Colonialism
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.
The Argentine filmmaker on colonialism, recreating history, and Zama.
From Super PAC to supernova, two artists view photographs through the lens of time, and time through the lens of colonialism.
Two poets reflect on colonialism, iconoclastic writers, and the political dimensions of translating literature under authoritarianism.
Writing with the body as her touchstone, the novelist channels a woman warrior in The Book of Joan.
Blunt yet intoxicating, James Gray’s The Lost City of Z betrays its outsize ambitions and pained revisionism with every last scene
If novelists could tell the story of climate change, they might spark the action scientists are calling for in order to save the planet.
“Dub was my sound because of postcolonial movements. I grew up in it. I bathed in it. I breathed it. So why shouldn’t it be mine?”
“Women in Denmark should be both women and men at the same time, but ‘men’ and ‘women’—what does that mean?”
A new documentary celebrates the great filmmaker Ousmane Sembène.
Two recent interpretations of The Rite of Spring challenge the audience in new ways.
“The tragedy of imperialism is that its dehumanizing machinery disrupts the cultures of the colonized. That’s why after imperial powers conquer a nation it sometimes takes centuries for the conquered to create cohesive civilizations again and to regain their identity.”
There is a curse upon the adventurers and mendicants, second sons of the aristocracy and would-be-sovereigns of their own destiny who sailed for the New World. Read about it in this review of The Leaves of Fate by George Robert Minkoff.
Intercepted Telegrams of a Man in a Tartan Shalwar Kameez