Call for contribution: black xborg: a collective zine

Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash

Anvil Tongue Contributing Editor, Shaimaa Abdelkarim, is working on an exciting project with the brilliant Rémy-Paulin Twahirwa at black xborg. Please see below for more information, as well as a link to the submissions form.

deadline: 4 September 2021 by 12PM (BST)

This (e-)zine is an attempt to push beyond the lack of imagination that stagnates anti-colonial tactics. Imagining a conversation between Sylvia Wynter and Frantz Fanon’s work, this zine aims to conceive postcolonial conditions, in which freedom is a thriving practice. Both Wynter (2003) and Fanon (2004, 2008), in their own specific ways, call us to question and reject the colonial and Eurocentric normative models of ‘Man’ by creating new genres of human.

Eschatological discourses alert us about the end of the age of (hu)man, and the rise of the ‘human-into-the-machine’ and the ‘machine-into-the-human’ (Mbembe, 2020: 32) with the fusion of neurons, muscles, flesh, metal and steel pipes, electronic chips, plastics and polymers. Living in hostile, stifling and dreadful environments (polluted water and air, deforestation, desertification, drought, floods, forest fires, heatwaves, etc.), the arrival of these cyborgs heralds the resurgence of human-making projects.

But where should we start? Conditioned to look to the West, we have been blinded to other futures and possibilities for the human species. Thus, if we agree with Achile Mbembe (2017) that the future of the planet lies on the African continent, then the cyborg era seems to be part of a new race for the exploitation and appropriation of what René Depestre called the 'black ore' (1956).

Please follow this link for more information & to submit your work for considerations of black xborg: a collective zine.