Reading time
2 min
To share this contribution please copy the url below

Editors' Picks: Eric Otieno Sumba

 

As part of a series, members of L’Internationale Online editorial board revisit the archive of the platform, selecting contributions that resonate for them, their practice and the Museum of the Commons project. Here, Eric Otieno Sumba looks to contributions by Denise Ferreira da Silva, Nana Adusei Poku and Harun Morrison to call out the liberal state and western conception of time.

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.

In collaboration with Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF), the organization SOS Méditerranée rescues refugees in distress off the Libyan coast. The photographer accompanied the NGOs and documented the rescue missions in the sea and the life on board the Aquarius, December 2016. Photo: Laurin Schmid.

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

Carrie Mae Weems, Louvre, 2006, digital c-print, dimensions variable. © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

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

Khoisan Kween Mother, Lady Skollie, 2017. Courtesy of the artist.

The views and opinions published here mirror the principles of academic freedom and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the L'Internationale confederation and its members.

Related contributions and publications