The Funambulist Podcast

By The FunambulistSociety & Culture

The Funambulist Podcast episodes

November 01, 2022 Alexia Fiasco & Nilton Mascarenhas /// Histoire du Cap-Vert et de sa Diaspora
Le Cap Vert est quelque peu présent dans l'imaginaire anticolonial francophone par l'intermédiaire des écrits d'Amilcar Cabral (dont la mère était Guinéenne et le père Capverdien), mais l'imaginaire politique de l'archipel aux dix iles et de sa grande diaspora demeure trop peu connu de beaucoup d'entre nous en France. Cette conversation avec la photographe Alexia Fiasco et le militant Nilton Mascarenhas permet d'y remédier quelque peu. Pour les lectrices.eurs anglophone, elle peut etre acccompagnée par l'article de Flávio Zenun Almada and Sónia Vaz Borges à propos de la diaspora capverdienne de la région de Lisbonne dans The Funambulist 43 (sept-oct 2022) Diasporas.
1 hr 7 min
October 03, 2022 Eléonore Tran /// Art et photographies de la diaspora vietnamienne
Au sein de ce premier de deux (au moins) épisodes à propos de la diaspora vietnamienne, Eléonore Tran nous parle de recherche en histoire de l'art qu'elle a effectuée à propos des travaux de six artistes de cette diaspora: Bao Vuong, Prune Phi, Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn (qui avait participé au podcast de The Funambulist en 2019), Binh Danh, Quynh Lam et Dinh Q. Lê. Au sein d'un mémoire intitulé "Suture(s): Collecte et utilisation de photographies vernaculaires dans la pratique artistique du Vietnam et de sa diaspora" (2021), elle avait ainsi montré de quelle manière ces artistes mobilisent la mémoire (et son absence) par l'intermédiaire de la photographie (familiale et autre) afin de faire diaspora et questionner celle-ci.
Eléonore Tran est doctorante en histoire de l’art contemporain à l’université Paris 8. Diplômée de Lettres modernes (Université Paris Cité) et d’Histoire de l’art (Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne) ses recherches mêlent à la fois étude artistique, sociologique et historique. Sa thèse porte sur les différentes manières dont la photographie sert de matériau de mémoire au sein de la diaspora vietnamienne. À travers l’analyse des œuvres d’artistes contemporains originaires du Vietnam, elle considère la photographie à la fois comme un fragment permettant de reconstituer le passé et comme un médium permettant d’établir de nouveaux récits de soi et de la communauté.
52 min
May 30, 2022 Robbie McVeigh & Bill Rolston /// Ireland, Colonialism, and the Unfinished Revolution
This rather long conversation with Robbie McVeigh & Bill Rolston only evokes fragments of their book "Anois ar theacht an tSamhraidh": Ireland, Colonialism, and the Unfinished Revolution, which resituates Irish history within the global history of colonialism. We talk about Gorta Mór (the Great Hunger), the Irish Revolution, the Partition, as well as the contemporary forms of struggle and internationalist solidarity in the North of Ireland.
Robbie McVeigh & Bill Rolston are the authors of "Anois ar theacht an tSamhraidh": Ireland, Colonialism, and the Unfinished Revolution (Beyond the Pale, 2021). Robbie McVeigh is a researcher based in Edinburgh, who has written extensively on equality and human rights in the context of the North of Ireland. Bill Rolston is a former professor and director of the Transitional Justice Institute at Ulster University in Belfast.
1 hr 4 min
April 14, 2022 Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi /// Vietnamese "Refugee Settlers" in Guåhan and Palestine
For the release of Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi's book, Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine (UC Press) on April 19, 2022, we are proposing this interview of hers about some aspects of her research, in particular the articulation of this concept of "refugee settlers" or the ways through which both U.S. and Israeli governments have spectacularized and instrumentalized Vietnamese refugees resettlement. We end the conversation with the geographic image of the archipelago associated with the Vietnamese notion of nước as visions for decolonial imaginaries.
42 min
April 08, 2022 STEVEN SALAITA /// Languages of Colonialism and Resistance in Palestine
This conversation between Shivangi Mariam Raj and Steven Salaita reflects over Palestine by examining how settler colonial logics are coded within language — ranging from the limits of human rights framework to conditional solidarities, from visual grammars of sanitized victimhood to academic censorship, and more. We also discuss the defiant vocabulary of resistance, as embodied by Palestinian armed rebels, prisoners, and scholars.
Steven Salaita is a Palestinian scholar and public speaker based in the U.S. He has previously taught at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and Virginia Tech. He is the author of several books, including “Anti-Arab Racism in the USA: Where it Comes From and What it Means for Politics Today” (Pluto Press, 2006), "Holy Land in Transit: Colonialism and the Quest for Canaan" (Syracuse University Press, 2006), "Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), "The Uncultured Wars: Arabs, Muslims and the Poverty of Liberal Thought - New Essays" (Zed Books, 2008), "Modern Arab American Fiction: A Reader's Guide" (Syracuse University Press, 2011), "Israel's Dead Soul" (Temple University Press, 2011), "Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom" (Haymarket Books, 2015), "Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine" (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), and "We Could Be Free: Palestine in the Revolutionary Imagination" (Haymarket Books, 2019), among others.
1 hr 1 min
February 25, 2022 Quito Swan /// Black Internationalism From Bermuda and Africa to the Oceanian Struggles
Quito Swan’s forthcoming book Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anti-colonialism, and the African World (NYU Press, March 2022) beautifully encompasses the type of internationalist solidarity our 39th issue The Ocean… From the Black Atlantic to the Sea of Islands would like to convey. As such, this interview about the struggles of liberation in Melanesia (in particular West Papua, Kanaky, and Vanuatu) constitutes a cornerstone of the issue, for which we are deeply grateful to Quito.
Hailing from the island of Bermuda, Quito Swan is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. An award-winning historian of Black internationalism, he is the author of Pauulu’s Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice (University Press of Florida, 2020), Black Power in Bermuda: The Struggle for Decolonization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anticolonialism, and the African World (New York University Press, 2022). Pauulu’s Diaspora was awarded the African American Intellectual History Association’s (AAIHS) 2021 Pauli Murray Book Prize and a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) 2021 Fellowship Book Award Prize.
48 min
February 07, 2022 Mohamad Amer Meziane /// An Ecological and Racial History of Secularization
In May 2021, Mohamad Amer Meziane published his first book, Des empires sous la terre: Histoire écologique et raciale de la sécularisation (Subterranean Empires: Ecological and Racial History of Secularization). We speak with him about the ambitious work he develops in this book, linking European secularization (and Europe's definition of what constitutes religion) with colonial extractivism from the first industrial revolution to the alteration of the world's climate.
Mohamad Amer Meziane holds a PhD in Philosophy from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. He is currently a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Religion Culture and Public and the Institute of African studies at Columbia Unversity. His first book, Des empires sous la terre, published in 2021 by La Découverte, deploys an eco-racial history of secularization. Inventing the concept of the Secularocene to describe aspects of the present climate crisis, he argues that orientalism and climate change can be seen as two facets of the secularization of empires during the 19th century.
1 hr 9 min
November 18, 2021 Jessica Namakkal /// On French Colonialism in India
When, in October 2021, we interviewed Priya Ange and Anita Kittery for our francophone show "Diasporas et Imaginaires des Luttes" about the Tamil diaspora from Puducherry or Tamil Nadu at large in France, we relied a lot on the work of Jessica Namakkal, who dedicated a book to "the making and unmaking of French India." We are therefore happy to provide you with an anglophone conversation with her about French colonialism on the Indian Subcontinent. This is part of a broader effort to render the complexity to the Subcontinent's recent history, which is usually depicted under the sole and uniform history of British colonialism.
Jessica Namakkal is associate professor of the practice in international comparative studies, gender, sexuality, and feminist studies, and history at Duke University. She is the author of the book Unsettling Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of French India, published by Columbia University Press is 2021. In addition, she is a member of the Radical History Review editorial collective, one of the co-editors of the Abusable Past, and a member of the South Asian American Digital Archive’s academic council.
1 hr 3 min
October 25, 2021 Diasporas et Imaginaires des Luttes /// Priya Ange & Anita Kittery: Puducherry & Tamil Nadu
Durant les deux épisodes dédiés à l'histoire de la diaspora tamoule d'Ilam, nous annoncions que nous jugions crucial de produire au moins un épisode à propos de l'autre diaspora tamoule en France, celle du Tamil Nadu et, pour nombre de ses membres, de Puducherry. Ce dernier cas nous permet de parler du colonialisme français en Inde. Celui-ci, implanté dans les cinq colonies de Chandernagor, Yanaon, Mahé, Karikal et Pondicherry (Puducherry), a duré près de 300 ans, laissant des traces de la hiérarchie sociale ainsi créée jusqu'à aujourd'hui, sur le sous-continent indien et dans la diaspora.
1 hr 6 min
July 20, 2021 SHAHRAM KHOSRAVI /// Waiting Bodies in Dictatorial and Bordering Regimes
This conversation was recorded to be published in The Funambulist 36 (July-August 2021) They Have Clocks, We Have Time.
Waiting is a particular temporal praxis, whose political dimension is more likely to be missed by those who make people wait than by those who have to wait for a visa, for food, for access to the city, etc. Shahram Khosravi shares with us some of his reflections on this action of waiting; its Kafkaian dimension, but also its revolutionary potential.
Shahram Khosravi is a former taxi driver and currently an accidental Professor of Anthropology at Stockholm University. Khosravi is the author of some academic books and some articles but he prefers to write stories. He has been an active writer in the international press. The past year he has been working on an art book on Waiting and two years ago he started Critical Border Studies, a network for scholars, artists and activists to interact. See also his short story in this issue.
36 min