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My heart is in pain because this book started with so many colours (and with it, nuance) — like life in a bowl — and took the darkest, most regrettable turn.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised as the arrival of Western institution in a native community was meant to be some sort of an anchor here? but at the same breath I also think it’s so raw and talented of Achebe to write of imperialism in ways that does not pivot on the colonisers but on the men and women who have tended to their lands and danced, lived, died on it. Who saw traditions as not an extension of their lands but as something so spiritually EMBEDDED in their faiths and collective identities. + the discourse of gendered ways of living + the conflict and transition in the unhomely (literally in a Freudian sense) + how Achebe refers to kola nuts, cocoyams and fruits and seeds of the earth as if each was its own authoritative character integral to the village and its children.

Still processing how HEAVY MY CHEST is after I arrived at its ending. Also The ‘white men’ are just extras here (we love it) by @busy_archiving

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3 years ago

“This merits the term irony: liberal democracies ended up establishing what no totalitarian regime could have ever put in place: files, updated daily, on every citizen. Paying for a purchase with a card, buying a train ticket, visiting a website, the daily restocking of social media accounts with data: isn’t progress exhilarating? You can’t stop thinking, as you make your way, about the cameras that capture you at every turn, you and every other passerby, and would’ve captured Nguyên back then—on a street corner, in the metro, near a library. At least the Annamite had the leisure to escape the snitches that we now enthusiastically keep in our hands at all times. Soon, drones will replace the last birds and facial recognition will expand with no one resisting them at all. Nothing if not banal: comfort rules better than the whip.”

Excerpt From
Faraway the Southern Sky
Joseph Andras and Simon Leser by @busy_archiving

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2 years ago

This one is for my global developments reader, and while this book packs only 200 something pages it’s really narrativised like an in-depth investigative piece which transports you across regions. In a way it’s also a memoir and diary of a true investigative reporter, whose language sometimes reminds you of a profound economist. The context of developments here is narrowed down into food distribution, commodity and supply chain whose value is treated as a playground and as the most exciting betting arena by the world’s richest. So you can expect Liberti’s first-hand reporting of the occupation and wholesale underselling of agrarian lands in the Global South, focusing on Ethiopia, Brasil and Tanzania. Indonesia gets an honorable mention here too thanks to farmer, activist and labour organiser veteran Henry Saragih, who holds a commendable voice against mass agribusiness/industrialists on a global level. What I can say is that the ways state officials will trick and exploit their own people for “foreign investments” will really surprise you. In Muhaga, a Tanzanian province bordering on Rwanda, the government manipulated entire villages to give up their crops and land, and in Brasil the rise of agrofuels have led to the forced displacements of indigenous peoples. Liberti fiercely followed the trails of what’s happening in rural Ethiopia to the skyscrapers in Riyadh to Wall Street.

If you want to understand how the contract-laden workings of foreign investments actually stifle local developments and wealth, and how institutions like World Bank and International Monetary Fund have always been complicit in this theft, pick up this book.

#LandGrabbing by @busy_archiving

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2 years ago

First poster .. maybe I should decorate a little more.. also awaiting Half of a Yellow Sun ❤️❤️❤️❤️ cannot wait to post the book and aggressively announce my reading progress as I further procrastinate on my essay by @busy_archiving

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4 days ago

the bowl with one spoon. hit a sweet spot somewhere between earth into property x spheres of insurrection. Need to metabolise n write something out of it but distraction stay distracting me! The monotony and strictness of corporate capitalism is honestly too much I just withdraw mentally 👩🏽‍🎤 by @busy_archiving

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12 days ago

It is an honour to have my first prose poem “Cut” find its home in the welcoming pages of @dia_critics.. Thank you to the editors for the kind collaboration.

Full text in bio. by @busy_archiving

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24 days ago

Many of my favourite historians take a writer-first approach to their scholarship. This means that they’re able to explain whatever they’ve been studying seriously for decades as something truly close to all of us and that has affected each of us in different ways. The first anthropological scholarship that pulled me in was Graeber’s Utopia of Rules… that was 2021, and since then I’ve engaged, though not always seriously, with most of his work. Really, his storytelling hypnotised me.

Last year I discovered that when he was away in Madagascar researching for what would become Pirate Enlightenment, he had brought only two novels with him, one of which was The Brothers Karamazov, a book whose passages I have tattooed on my ribs.

I am now reading Tony Hall’s Earth into Property. 30 pages in, and already very in love. I discovered too, that he was moved to write this ethnobiography by Che’s Congo Diary, part manifesto and part autobiography, which I happened to buy in London for £8 a few years back.

How can I not be amused and invested by this textual world, this world of thought that, in Golsorki’s words, orients itself toward the South? To learn that you share an unexpected, though not random, favourite reading with your favourite authors.. I feel so reaffirmed in my curiosity by @busy_archiving

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25 days ago

Damn. Happy Sunday by @busy_archiving

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2 months ago

A few excerpts from my latest work “Colonialism in the Machine,” appearing in @thepomegranatearchive. full text in bio :-) by @busy_archiving

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2 months ago

This book came to me at a time where I have been struggling to find the tool necessary to think about the strain between the working/capitalist body and the radical/creatively depleted self looking for a way out. Most discourses point toward the macropolitics: a complete revolt - reform - the undoing and redoing how labor is organized and capital/resources distributed.. which, of course, is sensible in its own rights. But how does decolonization take place on a micropolitical level?

What does it take for the laborer, tied to extorting work or various forms of precarity, to arrive at a “rupture” with the colonizing macropolitics that structure the scaffolding of their lives? We imagine a future of living otherwise, but what practical and psychoanalytical frameworks do we really have in analyzing what Rolnik terms “this pimping of Life”? In this work she “asks us to pay attention to what else is going on even under extreme duress - the experiments and exercises in the extrasensorial, extracognitive, and the extrasentimental. In place of the interpersonal, of interpersonal relations, instating the hazardous figure of the person, an extra entanglement must be militantly preserved and practiced. Micropolitics tends to announce through resonances the potentialization of life, and it is to the rehearsal and revision of these resonances we must turn.”

Spheres of Insurrection: Notes on Decolonizing the Unconscious by Suely Rolnik by @busy_archiving

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2 months ago

I am married to library.memoryoftheworld.org

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// this is my current rota taken in Democrazy by @busy_archiving

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2 months ago

I will never skip a digital inequality literature. This is because no other infrastructure binds as many social problems as tightly as technology does — class, gender, race, (im)mobility, all of which lead back to the question of labour, access and participation, alongside the invisible forces shaping how these factors are distributed across people. This book, part of Pluto Press’ “data and inequality” series, break down this very problem by dissecting what appears on our digital maps, the limits of how accurately they represent places, and most importantly who gets to do the privileged work of representing and what this means to everybody else.

What makes the literature especially interesting is how seriously it engages with what it calls “information ecology” and the contested layers precariously holding this ecosystem together: language, unpaid work, excess/leisure time, unequal broadband costs and the more ethical and relational questions tied to autonomous participatory work, e.g. Wikipedia editing. In a way it’s like having the generic digital inequality statistics often churned out by the UN and industry white papers reframed and explained to you by a historian. And me I love some urban sociology … and so I was immediately hooked once I realised the book examines the labour and limits involved in digitally mapping communal urban spaces.

It is also 178-pages light. I could have easily finished it in a week but God the way this small life has been testing me… don’t even make me go there oh. I even had to reintroduce myself to Yoga! Anyhow - Happy long weekend family. Bless. by @busy_archiving

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3 months ago