iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

An unmasked man sat next to me (masked) and said “are you feeling okay or just preventing illness?” To which I replied “I feel fine but what difference does it make if you’re not wearing a mask?” He said he’d throw one on if I said I was unwell (he didn’t have one), this rationale is lost on me.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

If they also push harder for these mask bans…

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

Galleanisti is back and so is the attendant sub-whiteness of the 19th/early 20th century Italian in the U.S.!

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

The Journal for Architectural Education’s Palestine issue — for which I was an issue co-editor — was cancelled by the board of Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture citing risks and “new actions by the U.S. presidential administration” 😐 www.archpaper.com/2025/02/acsa...

archpaper.com

ACSA cancels Fall 2025 Journal of Architectural Education issue about Palestine and fires its interim executive editor

ACSA announced this afternoon it has cancelled a forthcoming JAE edition about Palestine. The Fall 2025 issue was planned to be edited by Cruz Garcia, Nora Akawi, Omar Jabary Salamanca, Zoé Samudzi, a...

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

I was writing abt Israel’s pariah statecraft during Nigerian Civil War in its support for the Federal Republic *and* Biafra. After its alienation of African & the Middle Eastern states after the 6-Day War — Biafra War began a month after Israel attacked Egypt — it pivoted towards apartheid regimes.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

On one hand, I saw this coming because our neoliberal president is desperate to get out from under US/EU sanctions and attract foreign capital and Israel is very busy remaking inroads in Africa. On the other, the Israeli state after our land and minerals is beyond. www.zbcnews.co.zw/zim-and-isra...

zbcnews.co.zw

Zim and Israel forge new path for collaboration in tourism and agriculture - ZBC NEWS

Story by Peter Chivhima ZIMBABWE and Israel are set to embark on a collaborative initiative designed to strengthen cooperation in the fields of tourism and agriculture. During the launch of the Zim-Is...

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

Join us for this webinar with Hannah Al-Taher and Anna Younes about the suppression of Palestine both in Germany and within German Studies It’s this Sunday March 2nd @ 9am PST/12pm EST/6pm CET/8pm AST You can register here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Poster with red/green/black flags representing Palestine also has an image of German police with their backs to the camera revealing the words POLIZEI on their uniforms.

The event poster says “Censorship and Suppression: Solidarity with Palestine in Germany and German Studies, a webinar with Hanna Al-Taher and Anna Younes” on March 2, 9am PST/12pm EST/6pm CET/8pm AST

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

An only logical application of Zionism’s zero-sum rationale: that any presence of Palestinians anywhere — in our scholarship, on a map, in our cookbooks, in Palestine or it diasporic geographies — is an altogether negation of Israeli existence.

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Heba Gowayed هبة جويد @hebagowayed.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

A new McCarthy era is upon us. Stupid, depressing, and dangerous as ever. I wonder whose name will carry the dunce cap in the history books. Too many are complicit. I’ll need to find upset and action, but for now I’m feeling grief at the dehumanization inherent to all this.

Gov Hochul orders CUNY remove Hunter college Palestine studies job posting calls for probe into ‘antisemitic theories’

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

Anyway, inb4 I’m further accused of stigmatizing drug use, I have no problems with ketamine. And, when you have a culture of diabolically ambitious and cruel people as in today’s Silicon Valley, the relationship to psychoactives and their probably desired self-knowing outcomes aren’t gonna be great.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 24/02/2025

There’s an affective thing in talking to elders when they’re being honest: they’ll tell you the worst story you’ve ever heard and they’ll be morose and reflective, and moments later laughing about something else. And it’s a rollercoaster of fullness that usefully frames traumatic history.

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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 24/02/2025

I absolutely agree with this. The casual cruelty of the bored and comfortable should be discussed more often.

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katherine mckittrick @demonicgrounds.bsky.social · 17/02/2025

replicating racial-Malthusian inequities, gives that system fuel and reinforces the myth that gathering more money and more things is a form of freedom-making.

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katherine mckittrick @demonicgrounds.bsky.social · 17/02/2025

capitalism is therefore often depersonalized: that is, we often (not everyone of course!) blame “capitalism” without thinking through the who of capitalism. this is because it’s presented to us as a magical nobody, a divine (biocentric, in fact) socio-spatial structure.

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katherine mckittrick @demonicgrounds.bsky.social · 17/02/2025

one of the many important things I learned from Sylvia Wynter is that capitalism (specifically dispossession by accumulation) is a belief system (not just, say, a social-economic system). it is deified and worshipped. dig this: it’s a religion, faith, theology. we follow it.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 11/02/2025

Who doesn’t get death threats? White supremacists sent emails to my new department head in 2022 saying they’d shit in my skull because I said I’d dance on the royal family’s graves, and I’m a nobody.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 10/02/2025

Thinking about Afrikaners (smh) but actually thinking about the white American insistence on framing the post-colonial white settler as perpetually imperiled in stark opposition to their material and political economic conditions/realities. The foundational anxiety of the settler international.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 09/02/2025

For my horror & monstrosity class, I’m teaching about gender: the murders of trans youths, bathroom panics and anti-“gender ideology” discourses revolving around trans femininity as a kind of primordial monstrous feminine, and Davey Davis reading conversion therapy films into body-snatching horror 😮‍💨

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Zackie Achmat @zackieachmat.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

Our freedom is not for sale. The #MuskTrump presidency is trying to destroy the fundamental rights of all people everywhere. groundup.org.za/article/dona... We must build a global movement for justice, equality, freedom and dignity. #SouthAfricaIsNotForSale

groundup.org.za

Trump has stopped aid to South Africa, endangering thousands of lives

But we must not allow peddlers of hate to undermine our fragile constitutional democracy

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

Ok so let’s dig into the theology: When they’re facing the Zulus @ the Battle of Blood River, the Voortrekkers took a covenant — in return for God’s help in their victory, them & their descendants would keep the day as holy as the Sabbath. They won: God helped 460 Voortrekkers defeat 25,000 Zulus.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

This “Trump saves the Afrikaners” saga is wild. So Trump made that EO in which he commits to “the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination,” and Afriforum — an Afrikaner rights group — is like no thanks, we aren’t refugees and we aren’t leaving lmfao

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

It’s the Carnegie Commission of investigating the “Poor White Question” all over again. The Carnegie Corporation funded an inquiry into the condition of poor whites, ie rural Afrikaners who’d been dispossessed by the 2nd Boer War — the recommended economic upliftment was a blueprint for apartheid.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

Apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia have inhabited a crucial part of the white ethnonationalist political imaginary for decades. Dylann Roof was born 14 years after Rhodesia’s collapse, yet still wore its flag — and the Union of SA’s — on his lapel.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

Not excited for the Supreme Court part of these constitutional challenges forestalled, for the time being, by lower courts.

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 05/02/2025

the mystification is important point. the mythical "unqualified black person" who took a job or a spot at an elite college exists in the cultural landscape as a literal scapegoat for a sense a personal inadequacy or anxieties about status. it's not that you're not good enough, it's the blacks.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

“DEI” being another way of not having to talk about anti-blackness is pretty infuriating. So many opportunities to properly engage this linguistic obfuscation when the right went after “critical race theory,” “woke,” and “affirmative action,” but nope not really.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

Reminiscent of how police quickly recognized the photograph could create public records and reproductions of criminal types — the state is disposed to immediately seize any means of visualizing and reproducing our likenesses to produce biometric data for its nasty carceral ends.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

Ah yes, the very finished matter of colonial amnesia that is no longer a problem and has no political or material implications on anything at all anywhere in the world (including, per my original post, the literal state sovereignty of Greenland).

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

The one thing I hope comes out of Trump’s bullshit about Greenland is that I hope it sparks a conversation about Danish colonialism (inc. its participation in the transatlantic slave trade, primarily in the Caribbean) and the Greenlandic independence movement.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

Does anyone have good recommendations for masks that are good for sports? Comfortable and decent air flow, but still sufficiently protective? Has this happened yet or was the tech development abandoned when we decided athletes were too healthy to be harmed by COVID?

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 03/01/2025

Does that seem outrageous to you?” No words for how actually deeply cynical it is that they expect anyone to be satisfied with her answer (and still, surely, someone will be).

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 03/01/2025

Anyway, Christina Sharpe wrote that “the Internet allows for the consensual as well as the nonconsensual acting out of racialized fantasies” in “Racialized Fantasies on the Internet” back in 1999 (!!!) and here we are with actual profile interactive AI blacks in 2025.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 03/01/2025

Rereading Ramose for a paper and endlessly grateful for the dynamism that hunhu/ubuntu afford personhood and being. Not simple existence, but a contingent and relational existence. Not just being, but a constant enfolding of one’s being: a becoming-being, hunhu/ubuntu as “verbal nouns.”

“//111111111 is actually two words in one. It consists of the prefix ubu- and the stem ntu-. Ubu- 1vol cs the idea of be-ing in general. It is enfolded be-ing before it manifests itself in the 11111crcle form or mode of ex-istence of a particular entity. Ubu- as enfolded bei-ing is always 11rh.:nlcd towards unfoldment, that is, incessant continual concrete manifestation through pnrlicular forms and modes of being. In this sense ubu- is always oriented towards - ntu. At Jll ontological level, there is no strict and literal separation and division between ubu- and - 11/11. Ubu- and -ntu are not two radically separate and irreconcilably opposed realities. On the 1•onlrruy, they are mutually founding in the sense that they are two aspects of bei-ing as a onc-ness and an indivisible whole-ness. Accordingly, ubu-ntu is the fundamental ontological 11ncl epistemological category in the African thought of the Bantu-speaking people. It is the Indivisible one-ness and whole-ness of ontology and epistemology. Ubu- as the generalized understanding of be-ing may be said to be distinctly ontological. Whereas -ntu as the nodal point at which be-ing assumes concrete form or a mode of being in the process of continual unfoldment may be said to be the distinctly epistemological.”

“The word umu- shares an identical ontological feature with the word ubu-. Whereas the range
of ubu- is the widest generality umu- tends towards the more specific. Joined together with
-nlu then umu- becomes umuntu. Umuntu means the emergence of homo-loquens who is
simultaneously a homo sapiens. In common parlance it means the human be-ing: the maker of
politics, religion and law. Umuntu then is the specific concrete manifestation of umu-: it is a
movement away from the generalized to the concrete specific. Umuntu is the specific entity
which continues to conduct an inquiry into be-ing , experience, knowledge and truth. This is
an activity rather than an act. It is an ongoing process impossible to stop unless motion itself is stopped. On this reasoning, ubu- may be regarded as be-ing becoming and this evidently implies the idea of motion. We propose to regard such incessant motion as verbal rather than the verb. - ntu may be construed as the temporarily having become. In this sense -ntu is a noun. The indivisible one-ness and whole-ness of ubu-ntu means, therefore, that ubuntu is a verbal noun.”

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FT @fucktheory.bsky.social · 03/01/2025

Not only is this incredibly fucking creepy and unnecessary, it also comes after a decade of social media platforms pushing us to upload ID, verify our identities, handing out authentication badges etc. supposedly to prevent this EXACT phenomenon.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

A single list shattering the illusions of Dutch innocence. Curious to see if the commentary can proceed beyond guilt or frantic attempts at absolution.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

In fairness, German media also likes to pretend it doesn’t understand why the AfD’s stronghold is in the former East: one of many consequences of the impoverished memory politics of toothless denazification.

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utopia deferred @utopia-defer.red · 02/01/2025

oddly no equivalent crying, in terms of existing visa systems, for the entire system of migrant labor that has existed for decades across the southern US border. as an example, there seems to be a silent consensus on the 200,000-300,000 migrant laborers we important annually for agriculture.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

Hot take: all immigration discourse about “skilled labor” is a dogwhistle no matter who it’s from and you can’t convince me otherwise.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

And to this, my AI policy literally says: “I am less interested in what algorithms decide is the ‘correct answer’ than what you think, what you are learning, and how you understand phenomena, ideas, and concepts.” If I just wanted the right answer I’d give my students multiple choice tests!

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

Almost impossible to know who this is about.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

I had a student whose final was flagged with 70%+ as paraphrasing from AI generated text. He could not understand why I considered Grammarly helping him “fix his sentence structure” plagiarism since it’s “not just getting Chat GPT to give you an answer.”

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

The university where I work has some serious financial trouble. In addition to cutting or shrinking departments and majors (mostly humanities) and firing faculty, they also planned to eliminate the role of the chief officer for DEI — the current position holder, obvs, is a black woman 😐

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Ken Wissoker @kwissoker.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

Great to see Caroline Fowler's brilliant and necessary new book reviewed in @hyperallergic.com !! "Why Isn’t Slavery Depicted in Dutch Painting?" hyperallergic.com/979904/why-i...

hyperallergic.com

Why Isn’t Slavery Depicted in Dutch Painting?

Netherlandish art is remarkably coy about the whole colonial endeavor. A new book seeks to uncover those connections.

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Melissa Gira Grant @melissagiragrant.com · 02/01/2025

conspiracy theorists aren’t just spreading made-up claims they are spreading those claims in the hope of gaining public confirmation that they are right and you do not have to hand it to them if they stumble into something accurate or useful to you along the way

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Melissa Gira Grant @melissagiragrant.com · 02/01/2025

the conspiracy theorists are banking on the fact that at least some experts or media figures with respectability and credentials will elevate their claims by saying they’re “worth considering” or despite being conspiratorial “raise some important issues”

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

To this useful thread’s point, there’s a cost-benefit analysis with RFK and any other skeptical position that seems superficially well-founded. It’s great he wants to remove EU-banned additives and preservatives from food, but at the cost of a dismantled and barely regulated food & health system?

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 01/01/2025

Political violence here is mostly committed by white people despite the insistence on equating terrorism itself with Islam, esp. post-9/11. That the Nola attacker had an ISIS flag on his truck doesn’t complicate anything at all as that’s also a part of this country’s terrorism profile.

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