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Noor Bakhsh · Qasum Faraz · Sajid Hussain
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Nidhil Vohra
Marissa Carruthers
Amira Ahmed
Ria Modak
Vrinda Jagota
LATEST
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Zahra Yarali
Noor Bakhsh · Qasum Faraz · Sajid Hussain
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Nidhil Vohra
VOL 2. ISSUE 1
María Constanza Costa
“The day of the second general strike, Buenos Aires—a city of 15.6 million people—was empty.”
Resistance Until Return
Ahsan Butt · Sadieh Rifai
Palestinian-American actor and playwright Sadieh Rifai confronts the mental toll of occupation, war, and the American dream in her world premiere, The Cave.
Surina Venkat
“Food organization at Columbia’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment began as the effort of just seven students organizing the chaotic assortment on the tarp, but it quickly evolved into a network attracting several student groups, professors, community members, and even other encampments, including the NYU and City College encampments.”
Zohran Kwame Mamdani
“I really got into organizing through the Palestinian solidarity movement. I co-founded my school's chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. The same people who used to walk by me in the student union when we were organizing for an academic boycott—those same people have reached out to me since to say they wish they had gotten involved, that they feel differently now. Really, the Black Lives Matter movement opened a lot of people's eyes to the interconnectedness of state violence.”
Fugitive Ecologies
Pierra Nyaruai
Marissa Carruthers
Zuhaib Ahmed Pirzada
Ben Jacob
Descendants of enslaved and indentured labourers cultivated life amidst the ruins of climate catastrophe in nineteenth-century Mauritius. Today, deforestation and the sugar industry have left a legacy of natural disasters and public health crises. What path forward remains for the unification of the political and scientific in service of the island’s labouring population?
Aruna Chandrasekhar
Information asymmetry, shadowy military operations, mining mafias, and the consent, or lack thereof, of the working class in how their information, labor, and presence are used are all tied to the production, distribution, and consumption of food, energy, and water in India. For climate journalist Aruna Chandrasekhar, this understanding, as well as the proximity of Operation Green Hunt to her hometown, led her to journalism.
An internationalist, leftist literary magazine seeking an activist approach to representation.
Colophon inspired by Rabindranath
Tagore's "Head Study"
Vedi Sinha
The Aahvaan Project was founded in 2016 based on the nirgun philosophy of love and the works of sufi saints such as kabir, lal ded and lalon fakir. A folk and storytelling collective, founded by Vedi Sinha in 2016, their music is avowedly political and inclusive.
Aneil Rallin
Literary theorist Aneil Rallin rejects the conventions of academic, scholarly writing being didactic. Instead of kowtowing to the distrust of playfulness in academia, he brings to the fore in his research poesis that can purposely by “playful or elliptical or weird or whimsical or mixed-genre or creative.”
Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara
An ambitious collaboration between Dhivehi visual and performance artists, experimental and folk musicians, typographers, and people from the many atolls of the Maldives creating vital cultural spaces in Malé—one that sheds light on how Maldivian artists use unified and disparate aesthetics to reflect on class, space, and politics.
“Partly because of the lockdown, things were suddenly more visible. It was like a veil was lifted. There was a heightening of cases of domestic violence, for instance, which we knew about but had to deal with it. We know about power structures, but I wondered what I could do to help... Art, at a certain point, felt pointless, but I did begin to wonder what role I wanted to play. What service do I want to provide the world?”
“I think of works like Shona N. Jackson's Creole Indigeneity, and fleshing out the narrative of brown movement. And, importantly, doing it in a way that decenters the United States, because, with indentureship we're talking about the movement from South Asia largely to the Caribbean.”
Harshana Rambukwella
Rubble as Rule
Saranya Subramanian
Torsa Ghosal
Tauseef Ahmad · Mohammad Aatif Ammad Kanth
Kashmiri homes and livelihoods are disintegrating, with major infrastructural developments and mining projects inducing landslides, disrupting water and electrical channels, and destroying agricultural trade in the region–all in the name of increasing Kashmir's connectivity. Impractical in scope, these infrastructural projects defy all recommendations geological researchers have urged developers to consider for decades: and the government is content leaving Kashmiris in unlivable conditions, so long as the homes are not yet one with the earth.
Alishan Jafri
Since his electoral victory in 2014, Narendra Modi’s Hindutva brigade has attempted to render Muslims invisible through hypervisibility. Mob-lynchings "don’t just happen” to Muslims. Thook Jihad is to be expected. By applying microscopic, misinformative attention to Muslim businesses, homes, and livelihoods throughout the country, the BJP has forced Indian Muslims to constantly create hideouts for their humanity. However, as Modi’s monumental loss in the recent Lok Sabha polls indicates, Muslims refusing to accept the social and psychological invisibilization are already leading the charge for a brighter electoral future.
“Not only has the neighborhood lost much of its middle-class transnational identity, but it is also being erased in the media and from the collective memory of Dubai. The livelihoods and lifestyles of Karama’s former inhabitants are threatened as the space for economic participation diminishes with the establishment of more exclusive, privatized, and upper-class modes of living and leisure in the area.”
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INTERVIEWS
Ahsan Butt · Sadieh Rifai
Huzaifa Pandit
Aneil Rallin
Shehan Karunatilaka
Zeeshaan Nabi
From Raags to Pitches
Vrinda Jagota
KOKOKO!, an experimental music collective from the DRC, has navigated political censorship and the country’s struggles with energy exploitation to create a sound that electrifies the present. Using repurposed household materials as instruments and makeshift cables for amps, they fuse French and South African house with Congolese folk to produce innovative live and stereo listening experiences. Their latest album, BUTU— “the night”—calls on audiences to bear witness to the cacophony of Kinshasa after dusk as a commentary on the political state of Congo at large.
Natasha Noorani
“We looked at all these old EMI vinyl album covers. I remember listening to the song and thinking: 'This song is pink.'”
Vedi Sinha
The Aahvaan Project was founded in 2016 based on the nirgun philosophy of love and the works of sufi saints such as kabir, lal ded and lalon fakir. A folk and storytelling collective, founded by Vedi Sinha in 2016, their music is avowedly political and inclusive.
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