Progressive culture since 1954
Resistance, in Latin, means to ‘stand firm against’. The same word, in another cosmos, is resistor, an electronic component that absorbs energy across a potential difference. With such a voltage difference, the electrical energy passing through the resistor is transformed into heat.
From Arinze Ifeakandu’s decidedly queer-centric fiction to the experimental sound of Fireboy DML’s music, young Nigerians are starting to embrace cultures that used to exist at the fringes of society. They are powered by a bohemian rush, a pressing need to skate down what Kerouac called the ‘senseless nightmare road’.
The ‘white imagination’ imagines itself as limitless – boundless, colourless, neutral and universal. Within the white imagination there is an invisible charter of rights that I hear frequently quoted, touted, lauded: it is my right to imagine whatever I want! My imagination is free!
I dedicate my life’s work to all past and present Iranian writers and thinkers who have been imprisoned, tortured, executed and exiled. We live in the age of new catastrophes. An exile’s life is about fighting against oppression in the country of birth, gaining knowledge, demanding justice and freedom for all the world’s people.
The scenes unfolding in the streets of Jerusalem, disturbing as they may be, should be seen and understood in context of decades of continuous dispossession and dehumanisation of Palestinians. A context marked by a violent rhetoric of displacement and replacement whereby those who are Indigenous to place and land can simply be replaced, erased, and removed without hesitation.