Giulia Colato
Edited by Veronica Vivi
Illustration by Maia Walcott
“You have to tell the world that North Korea is like one big prison camp . . . If you don’t speak up for them, Yeonmi-ya, who will?” (Park 264). After her mother said these words, Yeonmi Park decided to put aside her insecurities, her fear and the shame she felt and to write about her life.
Erin Hutton
Edited by Maria Elena Carpintero Torres-Quevado
Artwork by Natasha Ruwona: https://www.behance.net/natasharuw40cf
I read Noughts and Crosses when I was about thirteen. It is the first powerful book that I can remember reading. However, re-reading my slightly battered copy at eighteen was a very different experience. It was easier to understand that good people, like the characters in the book, could react so badly to violence. The terrorism in the story is painfully similar to current news headlines. Finally, after studying the fight for Black American civil rights at school, I could clearly see where Blackman got her inspiration. The scene where nought children face a mob of angry crosses to get into a decent school could have been drawn straight from the textbook photos of Little Rock Central High School, Arkansas, 1957. This seems especially important when one considers the things people said to the author as she was writing: “‘Slavery is in the past’, ‘Why d’you want to rehash something so painful?’, ‘Why do black people always harp on about slavery?’”(Penguin Random House, 2016). Perhaps, if books like Blackman’s were studied at university level, people would be less likely to have these attitudes, especially if the novel’s stark confrontation of cruelty made them consider that their comments are insulting. There are many example of history where people have ignored atrocities as they occurred.
Evianne Darcy
Edited by Ketaki Zodgekar
Artwork by Kelechi Hafstad: Kelechi Anna Photography
The timeless, multilayered Diary of a Madman by Lu Xun tells the story of a now-recovered “invalid” (Lu 21), who had previously fallen ill to a “persecution complex” (21), through which he became convinced that everyone around him was a cannibal, be it his brother, neighbour, or the children of the village in which he resides. In his delusional frenzy, the “invalid” believes he is serving time for trampling on “Records of the Past” (22), and that the local village children are being taught to “Eat people!” (24) He even suspects that the words of an antiquated book and the neighbour’s dog – descended from wolves – are conspiring to eat him too. Eventually, instead of being eaten, our madman cowers under the “weight of four thousand years of cannibalism bearing down upon” (31) him.
In an ending which parallels Macbeth, Lu Xun’s madman surrenders to the all-consuming cannibalistic heritage of bygone feudalism, which usurps his village. He realises that he has gone so far into his mania – spurred by his vandalism of documents pertaining to his country’s history – that returning would be pointless. Despite his fleeting uprising, which was dismissed as insanity, he will never be truly human. As a child, he ate his little sister: the reader discovers that the madman himself is a cannibal.
Sophie Hanson
Edited by Maria Elena Carpintero Torres-Quevedo
Art by Ottelien Huckin
https://www.ottelienhuckin.co.uk
Although existing feminist curricula reflect female marginalisation and its representation in literature for adults, there is significantly less feminist study of children’s literature. The significance of this cannot be overstated: the books we read as children form our understanding of the world and it is therefore important to include children’s literature in feminist critique. As a girl who always loved to read, children’s books failed to give me insight into the reality of inequality I would face as a woman, or of the potential I had in spite of it. In fact, it wasn’t until my late teens I came across a children’s book that provided this: that book was Good Night Stories For Rebel Girls by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo (2016).
Martha Blow
Edited by Abigail Eardley
Art by Livi Prendergast https://liviprendergast.wordpress.com/
On the 5th October 2017, The Times published a story presenting decades of allegations of sexual harassment against film mogul Harvey Weinstein. What followed was the uncovering of an endemic culture of sexual harassment within Hollywood, followed by the seismic #MeToo hashtag. The Weinstein Scandal forced the conversation about sexual violence into global discourse and brought to light its ubiquity. While Becoming Unbecoming was published in 2015, prior to the Weinstein Scandal, it nonetheless addresses the rape culture that normalised Weinstein’s—amongst others—actions. That the graphic novel is set in the 1970s does not diminish its relevance to contemporary society, as evidenced by Weinstein’s exposure, and for that reason it is crucially important to academic curricula.
Mayowa Omogbenigun
Edited by Veronica Vivi
Art by Zoë Guthrie http://zoeguthrie.com/
‘For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never allow us to bring about genuine change’. – Audre Lorde (‘The Master’s Tools’ 19)
My four years at university have led me to a simple conclusion: universities are bastions of white supremacy. From my first-year at university, it was clear that I would not belong in the proverbial ‘Master’s House’ (Lorde, ‘The Master’s Tools’ 19). It was micro-aggressions by students and academics alike. It was ignorant comments about the ‘Third World’ and the backward people living in it. It was learning everything from a Eurocentric and Western point of view and as postcolonial scholar Dipesh Chakrabarty explains, Europe was the silent referent in everything I was taught (42). The imbalance of power was clear by the content of what I was taught and by the language used to teach. Throughout my first two years at university, I struggled to find language to express how I felt and was deprived of any courses that discussed people of colour. In my second-year, I remember an ill-conceived course simply called ‘Asia and Africa 2a: Societies, Cultures, and Empires, c.1600-1880’ and ‘Asia and Africa 2b: Nationalisms, Liberation Movements and the Legacies of Colonialism, c. 1880-Present Day’. As you can imagine, the course lacked nuance and was far too vague to offer any real insight into either ‘Asia’ or ‘Africa’.
Ibtisam Ahmed
Edited by Karl Egerton
Art by Priyanka Meenakshi https://www.priyankameenakshi.com/
Utopianism has been a part of Western academia since the work of Lyman Tower Sargent in the 1970s. Taking its etymological roots from Thomas More’s Utopia, it is an interdisciplinary subject that explores human hopes and imagination in radical ways. It aims to build a better tomorrow by criticising the past and the present. It has a broad emancipatory potential which draws in a wide range of scholarship. As an avowed utopianist, I am proud to have my work counted in this field. Yet utopianism is often lacking in racial and cultural diversity. This is a major failing in a field that is supposed to be about challenging oppressive norms.
One of the reasons for this is because of the sources in the canon. Although modern works include writers of colour such as Octavia Butler, there is an assumption that classical utopian literature is almost exclusively white and male. Yet this leaves out a diverse range of texts that imagine the scope of human hope in intersectional ways. An author whose work I feel challenges this white Eurocentrism is Rokeya Shakhawat Hossain. Known in Bangladesh as Begum Rokeya, her life is taught extensively in middle school but is surprisingly absent in later education. Having first studied her biography in History when I was in my early teens, I rediscovered her work in the course of researching my thesis.
Interview by Toby Sharpe
Editing by Abigail Eardley and Toby Sharpe
Could you start by explaining what Queering the Map does – and why you think it’s important?
Queering the Map is a community-generated mapping project, which geo-locates queer memories, histories, and experiences in relation to physical space using an online platform. Part of the idea is to open up the question of what constitutes queer space, or even more basically, what constitutes queerness. So, it’s a very open call in terms of submissions: whatever counts for the person submitting counts to the project and the process of queering space.
In the context of queer theory, there’s value in trying to unsettle what queer identity means. Queering the Map offers the opportunity for people to define what queerness means for them on their own terms, adding nuance to this term which can be endlessly changed and expanded – moving beyond a singular understanding of queerness, towards a collective understanding.
Temitope Ajileye
Edited by Veronica Vivi
Art by Anonymous
“I don’t know where to begin […] because nothing has been written here. Once the first book comes, then we’ll know where to begin”. Barbara Smith
There is some irony in how I came across Black is Beautiful, a masterpiece created by African American scholar Paul C. Taylor. I was looking for Russell’s History of Western Philosophy and, while waiting for the bookshop staff to locate it (their attempts would eventually prove unsuccessful despite their certainty that ‘Russell has to be in the shop’), my eyes wandered and settled on Taylor’s book. How lucky I was!
The opening quote, taken from Barbara Smith’s Toward a Black Feminist Criticism, immediately presents us with the urgency that the book tackles and tries to solve. There is much art by, about, and with black people, but not enough thought to connect them together, help us think more productively about black expressive culture, which would allow us to contextualise and understand our reactions to black art. There is a strong feeling that much can be said about this art and an even stronger desire for these intentions to be finally clearly stated.
The archive has been the space of intervention from the beginning. One of the few spaces, reservoirs of memory, for diasporic subjects is the archive.
John Akomfrah (2014)
Benjamin E.I. Lubbock
Edited by Maria Elena Carpintero Torres-Quevedo and Rianna Walcott
Art by Maïa Walcott https://maiawalcott98.wixsite.com/mysite
Memory and the moving image are John Akomfrah’s materials. In The Unfinished Conversation, a three-screen video installation, his subject matter is the formation of identity, which, for individuals struggling to define themselves in their social contexts, is a matter of urgency. It is not easy to explain how identities are created, and there are few who have considered the matter in greater depth than Stuart Hall, around whom the film revolves. Born in Jamaica before immigrating to Oxford, Hall became editor-in-chief of the New Left Review and a founding figure of the New Left movement. He was an activist, regularly televised for his analyses of media reports, and co-authored seminal texts such as The Popular Arts (1964), which advanced the claim that film, media and pop culture should be taken seriously as objects of study. But what he was arguably most renowned for were his theories of identity: “Identity is formed at the intersection between the political and the personal” (Hall, 2013).
