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Join our first reading group to read extracts from two issues of The Funambulist on Palestinian Political Imaginaries and future visions. Editor Léopold Lambert, academic and writer Sophia Azeb and artist Leila Abdelrazaq. Together, we will read excerpts from the magazines’ issues Futurisms (August 2019) and States of Emergency (May 2020) and share responses.

In her piece entitled Who Will be When We Are Free? On Palestine and Futurity, Sophia Azeb focuses on what Palestinianness will mean when Palestine is free. Examining the dissemination of iconic Palestinian photographs within the diaspora, Leila Abdelrazaq examines portraiture and the politics of self-representation. She argues that, in colonial context, photos originally thought as precious records of lives past and present can become limiting images and shrink political imagination.

Léopold Lambert is an architect, writer and the founding editor of The Funambulist. He has written three books on the politics of the built environment, including on the settler colonial context of Palestine. His next book looks at the spatial history of the French state of emergency in Algeria, Kanaky and France’s banlieues.

Sophia Azeb is a writer and academic. Her book project, Another Country: Constellations of Blackness in Afro-Arab Cultural Expression, looks at how blackness is articulated and mobilized by African American, African and Afro-Arab writers, artists and political figures in post-war North Africa and Europe. She is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Chicago.

Leila Abdelrazaq is a Palestinian author and artist born in Chicago, based in Metro Detroit. Her debut graphic novel Baddawi (2015) was shortlisted for the 2015 Palestine Book Awards and is published in three languages. She is the author and illustrator of The Opening (2017), zines and short comics. She is co-founder of Maamoul Press.

Listen to the conversation below

Image: Leila Abdelrazaq, Khalid Ra’ad’s ‘Bedouin Woman and Child’. Courtesy of Leila Abdelrazaq.