After more than a decade of bringing you writing and art from over 60 countries, WARSCAPES is transitioning. We will continue our work of subverting, reframing and decentering mainstream circuits of knowledge through the Radical Books Collective, the Decolonize That! short books series and the BookRising podcast.
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September 29, 2022 Topics:Region:How To Do Better As A White Man: An Emotional Reckoning
Esther A. Armah May 16, 2022 How do I do better as a white man? asked Oscar-winning actor Matthew McConaughey of Emmanuel Acho on the latter’s show ‘Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man.’ That question was asked during a weekend when social media timelines are flooded with images of 18-year-old white supremacist Peyton Gendron who murdered 10 Black people at a Buffalo supermarket. Once again, the ordinariness of daily life, running errands, hanging with family – mundane beauty is transformed into a murderous blood bath as whiteness spewed its ugly masculinist hate.
Topics:Region:Through the sieve of dry grass walls: Indonesia's Sitor Situmorang
Asri Saraswati November 30, 2021 Sitor Situmorang graced the Indonesian cultural political terrains in more ways than one. Born in 1924 in Harianboho village, west of the Sumatra’s Toba Lake, Situmorang began his career as a reporter. In 1941, during the period of Dutch colonization, he moved to the capital city, then-called Batavia, and became known as a prominent intellectual and literary figure in Indonesian modern literature, publishing hundreds of poems, short stories, and essays.
Topics:Region:Dadaab Corona Notebooks
Abdi Aden Abdi, Fowsia Abdulle, Khadijo Sheikh Ahmed, Océanne Fry, Judy Mary July 29, 2021 These flash fiction pieces were created in the course "Writing African Futures," taught by Kerry Bystrom (Bard College Berlin) and Aedan Alderson (York University) as part of the program Borderless Higher Education for Refugees and in association with the Open Society University Network Hubs for Connected Learning Initiatives. Students from Dadaab as well as from Berlin thought together for a semester (January-May 2021) about science fiction as a genre that might enable largely hidden experiences to be seen and different futures to become imaginable.
Topics:Region:Black Intimacies, Racial Reckoning and the Need for Emotional Justice
Esther A. Armah May 26, 2021 May 25th. Now, a date for global Black calendars. George Floyd's murder one year ago today ignited and expanded a movement, and on this day in 1963, an organization was birthed to build unity across Africa. One killing brings both together - that of Amadou Diallo. It combines race, police brutality in America, immigration and Africa. For me, it opens a difficult door to talk intra-racial reckoning and racial healing in the context of global blackness, and Emotional Justice.
Topics:Region:Between Eggs and Shells: On Street Protests in Colombia
Steven Herran May 13, 2021 How appropriate that in Colombia, "crushing tax reform" is spoken of as “reforma tributaria” (tributary reform). I am hard pressed to find a more accurate term which hints at a dystopian world in which tribute is paid to aloof ladies and lords whose pomp and gaffs elicit disdain and giggles from the public. And prior to armored trucks lighting up the night sky, to legion of armed police firing live rounds at fleeing citizens, the patricians had given reasons to laugh.
Topics:Region:Yemen's Change Square, Ten Years On
Laura Kasinof March 18, 2021 Ten years ago, on March 19, 2011, I walked into a tent in the antigovernment protest encampment in Sanaa, Yemen, known as Change Square. I cannot remember why I walked into this particular tent rather than one of the hundreds of others. Maybe I had seen the two bullet holes on its outside flap, or I was beckoned to enter by one of the tribesmen sitting under the tent’s green tarp, but I recall clearly what one of the protesters inside told me that day.
Topics:Region:The Ethiopian Civil War: Views through the Prism of Eritrean (Social) Media
Abraham T. Zere December 24, 2020 Eritrea’s direct involvement in the ongoing Ethiopian civil war has been highly contentious for many observers. Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) leaders reportedly have claimed they’re mainly fighting the Eritrean army in support of Ethiopian federal government soldiers. Eritrean leaders either have been silent or denied it.
Topics:Region:The Empathy Exodus
Esther A. Armah November 14, 2020 The Aisle. Reach, engage, stretch across it. So says Biden, and the Biden camp post the US election win. After these last four years, the aisle has become a political middle passage. It is a space strewn with the debris of a decimated democracy; abandoned policy, caged children separated from their parents, grieving families from COVID, super spreader rallies, Supreme Court Justice sexual assault hearing, the corpses of black bodies slain by the police, unindicted police officers, gun-toting white men from militia groups, and 911-calling white people.
Topics:Region:Ethiopia: Urgent Call and Appeal for Peace
Warscapes November 14, 2020 Urgent Call and Appeal for Peace in Ethiopia from Citizens of the Horn of Africa
We, the undersigned citizens of countries of the Horn of Africa, condemn in the strongest possible terms the outbreak and escalation of open warfare in Ethiopia. We are saddened by the attendant losses of life, property, infrastructure and opportunities. We deplore in equally strong terms further stoking of the conflict.
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