Editors' Picks: Eric Otieno Sumba

After the recent spate of drownings in the Mediterranean, I revisited a text on the misnomer ‘refugee crisis’. The term ‘refugee crisis’ is itself an attempt at outsourcing the crisis of the liberal state, one that consistently fails to account for the role of raciality, as Denise Ferreira da Silva argues in her analytically rigorous piece. A second, only seemingly unrelated piece I've returned to is by Nana Adusei Poku. Poku considers the role of time as a political tool to reproduce a hegemonic education system which condemns people interested in decolonial ontologies and epistemologies to “catching up” with knowledge they have been systematically and generationally deprived of by eurocentric curricula. The act of “catching up” is of course illusory, since the frame of reference itself—linear time—is eurocentric as well. A third text provides a possible solution to both the outsourced crisis and the game of catching up: drawing from a Caribbean genealogy of the West African figure Anansi (spider), Harun Morrison suggests that “we must each become our own spider, unique from any other” as we move through the web: unpredictable in our tactics and adaptable in our responses to the strictures of power we encounter in our work. Like Cathryn Klasto, who also chose this article, I feel Morrison’s advice remains instructive for these uncertain times.

Eric Otieno Sumba was a member of the editorial board for L’Internationale Online 2022-23. He is an editor (publication practices) at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.

Denise Ferreira da Silva, ‘The "Refugee Crisis" and the Current Predicament of the Liberal State’, 2017

Nana Adusei Poku, ‘Catch Me, If You Can!’, 2015

Harun Morrison, ‘When and Where to Become a Spider’, 2020