Colonialism

Art that addresses colonial legacies.

Installations that reframe colonial perspectives.

The Mosotho filmmaker on oral literature, forced resettlement, and stitching together the old and new.

The poet on his new collection, language as resistance, research as a starting point, and how the intimate suggests the epic.

One hundred years later, Hartman revisits W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1920 short story, “The Comet”—”a speculative fiction about the end of the world written after the pandemic of 1918, after the Red Summer of 1919, and in the context of colonial expansion and atrocity.”

Last spring, inspired by Édouard Glissant’s theory of mondialité, I created an experimental performance salon at The Kitchen, featuring sound stories with an attitude of globality and an improvised/ambient/chanting vibe.

The writer and activist filmmaker on completing the trilogy comprised of Nervous Conditions, The Book of Not, and This Mournable Body—narratives of women’s strength in the face of injustice.

Exploring Grenada’s past and present.

A playful take on Latin American expeditions that reveals the contradictory problems therein.

The “mother of African contemporary dance” discusses her solo, multimedia performance SOMEWHERE AT THE BEGINNING.

I disrupt the concupiscence of tube worms / where your snowy owl eye consults among white crusts / the venom of my gymnodactyl eye / which bribes the slag of trilobites

On a visit to the New Mexico Museum of Art, two poets grapple with questions of performed authenticity and settler poetics, while analyzing depictions of the American West.

The artist discusses her current retrospective.

In a leafy courtyard at Cairo University, the philosopher Graham Harman explains that politics is just another object among a level field of objects …

The secrets are boxed within. That’s what I thought two years ago in Quezon City, where I was doing research at the University of the Philippines Center for Ethnomusicology.

Beading images of deadly viruses and bacteria into enticing designs, Cuthand makes visible Indigenous communities’ exposure to disease from first colonial contact to today.

Sisters Lydela and Michel Nonó conduct performative interventions at their art space/home in Puerto Rico, using improvisation to process family memories and trace the wounds of colonialism.

Historical currents reveal cultural trauma and methods of recuperation.

Peru is an experiment—from colony to slavery to independence to diasporic migration; from military to revolutionary to criollo dictatorship; and then from corruption to neoliberalism to democracy to, finally, more corruption. (Can someone rewind the tape and get us back to side A please?) In the 1970s, out of this motley salad of historical tensions came musicians Arturo Ruiz del Pozo and Miguel Flores, who questioned the nature of Peru’s cultural production and identity with sound.

Through layered symbolism—such as sticks and roots threading and pricking interconnecting bodies and mounds of earth—the Kano, Nigeria–born, Paris-trained, Antwerp-residing artist Otobong Nkanga works through the trauma of decolonization by probing links between Europe’s economic growth and the exploitation of African lands.