Why does this matter? Some experts argue that the saturation of elections has significant downsides — exhausting voters and hurting the quality of governance by pushing lawmakers toward more campaigning, fund-raising and short-term thinking.
08.11.2022 | by German Lopez
Growing up, Felipe Adão had to navigate two worlds: one as a Brazilian, the other as an Afro-Brazilian. He studied at private schools, but lived in an underprivileged area of Campinas, a city in the state of São Paulo. Both his friends from school and his friends from the street had an influence on his upbringing.
21.10.2022 | by Jessy Damba Diamba
Shortly after Amini’s violent death on 16 September, protests broke out and spread from the Kurdish parts of Iran to the whole country and the world. Demonstrators chanted the Kurdish slogan “jin, jiyan, azadî” – “woman, life, freedom”. But in news reports, particularly Western ones, Jîna Amini’s Kurdish identity has been erased – she is described as an Iranian woman and her ‘official’ Persian name ‘Mahsa’ – which for her family and friends existed only on state-documents –is the one in headlines. Calls to “say her name” echo in real life and across social media but unwittingly obscure Jîna’s real name and, in doing so, her Kurdish identity.
18.10.2022 | by Meral Çiçek
In the aftermath of Mahsa Amini’s death under Iran’s state custody, students have recently given a new energy to the weeks-long protests. They launched large demonstrations at Tehran University on Saturday and Sharif University on Sunday, according to a stream of videos that continue to be released. Protests were also reported at campuses in the central city of Isfahan, Kerman in the south, Mashhad in the northeast, Tabriz in the northwest, and elsewhere.
12.10.2022 | by Sanya Mansoor
In January 2022, Xiomara Castro became Honduras’s first woman president, restoring electoral democracy to the country after more than a decade of dictatorship. Running with the leftist Liberty and Refoundation (LIBRE) party, Castro’s election breaks with the century-old two-party system that traded power between elites in the establishment National and Liberal parties. With a mandate for transformation and high popular expectations, Castro faces significant challenges in a context of profound systemic crisis.
25.07.2022 | by Hilary Goodfriend
In the collective’s prolific and extensive filmography, the gesture of deconstructing the audiovisual and cinematic grammar is inseparable from the disarticulation of the hegemonic perceptive, cognitive, representative and scopic regimes. Los Ingrávidos’ work shifts indeed to a theoretical reflection, formalised in a correlative film praxis, focusing on the intersection between different domination categories related to the capitalist-colonial-patriarchal system. Their films aim, precisely, to disarticulate the perceptive-cognitive models and the audiovisual and cinematic forms resulting from domination categories.
21.03.2022 | by Raquel Schefer
The conflict raging in Ukraine between Russian and Ukrainian Slavs, the latter with the support of a tribal coalition of nations across sub-Scandinavian Europe, has exposed much more than the fragility of peace on the disease-ravaged subcontinent. It has also revealed a mean streak of racist exceptionalism with which many Europeans, and people of European heritage, tend to regard themselves.
It has been impossible to miss the shock among Caucasian journalists covering the war, sparked by Russia’s invasion under the pretext of supporting ethnic allies in the eastern tribal enclaves of Donetsk and Luhansk, which it has recognised as independent states, at the idea that this could happen in Europe.
04.03.2022 | by Patrick Gathara
And so, as we engage with vinyl reissues such as these, we are also engaging in a fight against forgetting much more than just music. These are valuable artifacts of South Africa’s musical history that were transcendent of repressive daily conditions. Challenges remain in the here and now. The vibrant, radical artists of today’s South African jazz are the descendants of such soothsayers of the non-verbal, speaking truth to that which cannot be silenced. They are still learning to look at themselves differently, still redreaming the world, hidden gods speaking from within them a new language we will all need to learn in order to talk to each other. It’s about much more than just music.
21.08.2021 | by Liam Brickhill
Jean’s aim is to give these people and their frustrations a voice, and to make the viewer confront their own perspectives on migration. “I think a lot about the indifference that characterizes the complicit silence of the rest of the world towards victim states,” he says. “I’m inviting an awareness necessary to free the world from these dehumanizing practices.”
01.07.2021 | by Jean David Knot and Alex Kahl
The memorial - rows of palm trees painted in black - was designed by Angolan artist Kiluanji Kia Henda and funded by Lisbon council. It will stand in the centre of the city.
From the 15th to the 19th century, Portuguese vessels carried close to 6 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic, more than any other nation, but up to now Portugal has rarely commented on its past actions and little is taught about its role in slavery in schools.
Rather, Portugal’s colonial era, which saw countries including Angola, Mozambique, Brazil, Cape Verde, East Timor as well as parts of India subjected to Portuguese rule, is often perceived as a source of pride.
24.03.2021 | by Catarina Demony and Victoria Waldersee
References to Portugal’s epic, seafaring past like these litter this city – there is even a Vasco da Gama shopping mall. But until now, there has never been a single explicit reference, memorial or monument in Portugal’s public space to its pioneering role in the transatlantic slave trade, nor any acknowledgement of the millions of lives that were stolen between the 15th and 19th centuries.
15.03.2021 | by Ana Naomi de Sousa
It’s a common place to say that the memory production drags with it, inevitably and concomitantly, the forgetfulness production. There are many ways of forgetfulness, the most insidious of which is, undoubtedly, the memory erasure, the past rewriting as part of a deliberated strategy of intervention in the present.
13.03.2021 | by António Sousa Ribeiro
And so it was in these places of refuge that Black Lives Matter arose, a largely Northern- and Western-born protest movement against persistent racial discrimination in many forms. It is organic and leaderless like the Great Migration itself, bearing witness to attacks on African-Americans in the unfinished quest for equality. The natural next step in this journey has turned out to be not simply moving to another state or geographic region but moving fully into the mainstream of American life, to be seen in one’s full humanity, to be able to breathe free wherever one lives in America.
17.02.2021 | by Isabel Wilkerson
Ignoring the central role of race and colonialism in world affairs precludes an accurate understanding of the modern state system.
Worldwide protests against police racism and brutality and the toppling of statues commemorating white supremacists have led to a public reckoning in the United States and many other countries—forcing citizens and governments to confront the historical legacy of systemic racism and the enduring inequalities it has created.
16.02.2021 | by Gurminder K. Bhambra, Yolande Bouka , Randolph B. Persaud, Olivia U. Rutazibwa, Vineet Thakur, Duncan Bell, Karen Smith, Toni Haastrup and Seifudein Adem
It is February 1964—one year into the armed struggle for independence in Guinea Bissau against Portuguese colonial rule. Cabral, the independence struggle’s leader, had called a conference in Cassaca for his African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) fighters to re-organize and address inter-party grievances.
The Cabral as seen in this and similar photographs, with his defiant stance, dark glasses, and signature knitted stocking cap in spite of the West African heat, would become the iconic image of the West African country. More than fifty years later, the image is still used to signify both Guinea Bissau’s victory in the 11-year independence struggle and the country’s continued hopes for the future. But what about the faces of the young women surrounding the independence hero? Directly to Cabral’s left in the image stands a round-faced, then 14-year old girl, Joana Gomes.
04.02.2021 | by Ricci Shryock
The existing economic trends, and the power of the existing political and economic elites, have been strengthened, and the Tunisian people have yet to reap substantial benefits from their revolution. Tunisia is, ostensibly, now a democracy, but a series of technocratic governments have struggled to bring change, and to balance the interests of the traditional elite and the less privileged general population.
07.01.2021 | by Layla Riahi and Hamza Hamouchene
One group that is getting extra attention in this war of propaganda is rappers, as hip hop has long played a central role in the cultural political imagination of Cuba. Last month, Havana rapper Denis Solís was arrested by Cuban police for “insulting an officer.” Soon after, an artist and activist group he belongs to called the San Isidro Movement mobilized an occupation of a public square and went on a hunger strike to demand his release. Videos of the subsequent crackdown by the Cuban authorities went viral, and hundreds came out in the following days to protest the heavy-handed treatment. The protests fizzled out after stalled negotiations with the government, but the damage to the government’s public image had already been done.
22.12.2020 | by Luna Olavarría Gallegos and Boima Tucker
Hudnall records for posterity the architecture of weathered shotgun houses and the vibrant lives within them. He depicts people at ease, celebrating holidays, dressed in their Sunday finery, and kids in the thrall of summertime. “These are the young Floyds coming up,” he says. “They need to be cared for and guided. Rather than holding up a sign and marching for a day or two, then forgetting about it, come here, talk to people, get to know them.”
14.12.2020 | by Earlie Hudnall and Paul Moakley
This essay investigates the ways in which contemporary artistic practices have been working towards an epistemic and ethico-political decolonization of the present by means of critical examinations of several sorts of colonial archives, whether public or private, familial or anonymous. Through the lens of specific artworks by the artists Ângela Ferreira, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Délio Jasse, Daniel Barroca and Raquel Schefer, this essay examines the extent to which the aesthetics of these video, photographic and sculptural practices puts forth a politics and ethics of history and memory relevant to thinking critically about the colonial amnesias and imperial nostalgias which still pervade a post-colonial condition marked by neo-colonial patterns of globalization and by uneasy relationships with diasporic and migrant communities.
06.12.2020 | by Ana Balona de Oliveira
This article examines the impact of contemporary curating and cultural programming in the configuration of critical perspectives on Portugal’s postcolonial identity. It argues that visual creativity is forging a new paradigm in the Portuguese cultural field. In this context, postcolonial discourses are not silenced but, rather, aligned with international agendas in broader cultural initiatives mirroring the transformation of the main Portuguese cities into cosmopolitan, multicultural, and multiethnic enclaves.
01.12.2020 | by Marta Lança and Carlos Garrido Castellano
