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You’re so cool!
Like many Latin American authors, Laura Restrepo’s biography includes dramatic politics. Politically active in her own country, Columbia, she participated in the Spanish resistance to the Franco regime...
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The border fortification as symbol of freedom
On 9 November 2009, the world’s news media turned its gaze toward Berlin. There, political leaders from all of the victorious powers of World War II – Prime Minister Gordon Brown from the United...
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The face of the masses, the gaze of the masses
“Power struggle has assumed new forms,” wrote Ernst Jünger in his introduction to a compilation of photographs published in 1933. Jünger and his editor Edmund Schultz were groping for the zeitgeist...
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Extractivism above all?
The Skouries forest in Chalkidiki has been at the centre of a hotly contested dispute between the mining company Hellas Gold, a subsidiary of the Canadian mining giant Eldorado Gold, and local...
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Carpets and ceramics
People are formed by cultural heritage, or what others presume their cultural heritage to be. Cultural heritage is, in turn, formed by people. Some don’t need to explain who they are or where they come...
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The legacy of 2015
On my way to Brussels, walking through the airport, the unbearable lightness of my EU citizenship made itself felt with singular clarity. The airport floor was smooth and bright and there was nothing...
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Only love can save those who are infected with anger
[Seated in front of the camera] Which way do I look? … Life itself gives birth to all my themes. At first, as you know, it turned into several books. A history of that period of time, the Red time,...
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‘The long historical struggles over the geographies of our lives’
Håkan Thörn (for Ord & Bild): For the past 50 years, Leftists all over the world have been living more or less in the shadow of 68. Still today, any discussion about the past, present and future of...
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Headwinds and tailwinds
It is cheering to look out over a series pastorum, as the Church puts it – a congregation of shepherds. Although here, the congregation is made up of editors – a series redactorum. Realising just how...
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Pro-European sentiment vs political fragmentation
After the surge of support for the far right in last September’s general election in Sweden, it took an unprecedented four months of wrangling to establish a minority government of the Social Democrats...
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Cracks in the future
An event, a date. A brief moment of violence and deliverance: the world stumbles, loses its balance and recovers. Political conversations converge on that extraordinary moment. Soon enough, the...
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An Indian writer discovers Europe
After the rupture caused by World War Two, Britain began to drift further away from Europe. The Fifties and Sixties were the decades of the Movement poets in English literature, with Philip Larkin,...
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Texts without words
We settle down in the yard to shelter from the heat. This is Koza Han, the silk bazaar in Bursa, my mother’s hometown and, under our parasols, we sip Turkish coffee while my mother tells me about the...
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Alchemizing old hates
In January 1556, the Emperor Humayun tripped over his cloak and tumbled to death down a flight of stairs in Delhi, bequeathing a fragile kingdom to his thirteen-year-old son, Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar....
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The less we care about healthcare workers
Just four decades ago, young men were dying in secluded hospital rooms. Saying a final farewell to loved ones was strictly forbidden. A year or so earlier, many of them had been fit and well,...
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A chronicler of human complexity
Ord&Bild: The first question is straightforward: what makes the work of James Baldwin relevant today? Cultural, artistic and political perspectives are equally relevant! Douglas Fields: The Irish...
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The ‘cuir’ turn
This article was first published in Ord&Bild 3/2021. ‘Corpas’, instead of the masculine ‘corpos’ for bodies, ‘cistem’ rather than ‘system’: Brazilian trans activists, socially, culturally and...
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The alchemists of Ludwigshafen
Food comes first in the order of humanity’s needs. Then come not only morals (Brecht), but also all the subtleties of advanced gastronomy. From this simple perspective, food is fuel: the fats, proteins...
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