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Zoé Profile picture
Zoé
@ztsamudzi
she/her, mwana wevhu | writer, associate editor w/ @Parapraxis_Mag, assistant prof of photography at RISD
6 subscribers
May 21, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Idk I’ve encountered too many people from communities fighting for their ancestral land because of its spiritual significance. Someone would argue that’s not real revolutionary work or whatever, it’s also land that’s been under threat by colonial or capitalist interests for ages. The spiritual becomes deeply entangled with the material (it’s land where you bury your dead, it’s lans that feeds you, etc.), they are not and can never be divisible. And yet that spiritual wounding animates a politic with very real material goals and impacts.
May 21, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
When white people start talking about “reality” in their critiques of religion it’s a sign for me to bail. Some of our lifeworlds consist of metaphysical realities beyond the material and it doesn’t make us any less committed to materialism or anti-capitalism. It isn’t just the New Atheists that put many of us off anti-theism despite the deeply useful critiques of religious institutions and their role in [racial] capitalist mystifications, colonialism, and extraction: it’s white zealotry in every direction.
May 20, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
I hate these because they’re still Westphalian border-making projects; what in god’s name is an “ethnically drawn border” when a border is itself an imperial logic For example, since the 19th century there have been debates preoccupied with whether the San (both as a collective people and individual groups like the ǀXam, in what’s now South Africa) are integrationists or isolationists. The more contemp. iteration is the “Kalahari Debate.”
May 18, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Following Gonzales-Day’s redaction of the victims of lynching to emphasize the staging & perpetrators of violence, I redacted this image from today’s Flag March. The triangulation between the violent actors, the permissive soldier, and documenting photographers is pure horror. Image The Flag March celebrates the capture of E. Jerusalem in ‘67 (what the government refers to as a “reunification”), and is annually commemorated by anti-Palestinian chants and violence against Palestinians as Israelis move through the Muslim Quarter recreating the soldiers’ route.
May 18, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Yeaaaah, “Being a Black African means liberation from the weight of historical systemic racism” is literally categorically false. Honestly, I’m mostly bored with the way African people write through and process their epiphanies around blackness when the come to the US. The decoupling of transatlantic slavery and colonialism is an ahistorical disconnection I wish we’d stop.
May 17, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
This, more than anything, is making me think about how we sidle students with assignments that function far more as time-consuming busy work than anything else that actually promotes critical thought. Being busy isn’t a sign that the ideas in class are being engaged and one of my biggest struggles is figuring out how to reasonably reinforce lectures/seminars with out of classroom work. To me, this dearth of pedagogical imagination feels more urgent & crisis-like than ChatGPT.
Mar 23, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Ok but…are you literally a person with a uterus though? Imagine getting offended by words that describe you as though there aren’t actual things to be upset about? Have you ever seen a Venn diagram? Ok then you can be a woman AND a person with a uterus, you baby.
Mar 23, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Someone replied to me “are you saying Democrats have to condemn Republicans every time they’re acknowledging something bad?” I’m sorry what the fuck is the purpose of an opposition party otherwise? Literally THE LEAST you can do for your constituents if you’re not actually going to take an actual unified political stand is to consistently make connections highlighting the nefarious things your opposition is doing! This is the problem we’ve been having for decades!!!!!
Mar 23, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I have a lot of contempt for the US government for rightfully condemning these horrific homophobic bills in Uganda and elsewhere without fully accounting for how the targeted export of evangelical Christianity to Africa facilitates their creation. There’s an implicit positioning of *African* homophobia as antithetical to *universal* human rights that absents the multi-billion dollar flow of anti-abortion/sex ed/LGBTQI funds & programming from right-wing Christian groups into Africa for YEARS

opendemocracy.net/en/5050/africa…
Mar 22, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The semiotics of white internationalism at work! The confederate battle flag is a useful stand-in for the criminalized swastika flag, we’ve seen American white nationalists holding both the imperial German *and* Nazi Reichskriegsflagge; Dylann Roof, ofc, wore Union of SA & Rhodesia pins. Imperial projects have global resonance.
Mar 4, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The state’s willingness to destroy families and traumatize trans kids in order to preserve the “sanctity” of the family and purge transness from existence is beyond horrifying.

“I can’t believe this” has to stop; this is the logical conclusion of years of legislative antagonism. I think there’s a deep deep danger to the kind of liberal incredulity. We make constant reference to the Weimar years and the fascist buildup to the enactment of Nazi genocide after 1933: cis people urgently have to stop being unable to see the clear writing on the wall.
Mar 2, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This whole “parents having sex with kids in the house” discourse in unnerving? Surely there’s a middle ground between screaming so loudly your child is terrified (and then derangedly recording them crying) and simply pretending it doesn’t happen? Idk whatever’s happening with this puritan streak from refusing to talk about sex with your kids in healthy ways to the awful discourse about kink at Pride; the child-centric moral panic is bipartisan it seems!
Feb 1, 2023 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Also the curatorial difference between the Asian and African ethnological collections is quite jarring and revealing. In the former, there’s a giant listening room, outside of it are collections of musical instruments. “Sounds of the World” is the theme. This isn’t to say communities aren’t calling for restitution, it it feels really astonishing to see “Asia” as this continent of sound and “Africa” as this place full civilizational objects of significance for the taking.
Jan 6, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Thinking about this thread about Chapelle showing up to Ghana and making awful homo/transphobic jokes (jokes specifically about how anything goes in Africa comedy-wise) and Chance laughing it off alongside the murder of Edwin Chiloba If you’re diasporan trying to do some “return to motherland” campaign, at least aspire to do as little harm as possible? But between driving inflation & making space for the kind of rhetoric that’s part of a larger discourse that leads to LGBTQ people being murdered? Man
Jan 6, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Part of what’s been so uncomfortable about the Meghan Markle discourse is that her whole escape from the horrors of the racist royal family is inextricably linked to this man’s inevitable post-monarchy redemption tour, ie his tell all…which includes this Harry’s whole MO seems to be the truth will set someone free, but it’s a self-serving (self extends to his wife & kids) truth because he’s simply attempting to self-humanize apart from their dysfunction. His response to 9/11 and casualness about killing “Taliban” is just that.
Dec 1, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Who’s doing whataboutism? It’s not just what people are advocating for, it’s also about implication in structures of discourse and productions of violence. Would Jones be “less antisemitic” if he was pushing racist and fatal conspiracies without Kanye yelling about loving Hitler? Racism isn’t just ideas you’re willing to spout, it’s about materialities of power. If Kanye said this on Tucker “great replacement” Carlson and Carlson cringed or objected, is he suddenly exonerated of the dangerous & radicalizing ecosystem he’s fomented the past several years?
Dec 1, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
It’s not a matter of being “more antisemitic”: it’s a matter of understanding the line of what’s less unacceptable to say in public. You think most of these Republicans are “less antisemitic” than Kanye or they just understand what they “can and can’t say” without censure? Kanye—a man we know to be a megalomaniac, unmedicated, a contrarian, and shades of bigoted—is not necessarily “more antisemitic” than any of these awful right wingers. But they’re able to sit “look uncomfortable” & let their black mouthpiece say whatever horrible thing he wants.
Nov 30, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Speaking of work, are we gonna talk about the DEI-fication of postcolonial theory via Isaac Julien’s knighting or are we just going to pretend it didn’t happen? Is it possible to jump the shark more than to be knighted by the King of England for your “services to diversity and inclusion in art” after a career of citing Stuart Hall as your theoretical influence?
Nov 29, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
This thread is a good example of why we as a diaspora need to cultivate much more critical understandings of "home": because our relative freedom and autonomy on the continent always comes at a price for people who are made even more precarious to accommodate us and our money. There are A LOT of politicians with much to answer for..
Nov 29, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Terrific, yes, just like getting a paper cut between my fingers is terrific or diarrhea from eating too much mango is also terrific One of the very last journals I could possible want to offer any kind of racial analysis is the American Economic Review. Great you found statistically significant changes in white stereotype perceptions, but what of the trauma of subjecting black students to racist white kids?
Oct 7, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Listening to @FazilMoradi's presentation and struck by how he describes the repatriation of looted artifacts from European institutions to African ones as still an epistemicidal transfer facilitated by the state: "catastrophic art" is unassimilable!
read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture… He's calling on us to envision more robust regime of material restitution that refuses the easy historiography: of envisioning a hospitality (and relationality) that resists easy neoliberal and curatorial instrumentalizations and the remakings of imperial citizenship & property.