, the stakes and the language are
much clearer. Those of us who are Indigenous are
still readily marked as Indios or worse Inditos (little
Indians) by those who own the most land, the most
privileged, and those who are considered the real
citizens of Guatemala, otherwise known as Ladinos
or Criollos. Ladinos and Criollos continue to claim
publicly that our Maya dress is not sophisticated and
does not belong on red carpets or award stages.
Ladinos and Criollos begrudgingly allow us to fill
certain positions or enact certain cultural practices,
but all within limits so as not to actually disrupt the
material inequality from which they benefit.
One of the challenges for those of us migrating is the
challenge of holding two settler nations accountable.
In some ways, the challenge is even more primal: it
consists in surviving two settler nations—three even,
if we count our travel through Mexico. Each country
has developed its own apparatus for how it elimi-
nates Indigenous people. In Guatemala, elimination
has taken the form of an enduring genocide; from
the first invasion of colonizers to the arrival of coffee
and banana plantations, the U.S. intervention, or the
most recent Maya genocide of the 1980s. We continue
to deal with the issues of clandestine graves, stalled
reparations, and the government keeps on stealing
resources, criminalizing organizers, turning a blind
Fig.1
eye to feminicides, and ignoring ongoing malnutri-
tion and poverty. However, against this backdrop,
Mayas and their supporters are attacking the colonial
state from every direction as well. Those Indigenous
communities, nations, collectives, and peoples who
fight back instead do so by explicitly naming their
belonging to a Garifuna, Maya, or Xinca people, or
perhaps even more specifically their language-nation
names like K’iche’, Mam, Ixil. From Indigenous aca-
demics to grassroots organizers, to media producers,
to land and water defenders, I see our communities
in Guatemala fighting for their lives on every front.
Their struggle to survive the violence and territorial
dispossession produced by the joining forces of the
Guatemalan nation, major foreign corporations, and
organized crime often results in Mayas having to flee
their ancestral territory to escape direct threats of vi-
olence, to continue organizing, or to escape the other
side of colonial domination: intergenerational poverty.
From the 1970s to today, we come to the United
States fleeing state terror. But like Guatemala, the
United States has also perfected its tools of Indig-
enous elimination. Once in the U.S., many Mayas
face a government already poised to brand them
as Latino immigrants. This miscategorization is
about more than recognition and representation, it
is about rethinking why this is a contradiction and
the consequences of thinking of these categories as
contradictions. I have no illusion about the way the
state recognizes us, but it is crucial to see how the

52 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41 DECENTERING THE U.S. 53


Fig.2
erasure under the category of Latinx is purpose-
ful and useful for the U.S. settler colonial project.
In 2019 we saw the most devastating consequenc-
es of these structures as multiple Maya children
died as a result of migration and detention. News
coverage left many of us in the diaspora reeling.
These children were killed by the overlapping
conditions of fleeing poverty/dispossession, making
an arduous journey through Mexico, and being
treated as criminals upon their detention, rather
than receiving appropriate humanitarian aid. This
includes Indigenous language interpretation, but
also intensive medical assistance given that those
of us who undertake such exiles today often have to
cross through what Jason de Leon calls the Land of
Open Graves (2015), known otherwise as the Sono-
ran Desert. The poverty and at times malnutrition
that Indigenous people face in Guatemala becomes
compounded by the arduous migrant journey
through Mexico. This is further exacerbated by the
weeks-long journey through this desert. When the
U.S. border patrol apprehends them, rather than
providing them with intensive medical care and hu-
manitarian aid, they often detain them in what are
essentially prisons.
54
What then does it mean to be an
Indigenous person whose ancestors
walked those same routes and
paths since before it was a settler
border, let alone a heavily militarized
one? Only in our current myopic
moment do we think of migrants as
“undocumented, unauthorized” by
settler governments.
The United States as a settler government that ex-
panded from “sea to shining sea” has had centuries
to perfect the technologies of terror it continues to
deploy. From not recognizing migrants as Indige-
nous people with Indigenous rights and sovereignty,
to chasing down Haitian migrants on horseback in
strategies that are reminiscent of chattel slavery
and Jim Crow, the United States in the 21st century
maintains the software it has always used. It has
now upgraded them to be able to deploy these strat-
egies against undocumented/unauthorized people.
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41
The miscategorization of Mayas as
Latinx, like the misrecognition of
Quetzaltenango, is about much more
than naming. It is a terrain of struggle
over historical memory and power.
Who decides these names and, in that process, ce-
ments ideas that limit our access to our homelands
and to our sovereignty? The fight against this coerced
inclusion into Latinidad has been most forcefully
waged by Indigenous organizers who are often forced
to witness the failure of even the Latino immigrant
rights movement to account for Indigenous needs as
well as confronting the painful realities of Indigenous
migrants they support. They see firsthand the havoc
wrought or obscured by this “inclusion.”
There are also many Indigenous migrants who
maneuver in and out of these identities as part of
their everyday reality. They may join a food vendor
campaign that employs a more Latino immigrant dis-
course or strategy, and this does not erase who they
are. Indigenous migrants may seek U.S. citizenship,
DECENTERING THE U.S.
Fig.3
and this does not eliminate their relationships to their
ancestral territories. These, and countless others,
are tactics of daily survival that we engage to carve
out space wherever we may be. Ultimately, it is up to
Maya people as a collective to determine the parame-
ters of what it means to belong and be accountable to
each other in the diaspora and in relation to our an-
cestral territory. My own claim to Latinidad has been
less about the idea that I or my children have ceased
to be Maya, and more about a sense of responsibility
to understand myself as a guest on occupied territory.
I know that I am counted as such, and in being so
counted as an immigrant or a Latina or a Guatema-
lan or a Central American, is to also be wary of how
I am engaging in the settler structures that limit and
enclose Tongva sovereignty or Native sovereignty. I
cannot say that this is the work that Latinidad should
do, but to solely claim Indigeneity at the scale of an
entire continent would belie the way that we also
occupy Indigenous territories that we have not been
invited into. Migration can be terrible, and in this
context of terror, it has been Native relatives who
have stepped in to hold space, speak against the vio-
lence facing their southern relatives, and established
nation-to-nation relationships that have perhaps be-
come the most hopeful space for many of us.
55
In my own experience, the first person I ever heard
speak publicly about the detention-caused death
of Maya and Guatemalan children was Jessa Cal-
deron, a Tongva relative. I wept in the audience
as she spoke about the harm done to children, to
Indigenous children. In other instances, Native
people have shared resources like surgical masks
and information for the Maya immigrant commu-
nity during this pandemic. When I think about
ideas like reconciliation for instance, I don’t think
of the settler government, I think about the possibil-
ities held by what Mississauga Nishnaabeg writer
Leanne Simpson terms as “Indigenous Internation-
alism.” For better or for worse, as Maya people, we
also know the pain of clandestine mass graves, we
also know that the politics of elimination are not
theoretical but, rather, an everyday reality. It can
be from knowing these sites of terror, from sharing
our stories of survival from building together, that
we may demand more of the settler state while also
knowing that abolition and LANDBACK are the
only ways forward. That is to say, I have more hope
that sovereign Native nations will understand our
struggles. Similarly, I understand that the struggle
for Tongva life needs to be supported by those of us
trying to be good guests on this occupied territory.
Despite this context of terror, I want to end on
a note about survival and the power of naming.
For the most part, my work in community and in
academia has focused on our survival. It’s both a
strategy for taking care of myself, as the struggles
I laid out here are very hard for me to think about
and write about, but also because I do not want our
suffering to be the only narrative existing when we
well know that joy, laughter, love, and support are
also pillars of our continued existence.
When I was twelve, I legally changed my name. I
was offered the opportunity to become a legal per-
manent resident, and this required my adoption by
extended relatives. My relatives gave me the option
of keeping or changing my name from Boj to Lima.
As a twelve-year-old undocumented Indigenous
child, I was tired of my complicated and strange
name and jumped at the chance to change it to
something more Spanish sounding. I finally had at
least a surname that was legible to the Latinx com-
munity, where I was attending public school. It took
about ten years for me to realize that in dropping
my K’iche’ name of Boj, I had severed the ties I had
to my relatives still in Xe Lajuj Noj. I had severed
ties to my people and my ancestral place as well as
to the significance of my name which means “clay,”
and is also the name of a fermented drink made in
clay pots. It took me over a decade, but I ultimately
56
went through with changing my name back and I
did so with a newfound sense of pride.
Maya resistance across borders is policy change,
blockades, language revitalization, the defense of
our textiles, refusing the celebration of the 200-year
anniversary of the establishment of a Guatemalan
nation. Our resistance is interpretation, wearing our
Maya dress whenever we choose to, sharing meals,
and maintaining our food-based epistemologies alive.
Sometimes, our resistance is simply
how we hold on to names:
the names of our people, the names
of our communities, the names of
our places, and the names of our
ancestors.
It is in this context that I think we should consider
the work of a term like Latinx. Naming Indigenous
people as Latinx has more often than not served to
obscure the sovereignty of Indigenous people who
cross settler borders for their own survival. At the
same time, as we work to defend ourselves against
this harm, we must also remember that many in our
community also claim Latinx to articulate or under-
Fig.4
stand their own position as immigrants, workers,
students, and so on. Therefore rather than advocate
for one versus the other or some uneasy combina-
tion, I would argue that we consider who we leave
out and what politics we obscure when we take a
stance that Latinidad and Indigeneity is an either/or
choice. It is important to remember instead that as I
noted in the beginning, the Kab’awil models for us
an expansive gaze, one that can engage multiplicity,
and plurality. This expansive gaze can teach us that
rather than a Latinx or Indigenous discourse, it is
important to consider the work, genealogy, possibil-
ity, limitations, and violence of each term and move
accordingly. ■
Floridalma Boj Lopez is an Assistant Professor in the César
E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o Studies at UCLA. Her
work uses a transborder approach to analyze the experiences
of Maya migrants as they cross settler colonial borders and
encounter distinct racial logics in the United States. She is
particularly interested in how these communities respond to Fig.1 Border between Mexico and Guatemala. / Photo by Eric V. Ibarra (2021).
structures of state violence and understand their relationship Fig.2 Floridalma Boj Lopez and her daughters cleaning her dad’s tombstone in Xe
to indigeneity in ways that account for distinct experiences Lajuj Noj in 2019. / Photo by mark! Lopez.
Fig.3 Festival in Quetzaltenango in 1979. / Creative commons, Infrogmation of New
across generations. Orleans.
Fig.4 Quetzaltenango Cityscape and the surrounding mountains described by
Floridalma Boj Lopez in her text. / Photo by Herny Aranjuez.
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41 DECENTERING THE U.S. 57
 ON DALIT DREAMING
AND REBELLIOUS JOY
A CONVERSATION BETWEEN SHAISTA PATEL AND VIJETA KUMAR
In an issue dedicated to the pluriversal imaginaries our all-too-
strong influence from the U.S. political ‘software’ prevents,
it was crucial for us to address one massive blindspot of this
model: caste. This is why we invited Vijeta Kumar and Shaista
Patel to exchange by letters about their perspectives on Dalit
resistance from the two distinct geographies of the Indian
Subcontinent and the diaspora in the United States.
Dear Vijeta,
We are two caste-oppressed women, coming from
very different contexts, here in a conversation
today. Could you have imagined coming together 20
years ago?
To be able to come together to share
our thoughts on caste and casteism
in this very unkind world somehow
feels like an act of rebellious joy.
How often are people from non-dominant castes un-
derstood to have anything to contribute to a conver-
sation in a text picked up by theorists from different
fields? This opportunity is quite precious for me. I am
excited to see what we can tell here in words; I am
even more excited about the silences we are collab-
orating on in our writing. All the ellipses, all the
words that trail off into nothingness. This is the bond
we are forming here through writing and refusing
to write. And as I write this, Black feminist scholar
Katherine McKittrick’s words ring loud in my ears:
“The story asks that we live with the difficult and
frustrating ways of knowing differentially. (And
some things we keep to ourselves. They cannot
have everything. Stop her autopsy). They cannot
have everything.” (Dear Science and Other Stories,
2021)
We won’t tear open our flesh or that of our kin so
that the reader can understand how genocidal caste
violence has been for centuries. Let them Google
things. They have cheered over and probed at our
decaying and burnt flesh long enough.
58
But to you, I say what you already know: no matter
how intent the Brahminical and white supremacist
world order is on erasing us in all our forms, how
much it wants to erase our histories, we are here,
and we are the future ancestors of those whose
arrival into the world has been challenged for mil-
lennia. Every act of ours towards addressing caste
violence, even this act of coming together, I see this
as an event of welcoming them into their world—a
world where they can live wholeheartedly.
Vijeta, we both are in academia. So, let’s begin with
that? I would like to talk about caste work in the
U.S.. I will be grateful to hear some reflections on
your work as an educator in India. It’s a context I am
somewhat unfamiliar with as a diasporic Pakistani.
Dear Shaista,
I’ve been thinking about what it means to ‘get’ an
education. I am considering the word ‘get’. (c. 1200,
“to obtain, reach; to be able to; to beget; to learn”).
The word is dependent on the act of obtaining. As in
not something that is already there for you to take.
But as something that relies on your ability to ‘get’
it. One needs to be able in order to get.
I’ve been thinking about this word because last
week I spoke to a student sitting across from me at
my table in college, who could have very well not
been sitting there—not because of fate or chance,
but because of caste. He told me that, in his school,
he believed (like everyone else around him) that he
was a weak student because it took him a long time
to answer questions. At parent-teacher meetings,
his parents were told to take him back because he
didn’t have the capacity to learn anything, and that
he simply didn’t know “how to be a student.”
His mother, a sweeper, was once asked by a neigh-
bor what the point of sending him to school was?
“It’s not like he’s going to do anything great. What
can a sweeper’s son do?” When the exam results
were announced that year, his mother was sweep-
ing the street outside his school, and discovered in
horror/delight that her son’s photo was being dis-
played on the school gate along with the other
Fig.1
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41 DECENTERING THE U.S. 59
rank-holders for having topped the exam. She
called him from someone’s phone and made him
come to school. They stood outside the school for
a long time that day, watching his photo. Later, his
mother bought a box of sweets, took him along and
went to the neighbor to tell her that her son was a
topper, and to also casually ask where her son’s pho-
to was. He laughed as he told me this and the joy in
his face stunned my need to break down.
It reminded me of the late Kannada Dalit writer
Siddalingaiah, who once recollected in an interview
the story about being invited for a talk at a hostel
and going up on stage to be felicitated. He was sur-
prised to see his cheering mother, also a sweeper in
the hostel, holding a broom in one hand and waving
at him from the other.
I am wondering what these stories are about, if not
of celebration? But then again, these are also stories
of mothers and the brooms they hold in one hand,
and the joy they hold for their children with the
other.
A lot of what those who come before us sacrifice a
lot more about which we may never learn. There
is so much about education this country takes for
granted that I am afraid that I may take it for grant-
ed too. When the student had finished telling me
this story, we both scrambled for other words to fill
the silence. He hadn’t talked in class for a long time
until one day he saw a picture of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar
on my window and, since then, every time he came
to see me, he came with more stories. It scares me
sometimes to think what would have happened if he
had never seen that picture or, worse, if that picture
was never there to begin with.
I am thinking what does it mean then, to get an
education when there’s so little for Dalit students
on campus to want to continue. There is more of
an active pursuit to keep them off campuses than
there is to keeping them in. Especially when it takes
so little for them to feel like they belong. And as
teachers who were once students like them, what
does it mean for us to be involved in their education
while we are still holding onto ours? When there
are students carrying caste on their shoulders, in
the classroom, what do we do with ours?
Sometimes, when I am reading an
essay or a poem for class, I have
the gall to be inspired by a beautiful
line and I want to remain with that
60
sentence for the rest of the day, carry
that to the classroom instead, and
leave my caste outside.
I am not always able to do that because as the say-
ing goes, you may not follow caste but other people
do. Something in my body or its memory or that of
a student’s will take control of my day and I give up
and return to being the scared and weak student I
once was.
I am compelled also to think if it would’ve happened
to me if I was a teacher from a dominant caste. It
is exhausting to live in a constant push-pull of “ifs.”
But the casualty, very often, is not me, I know I will
fight it. The casualty is that line, which I have now
lost to the rhythm of caste, once again.
Toni Morrison speaks of race as a distraction in
her 1975 keynote address at Portland State Uni-
versity:“The function, the very serious function
of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing
your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over
again, your reason for being. Somebody says you
have no language and you spend twenty years
proving that you do. Somebody says your head
isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists work-
ing on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have
no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you
have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of
this is necessary. There will always be one more
thing.”
This is true of caste as well. It is a distraction. My
student shouldn’t have to worry about parent-teach-
er meetings when he could be figuring out a way
to be a student on his own. I shouldn’t have to get
sucked into another debate on reservation (merits/
demerits), when I could be writing a short story
about women who move in together to read books
all day only to have one of them discover to her
complete horror that the other woman talks a lot.
I don’t want to write about caste. It is exhausting
to have to think of different ways to say the same
thing over and over again.
“It keeps us from doing our work.”
This was just a small glimpse into my work day.
What is yours like, Shaista?
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41
Hi Vijeta,
What you’ve shared above is so powerful. There are
places where I have left comments on your reflec-
tion, asking for references or dates, all in an effort
to make some of the words, some of the people
you’ve mentioned, more legible to Western readers.
I now wonder whether I should have done that…
Refusing to become legible is refusal to be devoured
by them. So, I apologize for my earlier comments,
Vijeta.
Your desire to leave caste outside your classroom,
for me, is a concrete example of that otherwise
dubious-for-me conception of building a different
kind of a world—an otherwise world. What you
said reminded me of a line from the formidable Dr.
Kumud Pawde’s autobiography (1981), where she
notes, “What comes by birth, but can’t be cast off
by dying—that is caste.” I have read this line many
times, but hearing your desire to “leave caste out-
side,” while reveling in the generosity of beautiful
words, is making me feel so many things, and I find
it difficult to calm down my brain and intellectualize
any of my many feelings. I do have fleeting images
of unfleshing myself... Like that would let one leave
their caste or race at the threshold.
I don’t know if this appears ‘out of place,’ but I won-
der if there are Dalit genomic scientists examining
our DNA sequencing and if they can find that our
centuries of survival, of living in the face of most
brutal humiliation and genocides can teach the
world something about humanity, about reliance,
about willing our way out of apocalypses. I just
finished reading Métis novelist Cherie Dimaline’s
book, The Marrow Thieves (2017). This young adult
fiction, which moved me to my core, is about a fu-
turistic world—maybe it’s the world we live in right
now? My tenses are genuinely all confused and I
laugh and choke it up to English being my second
language but, really, that is so not the case. In the
novel, white people have lost their ability to dream
and so they hunt down Indigenous people for their
bone marrow since it holds the cure for this fatal
calamity of dreamlessness. I loved that very diffi-
cult-to-read book, but also kept thinking about what
the power of Dalit dreaming might also be able to
teach the world, you know? Forgive me for my tan-
gential or rather intrusive thoughts… Where was I?
Everything you have shared above is, for me, an
intentional practice of living with dignity, of build-
ing communities outside of a world order made
meaningful through caste hierarchies. I just want to
take a moment to appreciate all that you are shar-
ing with me. My writing of a ‘response’ is shifting
DECENTERING THE U.S.
and I keep going back to my sentences, and erasing
them. We have a deadline so I will have to send this
in to Léopold and Shivangi Mariam, but I hope what
I write can be read as a continuing engagement
with your reflections. This way, I would find some
peace in knowing that readers understand that my
thoughts in this moment are insignificant and a
‘bad draft’ in relation to what I might have written
tomorrow or the day after…
I was going to talk to you about casteism in the
U.S. academy. But I genuinely don’t know what to
share. I should have made a list of key points… But
I want to say that I feel like an unfeeling robot some
days, constantly trying to make caste legible in
Western academia, constantly reminding students,
colleagues, and all the administration people that
caste, as a 2,500-year-old structure of violence, as
one of the oldest forms of incarceration, is older
than that of white supremacy.
I am forced to make those
equivalences to give some credence
to my world ordered by not only white
supremacy but also by intense anti-
Muslimness and casteism.
Here I am, wanting to talk about Dalitness as re-
calcitrant, as rebellious, as an errant, as a refusal
of and challenge to the very ways in which life is
organized in our world, but the utterances from my
mouth at meetings and in emails to my department
are requests to include/recognize caste in my Uni-
versity’s anti-discrimination policy. All my thoughts
about Dalit dreaming and its teachings get reduced
to requests for inclusion. And this diversity work
forces me to build strategic alliances in ways that
sometimes engulf caste violence, and I stay there,
waiting for my turn to bring up anti-Muslimness
and casteism.
Diversity work is one of calculations and so that’s
what I have become: a mere mathematician in this
game of diversity in a large public university in
the U.S. Sometimes, after administration or depart-
mental meetings, I ask myself what it means to be
present in ways that you do not even recognize
yourself? I move around my office, walk around
my campus and in the world, feeling disengaged
and alienated from myself. It’s like I am the shad-
ow walking with that other unrecognizable body.
I have an academic analysis of caste and race and
61
 what it means to think about caste in a department
like Ethnic Studies. Or even what it is to keep doing
anti-caste work at my school with its Brahmin cis-
man Chancellor.. But instead, here I am, stuck in all
the affect and all the sensations, miserably failing to
write in a scripted, ‘professional’ academic form that
I am expected to deliver my writing in… Nobody
bjcbe eiedjejdd jdjjdbbcb cbcbbcbc nnwdwndwnd to
anyo or myself, feeling completely isolated.
[These redactions are an unseeing of my words
because I mean to refuse 1) more information and 2)
let you revel in my misery. I am grateful to Christi-
na Sharpe (2016), Billy-Ray Belcourt (2016) and Eve
Tuck (forever) for teaching me this practice]
Were I to speak, I’d look
like a cracked windshield.
My two hundred and six lonely bones
have each acquired a type of consciousness.
⇣
Sometimes a body is that which happens to you.
(Billy-Ray Belcourt, NDN Coping Mechanisms:
Notes from the Field, 2019)
Vijeta, that quote from the wonderful Toni Morrison
which you have above is so powerful. We are alien-
ated from our being, from our kin, all in an effort to
make our humanity legible to these systems of dom-
ination in the first place. In that effort, our ability to
love ourselves and each other is compromised.
What I have been saying about Dalit
dreaming is something, I think, even
my bone marrow probably doesn’t
hold anymore after centuries of so
many dispossessions that I have
Fig.2 even forgotten what it is that I have
forgotten.
Where caste is rejected as vestigial in a
casteism-like-genocide world order, what futurity can
even be afforded to those whose lives are marked
as completely disposable? You know, as I was writ-
ing this, I was reminded of how somebody shared a
news story in a whatsapp group on how they, that
is, genociding anti-Muslim, casteist, and heteropa-
triarchal Bollywood is now making a biopic on that
Thakur man who shot and killed our revolutionary
warrior elder, Phoolan Devi. That man is now a
politician which is not an aberration. We know that
62 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41 DECENTERING THE U.S.
they become leaders only through our massacres and
genocides. Every day, the casteist and anti-Muslim
violence feels so intense. I am enraged every single
day. But even then I want to hold onto this sense of
futurity because look, I am so privileged. Caste is
not a site of genocide in Pakistan or its diaspora so
I feel like I need to sit down and be quiet. But here
I am, all weepy and excited because I get to write
these letters to you in all my incoherence and with
all these tangential- to-the-script disruptions. I said
it above too that these words… futurity, otherwise
worlds, joy, liberation… do not come easily to me. But
as our sister Thenmozhi Soundararajan reminds me,
and often, our ancestors did not fight and lived the
lives they did just so we can be sad. So it’s a constant
dance between terror, hope, living, refusals, escap-
ing death... You know what I am saying. As a Dalit
woman in India, you know better than I ever can. I
acknowledge that.
Dear Shaista,
I can’t tell you what a joy it was to read you. “Dalit
dreaming” is a phrase I have never heard before
and feel all too overwhelmed by the possibilities
it holds. And to hear of it for the first time from
you, here, like this, makes these possibilities all too
touchable, reachable. I am wondering now what it
means for you, me, and others like us to dream. I
am thinking what it must be like for you to carry
around these dreams in your eyes, your body, and
mind every day and to have them “reduced to re-
quests for inclusion” in boardroom meetings. What
you’ve said with such deliberation is at the heart
of what I wasn’t able to articulate and what I have
struggled with in the past, and continue to struggle
with even now.
Sometimes when I talk about caste in my class-
room, a part of the energy goes into proving to a
caste-ignorant student that caste is alive and thriv-
ing. By the end of this argument, after having gone
through every excruciating detail from history, lived
experience, anecdotes (those of mine, and others), I
see a look of absolute disgust on the student’s face.
That’s a look I know well, and regardless of how
familiar this look is, it always unsettles me. It’s the
belittling look of someone asking “If indeed things
are as bad as you say they are, how did you end
up here, wearing what you do, teaching English,
writing on a macbook?” There are several ways in
which I address this and, in that moment, I am al-
ways able to claim space back, but nothing prepares
me for the way I want to abandon myself for the
rest of the day.
63
That student isn’t saying anything particularly dif-
ferent or anything I haven’t heard before. We have
all heard the same argument in various ways, and
it doesn’t merit more than a yawn as response, but
even the capacity of the laziest argument to unsettle
you, an experienced teacher, and make her recon-
sider whether she truly belongs in the classroom
and whether she should even be talking about caste
at all is inhuman.
That student is merely mimicking what they have
heard before, picked up from home, street, friends,
but I hate that in that moment, I am allowing some-
one who is just reciting an unoriginal thought to
consume me. This is a worry I have learnt to respect
over the years. I don’t want to be unkind. I wor-
ry that my defensiveness, eagerness to prove the
student wrong or more importantly, to prove myself
right gets in the way of their learning.
Classrooms are meant to be learning spaces after
all. How is any kind of learning possible for them
or for me if I am constantly protecting myself and
being vulnerable at the same time? It is easy to
borrow the manufactured rage from twitter and
unleash it on students, to drop words like “entitled,”
“savarna” (dominant caste), “spoilt,” etc., but as a
teacher, my job demands that I leave that rage, espe-
cially since it comes so easily outside the classroom
and rely on something more surgical, cold, unyield-
ing like logic to defeat them.
On some days, my bitterness scares me, my own ca-
pacity to rely on bitterness as an excuse to not work
hard scares me more.
It’s true, bitterness is useless in the
struggle against caste. But what I am
truly terrified of is losing kindness.
It would be comical almost to lose
kindness in this whole process of
learning to be human.
So when you say, what does it mean to be present in
ways that you do not even recognize yourself, Shais-
Hi Vijeta,
We are exchanging these messages in April which
is indeed Dalit History Month. I don’t really know
how (widely) it is celebrated in India, and if there
are discussions on themes for the month, and how it
disrupts the Brahminical supremacy of Indian insti-
tutions. But I genuinely appreciate this reminder of
kindness from you. Thank you. I am going to hold
onto it in my coming days and weeks.
Here, in the U.S., I sit in terror during this month,
waiting for event announcements on social media
from casteist Indian scholars who never engaged
with caste in their analyses, but have now learned
that caste is a profitable site of career building
(publications, grants, street credit, gratitude from
caste-oppressed people, wonder and appreciation
from their white or not Western colleagues and
students). These academics have, through hard
work of Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi theorists/organ-
izers, realized their ‘caste complicity,’ and purport
to design research projects (with funds, of course),
and write journal articles on the matter, and yet
can never be honest about their very willful partic-
ipation in upholding caste-based and anti-Muslim
genocidal world order. You can never make them
speak about the particularities of their own families’
participation in this dehumanizing-for-us structure
of Brahminical patriarchy.
In Western academia, brown-skinned South Asians
are flattened into the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion
(DEI) categorization of “brown” or “Asian.” We then
circulate as being the same kind of people coming
from same or similar cultures, histories, caste, and
political locations, as if there isn’t a centuries-old
caste apartheid in place. In North America, Brah-
mins, presenting themselves as injured subjects of
white supremacist universities, and touting post-
colonial and subaltern theories pretend to present
seemingly ‘alternative’ archives of history from
that of the colonizers. There is much respect for the
field of Subaltern Studies in South Asia and in the
West. However, the entire field of subaltern studies,
and postcolonial studies as done by caste-dominant
South Asian academics, has always been led by
Brahmin and other caste-privileged Indian academ-
ics and yet… I am untenured, Vijeta. There is so
makes me hope that these pretentious ‘subalterns’ They can’t steal the sacred from us. We will continue
are actually silenced through sheer terror of being to dream different lives for ourselves and our chil-
haunted. Am I being anti-academic here? Honestly, dren. Insha’Allah. Jai Bhim. Jai Savitri. Jai Fatima. ■
we talk about generosity in our scholarship and this
prayer for never-stopping haunting of caste-domi- Vijeta Kumar teaches English at St. Joseph’s College
nant people is my care for our people. I’m so clearly (Autonomous), Bangalore. She writes at rumlolarum.com.
reminded here of this quote by Eve Tuck and Chris-
tine Ree: “Haunting does not hope to change peo- Shaista Aziz Patel works as an Assistant Professor of Critical
ple’s perceptions, nor does it hope for reconciliation. Muslim Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UCSD.
Haunting lies precisely in its refusal to stop” (“A Her scholarly and all other poltical investments are in several
Glossary of Haunting,” 2013). I am exasperated. See questions that draw upon theories in Indigenous (to North
how a celebratory month for me also becomes about America and South Asia), Black, Dalit, anti-caste, Muslim, and
all this bitterness (nodding at what you said above transnational feminist studies.
on your bitterness and anger toward the university
and caste-dominant students).
You know Vijeta in my department of Ethnic Stud-
ies I wrote and released an anti-caste statement. It
went relatively easy for me, with people either stay-
ing silent (a majority) or emailing to support this
statement. The administration is Brahminical and
white supremacist, but I don’t think I am on their
radar as yet, which is the reason for all this happen-
ing smoothly. Then I think about the experiences of
Dalit and allied savarna students and alumni who
had to fight so hard to get caste included in Cali-
fornia State Universities, the things we heard at the
Santa Clara Commission for Human Rights hear-
ing on caste last year, the notorious case of caste
apartheid at Cisco and in all workplaces in the U.S.
where Indians are, the BAPS mandir in New Jersey
which used Dalits for coerced labor, all of these tell
you that caste violence is very well alive in diaspo-
ra. As Babasaheb (Ambedkar) said, “If Hindus mi-
grate to other regions on earth, Indian caste would
become a world problem.”
I end my message with a hollowness
in my stomach but still holding onto
this practice of Dalit dreaming and
my special gratitude to Indigenous
scholars here for teaching me that
we can dream different futurities for
people written off as dying. Fig.3

ta, I was able to see you, and I was able to see me.
This year’s Dalit History Month, for me, is a con-
stant reminder of kindness. I don’t know if I have it
in me to return to kindness every day, but I want to
try. What is your Dalit History Month like?
much I want to say and have said, but in the face
of genociding caste powers, sometimes my knees
shake… I dream of Savitribai Phule, Mohtarma
Fatima Sheikh, Nangeli devi, Jhalkaribai, all of
them forever generating vengeance and haunting
these academics. Okay you might be laughing now.
I am too but, honestly, the rage in my body for them
While these dominant caste people continue to steal
our lands, bones, flesh, souls, futurities, I am going
to continue my refusal to give in and continue to
do my work and think through how our (Dalit and
Muslim) acts of meaning making can serve our an-
cestors, our people, our future generations.
Fig.1 Savitribai Phule (2020) by Siddhesh Gautam.
Fig.2 Picture of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar in Vijeta Kumar’s office, mentioned in the
conversation. / Photo by Vijeta Kumar (2022).
Fig.3 Thenmozhi Soundararajan posing in front of her artwork Ama, Amachi, and
Mother. We Are Still Here (2019) engraved in copper plates, which were historically
used to inscribe caste laws.

64 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41 DECENTERING THE U.S. 65

 THINKING THROUGH QUEERNESS
IN A PLURIVERSAL GLOBAL SOUTH
A CONVERSATION WITH RAHUL RAO
Drawing from his book Out of Time: The Queer Politics of
Postcoloniality (2020), we ask Rahul Rao about the delicate
ways through which we can pluriversally think of queerness,
without attributing circumscribed Western-forged identities to
it. Moving beyond the recurrent questions that ask whether it is
homosexuality or homophobia that is Western, he helps us to
think through queer counter-narratives in the South from the
Indian subcontinent to Uganda.
LÉOPOLD LAMBERT: There’s been important works in
the past two decades that have allowed to decenter
a U.S., and beyond this, a Western perspective on
queerness. I’m thinking for instance of Jasbir Puar’s
Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer
Times (2007) or Joseph Massad’s Desiring Arabs
(2007). Yet, a simplistic reading of these works have
been leading some people in the anti-colonial and
anti-racist movements to state that “homosexuality
is a Western concept” as a way to legitimize their
queerphobia or, at the very least, to give priority
to the fight against violent processes of racializa-
tion. How do we find the right balance between the
necessary decentering of Western epistemology and
its noxious efforts towards universalization, and the
solidarity work with queer movements (whether we
call them “queer” or not) around the world?
RAHUL RAO: I think you have several questions in
there, so I might just try and unpack some of that.
This headline phrase, “homosexuality is a west-
ern concept” is something I’ve encountered a lot
while doing my research for Out of Time. In fact,
I structure the book around an opposition between
two statements: “homosexuality is Western” and
“homophobia is Western.” We hear these statements
articulated often in opposition to each other, particu-
larly in Global South contexts between, on one side,
queer activists saying that homophobia is Western
and cultural conservatives, on the other side, saying
that it’s homosexuality that is Western. One of the
arguments I’m making in the book is that both these
statements are in a sense, true, but evasive.
If we think first about the phrase “homosexuality is
Western.” At one level, this is what Michel Foucault
says in History of Sexuality (1976): he tells us that
homosexuality, as an aspect of personal identity, is
66
something that only begins in a certain place and
time, in Europe in the 19th century. Through dis-
courses of psychiatry and law and literature, you
begin to see the homosexual spoken off as what he
calls a species, as a particular kind of individual
with a particular sense of self. In contrast, previ-
ously, the homosexual was not a type of person.
Rather, every person was capable of homosexual
acts, which were considered aberrant, but that did
not make the practitioner of the homosexual act
into a particular type of person. So if we think of
homosexuality as personal identity, then yes, it is a
Western notion. And we can talk about the various
processes by which that notion becomes universal-
ized from the mid-19th century onwards. But I think
that when cultural conservatives say homosexuality
is Western, they’re not particularly interested in
this. They’re not focusing solely on homosexuality
as an aspect of personal identity. They’re usefully
ambiguous about whether they’re referring to same
sex acts, or same sex identities. In fact, many of the
laws that criminalize same sex sexuality don’t talk
about identity at all: they name a series of acts and
say, “these acts are against the order of nature.” So
there’s a kind of ambiguity in cultural conservative
discourse, about what exactly they mean, what ex-
actly somebody like Ahmadinejad means when he
says “There are no homosexuals in Iran,” for exam-
ple. Clearly, he’s coming from a very different place
than Foucault’s! But the statements appear to look
the same when they’re placed next to each other. I
think it’s really important to unpack how different
their meanings are.
You also brought up the issue of people within
anti-colonial movements articulating this idea that
homosexuality is Western, or that struggles around
sexuality have to, in a sense, take second place to
the struggle against racism. And that is a different-
ly troubling kind of conversation. It’s one that I’ve
thought about quite a lot, and many queer and fem-
inist thinkers have been deeply preoccupied with
this question.
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41
This is very vexing because it often
produces situations in which those
expected to be allies turn out to be
not particularly so around questions
of gender and sexuality.
There’s a long genealogy of this kind of troubling
discourse. We can even see it in a figure like Frantz
Fanon, who, in various throwaway comments in
some of his work, tends to associate homosexuality
with whiteness, and tends to read homosexuality as
a function of white exploitation. Now Fanon is real-
ly responding to a colonial sexual political economy,
in which Black bodies are treated as sexual objects.
They are either seen as objects that can be used by
white men for sexual pleasure, or hyper sexualized
as Black men often are, and seen as violent and
oversexed rapists, which in turn is used to justify
the perpetration of white supremacist violence on
Black people, and particularly enslaved people. So
Fanon is describing that colonial sexual political
economy and responding to it.
The problem, I think, is that some resistive re-
sponses to that colonial sexual political economy,
took the form of hyper masculine Black nationalist
politics, where the the most appropriate response
was thought to be one of hyper masculinity, in an
attempt to recuperate this humiliated Black mascu-
linity. And that was done in part through the per-
Fig.1
petration of violence against differently gendered
Black subjects. We can see some of these dynamics
at work in some national liberation movements, for This is not in any way unique to Black movements,
example, which many people have written about. by the way. In the South Asian context, also, we can
What is important, I think, is that there has been see how the sexual and gender stereotypes imposed
a very long running and strong Black feminist by colonialism are different, but they’re still analo-
critique of this, within anti colonial movements. I gous. Bengali men are described as effeminate in
think of bell hooks for instance, and her critique of British colonial discourse, and one of the responses
Fanon, where she says that he envisages the coloni- to the humiliation created by those stereotypes was
al encounter as one between Black men and white for an an early generation of anti-colonial South
men. She critiques how he thinks that all would be Asian nationalists to say, “we need a kind of hyper
well, when equality is restored between Black men masculine martial, Hindu anti-colonialism in order
and white men. Black women somehow disappear to dismantle these damaging stereotypes.” This
in that picture. Except, of course, when he’s think- produces an anti-colonial moment in which the
ing about the sexual relationships between white feminine, the androgynous, has to be effaced, has
men and Black women, and Black men and white to be gotten rid off, in order to craft and wield this
women. So there is, I think, this Black feminist strong anti-colonial resistance. So it’s a dynamic
critique, which we’ve known for a long time. It is that I think we see in many different places, and it’s
the best way in which to address this very vexatious in part a response to the humiliation of colonialism.
discourse within anti-colonial movements, claiming
that homosexuality is a Western concept, and that it LL: As a pendant to my first question and hinting at
must be effaced in order to recuperate this humiliat- what you already said, there is a growing under-
ed Black masculinity. standing that a large part of the structural
DECENTERING THE U.S. 67
queerphobia that we are either witnessing or ex-
periencing in some countries of the Global South
are built on the foundations of European coloni-
alism and its imposition of a dogmatic Christian
morality with regards to sexuality. So in this case,
it’s no longer homosexuality that is Western, it is
homophobia. Although it’s difficult to fully contest
this vision, how do you think we can reconcile this
accurate yet incomplete reading of history while not
making colonialism, and through it, the West, the
alpha and omega of everything?
RR: Yes, so here, we think about the statement that’s
made in opposition to “homosexuality is Western,”
which is the counterclaim, that homophobia is West-
ern; that it really begins with European colonialism
and, as you say, the imposition of this dogmatic
Christian morality. And again, at one level, that’s
true, if by homophobia, we mean, homophobia in
the law. What British colonialism does in many
places—I think it’s slightly different in the context
of other European colonialisms—is to impose these
penal codes in many of its colonies. And one major
element of those penal codes is the regulation of
gender and sexual morality, particularly the crim-
inalization of homosexuality, so of course, we can
say that the institutionalization of homophobia in
law begins with European colonialism.
But I think, again, that this is an evasive statement.
If we are trying to displace
responsibility for homophobia
entirely onto European colonialism,
this effectively neglects or refuses
to ask questions about the ways
in which normative gender and
sexuality were constructed before
the European colonists even arrived.
And of course, every society had a normative order
of gender and sexuality. Part of what it means
to have a normative order is that non-normative
practices tend to be in some way circumscribed,
or penalized, or punished. That may not have
happened through the institution of the law, but it
nonetheless existed in the South Asian context. For
example, we can think of the caste system, which
is thousands of years old. In many ways, it was
institutionalized by Hinduism, as the regulation of
68
gender and sexuality, the caste system was nothing
but a very rigid system that maintained practices of
endogamy. And that meant it regulated who could
form legitimate sexual liaisons with whom. So this
is a form of regulation that predates the advent of
colonialism by centuries, and also postdates it as the
caste system continues to be a system of regulation
in operation in South Asia today. And even moving
outside of South Asia, we have to remind ourselves
that these colonial penal provisions that European
colonists instituted were then kept on the statute
books by post-colonial states for several decades,
and were often infused with new content and new
meaning. The post-colonial state has breathed new
life into these colonial laws. So I don’t think we can
rest comfortably on the argument that homophobia
is solely attributable to the intervention of European
colonialism. Colonialism introduced important shifts
in the way gender and sexuality were regulated,
but to claim that that is the moment of origin of pro-
scription is, I think, very problematic.
LL: Your book was partially built in the context of
criminalizing new laws passed relatively recently
by the Ugandan state, and the Western hypocrisy—
Fig.2
actually I hate the concept of hypocrisy in political
analysis so I don’t know why I use it here—in reac-
tion to it. This offers us a specific example: could it would be a mistake to read both the Ugandan To say that homosexuality is Western
you talk about it? Penal Code and the 2014 Act as purely the result of
external imposition. Because the Ugandan partners or that homophobia is Western is
RR: Sure. The Uganda Anti Homosexuality Act was
central to the book. This was a law that was intro-
and interlocutors in these situations (the priests, the
politicians, etc.), who are working with the U.S. con-
to try and tell a story about how
duced in the Ugandan Parliament in 2009. Ugan- servatives are equally important to the story. And particular forms of desire began: they
da already criminalized same-sex sexuality in the so part of what my book tries to narrate is these
are origin myths.
Penal Code, which was in part, a remnant of British transnational interactions between cultural conserv-
colonialism. It was ultimately passed into law in atives in different parts of the world that result in
2014. What this Act did was to ramp up some of the production of a particular law or a particular These myths circulate endlessly in these arguments
these penalties, and it added new offenses onto the arrangement around sexuality and gender. and conversations, and because of this, I became
statute books. One interesting dynamic around this interested in what possible counter-stories might
act was that it was encouraged by U.S.-based Chris- LL: Your book focuses particularly on time and on be told, that might expand the space for gender
tian evangelical activists, who had for a long time dismantling what you call “heterotemporality.” You and sexual non-normativity. In the Ugandan con-
been organizing transnationally. This is a story that
Kapya Kaoma documents very well. These activists
offer possibilities to write queer histories, in par-
ticular, queer histories of the South, through other
text, I became really interested in the story of the
last pre-colonial ruler of the kingdom of Buganda,
had begun losing the battle against LGBT rights in codes of writing history than the hegemonic West- which is the largest of the pre-colonial kingdoms
the U.S. and in Western Europe, and they began to ern ones, in particular he U.S. codes. Could you tell that were merged to form the present day state of
work with cultural conservatives in what they think us about these queer temporalities you are describ- Uganda. As the story goes—it is recorded by West-
are the more conservative parts of the world in the ing and/or helping to build? ern missionaries, so the sources have their own
Global South. The agenda here is to prevent pro- biases and investments—this man, Kabaka (King)
gressive moves towards the acceptance of same-sex RR: One of the things I noticed in the arguments Mwanga, used to have sex with men in his court.
sexuality within their respective Christian denom- around sexuality was that history and time were be- This was until the Christian missionaries arrived,
inations by creating these global conservative alli- ing mobilized by actors on all sides, through exactly converted these men to Christianity, taught them
ances. That’s certainly part of what was going on the discourses we’ve been talking about. that this was a sin, at which point they began to
in Uganda in the 2009 to 2014 period, and it contin- refuse the King’s sexual advances. In a rage, he
ues to this day. What I think is important when we ordered them to be put to death, and they were ex-
analyze these situations is to think about the agency ecuted in this very public way in 1886. The story is
of the Global South actors in these processes. I think very well remembered because the Catholic Church
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41 DECENTERING THE U.S. 69

Fig.3
then began a campaign to have these men canon-
ized. It was a long process that ultimately bore fruit
in the 1960s, when the then Pope declared 23 of the
murdered Catholics, martyrs. They are called the
Uganda martyrs and, as with many Catholic saints,
there is today a cult of veneration around these
Uganda martyrs.
What intrigued me in this story is that you have
here a very well known story about a supposed
same-sex desiring figure: the ruler of the kingdom
himself. And this is an instance of same-sex desire
that is thwarted by the advent of Western colonial-
ism and Western Christianity. But at the same time,
contemporary Ugandan seem to think or argue
(especially cultural conservatives) that homosexu-
ality is something that comes from outside. So how
can these two accounts circulate? This was what I
was most curious about. And so I became interest-
ed in how ordinary Ugandans narrated the story
of Mwanga. This led me to think about memory as
one way in which we might find these counter-nar-
ratives. I’m not so much interested in history, if by
history, we understand an authoritative story about
what actually happened in 1886. What I’m more in-
terested in is memory, which is how to present what
Ugandans think happened in this time and place,
and how might that influence their attitudes about
non-normative or normative gender and sexuality?
70
And so what I end up finding is a range of different
stories that circulate around this moment and my
job—at least the way I see my job—is not to adjudi-
cate between these different narratives, to say this
is right and that is wrong. I’m in the position of a
curator who is collecting these different and con-
tradictory stories and trying to historicize them and
trying to make sense of the ways in which differ-
ently positioned subjects in Uganda have different
kinds of investments in telling the story in different
ways. Some of those stories are, I think, pretty clear
in their rendering of an ancestor or a king, who did
have same-sex desires, which suggests that such
desires were known, and were accepted in another
place and time, but in a way that has perhaps been
forgotten or effaced.
LL: As a conclusion, do you think that one way to
decenter the U.S. political ‘software’ (as we propose
in this issue) with regards to queerness would
not consist in questioning the way queer political
identities are often formed around one letter that
joins, in an inclusive paradigm, the LGBT trunk,
leading more to the juxtaposition of these identities
(LGBTQI2s+)—independently from the many other
immanent political identities at work here—than to
a cohesive political movement? In other words and
to the risk of being caricatural, does a Dalit Tamil
trans woman living in North India (i.e. in a potentially
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41
inhospitable environment) really share enough an
identity with a white French bourgeois gay man liv-
ing in Le Marais for them to be political associated?
RR: Here again, there’s a lot going on in your ques-
tion, and I want to unpack it a little bit. At one level,
your question is about identity. Identity politics have
been really important in winning particular victo-
ries, in carving out space for resistance. But identity
can also be limiting because identity is a normative
project that draws boundaries between those who
belong to the identity and those who do not. And
those boundary drawing practices, even if they
might be necessary in the course of resistance, can
also harden into coercive, exclusionary and oppres-
sive formations. We know this from the history of
nationalism, but we also know this from the history
of other kinds of identity politics movements that
can begin as emancipatory projects, but become
something else. What is interesting about queer
politics or queer theory is that it began as a critique
of the limitations of identitarian politics, particularly
sexual identitarian politics organized around sexual
identities, like gay, lesbian, etc.
The problem is not just that
these identities have a particular
geographical provenance—they
come from a certain place and a
certain time—but also that as identity
politics, they become invested in
these boundary drawing practices
and end up being exclusionary in all
sorts of ways.
But the irony is that queer critique, or queer politics,
itself becomes co opted as a kind of identity. So now,
we sometimes see the very placement of the letter Q
in that string of letters that you named, which is an
irony because Q has sort of been domesticated as an
identity: it has become one identity among many—
sometimes it’s used as an overarching identity, but
still an identity.
Now, I feel a bit awkward about criticizing that,
because it would imply that “queer” has a particular
meaning that it is now departing from. That too
would be, I think, a very unqueer thing to do: to try
and fix its meaning and to insist that everyone hold
on to that original meaning. I think that meanings
DECENTERING THE U.S.
change, concepts become re-signified. We have to
be attentive to that, and there has to be space for
that. So I suppose broadly, I’m trying to say that the
proliferation of identity categories does not neces-
sarily address the problems that these movements
are trying to grapple with. There is a certain value
to recognizing more and more identity categories.
But that does not address the fundamental problems
with identity, that queer critique was trying to ges-
ture at in its originary moment. Maybe we need to
think about ways in which identity politics does not
always express the truth of non-normative desire.
A really interesting book that I would recommend
here is akshay khanna’s Sexualness (2016). khanna
is an anthropologist, and the book is based on work
with same-sex desiring (mostly masculine) folks in
India, and one of the arguments khanna makes is
that for many people, sexual desire is not experi-
enced as an aspect of identity—to go back Foucault’s
understanding of sexuality. It does not answer the
question of who I am as a person, it’s just something
I do. Sexual desire flows through the body, without
necessarily constituting the self as a particular type.
This is something that khanna names “sexualness,”
rather than sexuality.
So what I’m trying to suggest, by referring to
khanna’s book, is that the very notion of sexuality
is a provincial one, it does not express the ways in
which people all over the world experience desire.
And so we cannot decolonize our conversations
around sexuality purely by adding more identity
categories to the alphabet soup, or even just by
holding on to some original meaning of queer, as
crafted in the radical West. We need to think about
the range of ways in which sexual desire that is ex-
perienced by people all over the world is described,
is talked about, is performed, is lived, and there is
an infinite array of conceptual devices that people
are offering in scholarship, but also in the politics of
activism that we need to be attentive to.
As for the last point of your question about whether
people in this range of life worlds can find commu-
nity, can identify with each other, it’s ironic that you
framed the sentence in that way, because I recently
read Mark Gevisser’s book, The Pink Line (2020).
It is a huge book that does a sort of global survey
of LGBT politics, all over the world, and some parts
of the book engage very deeply with the politics of
trans and kothi communities in South India. Now,
Mark is a white, gay South African man who lives
in Cape Town. The book ends with his engage-
ment with kothi communities in Tamil Nadu, and
he quotes one of the kothis as identifying him as a
kothi, making this transnational cultural connection.
71
I have no reason to doubt that this identification was
genuine. I don’t know the story behind it, really, but
I think that it suggests that sometimes, despite these
vast gulfs of caste and class, and identity, people
do find common connection across those gaps. The
politics of solidarity however is not an easy one.
Solidarity has to be forged across these huge gulfs
of power, and that often raises very uncomfortable
questions.

I think it’s always important to ask

who is expressing solidarity with
whom and whether the solidarity
is solicited? Is it reciprocated? Is it
wanted? Or can solidarity sometimes
be a problem, an imposition, an
exercise in power?
Those questions are never going to go away, but the
fact that there are problems and power differen-
tials cannot mean the end to a conversation about
solidarity, because otherwise I think we would be
locked in our respective identity silos, separated,
and very much the weaker for it. ■

Fig.4
Rahul Rao is a 2021–22 Fellow at the Netherlands Institute
for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences,
and Lecturer in International Political Thought at the School
of International Relations, University of St Andrews. He is the
author of Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality
(2020) and Third World Protest: Between Home and the World
(2010), both published by Oxford University Press. He is
currently working on a book about the politics of statues.
He is a member of the Radical Philosophy collective.

Fig.1 Cover of Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality (Oxford University
Press, 2020), Rahul Rao’s second book. Artwork by Sane (Eria Nsubuga).
Fig.2 & 3 Two of the 23 stained glass windows picturing the Uganda Martyrs in a
Catholic Shrine in Namugongo. / Photo by Rahul Rao (2012).
Fig.4 The Uganda Martyrs’ Museum in Namugongo (periphery of Kampala). The
painting depicts the climax of the Mwanga story, namely the execution of the courtiers
who supposedly refused to have sex with him. / Photo by Rahul Rao (2016).

72 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41 DECENTERING THE U.S. 73

 ON NAMING AND
TRANSLATING IN PALESTINE
BEKRIAH MAWASI
In this text, Bekriah Mawasi questions the ways through
which the Palestinian struggle for liberation is translated into
English, often creating unnecessary equivalences, as well
as inadequate adaptations to a framework made by and for
others. She brings our attention to the crucial site that naming
constitutes, both in the transmission of specificities and in
cultivating memory.
Calling things by their name where I live is a stren-
uous daily exercise. By the end of each day I flash-
back the language I uttered throughout the passing
hours in three lingual modes, making sure they
align and accommodate my intention to its purpose.
I find solace in language and, with translation, I
manage the ghosts of otherness, of receiving and
perceiving. The diglossic nature of Arabic teaches
me to adapt and look forward to a nuanced under-
standing fluctuating between crystal-clear thoughts
through classical Arabic, and the instant lexicon of
emotions that saturate the vernacular. I often find
myself designing habits to cleanse my imagination
from the redundant derivatives of outsourced in-
formation about what I see in front of my eyes, and
attracting to the frame what is invisible.
An ecological park named Hiriya Recycling Park
as it appears on Google Maps, might seem like
a 21st century celebratory green extravaganza
where “making the garbage bloom” is a conscious
act to save the planet, yet it carries the name of a
destroyed Palestinian village which was complete-
ly covered by waste. lf a river has a name on a
sign planted on its bank, I would usually skip the
sign and hope to find the Arabic name of the river
online, using my multilingual skills, relying on my
family’s knowledge, or looking it up in a book I
trust. This might sound like an etymological ap-
proach, but in fact it is an act that undoes erasure.
The bizarre common meaning of
being a Palestinian relies on unseeing
and all the what ifs possible, that in
one hand, while on the other I need to
excavate history from my ancestors
74
using a fork, turning temporality into
a long waiting line in a liminal space
where a ‘start-up nation’ is rising.
Some time in the late 2000s, I was on a student bus
to campus, when a tall blonde man with a backpack
slung over his shoulder noticed my necklace pen-
dant.:
“Cool pendant. What is written on the map?” he
asked, in a distinct North American accent.
“Palestine,” I replied, annoyed.
This one word made this total stranger harass me
throughout our ten minute ride for wearing a piece
of jewelry, while the other passengers kept silent.
There I stood alone as if I was standing in the
security check line at Ben Gurion airport: a subject
to dehumanize on board. To eloquently describe the
disruption of the road and the unrecognizable land-
scape, Mahmoud Darwish writes:
“We were kindhearted and naïve.
We said: The land is our land
and no external affliction will befall the map’s heart.
And the sky is generous to us.
We hardly spoke to each other
in classical Arabic, save at prayer time
and on holy nights.
Our present serenaded us: Together we live!
Our past amused us:
I’ll come back if you need me!”
(“At a Train Station That Fell off the Map,” 2008)
The protests that erupted in Palestine in April
and May 2021 have brought global attention to the
events on the ground. Crowds in the streets and
screens of New York, Melbourne, and London called
to #SaveSheikhJarrah, as families in the Jerusalem
neighborhood faced their recurring dispossession.
We saw how the discourse about Palestine and Pal-
estinians was paraphrased in diverse media and a
spectrum of dialects and languages. We read about
Palestinians documenting and expressing their
sorrows and fears and what is going on in their
everyday lives in spite of social media censorship.
Digital media brings possibilities for restoring and
reestablishing a collective voice for Palestinians,
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41
it brings them together and connects them, offers
them spheres where they present and promote
their culture and explain their struggle. Despite
the systematic oppression reflected in censorship,
Palestinian youth enacted several acts to disrupt
the technology by which systematic censorship was
enacted, such as typing fragmented words in order
to mislead algorithm intelligence.
Yet, the malleability of representing
Palestine in a digital form can be dis-
tracting and disorienting.
The use of social media to increase engagement has
led to the creation of hashtags that mirror political
activity taking place in the United States. A hashtag
functions as coded language used on profit-oriented
online platforms. Its usability is bound to the corpus
of posts connected all together to mark an idea; they
function as index terms where information is fed by
the users of the platform. While Palestinians repur-
posed the digital tools to advocate for themselves,
they borrowed hashtags and slogans from other
global movements. When using a hashtag such as
#PalestinianLivesMatter, we create an unnecessary
comparison between the Black struggle in the U.S.
and the Palestinian struggle for liberation. All this
is done to seek relevance and visibility in the sea
DECENTERING THE U.S.
Fig.1
of online content and revolutions on platforms that
echoes the oppression against these communities to
virtual spheres. But some slogans are and should
be immune to translatability. Translating the slogan
into Arabic raises a dilemma: would it sound better
in classical Arabic or vernacular Palestinian? Would
using the same exact syntactic structure of the
phrase #BlackLivesMatter be convincing semantical-
ly to the Arabic reader? Are we seeking social media
engagement in order to be included in a U.S.-centric
discourse of other oppressed communities? Is this
what solidarity really looks like?
In his work Contribute a Better Translation (2011),
Palestinian artist Sharif Waked invites listeners to
provide a better version to Palestinian political slo-
gans read by the automated voice of Google Trans-
late services emphasizing the question of subjectivity.
Is the perpetual recontextualizing of
Palestine and the Palestinians by any
and all means possible the only meth-
od to tell our stories and the many
Palestines that were created in our
imagination?
75
 Fig.2

76 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41 DECENTERING THE U.S. 77

 The fact of being a Palestinian has been fragmented
into diasporas, psyches, and socio-political realities
within and out historical Palestine. Palestine is cease-
lessly being expunged from its people, off maps, at
cultural institutes and universities, from databases
and knowledge systems. A slogan used in a Pales-
tinian village in Israel on Land Day which invites
people to go on strike—“Down with terror. Be an
Arab and Strike”—however apt in its context, might
not be of relevance in a Palestinian refugee camps in
Lebanon.
Defining Palestine by Juxtapositions ///
Before starting to write this text, I encountered an
image of the Dome of the Rock in an outstanding
composition titled “Walls of Jerusalem and the Fer-
ris Wheel Looking From West Restaurant Pavilion.”
The stereograph was taken at the 1904 Louisiana
Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. I
was amused by the wheel as a whirling observation
point designed by foreign architects in a land far
away from Jerusalem. I however wondered why
the name of the building was not mentioned in the
cataloging input at the U.S. Library of Congress,
despite being the main structure that would make
Jerusalem recognizable. This image from a world
fair anticipates the ways colonial practices through-
out the 21st century have turned Jerusalem into
an amusement park of symbols, a gimmick, which
determines how natives explain themselves through
the new facades settler colonialism has installed.
The composition invites the observer to question the
nativeness of the landscape, suggesting that it can
be transferred or manipulated.
Tracking the genealogy of indigene-
ity as a concept when talking about
Palestinians, I found myself trapped in
a language I avoid using.
Indigenous people were not given this adjective
before turning indigeneity into a legal colonial status
or a framework for theoretical analysis. An indig-
enous community is a group of people who were
in a place prior to the arrival of new settlers, and
whose relationship with the surrounding is rooted in
certain ways of life, resources, and knowledge. Ap-
proaching the impact of U.S. political activism on the
current discourse on Palestine and the Palestinians,
one has to question the reliance on presenting a
counter-argument to Zionist justifications of settler
colonial territorial expansion and elimination of
Palestinians based on an interpretive paradigm used
by Palestinian and non-Palestinian scholars in North
America. The geographical imagination of Palestine
is not merely semantic. It is a battle over collective
memory and collective expression of desires and
ambitions. It is an ongoing questioning of current
social and spatial infrastructures determining the
lives of those who are on the ground and those who
were deprived of their native nature or are about to
be displaced. ■
Bekriah Mawasi is a writer, translator and artist based
in Palestine. She explores movement in space, visual
cultures, and contemporary literature. Her work takes form
in writing (essays, short stories, poetry), illustration, and
photography. She works in the field of open knowledge,
and digital accessibility. She co-founded Mudam, an online
cooperative project to translate seminal texts that discuss the
interpretation of images into Arabic.

Fig.4

Fig.1 Young Palestinian refugees from the al-Jalazone camp (near Ramallah), standing
in front of the rubble of the boys school in their native village al-Abbasiyya (Jaffa
district), near Ben Gurion airport. / Photo by Bekriah Mawasi (2009).
Fig.2 Walls of Jerusalem and the ferris wheel looking from west restaurant pavilion, 1904
Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis, USA. / N. Bennington, U.S. Library of Congress.
Fig.3 In their work At those terrifying frontiers where the existence and disappearance
Fig.3 of people fade into each other (2019), Palestinian artists Ruanne Abou-Rahme
and Basel Abbas create avatars from images that were drawn from people who
participated in the March of Return in Gaza, reflecting the invisible and embedded
violence of representation in the circulation and consumption of images. The work
corresponds with Edward Said’s book After the Last Sky (1986), and explores
constructed meanings of being and becoming a Palestinian.
Fig.4 “Down with terror. Be an Arab and Strike!,” on a wall in Jaljulia (1976) in Matzpen ,
the bilingual publication of an Israeli anti-Zionist organization founded in 1962.

78 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41 DECENTERING THE U.S. 79

THE FUNAMBULIST STILL THE FUNAMBULIST N°40
MARCH-APRIL. 2022

AVAILABLE! THE LAND… FROM SETTLER COLONIAL

PROPERTY
ISSUE N°41 MAY—JUNE 2022 NEXT ISSUE N°42 JULY—AUGUST 2022
DECENTERING THE U.S. THE ALGERIAN REVOLUTION
THINKING THROUGH BLACKNESS, QUEERNESS,
BROWNNESS, CASTE & INDIGENEITY FROM
AND THE WORLD
ELSEWHERE SPECIAL ISSUE FOR THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY OF
ALGERIAN INDEPENDENCE

FUNAMBULIST Contributors:
fu·nam·bu·list (fyo͝ o-năm′byə-lĭst) Michael DeForge, Szu-Han Ho, Meng-Yao Chuang, May Shigenobu, Ethel-
noun. One who performs on a tightrope or a slack rope. Ruth Tawe, Kanako Uzawa, Kellem Monteiro, Cases Rebelles, Bekriah
(The Free Dictionary) Mawasi, Zoé Samudzi, Rahul Rao, Sinthujan Varatharajah, Floridalma Boj
Lopez, Shaista Patel, and Vijeta Kumar.
ISSN: 2430-218X
CPPAP: 0921 K 92818 Special Thanks:
Publisher’s Address: The Funambulist, Hiroko Nakatani, Karim Kattan, Zoé Samudzi, Michaëla Danjé, Dubravka
75 rue du Cherche-Midi, 75006 Paris, France. Sekulic, Siddhesh Gautam, Alyosha Goldstein, Edwin Nasr,
Printer’s Address: Ruanne Abou-Rahme , Basel Abbas, Jelena Savic, and Julia Albani.
Alpha S.A.S. 57, ZA La Boissonnette 07340 Peaugres, France.
SUPPORT THE FUNAMBULIST: SUBSCRIBE!
Editor-in-Chief: Léopold Lambert Subscribe on a monthly or annual basis, to the digital or/and printed
Head of Communications: Shivangi Mariam Raj versions or by requesting your university to take an institutional
Advisory Editorial Board: Margarida Nzuzi Waco, Caroline Honorien, subscription.
Nadia El Hakim, Flora Hergon, and Noelle Geller
Graphic Designer: Akakir Studio Contact: info@thefunambulist.net /
Contributing Copy Editor: Carol Que subscription page: thefunambulist.net/magazine/subscribe

DIGITAL + ONLINE PRINT + DIGITAL + ONLINE INSTITUTIONAL SUBSCRIPTION

2.50 EUR per month or 30.00 EUR per year 5.00 EUR per month or 60.00 EUR per year
— —
• Access all past articles in the online archive. • Access all past articles in the online archive.
• Receive the digital version of each new issue • Receive the digital version of each new issue
the day it is released. the day it is released.
• Receive the print version of each new issue in
your mailbox.
200.00 EUR per year
—
• Every computers in your university/library have
access to all past articles in the online archive.
• Receive the digital version of each new issue
the day it is released.
• Receive the print version of each new issue in
your mailbox.

Understanding settler colonial land dispossession, extrac- We still have a good stock of our 40th issue, which inaugurat-
tivism, and property and envisioning LANDBACK in South ed our brand new design and format! Order yours at
Africa, Ecuador, Turtle Island, Palestine, Alaska, Australia,
Student digital + online subscription for 10.00 EUR per year. Kenya, the Caribbean, and Chile. THEFUNAMBULIST.NET/SHOP

80 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41 DECENTERING THE U.S. 81

82 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°41