Volume 3, Issue 1

If narratives that uphold secular humanism have led to an “unparalleled catastrophe” as Sylvia Wynter notes in an interview with Katherine McKittrick, then it is time to unwrite them. In this essay, I examine the dead as a category that exceeds metaphysical classifications of subject and object and provides alternate possibilities of communication and hybridity. To do so, I call on work by Claire Colebrook, Jacques Derrida, John Durham Peters, Eve Tuck, and Unica Zürn, among others, with the cultural work and words of Sylvia Wynter as a guide and galvanising force. Here, I repopulate the life/death seam with gorgons, witches, fates, and revenge stories. If ghosts are seen simply as other beings, albeit taboo ones like bacteria, or require alternate cultural narratives like villains, or exist both in the symbolic sphere of the mystical and the so-called natural world like roses, what kinds of methodologies can be opened? What do the dead have to say and how do we listen?

This paper analyzes the travel journal of Madeiran author Maria Celina de Sauvayre da Câmara, De Nápoles a Jerusalém [ From Naples to Jerusalem ],3 dated 1899, from a Cultural Studies perspective. The present study focuses on pilgrimage, a physical and spiritual journey, as a ritualistic and mystical performance which, by means of staging and writing, composes a practice that allows physical and spiritual deterritorialization and reterritorialisation and the negotiation, through the sacred and through religion, of tolerances, concessions and availabilities of the subject regarding the acceptance of the Other’s religious difference, giving rise to new senses. The treatment of pilgrimage as a means of promoting contact with the Other(s), leading to deep processes of self and hetero-knowledge linked to rituals that contemplate sacred and profane space(s) and time(s) and binomial or culturally constructed representations, wherein discourses of power emerge, is inextricable in this discussion. The travel journal is a testimony to the articulations between sacred and profane and a mechanism perpetuating hegemonic and orientalist discourses derived from intrinsic relations and practices of power in the sociocultural context of individuals. We envisage pilgrimage as a transforming practice and a means of (re-)cognition and (re)construction of the Self/Other, through a personal and sacred/profane cartography promoted by writing and exalting the feeling of religious community.

To make visible the invisible has always been a key challenge to film. This paper will study how German director Werner Herzog, a regular explorer of the material / spiritual dichotomy, has managed to visualize something as invisible as faith in his documentaries Pilgrimage (2001) and Wheel of Time (2003). By identifying a strong narrative and aesthetic focus on gesture, we will work on a possible reading on physical devotion as a contemporary substitute to sacrifice. Gesture, then, will become not only the visible translation of what we will argue is represented as a natural and universal faith, but also the apparatus enabling the feeling of the sacred.

This paper describes a creative partnership between a theologian and a poet arranged by the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts at the University of St Andrews in 2018. The TheoArtistry project seeks to reintroduce artists to traditional religious culture and to foster collaborations between academics and art practitioners (Corbett). In this article we discuss and utilise Theological Action Research methodology (Cameron et al.), to explore the process and outcomes of one such collaboration tasked to produce a poem inspired by an Old Testament passage and the theme of “Annunciation.” The researchers in this collaboration drew on a diverse range of cultural forms and accommodated a position of scepticism towards Christian faith. An examination of the cycles of action and reflection in the production of the poem enables conclusions to be made concerning the impact of this interaction upon the collaborators’ theological thought and practice. This section closes with the final poem and a brief team commentary. The final section evaluates the partnership in terms of the TheoArtistry goals and shows how it both supported the project and set a challenging precedent for broadening the scope of theological openness and inclusivity in future collaborations.

This article contextualises the adoration of la Divina Pastora (Siparia Mai) in Trinidad with the racially charged politics of the island nation. Using interviews and participant observation, it demonstrates the importance and unique nature of this practice which allows people of many faiths share in the space that is la Divina. This religious, cultural and social space is one of many on the island where diversity is celebrated, unlike the political arena where race-baiting is used to rally the electorate. The article uses various theories of race to analyse why Hindus and Catholic devotees are willing to share access while their political leaders seem unwilling and/or unable to do the same meaningfully. The paper concludes that while no current theory of race sufficiently explains the la Divina experience but that She embodies the national hegemonic ideal which politicians claim they embrace but which they do little to encourage because doing so will undermine their political base.

It can be argued that theology in the Caribbean has, until recently, been reticent in engaging cultural studies, and particularly in using African Caribbean religiocultural heritages and art-forms such as carnival, reggae, stickfigting, Obeah and Myal, as examples, as sites for theological reflection. Undergirding this reticence is a colonially inherited belief in a dichotomy between the sacred and the secular; between the church and culture; and consequently, between theology and the social sciences. This paper argues that despite popular mis-conceptions, Junkanoo, a mainly Anglophone Caribbean street festival fundamental to Bahamian identity, has always functioned as a new and liberative way of doing theology in that context. Its complex relationship with the church deeply challenges concepts of sacredness, secularity, profanity, and idolatry as they are lived out in contemporary Bahamian life. This insight is important not only for theological research and discourse, but also for cultural studies and various forms of social research, since accessing the dynamic truths of such African Caribbean religiocultural productions and experiences require such an interdisciplinary approach.

Indian urban public spaces have witnessed massive transformation post liberalization and globalization. In 2017, city spaces offer novel experiences and unravel new political dynamics in tune with the paradigm shifts in socio-political, economic and cultural domains. The city was shaped by the colonial and later modernizing forces, is being foregrounded in the postmodern, postcolonial discourses, and its public spaces therefore emerge as significant components in the social developments as witnessed in the new millennium. Ganesh Utsav in Mumbai is closely linked to India’s history of political struggle against British colonialism. There has been a phenomenal growth in its popularity and visibility, as a festival for ten days, encapsulating the whole city, transforming its identity as a financial capital of the country to a multiple layered carnival ground, with processions and festivities involving the majority of its population. Post globalization and neoliberalisation, the festival has transformed itself, assumed an identity uniquely political along with the rise of the right wing to power. My paper will be an attempt to critically evaluate this festival and the paraphernalia of sacredness that encapsulates the city space for ten days every year. While the spatial identity of religious practices is fascinating to observe, the ten-day festival of Ganesh Utsav builds a fabric of the sacred and profane across the city. The theoretical tool used in this study is Foucault’s heterotopias and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage. The de/re-territorialising aspects of these spaces will also be examined.

Grime is a genre of Black British music originating from London at the turn of the twenty-first century. In this article, I explore responses to moments of Grime music making and engagement in live performance settings. I make connections between Grime, Black music streams (Lena), Black Atlantic (Gilroy) practices, the Black Public Sphere (Baker) AND how engagements at these intersections are connected to spiritual practice in the context of live performance. The power in Grime live performance settings; where the spiritual is found, connects to the sonic characteristics deployed, embodied and emotive responses and cultural practice. Spirituality, through cultural practice, is an Africanised religious/spiritual outlook that remains with the African diaspora over time and space (Mbiti). Smith’s work shows how African derived religious and spiritual practice continues in diasporic religious practice contemporarily. Through live performance (raving/club culture), I explore and theorise how power is a) generated, b) operates, and outline the roles people play in the cultural-spiritual practice. Building on the work of Smith, Kennett, Sylvan, Mbiti and Baker, I introduce theories: 1) Liminal Energy Power Spirals (LEPS) and 2) AmunRave Theory, to show how the spirit enters live performance space.

In this essay I discuss artworks by a sample of young people with a Muslim background who participated in the Numur—Islam and I exhibition, which was organised as part of the Young Muslims and Resilience (2016-2018) research project. Art exhibitions were staged in November 2017 and March 2018 with eighteen young adult participants/co-researchers. Their artworks included video and textile installations, photo collages, paintings, calligraphy and poetry, dealing with issues such as faith, dialogues between religious communities, gender, belonging and sexual diversity. Here I concentrate on some works by the participants who stated that they leaned on Sufism or spirituality in their working processes, or whose works expressed qualities that may be reflected through the spectrum in which rhizomes of Sufi ways of understanding human existence in the world are present. In their artworks, the participants created fresh ideas about possible encounters, which I interpret as being linked to modern and postmodern ideas of relationships between spaces and “becoming communities.” Likewise, these ideas can be traced to our common philosophical heritage, which is partly based on spiritual mystic thought and practices of different religions. By using art, the participants could embody this legacy, create spaces for themselves and open landscapes for discussions between Muslim believers and people with different religions and worldviews.

This article aims to explore, how the struggle over the sacred and the secular is enacted within the material culture of the front room as an index of the double consciousness that takes place in the black every day. The scared is often reduced to the purely religious, but unshackling it, and engaging with the sacred as a spectrum of spiritual experience that illuminates its dialogic relationship with the political, and therefore the secular. Reclaiming the sacred provides a critical praxis towards decolonising the legacy of coloniality in the context of postcolonial modernity. As a cultural institution of self-making, valorising the material culture of the front room as a space of black interiority resists the racist trope that we live on the street, and have no homes to go to, with families and values. This interiority has shaped, and been shaped by the cultural politics of postwar Caribbean migration, and reveals the rich complexity of “black domestic life” that the “generality of society” rarely understands. Connecting the spiritual with the political provides a psychic recuperation towards resisting and healing from trauma as a process in an ongoing structuring of colonial power, cultural imperialism, and racial violence. This article will draw on research in curating my installation-based exhibitions, The West Indian Front Room (2005-06) and Rockers , Soulheads and Lovers: Sound Systems Back in da Day (2015-16).

Nowadays, popular music artists from a wide range of cultures perform in English alongside other local languages. This phenomenon questions the coexistence of different languages within local music practices. In this article, I argue that we cannot fully understand this issue without addressing the sacred dimension of language in popular music, which entails two aspects: 1) the transitory experience of an ideal that challenges intelligibility, and 2) the entanglement with social norms and institutions. Further to which, I compare Latin hegemony during the Middle Ages and the contemporary French popular music, where English and French coexist in a context marked by globalisation and ubiquitous digital technologies. The case of the Middle Ages shows that religious control over Latin led to a massive unintelligible experience of ritual singing, which reflected a strong class divide and created a demand for music rituals in vernacular languages. In the case of contemporary French popular music, asemantical practices of language are employed by artists in order to explore alternative, sacred dimensions of language that challenge nationhood.

Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) is a very dark dystopian fable which introduces the reader to a post-apocalyptic scenario in which the planet Earth is on the edge of destruction, and human beings have been almost completely eradicated and substituted for a new, genetically-engineered, race. In this article, I am going to analyse the fundamental role phallogocentrism plays in the destruction of humanity and in the creation of a new world order populated by primitive but more ecological creatures.

Due to the attempts to restrict the abortion law in Poland in 2016, we could observe a new broad-based feminist movement emerge. This successful movement became known worldwide through the Black Protests and the massive Polish Women’s Strike that took place in October 2016. While this new movement is impressive in its scope and can be described as one of the most successful opposition movements to the ethno-nationalist right wing and fundamentalist Catholicism, it also deploys a patriotic rhetoric and makes use of national symbols and categories of belonging. Feminism and nationalism in Poland are usually described as in opposition, although that relationship is much more complex and changing. Over decades, a general shift towards right-wing nationalism in Poland has occurred, which, in various ways, has also affected feminist actors and (counter)discourses. It seems that patriotism is used to combat nationalism, which has proved to be a successful strategy. Taking the example of feminist mobilizations and movements in Poland, this paper discusses the (im)possible link between patriotism, nationalism and feminism in order to ask what it means for feminist politics and female solidarity when belonging is framed in different ways.

Inaugurated at the Brooklyn Museum of New York in 2017, the path-breaking exhibition “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85,” centers the creative expressions and lived experiences of black women artists within a primarily white, middle-class, heteronormative mainstream feminist movement. Engaging visual mediums, artist-activists rendered a black feminist politics through cultural and aesthetic productions. In so doing, artists recast extant representations of black social life, demanded inclusion within cultural institutions, and created black-oriented spaces for artistic engagement. In the contemporary global political climate of anti-blackness, artists craft socially engaged practices that creatively intervene in public space and the cultural institutional landscape. Through a critical analysis of Carrie Mae Weems’ Operation: Activate , Simone Leigh’s The Waiting Room , and LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Flint is Family , this essay concerns recent interventions that mobilize an expansive approach to art combined with activism. The myriad practices of Weems, Leigh, and Frazier recompose sites of political engagement and empowerment that enact a broader praxis of reimagining social worlds. These projects belie the representational fixity on which art economies hinge, gesturing to material formations that elicit tactile modes of relation, and challenge the bounds of subjects and objects in the world.

“No ideas but in things!” William Carlos Williams’s leitmotif for the modernist epic Paterson seems to anticipate the current renewal of academic attention to the materialities of culture: When the Smithsonian Institution accounts for The History of America in 101 Objects (Kurin) or when Neil MacGregor, designated director of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, aims at telling The History of the World in 100 Objects (2011), they use specimens of material culture as register and archive of human activity. Individual exhibitions explore the role of objects in movements for social and political change ( Disobedient Objects , Victoria and Albert Museum, London). Large-scale national museum projects like the new Humboldt Forum in Berlin or the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., draw attention to the long existence of collections in Western institutions of learning and reveal the inherently political character of material culture—be that by underscoring the importance of institutional recognition of particular identities or by debates about provenance and restitution of human remains and status objects. The plethora of objects assembled in systematic as well as idiosyncratic collections within and outside the university is just beginning to be systematically explored for their roles in learning and education, funded by national research organizations such as the German BMBF.1 In theatrical performances, things function as discussion prompts in biographical work ( Aufstand der Dinge , Schauspielhaus Chemnitz) or unfold their potential to induce a bodily experience ( The Force of Things: An Opera for Objects , GK Arts Center, Brooklyn, NY). Things are present: as heritage, as commodities, as sensation; they circulate in processes of cognition and mediation, they transcend temporal and spatial distantiations. Things figure in narration and performance, in our everyday life practices, in political activism. They build knowledge of ourselves and others, influence the ways in which we interact with our fellow human beings, and in which we express or control our feelings. They combine the apparently concrete and the fleetingly abstract. Overall, things make us do things.

The “material” turn has steadily gained currency in cultural studies and the humanities, with scholars increasingly attentive to theorising things and examining their presence, power, and meaning in any number of fields and disciplines. This essay stems from the keynote lecture given at the conference MatteReality: Historical Trajectories and Conceptual Futures for Material Culture Studies , held on March 23, 2017, at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Freiburg. Focused in particular on the meaning of materiality in American art history and American Studies today, it opens with an examination of the factors of monetisation and mobility and segues to a consideration of more efficacious ways to assess, theorise, and critique the material turn. Two areas that are particularly relevant in terms of rethinking, and mediating, materiality in American art and American Studies are those of technological process and affect: how things are made and how things make us feel.

This essay examines the materiality of the two pianofortes in Jane Austen’s Emma (1815). Rather than focusing on the piano’s symbolic function—its cultural capital, for instance—this essay highlights how the physical qualities of the piano as an object enable specific plot and aesthetic effects within the novel. The instrument’s conspicuousness—the continuous human attention that it demands—allows these two instruments to become objects of sustained discourse within the plot. However, in addition to affording certain narrative effects, the piano also functions as a site of interpretive ambiguity, as the object continues to call attention to itself even after its narrative fecundity has been allegedly resolved. By examining the novel’s engagement with these pianos, this essay argues for a more open understanding of narrative agency—one that acknowledges the narrative generating and genre-undermining power of things.

This article examines social participation and the dissemination of cultural knowledge through artefacts, and analyses how unspectacular and mundane everyday objects manage to convey ideas of the exceptional and heroic, as, for example, in the case of Admiral Lord Nelson and the souvenir culture surrounding him and his victories. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the British Empire expanded and consolidated its global influence, relying heavily on the British Navy in the process. Public interest in the Navy—and in its prominent figures—increased and was also consciously promoted, and, as a consequence, elements of maritime culture were taken up and adapted in everyday culture. Nautically inspired artefacts became the fashion, and the new opportunities for mass production contributed to their proliferation. Thus, admiration for a naval hero found its expression in a multitude of artefacts which, taken by themselves, have nothing of the heroic about them but taken en masse demonstrate the significance of naval prowess in this period, and the forging of connections between the domestic to the foreign sphere.

This essay looks at water in Victorian fiction and argues that it is important not just as motif or symbol—which is how literary criticism has traditionally approached it—but as a metamorphic substance. I propose a material ecocritical framework in order to conceptualise water as literary matter, and I analyse selected passages from four canonical Victorian novels through a focus on aquatic materialisation and transformation. I argue that through the emphasis on these processes in a variety of water scenes from Jane Eyre , Wuthering Heights , Lady Audley’s Secret , and Dracula , water emerges as not inert but agential. Through a material ecocritical approach which rejects intentionality as a precondition of agency, representations of nature as animate can be reconceived as not necessarily anthropomorphic or as instances of the pathetic fallacy, but as bearing witness to how agency is shared by humans and their environment.

The New Materialisms constitute a rich field of critical inquiry that does not represent a unified approach; yet there is a general tendency to theorise objects by highlighting their agency, independence, and withdrawnness from human actors. Jane Bennett speaks of “thing power” in order to invoke the activities of “nonsubjects,” and she suggests to marginalise questions of human subjectivity and focus instead on the trajectories and propensities of material entities themselves. This essay takes issue with Bennett’s and other New Materialist thought, and it also offers a critical engagement with Bruno Latour’s notion of nonhuman agency. In his recent work, Latour has been concerned with the question of how we can tell our “common geostory.” Taking up his literary example (by Mark Twain) and adding one of my own (by William Faulkner), this essay argues that our understanding of the powers of rivers and other nonhuman agents remains rather limited if we attend primarily to the mechanics of storytelling in the way Latour does. Rather, it is the aesthetic and experiential registers of literary worlding that offer alternative venues for imagining nonhuman beings and our interactions with them in the era of the Anthropocene.

This essay discusses Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather from an ecocritical perspective, asking how her late 1960s’ novel already anticipated some of the politics of early twenty-first-century environmental thinking in the postcolonial sphere. The alliance of various marginalized characters who, one way or another, violate against existing hegemonic structures replaces the ideological and cultural conflict over territory, which derived directly from the colonialist past, with an agricultural revolution that aims to empower those who most closely resemble the subaltern classes variously theorized in postcolonial theory. This re-turn to the physical or even Real, to the materiality of the earth, opens up an alternative to the cultural essentialism that, from its beginning, created numerous stumbling stones on the path towards decolonization. Through its turn towards farming and the land and away from cultural forms of hegemony, the novel emphasizes the materiality of reality.

This article investigates the multifaceted roles that pictorial representations of the human body have played in earthquake visualizations. From the first conventional repertoires in early modern Europe to the photographic iconographies of the early-twentieth-century United States, human bodies have served as tangible proxies—human seismographs—visualizing not only the actual intensity of the seismic forces but also the severe disruption of contemporary cultural ideas, beliefs, and worldviews. As a general pictorial motif, the human body moreover allows viewers to emotionally identify and develop empathy, enhancing the pictures’ cultural efficacy. Drawing on samples from San Francisco’s earthquake of 1906, the study shows how the staging of bodies has stayed a central signifier of the cultural disruption even after seismology brought about the demystification of earthquakes. With the financialization of earthquakes and the shift of the public’s attention to the aftermath of earthquakes, human bodies became materialized ideology, strategically appropriated in order to promote political, economic, and ideological agendas. As such, the human body emerges as a juncture in the popular earthquake iconographies linking—but also complicating—competing categories such as, for instance, mind and matter, private and public, local and (trans)national, individual and collective.

This article addresses popular claims that photography has been “dematerialized” in the digital era. It engages a wide range of critical writings about photography from the early 19th to the 21st century to demonstrate that different versions of these claims have always formed an important part of photography criticism. However, rather than doing justice to photographs’ materiality or their complex entanglements with what has been considered material and immaterial, human and nonhuman, they have tended to somewhat limit our understanding of the medium’s material, sensory, and affective valences. This article argues that a sustained engagement between visual culture studies, sensory studies, and the new materialisms can help us understand more fully both analog and digital photography’s contingent position within the material world, varying sensory ideologies, and different subjectivities.

This essay reprises the status of objects in relation to critical conversations that favor things and thing studies over other methodologies of material culture studies. Recent discussions have dismissed objects as passive foils that lack in meaning. Glossing the factor of representation, however, these discussions have also glossed over a factor crucial in shaping the way in which the distinction between objects and things is made accessible in theory and practice. Two examples taken from eighteenth-century American literary culture, an anecdote by Benjamin Franklin and a sales ad published by the Pennsylvania Gazette, illustrate how in the process of representation objects become imbued with significance that reaches beyond mere signification and object classification. Once conceived as ‘material signs,’ objects become participants in cognitive environments in which seemingly meaningless symbols foster meaningful engagement with materiality.

This special issue explores spaces where identifications with the African diaspora become articulated, (re)negotiated and, as demonstrated by many articles in this issue, established as a field of the collective agency with transformative power in European societies. The African diaspora communities and cultures in Europe are constructed not only by individuals’ engagements in Africa and its global diaspora but also through the collective agency, aiming at promoting change in European societies shadowed by the normative whiteness, nationalist discourses and policies, human rights violations and overt racism. In this introduction, we discuss the empirical studies presented in this special issue as examples of academic, political and artistic spaces of African and black diasporic agency. Together, the articles make visible the diversity of African and black diasporic spaces in Europe. They also challenge methodological nationalism as well as essentialising discourses of race and ethnicity by acknowledging the global circulation of African and black diaspora cultures and the meanings of the transnational connections for diaspora communities.

This paper considers aspects of the rise of neo-fascist political sentiment across Europe. It suggests that an appropriate political response to those developments must involve a reconsideration of the politics of sympathy which is seen as essential in the formation of solidarity.

This article considers the internationalisation and institutionalisation of the fight against European and global racism and sexism within the World Council of Churches in the 1980s and 1990s. It presents the ways in which the Women Under Racism sub-programme, the SISTERS network that emerged from it, as well as their respective coordinators—the Afro-American activist Jean-Sindab and the Afro- Brazilian activist Marilia Schüller –facilitated encounters between Black-European women. In turn, this paper analyses Black-European women’s agency within these institutional and transnational antiracist and gendered spaces. I argue that the WUR and the SISTERS network were used by Black-European female activists to meet each other and other women of colour, and to voice and share their experiences publicly. These international gatherings also stimulated a transnationalisation and a Europeanisation of their activism, while being spaces where they affirmed multiple and overlapping identifications.

It has been several years since the term “Afropolitanism” was coined and instigated an intense debate in both the offline and online world. Although Afropolitanism is celebrated for highlighting positive depictions of Africa, it has also been criticised for its supposedly exclusive and elitist focus. Several scholars have distinguished Afropolitanism from Pan-Africanism by framing it as the latter’s apolitical younger version. Following the discussion around these perceived differences, this paper investigates how Afropolitanism negotiates the African diaspora discourse in relation to Pan-Africanism. Thus far, the study of Afropolitanism has remained mostly limited to the field of literary and cultural studies. In order to move the discussion on this term further, this paper explores the lived experiences of twelve black Londoners with Afropolitanism and Pan-Africanism. By using the notion of “performance,” I show that Afropolitanism and Pan-Africanism are constructed and deconstructed in both diverse and overlapping ways. The narratives emerging out of this dialogue question the centrality of the Middle Passage epistemology and the tendency to essentialize experiences in the African diaspora discourse.

This article contributes to scholarship on Afroeurope by investigating the intersection of blackness, Africanness, and Europeanness in everyday discourses and social practices in the Netherlands and Italy. We examine how young African-descended Europeans are forging new ways of being both African and European through practices of self-making, which should be understood against both the historical background of colonialism and the contemporary politics of othering. Such practices take on an urgency for these youth, often encompassing a reinvention of Africanness and/or blackness as well as a challenge to dominant, exclusionary understandings of Europeanness. Comparing Afro-Dutch and Afro-Italian modes of self-making, centred on African heritage and roots, we discuss: 1) the emergence of a transnational, Afroeuropean imaginary, distinguished from both white Europe and African-American formations; and 2) the diversity of Afroeuropean modes of self-making, all rooted in distinct histories of colonialism, slavery, and immigration, and influenced by global formations of Africanness and blackness. These new Afro and African identities advanced by young Europeans do not turn away from Europeanness (as dominant identity models would assume: the more African, the less European), nor simply add to Europeanness (“multicultural” identities), nor even mix with Europeanness (“hybrid” identities), but are in and of themselves European.

This article focuses on emerging forms of ethnic identification among Italians of Ethiopian and Eritrean origins. In 2013, in parallel with the so-called refugees’ crisis in Europe, children of immigrants engaged in the Milanese management of forced migrations in the diasporic neighbourhood of Milano Porta Venezia. They legitimated their actions by emphasising a shared Habesha ancestral ethnicity with the asylum seekers from the Horn of Africa. The article considers their ethnic identification in relation to the changes in the public discourse on the Mediterranean route. These ethnic identifications and mobilisations are interpreted as claims for social recognition as Italians rather than a form of the revivification of their ancestral ethnicity in the analysis. The Black Mediterranean represent a privileged analytical and physical space to work on the resignification of Afro-European subjectivities in contemporary Europe.

This article focuses on representative digital platforms created and coordinated by African and Afro-descendant people from Spain and Portugal. It argues that, by sharing and articulating mutual narratives online, these platforms act as spaces where Afro-diasporic communities are being imagined. To that effect, this paper not only builds on theoretical reflections on how Blackness and Afrodescendance are conceptualised on the internet. Adopting a cultural studies’ approach that offers an interpretation of selected posts, it deduces the main narratives displayed and the diverse identificational spaces intertwined in those narratives. In doing so, the paper shows that these platforms challenge biased perspectives on Afro-diasporic communities and, within the digital space, conceptualise alternative, decentred—national and transnational—communities of Afro-diasporic people that are based on shared experiences of displacement, exclusion, resistance and self-empowerment.

In this article, the authors introduce “The Black Archives”—an alternative archive consisting of more than 8,000 books, official documents and artefacts. The archive is a critical intervention, challenging dominant historical narratives, which tend to downplay histories of colonialism, slavery and their legacy. The authors explore how archival research and art can be used to make visible the histories that have been marginalised in dominant historical narratives. This is done with a case study: an exhibition based on archival research on two Black radicals, Hermina and Otto Huiswoud. The research reveals the history of the black and Surinamese activism in the Netherlands which intersects with global histories of the black radicalism.

Even as it is often eclipsed by reference to the “contemporary,” modernity is widely celebrated in European museums and galleries. When refracted through the commitments of an avowedly Black artistic agenda, how might these institutions reconceive their understanding of modernism in light of African, diasporic, or Afropean perspectives? How might concerns with African agency be enacted in these cultural spaces as they project historical narratives and produce a “public” memory in their own image? What are the implications of the fact that critical resistance to modes of cultural appropriation may, nonetheless, reproduce a discourse that attempts to immunise itself from the association of modernism with colonialism? In the formation of modernist canons, what role might an example of African conceptual art have to play, even when consigned to a museum’s storage space? This paper explores such questions through the paradoxes engaged by Mechac Gaba’s reflections on his 1997-2002 project, “Museum for Contemporary African Art,” now owned by Tate Modern. In particular, it considers the dichotomy between “modern” and “traditional” as this has been constitutive of twentieth-century art history, informing a sense of the African presence within European museums. How might reference to the “contemporary” here relate to the potentials of decolonial cultural politics within such spaces?

Yinka Shonibare’s Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle , installed on the Fourth Plinth of London’s Trafalgar Square from May 24, 2010, to January 30, 2012, temporarily transformed a space dominated by the 19 th -century monumental sculpture of Lord Horatio Nelson, Britain’s most famous naval hero. When installed in Trafalgar Square, Shonibare’s model ship in a bottle, with its sails made of factory-printed textiles associated with West African and African-European identities, contrasted dramatically with the bronze and stone that otherwise demarcate traditional sculpture. Shonibare’s sculpture served to activate public space by way of its references to global identities and African diasporic culture. Shonibare’s Nelson’s Ship , this paper argues, inserted a black diasporic perspective into Trafalgar Square, offering a conspicuous challenge to the normative power that defines social and political space in Great Britain. The installation in Trafalgar Square was only temporary, however, and the work was later moved to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, where it is on permanent display. This paper provides an investigation of the deeper historical references Shonibare made to the emergence of transnational identities in the 19 th century and the continued negotiation of these identities today by considering the installation of Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle in relation to both sites.

This article analyzes silences in the novella this is not about sadness. Using theories of community building by Fatima El-Tayeb, opacity from Édouard Glissant, and theories by Popoola herself, my work argues for the generative way silences function. Silence interweaves the text in community of women and PoCs who create healing and community in shared trauma. Further, the novella articulates diasporic space through language. The use of language is complimented by multiple silences; silences occur when recalling trauma. Violence against Black women looms as trauma occurs in and around the piece, but the novella rejects a narrative of trauma (considering even the title). The narrator continues to exert agency as she continues to narrate the story after her death; just because her life is over, the story is not over. In a novella centering around women, Popoola’s diasporic story also allows for silence; the novella rejects the notion that words are necessary. Featuring multiple narrators, this novella embodies the struggle of and for language as well its emergence in a relational community.

The main objective of this article involves describing how African nightclubs of Lisbon have become spaces for cultural resistance against certain representations of African-ness, taking Madrid as a contrasting case. Since the 1970s, the so-called African nightclubs of Lisbon have constituted spaces for gathering and nurturing a sense of community for immigrants from Portuguese-speaking Africa. Commonly regarded suspiciously by most Portuguese citizens, commodification of the couple dance labelled kizomba during the 1990s helped changed their status. However, most African research participants do not recognise their beloved dance in the commodified version of kizomba . In this context, I analyse the commodification process as a form of symbolic violence that disguises postcolonial structural inequalities and unsolved conflicts through a discourse of neutral “approaching of cultures” on the dance floor. Moreover, from the point of view of a meritocratic symbolism, this discourse portrays the performances displayed at African discos as “basic” and unworthy. After exploring several ways of resistance to commodified kizomba displayed by African discos clientele, I conclude reflecting on the increasing symbolic power of global industries for naming social groups, structuring practices and exercising symbolic violence in late modernity.

This paper describes one of the constructions of African identity that occur through the spreading of sabar in European cities. Basing on a multi-sited fieldwork between Dakar, France and Switzerland, this paper traces the local roots and transnational routes of this Senegalese dance and music performance and presents the “transnational social field” (Levitt and Glick-Schiller) that sabar musicians and dancers have created in Europe. It analyses the representations of Africanity, Senegality and Blackness that are shared in Sabar dances classes, and describes how diasporic artists contribute to (re)invent “traditions” in migration. In this transnational dance world, “blackness” and Africanity are not homogenous and convertible categories of identification, on the contrary, they are made of many tensions and arrangements, which allow individuals to include or exclude otherness, depending on situations and contexts.

Music is intimately implicated in racialising discourses. This is particularly pronounced in the case of so-called black music, i.e. the types of music that are commonly associated with African-American identity, most notably jazz and various forms of popular music. Genres of popular music are furthermore constructed continuously on the basis of a notion of their “black roots.” The idea of the “black roots” of jazz and popular music is an essential ingredient of Paul Gilroy’s (1993) analysis of a specific authenticity of blackness. To stress the history and consequences of the pre-twentieth century slave trade and institutionalised racism, Gilroy has coined the concept “Black Atlantic” that builds on the idea of a distinct double consciousness inherent in blackness as simultaneously a fundamental constituent and the ultimate other of the West. In the article, I aim at rethinking the notion of the Black Atlantic in relation to North-Eastern Europe. By way of marine analogy I ask, and building on the notions of the Black Pacific and the Black Mediterranean, how to formulate an analytical design “the Black Baltic Sea.” In addition to addressing the impact of global racialising tendencies in music, this entails considering the cultural dynamics at issue in relation to the dynamics of postsocialism in the Baltic Sea Region (BSR) and Northern European indigeneity. On the basis of such a consideration, I argue that the styles of “black music” have been appropriated and adopted throughout the BSR, albeit in clearly different national manifestations which for their part imply variegated intersections between postcolonial and postsocialist processes. These intersections become manifest in the discourses over “new Europeanness” in music and the construction of national musical traditions, particularly when juxtaposed with the prevailing Islamophobia as regards treatments of Muslim music in mainstream media.

In this article, I examine cultural production as an avenue for mapping African diasporic identities and racialised experiences in Finland. Hip hop culture has long acted as a lingua franca for the African diaspora and has been central in the development of collective identities among second-generation European youth of colour. Prior to the 2010s, the landscape of Finnish hip hop was largely white with little engagement with race or hip hop’s roots as a Black American cultural form. This status quo was disrupted by the rise of Afro-Finnish rappers. Since gaining mainstream visibility, they have catapulted into the national consciousness with music that reclaims the language of racial and ethnic identities, interrogates assumptions about national belonging, and represents the lived experiences of first-generation Black/Afro-Finnish men. Approaching hip hop as a resource for resisting normative Whiteness and carving out space for Black/African diasporic collectivities in the Finnish cultural and political imaginary, I show how Afro-Finnish rappers articulate and navigate Blackness in relation to identity, racism, and national belonging in Finland. In doing so, I emphasise the tensions between racial, ethnic, and cultural hybridity, on the one hand, and the rigidity of Finnish Whiteness and national exclusion, on the other.

This paper analyzes one kind of Ballardian landscape, wastelands created by nuclear explosions, and aims at interpreting them as a study of the un-making of the human-made world. Cityscapes of ruins, crumbling concrete concourses and parking lots, abandoned barracks and military stations, radiation and mutations make Nagasaki, Eniwetok and Mururoa wasteland snap-shots of the future. In the minds of the protagonists, the un-made landscape is strangely soothing; they are attracted by the post-nuclear imagery and gladly embrace the upcoming catastrophe. Nagasaki, Eniwetok and Mururoa are the harbingers of a future where one can experience the nirvana of non-being. In this paper, I discuss the Ballardian un-making of the world and, hopefully, point to the subliminal meaning of atomic explosions in his works. To do this, I first discuss the references to the atomic bomb in Ballard's non-fiction ( A User's Guide to the Millennium , J.G.Ballard Conversations). Then, I isolate and describe the subsequent stages of the un-making of the world using his depictions of Nagasaki ( Empire of the Sun, The Atrocity Exhibition ); Eniwetok ( The Atrocity Exhibition , The Terminal Beach ), and Mururoa ( Rushing to Paradise ). Finally, I suggest a hypothesis explaining the subliminal meaning of nuclear bombs with reference to Freud's theories.

Landscape and architecture has played a major role in J. G. Ballard's writing, I have in particular been fascinated with the use of airports in his work. When attempting to hunt down and photograph J. G. Ballard's airport landscape police and security would disrupt my ability to take photographs meaning initial plans would be altered and I would turn my focus to the peripheries, spending time cut off from the infrastructure, dwelling in abandoned waste land and forgotten patches of wilderness. Inadvertently I would replay the roles of certain characters from Ballard's work, becoming marooned and learning to adapt to the landscape. Photographing these places would yield unusual results, images resembling a science fiction landscape, turning the realist properties of photography on its head. I would discover that the extreme nature of the airport landscape influences those who experience it, so when Ballard's work portrays the modern landscape he is also revealing the unseen psychology of the humans inhabiting it.

Crash’s philosophical and aesthetic focus on the wounded body has led to it being described by many of its readers as repulsive, disgusting, nauseating, and in other similarly visceral vocabulary. It has also, however, been praised in the highest terms for its perceived exploration and criticism of postmodernity, technofetishism, and the advertising industry, along with its estrangement of society’s acceptance of the automobile age and its mutilation of our landscape, psyche and bodies. Critics of Crash who wish to portray the novel positively frequently appear under pressure to defang this aspect of it, attempting to domesticate Crash’s troubling‘low’ matter by the aforementioned ‘higher‘ aesthetic or moral cause. Crash, however, eludes this manner of simplification; the novel cannot be adequately analysed by shirking from its embodied effects. A chimaeric fusion of opposing experiential and interpretive catalysts, Crash refuses to be statically categorised.

In 1970, J.G. Ballard used a London gallery as a laboratory in which to test ideas he was toying with, ideas that eventually found their way into his 1973 novel, Crash . Ballard found that art and literature were a fecund combination. Considering the richness of his imagery and the complexity of his ideas, it is not surprising that Ballard’s works have gone on to inspire artistic responses. Perhaps the most well known of these is Robert Smithson’s masterpiece, Spiral Jetty , 1970. However, most works inspired by Ballard’s writing respond to vague notions of things Ballardian rather than to a particular novel or short story. In this essay I will focus specifically on recent contemporary Australian artworks which were made in direct response to Ballard’s 1962 novel, The Drowned World , for a 2015 exhibition I initiated and coordinated titled Mapping The Drowned World . Using my own artworks as examples, as well as work made by fellow Australian artists Roy Ananda, Jon Cattapan and Janet Tavener, I will demonstrate that art and Ballard’s literature continue to make a great synergistic team: together they produce more than the sum of their parts.

Be it Pride of Baghdad (2006), Ex Machina (2004), Runaways (2003), The Private Eye (2013) or Saga (2012), the comic book author Brian K. Vaughan is renowned not only for the scope of the projects in his oeuvre but the nuance with which he portrays his characters, many of which are of types that usually receive less mainstream attention than their white, heteronormative, superhero counterparts. This paper will perform a close reading of Agent 355 as she appears in Vol. 1-10 of Y: The Last Man . As an analytical framework through which to parse the character, it will make recourse to the literary, cultural, and theoretical concepts associated with the magical negro. In doing so, this paper will analyse and explore the ways in which Vaughan’s writing simultaneously countermands and reinforces these stereotypical stock character arrangements in a precarious balancing act. Strong, intelligent, and determined in her expression and use of agency, 355 often fulfils the function of the magical negro, sanctified, and infused with black girl magic. On the other hand, Agent 355’s entire characterisation is also simultaneously circumscribed within the strong black woman stereotype replete with noble suffering and enduring perseverance.

The Wachowskis’ and Tykwer’s Cloud Atlas indicates strong potential for an investigation into the advancement of transcultural messages in global cinema because of its conceptual commitment to narrate the story against the backdrop of sexuality, race, gender, and class. By combining critical discourse analysis (Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Power/Knowledge ) with literary criticisms of postcolonial works (Hall, Hardt and Negri) and transcultural concepts of culture (Welsch, The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today ; Rings, The Other in Contemporary Migrant Cinema ), this paper investigates how far Cloud Atlas promotes transcultural identity constructs. Upon analysis of central themes and prominent characters Cloud Atlas transmits a message that if the aforementioned socio-cultural barriers can be overcome, we can cultivate something akin to a transcultural society. However, linkages to colonial discourse and quintessential cinematic conventions vis-à-vis white individualistic heroism demonstrate that Cloud Atlas ’s liberal-humanist worldview is one that can ultimately be branded as compromised by monocultural assumptions of US values and ideals as superior.

The article at hand analyses the aesthetic dimension of contemporary “tech companies,” particularly how their characteristic rhetoric of creativity, collaboration and disruption is built into the aesthetics of the physical work environments. For that purpose, proceduralist reading and environmental storytelling, usually applied to analyse meaning-making in digital game spaces, are adapted to conduct a comparative spatial affordance analysis on material from Officesnapshots, one of the largest online repositories for workspace documentation. Expanding upon earlier definitions of spatial affordances as quasi-textual features, the article defines the design elements of tech offices as a continuation of verbal and (audio-)visual corporate rhetoric employed by companies like Google, Facebook or Etsy. It thereby contributes a material-semiotic dimension to current debates about the epistemic implications of these software platforms, which José van Dijck summarises using the term “platform society.” Besides game and play studies, elements of architectural semiotics and cultural analyses of support spaces (e.g. Kracauer 1999 and Moran 2005) as well as broader concepts such as the politics of theming (Freitag 2017) or the embedding of digital technologies into physical spaces (Kitchin and Dodge 2011) complement the theoretical framework.

In critiquing the humanism of the Anthropocene, scholars have proposed multiple “-cenes” of their own (i.e. the Capitalocene, Plantationocene, and Necrocene). However, authors often consider these formations in isolation rather than considering the intersection between them. To address this oversight, I propose the use of musical artefacts as a site of examination as the forces behind these “-cenes” embed traces of themselves into these recordings and performances. Power electronics, a subgenre of noise music, provides an exceptionally fruitful area of research because of its tendency towards disruption as both a musical and ideological gesture. This inclination creates space for artists to evoke non-dominant narratives, allowing for new forms of interaction between “-cenes” to emerge. By way of example, I analyse the album The History of AIDS by power electronics artist Prurient. Utilizing Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome as a framework for interaction, the album evokes the sexual and racial politics within the Capitalocene, Necrocene, and Plantationocene, allowing space for audiences to consider all three formations simultaneously. This manoeuvring between various “-cenes” highlights the ways in which music acts as a “-ceneic” meeting ground and implies new directions for research.

Motivated by a sense of ethical obligation and environmental urgency, I commissioned a Toronto-based artist to take a portrait of a “more-than-human” me that embodied nonhuman elements. The aim of this artistic endeavor was to re-evaluate humans' impact on and relationship with the organic and non-organic beings and stuff with which we are entangled. My aim with the resulting portrait, “Mossification,” was three-fold: to visually represent a more-than-human (multiple-singular) self; to subvert the human-centric portrait by giving moss and lichen more visual space and symbolic agency; finally, to suggest, through movement in the form of a triptych, that if we do not change, humans will end up buried under by nature. This short essay is broken down in three parts. In the first two, I provide philosophical context then synthesize a brief history of portraiture with the aim of showing how “Mossification” subverts the genre. In the final part, I demonstrate how “Mossification” might be positively received but nonetheless fails to embody transcorporeality because of its entanglement with neoliberal systems that instrumentalize and objectify nature. I conclude that even though “Mossification” is problematic, it remains a productive visual experiment because of its generative capacity to destabilize human-centric representative traditions and symbolic codes.

From alcohol to LSD, Łukasz Kamieński takes readers on a unique 300-page journey through the history of warfare as seen through the prism of drug use. Beginning with the Greek city-states and ending with the contemporary consumption in the American Armed Forces, the text overflows with witty anecdotes, eloquent prose, and heart-wrenching realities found on drug-fueled battlefields. Drawing on literature, unclassified military and pharmaceutical studies, and private accounts of soldiers, Shooting Up is brilliant work that needs to find itself on every political science and history undergraduate reading list.

The review article comments on major themes and ideas analysed by S.E. Wilmer’s Performing Statelessness in Europe (Palgrave 2018). Wilmer’s analysis offers an overview of most recent as well as historical approaches to the concept of citizenship and the state which have been developed by avant-garde artists and theatre makers. The overall aim of Wilmer’s survey of political art is to “assess strategies by creative artists to address matters relating to social justice”. He also gives a significant amount of attention to various projects carried by German theatres which attempt to integrate resident immigrants into German society. The central thrust of his argument falls on a variety of contemporary theatrical initiatives directly concerned with the life of refugees and asylum seekers. The review highlights those aspects of Wilmer’s argument which directly concern the concept of modern society, nation state and identity. Wilmer shows precisely these aspects of modern state as most destructive. The review questions that assumption, arguing that the criticism of modern society should be more subtle and nuanced and that the potential failure of responding properly to the crisis does not necessarily lie entirely on the side of the state