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Hanan Zaffar · Danish Pandit
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Zahra Yarali
LATEST
Mai Ishizawa · Polly Barton
JAPAN
Zoya Rehman
ISLAMABAD
Aria Pahari
VOL 2. ISSUE 1
AYAH KUTMAH
“Euphemisms and doublespeak concealed disappearance at an unprecedented transnational scope.”
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"
Aamer Hussein
"How would Rafi Ajmeri have fared in the Progressive era that was dawning just then? Would his liberal attitudes have hardened into dogma, or would he have swung to conservatism in the Pakistan to which his brothers migrated as he too probably would have?"
Tarfia Faizullah
"Go back to sleep Ms. Chowdhury, the American situation is strange"
Rajiv Mohabir
"In Ayodhya’s sacked Mogul masjid / vultures scrawl Ram on new temple bricks. / Brother, from this mandir of burning"
“Welcome! Models politicians auto drivers butchers bankers accountants actors liars cheat saints masters slaves herpes gonorrhea HIV syphilis tops bottoms bottoms who top tops who bottom preferably top miserably bottom white black pink yellow brown blue high caste low caste no caste...”
"There was no one else in the four-berth compartment. I was comfortable. Somewhere near the Andhra-Orissa border I woke up and found everything dark. The train wasn’t moving either. Pitch dark. You couldn’t see anything out of the window."
Jamil Jan Kochai
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.
Priya Darshini · Max ZT · Shahzad Ismaily · Moto Fukushima · Chris Sholar
“Loneliest star, shining so brightly / For no one to see. / Loneliest star, tell me your secret / You shouldn't keep it.”
Natasha Noorani
“We looked at all these old EMI vinyl album covers. I remember listening to the song and thinking: 'This song is pink.'”
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