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Errant Journal

international publication for cultural theory and practice.

17/07/2024

Today on Radio AlHara, 13.30 Bethlehem time: 'UNSILENCED: The Streets Will Be Our Classroom – with Hebh Jamal' ()

The second conversation in 's series UNSILENCED is with Palestinian-American journalist Hebh Jamal. In the beginning of June 2024, the University of Heidelberg cancelled an event where Jamal was to speak about manufacturing consent for genocide and German censorship of Palestinians. We use this conversation to not only talk about the cancellation, but about the worrying rise of an academic discourse in Germany that frames postcolonialism as antisemitic, and thereby aims to discredit all anti-colonial voices. The complicity of universities worldwide in the genocide in Gaza exposes how these institutions are rooted in modern/colonial structures. This is why it is important to seek out our own communities, and why Jamal writes: ‘The streets will be our classroom. The streets will be our university.’
Image: the Refaat Alareer Library at the Amsterdam Student Encampment, May 2024. Photo by
.encampment

13/07/2024

Today: Too Hot to Read book fair in Berlin. Open till 19.00, free entrance!

02/07/2024

Errant Journal is very happy to announce her participation in a new Berlin Book Fair for independent publishers organised by and . To Hot Too Read takes place on Saturday 13 July and entrance is free (but be sure to part with some money in exchange for books). There will be food, drinks and a programme of launches and readings. Hope to see you there, and bring some friends!

27/06/2024

UNSILENCED: The Streets Will Be Our Classroom – with Hebh Jamal ()

The second conversation in the series UNSILENCED is with Palestinian-American journalist Hebh Jamal. In the beginning of June 2024, the University of Heidelberg cancelled an event where Jamal was to speak about manufacturing consent for genocide and German censorship of Palestinians. We use this conversation to not only talk about the cancellation, but about the worrying rise of an academic discourse in Germany that frames postcolonialism as antisemitic, and thereby aims to discredit all anti-colonial voices. The complicity of universities worldwide in the genocide in Gaza exposes how these institutions are rooted in modern/colonial structures. This is why it is important to seek out our own communities, and why Jamal writes: ‘The streets will be our classroom. The streets will be our university.’
Image: the Refaat Alareer Library at the Amsterdam Student Encampment, May 2024. Photo by
.encampment

25/06/2024

Dalia Wahdan’s ‘The Faithful Debt’ in Errant no. 6 examines debt as articulated in the Holy Quran through scripture as well as the etymology of words like Dīn, at once ‘faith’ and ‘debt’ in Arabic. As a case study of alternative approaches to the global debt crisis, she explores customs around finance, property, and creditor-debtor relations in Egypt. Wahdan argues ‘debt need not be a crisis. It need not be power abused’, as we ultimately decide its terms and value.
Illustrations from Life of the Prophet Muhammad, written at the order of the Mamluk sultan al-Mansûr 'Alâ' al-Dîn 'Alî (d. 778/1376). From the collection Siyar-i Nabî (Life of the Prophet), New York Public Library.

19/06/2024

UNSILENCED is a series of conversations by Errant Podcast with artists, scholars, and activists that have been cancelled, disinvited or de-platformed in Germany over their show of support for Palestine. The goal of these conversations is not to talk about the cancelling per se (although we really need to talk about that too!), but rather about the activities that were cancelled. With this approach we hope to discuss and show the relation between the work these artists and scholars do and the struggle for Palestinian liberation.
First up is folaṣade adesanya of Studio AGD (a collaboration with Anaïs Duplan and Zoe Butler). Back in November 2023, their curated project on Afrofuturism within the exhibition 'We is Future. Visions of New Communities' at Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany was suddenly cancelled because of some of the curators’ social media posts. In this conversation we talk about the relation between Afrofuturism and showing solidarity to all oppressed people everywhere, including Palestine. In light of this cancellation, it is also interesting to consider the ways in which the museum tried to steer Studio AGD’s interpretation of Afrofuturism from the start, particularly pushing for a message of a hopeful future. But what is hope in the presence of oppression and the work of healing and reparation that still needs to be done?
.duplan

12/06/2024

We’ve made additional space in Errant #6 to address the intensified struggle for Palestinian liberation and its relations to debt/guilt and finance. Bahar Noorizadeh’s ‘View From a Zonal World: Finance and Fragmentation’ shows the entanglements of the continued occupation of Palestine with finance.

Within the text, Noorizadeh also addresses the revolutionary potential of boycotting, in its ‘refusal to participate in the world as such, [which] denies that world not only of its authority, but its means of authentication.’ When practiced collectively as a form of civil disobedience, boycotting has the potential to disincentivize continued capitalist investment in Israel. As a tactic of sabotage akin to financial shorting, boycotts institute ‘a social imagination in expressing inconfidence in the longevity of the settler-colonial project.’
All images by Bahar Noorizadeh

04/06/2024

Read the rest of .me.mcghee 's short story 'The Cane Burners' in Errant Journal No. 6 'Debt', or on our website.

18/05/2024

As part of ‘Exist, Resist, Return’: A Week of Action for Nakba Day, called for by we want to make some content by Palestinian writers freely available on our website. We now also published a slightly amended version of Isshay Albarbary´s ´###, the unknown' from our fourth issue States of Statelessness. In his text, Albarbary confronts the very real repercussions of being stateless. While his nationality upon arrival in the Netherlands was first recognised as being Palestinian, his current ID card states his nationality as ‘unknown’ and his place of birth the code ‘###’. In the face of this bureaucratic erasure of Palestinian identity, which effectively labels him out of time and place, Albarbary questions whether this position offers an opportunity, or even necessity, to realise forms of being inconceivable today.You can find the essay in the open access part of our website via the linktree.
Image: Dheisheh camp. Photo by Isshaq Albarbary ()

15/05/2024

Errant is proud to publish her 15th podcast episode titled ‘Free Palestine from German Guilt? A (Continued) Conversation on the Use of History in Germany – with Sultan Doughan’. It can be listened to on Radio AlHara today at 13.30 Bethlehem time, and on our usual platforms from now on.
In this conversation I talk with political anthropologist Sultan Doughan about the daily repression in Germany of pro-Palestinian voices. Doughan’s work centers on how debates on memory, race and religious difference after the genocide of European Jewry generate, shape and minoritize Middle Eastern communities as Muslim. Her research explores how the memory of violence inscribes state-funded educational institutions in Germany to become arbiters of injury, as such hierarchizing suffering and belonging with grave consequences for contemporary migrant communities and their access to legal and political rights. Doughan is also the author of the essay ‘‘Free Palestine from German Guilt’? Responsibilization, Citizenship, and Social Death’, which was published in the sixth issue of Errant Journal on ‘debt’ and of which this conversation is a continuation.
Image: Graffiti in Berlin Neukölln that roughly translates to: 'resistance is a continued necessity.' Below it is a stencil of the late-Palestinian prisoner Bassel al-Araj, who died after an 87-day hunger strike in Israeli prisons. Photo by

13/05/2024

As part of ‘Exist, Resist, Return’: A Week of Action for Nakba Day, called for by we want to make some content by Palestinian writers freely available on our website. The first one is 'We're still alive, so remove us from memory. Asynchronicity and the Museum in Resistance' by Lara Khaldi from our very first issue. You can find the essay in the open access part of our website via the linktree.
Image: Jumana Emil Abboud (), Ein el-Joz Bride, 2015. Gouache and pastel on paper, 28 x 39 cm. Photo by Issa Freij

26/04/2024

All ready to go! in Madrid with fair neighbours and . We'll be here all weekend!

17/04/2024

Today on Radio AlHara: Errant Podcast #13, Labour, Self-representation and Solidarity - with .collective

Werker is a long-term multifaceted project concerning photography and labor. Their work focuses on developing working methodologies based on counter-archiving, self-representation, self-publishing, image analysis, and collective learning processes. Over the last ten years, Werker has created an international community of allies, exploring notions of collective authorship, queerness, reactivating oppressed histories, and worker solidarity.
Photo by

30/03/2024

NEW OPEN CALL! (see link in Linktree)
The seventh issue of Errant Journal aims to interrogate the role of the body in strategies of resistance from below. Taking Palestine as a starting point, the ongoing genocide committed by Israel and other colonial powers and the people’s continued struggle for liberation inform our thinking and praxis. From this political standpoint, we understand that resistance from below will never be considered legitimate by the system in place, specifically because it fights said system. In a world where the only forms of accepted and acceptable violence are state-led and state-condoned, any form of opposition to this order is automatically vilified and criminalised. In this issue, we want to explore the ways in which bodies – that are sexualised, criminalised, racialised, crip – have been able to divert and subvert in order to fight back.

For this issue, Errant Journal has invited Ghiwa Sayegh (), founding editor of Kohl: a Journal for Body and Gender Research () based in Beirut and Paris, as guest editor to lead the conceptual framework and relocate Errant’s editorial centre.
This issue is made possible with the generous support of . Image: detail of a poster designed by Baayoun, published by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, 1969

20/03/2024

'[...] Lebanon’s debt can best be understood as embodied in the tangible: a sectarian sponge cake, a crumpled Lira banknote, a plastic gun, and a Swiss-designed marble facade. The current state of Lebanon's economy is intricately woven within several circuits of failure and exhaustion.'

Read Ibrahim’s Kombarji’s () full text on the debt crisis in Lebanon and daily navigations of an ‘economy of exhaustion’ in the sixth issue of Errant Journal.
Images: 1) The Banque du Liban today. Photo by the author; 2) Banque du Liban, 1968; 3) Lebanese 1000 Lira banknote; 4) unknown; 5) A magazine ad for a toy gun, published in Jo-Jo, No. 7 (September 1947): p. 36.

29/12/2023

On the 12th of January, Errant Journal is taking part in the Micro Book Fair as part of the Expanded Publishing Fest , on the invitation of The Institute of Network Cultures. Hope to see you all there!

18/12/2023

‘What you call the first exile of the Jews [from Algeria] in 1870 should be understood as background to the creation of the settler-colonial state of Israel, which destroyed Palestine. The second exile in 1939, from their French citizenship was hijacked by the Zionists as proof for why the Jews needed a state of their own, rather than proof of why the Jews should protect their communal life from colonial predators, French and Zionist alike. And when the third exile came with Algerian Independence in 1962, Israel had already cemented enmity between Jews and Arabs into a fixture of the Jewish condition.’

Read the rest of Azoulay’s letter to Benjamin Stora, on the position of Algerian Jews in the French colonial project in Errant Journal #5. The piece reacts to the controversial Stora Report commissioned by the French government in 2021. Azoulay provides important insight into the erasure of shared Jewish-Arab histories, and its role in the settler-colonial projects of France and Israel.
Images: Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, The World Like A Jewel in the Hand - Unlearning Imperial Plunder (II), 2022

14/12/2023

In Errant #5, contributor tells of her personal discovery of the feminist newspaper ´bi***es, witches, & d***s´ from her homeland of Aotearoa, which she stumbled on in the archives of ‘a volunteer-run community library on the other side of the world.’ Subtitled ‘The Teachings of Black Feminist Publishing in Aotearoa’, Waerea’s text tells of the Black Māori activism contained in the newspaper’s section ‘The Black Forum’ and the intimate process of personal restitution than can still occur across diaspora and against efforts of assimilation.
Images: all from bi***es, witches, & d***s. a women’s liberation newspaper (1980-1981), published by Feminist Publications Collective (thanks to )

11/12/2023

Read the rest of Zoé Samudzi's () essay 'A Reparative Futurity Beyond Legality: The Case of Renty and Delia Taylor' in Errant Journal No. 5; Learning From Ancestors. Epistemic Restitution and Rematriation.

07/12/2023

The full title of Errant #5 reads ‘Learning from Ancestors: Epistemic Restitution and Rematriation’. Within the issue, editor-in-chief Irene de Craen’s conversation with Dr. Robin R. Gray provides crucial context for understanding the concept of ‘rematriation’. Gray outlines her positioning of rematriation as an Indigenous feminist paradigm and discusses the work she has engaged with her own community on the return of stolen Ts’mysen songs.

This conversation can also be listened to on Errant Journal’s podcast.
All images by Phil Gray (). Gray is from the Ts'msyen and Cree First Nations of Lax Kw’Alaams, BC and Fort Chipewyan, Alberta. Phil is committed to helping to revitalize and make known the artwork of Ts'msyen people. He is most proud of the work that records the stories and history of the Ts'msyen people and his art that adorns traditional regalia, organizational logos, and other community centered work that allows him to give back and stay connected to the community.

04/12/2023

Artist Aram Lee’s contribution to the fifth issue of Errant takes the form of a conversation between a museum object and a visitor. Her speculative text gives voice to objects, trapped in an airless vitrine with only faint memories of the hands that used to hold them, of the movements their bodies used to make. But Lee poses a revolutionary potential: what would happen if the climate-controlled museum begins to warm up?

Lee’s text emerges from the four-year (2021-2025) research programme Pressing Matter: Ownership, Value and the Question of Colonial Heritage in Museums in which Framer Framed, Amsterdam is partner. Pressing Matter addresses the future of colonial collections held in the Netherlands, bringing together a consortium of researchers from five academic institutions and five museums, alongside a network of national and international partners. The research investigates the potential of ‘colonial objects’ to support societal reconciliation with colonial pasts and their afterlives.
Images: Aram Lee, When, Objects, Turn, film (still), 9 min 2 sec, 2023

30/11/2023

In the text “King Kong on the Prinsengracht” in the latest issue of Errant, Adeola Enigbokan takes us along on a tour through the colonial history of Amsterdam, from the Prinsengracht to the Tropenmuseum, uncovering the violent ancestral culture of the Netherlands and other colonial powers, obsessed with the collection, classification and display of the Other.

“I shake with shame, for this place, for the people whose ancestors turned robbing graves and stripping bodies into a science, who built monuments and buildings to celebrate these macabre trophies. They did not bring me here to simply put me on display. They brought me here to die, to make sure my real name would be forgotten on my own island, to put my body into the service of their own ancestral cult. I feel the dishonor of all these objects, warehoused and exposed, fallen gods, reduced to artifacts, treated without the respect earned through centuries of sacrifice.”
Images: 1) Jacob Bosch, Manuscript map with the design for the Plantage, on an unknown scale, ca 1682. Source: Amsterdam City Archive; 2) C.A. Bombach Czn, Artis Schouwburg/Hollandsche Schouwburg, Plantage Middenlaan 24, 1891. Source: Amsterdam City Archive; 3) Joden – Niet-Joden II (Jews – Non-Jews II), 1942. Source: Amsterdam City Archive. Map on a scale of 1:1,000 of the neighbourhoods V2, W1 and W2 (= area bordered by Singelgracht, Amstel, Nieuwe Herengracht, Plantage Doklaan and Kazernelaan) on which numbers of Jewish residents (light yellow) are compared with non-Jewish residents (black): where 1 cm length of the pasted strips represents 50 people. The map (1230 x 1490 mm.) is numbered II, and was produced by public works officials.

27/11/2023

“I acknowledge I am indeed monstrous, and that this holds power.”

Dewi Sofia’s (.sofiaa) manifesto-like text closes the fifth issue of Errant Journal with a powerful call to reclaim the ancestors which have been alienated through colonialism. She tells the story of the manananggal; “the viscera sucker of the Philippine islands [...] described as unflinchingly beautiful and seductive during the day, only to unhinge at her hips at dusk and morph into a humanoid bat-thing that preys on foetuses, internal organs, and – at times – misbehaving men.”

Sofia describes the instrumentalization of monstrosity by colonial powers in the Philippines as a means of controlling the local population. Especially in the case of the manananggal and her origin in especially female community leaders, healers and revolutionaries who fought against colonial invasion.
Images: 1) Viñas Deluxe as manananggal on Drag Race Philippines, 2022; 2) Boy with a bat, presumably in the Philippines, circa 1935. Image licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0). Leiden University Libraries

23/11/2023

For the fifth issue of Errant Journal, we are happy to publish a translation of the 1960 poem ‘SOUFFLES’ by Birago Diop, a Senegalese writer and poet involved with the Négritude literary and artistic movement. Diop made his literary debut in 1947 with the massively popular Les Contes d’Amadou Koumba (Présence Africaine, 1967), for which he won the Grand prix littéraire de l’Afrique Occidentale Française. He continued to document folktales, write poetry, and work in veterinary medicine until his death in 1989. You can read the whole poem in English in our current issue ‘Learning From Ancestors. Epistemic Restitution and Rematriation’.
Credit: ‘SOUFFLES’ first appeared in the collection Leurres et lueurs, Présence Africaine, 1960 for the French language edition. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Translated from French by Nicholas Mandelbaum.

20/11/2023

Albert Mwamburi’s text for Errant Journal #5 explores the case of vigango: cultural artifacts of the Mijikenda, a Bantu ethnic group from the coastal region of Kenya. Vigango are wooden objects, erected as commemorative posts for Mijikenda elders and have immense spiritual value. The text reveals key misunderstandings by community outsiders, and those profiting from the illegal trade in the objects, that are used as justification for the looting of the objects; namely, that vigango which are left behind when a group migrates are no longer considered sacred. This however ignores the whole purpose of leaving the vigango behind; that the dead and the spirits of the dead are not to be disturbed. The ‘abandoned’ vigango were respected enough by the Mijikenda to be left behind to naturally decay, undisturbed, just like human remains. Mwamburi hopes that the return of stolen vigango can nurture and revitalize Mijikenda culture, if restitution occurs as a process led by the community and reflective of the intended culture of vigango.

Images: 1) Inscription above the outer gate of Fort Jesus, Mombasa, Kenya. Photo by Albert Mwamburi; 2) Cover of Kambishera Mumba, Maurice. The Wrath of Koma. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers Ltd, 1987.

17/11/2023

In his text ‘Aesthesic and Epistemic Restitution for the Joy of Life. Recalling Earth, Overcoming the Contemporary, Knowing Otherwise’ in Errant No. 5, Rolando Vazquez questions the whole edifice of Western aesthetics, its regime of appropriation, the system of representation, its control over temporality, the forceful reduction of telluric, communal, ancestral, relational temporalities, and the now of ownership, display and contemporaneity. What would it mean, he asks, if our museums, if our art schools begin training not in how to become sovereign-self, authors, curators, enunciator, somebody that controls and holds the power of representation, but instead, to become somebody that receives, who is capable of receiving the plurality of Earth and the plurality of worlds, capable of receiving the pluriversality of others and of earth-worlds. Can we move from the logic of owning to the logic of owing, from property to gratitude, from indifference to compassion? Beyond the question of the return of the objects, epistemic restitution and aesthesic restitution should bring about the value of relational epistemologies and aesthesis, in order to transform and to overcome the aesthetic and epistemological regimes of the West that are complicit in the destruction of Earth, the destruction of the plurality of worlds and the erasure of our earth-histories.
All images by

13/11/2023

In the essay ´A reparative futurity beyond legality: the case of Renty and Delia Taylor´ published in Errant Journal No. 5, Zoé Samudzi () looks at the regime of property ownership and its entanglement with the enduring questions of reparations for slavery through the daguerreotypes of Renty and Delia Taylor held and owned by Harvard University. According to Samudzi, the rigidity of the boundaries of mediums and the politics of provenance are mired in legal logics that prioritize the property claims of racial capital, and depersonalize objects in order to maintain their alienation from the ancestral ecologies to which they belong. She therefore calls for a transformation and re-classification of such photographs as a genre of human remains that could ostensibly be identified, claimed by, and returned to the families and communities from whom they originate. In turn, this would establish an understanding of reparation as a restoration of relations that seeks to maximize the dignity and collective recovery of historically marginalized people, and be a step closer to an expansive conception of justice as care.
Images:
- Portrait of unidentified woman, between 1844 and 1860, by Mathew Brady’s studio
- Daguerreotype, plate from the French company Christofle, between circa 1850 and circa 1858. The Nordic Museum registration no. 253240d
- Portrait of U.S. Congressman Joshua R. Giddings, between 1844 and 1860, by Mathew Brady’s studio

05/11/2023

At Errant, we stand with the Palestinian people in this time of extreme violence and hardship. We demand a ceasefire but also hope that international and public pressure shall not diminish when a ceasefire takes place. Let's never stop talking about Palestine until it is free, from the river to the sea.

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Errant Journal

Errant Journal is an international publication for cultural theory and practice aimed at bringing together diverse local perspectives on a global scale. By embracing the limits of our situated knowledge and the meaninglessness of a singular vantage point, Errant questions the politics of knowledge and representation through language, art and other disciplines. With its decolonial and pluriversal approach to themed issues related to (a.o.) geo/body-politics, museology, ecocide, and activism, it aims to connect theory with practice in an expansive field of knowledge.

Errant Journal is a concept by Irene de Craen, realized in collaboration with Framer Framed, an Amsterdam-based platform for contemporary art, visual culture, and critical theory & practice.

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