What I am Reading Now…
Naiza Khan
October 2020

There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.*

As a visual artist, I often find myself responding to a text through image making; a connection that is not easily translatable, but very tenuous and ephemeral.

What draws me to the five books/authors listed, is their commitment to develop a methodology which comes from the ground; de-colonial, feminist, working with experimental modes of enquiry and specific to the cultural and geographical context in which they work. This is crucially linked to social justice and indigenous political organizing and resistance. Each author explores a method, which allows for multiple ways of seeing and creates a sense of embodied knowledge – and a passing of knowledge across generations, which becomes an act of active inheritance. In this way, they reveal that questions of race, gender, class and environmental justice need to be interrogated as an intersectional space – and with greater transnational solidarity.

I feel this opens up the possibility to reflect not only on struggles of race relations, but also of animating historical memory to inspire future modes of resistance.

These texts have enabled me to rethink my research practice through a context-specific lens and to learn from the practice and pedagogy of scholars and activists in the field. I explore how ideas of a performative, embodied mapping allows for multiple ways of sensing the land and the body; how this gesture can invoke and visualize speculative possibilities and modes of protest against the structures of power that we are trying to resist.

* Audre Lorde, Learning from the 1960s (1982)