In “Israel, Palestine, and the Poetics of Genocide Updated,” Mark Levine and Eric Cheyfitz, taking into account the Post October 7th Israeli invasion of Gaza, revisit their 2017 essay “Israel, Palestine, and the Poetics of Genocide,” to focus on the question of the limits of the definition of genocide in the1948 Convention. While recognizing that Israel’s latest war on Gaza meets the definition of the 1948 Convention, dependent on scale and intent, the authors argue that an expanded, broader definition would better and more fully account for the incremental and structural genocides characteristic of settler colonialism, including Israel’s long-term rule over the territory of pre-1948 Palestine. Establishing a poetics that accounts for the longue durée structure and effects of Israeli policies in Gaza and across the Occupied Territories, their expanded definition builds on the eliminationist logic Patrick Wolfe's idea of “structural genocide.” While recognizing that “frontier homicide” is a component of structural genocide, they discuss additional, often non-lethal, components that work to eliminate Indigenous peoples as a group.
Patricia Font’s historical drama, El maestro que prometió el mar (2023), focuses on the pedagogy of Antoni Benaiges (1903–1936), a Republican educator who served for two years at a school in rural Burgos prior to being assassinated just days after the Nationalist uprising in July 1936. Focused also on the efforts to recuperate the legacy of Benaiges, whose body was deposited in a mass grave and has never been identified, the film employs a dual timeline narrative, telling interconnected stories in the past and the present to shed light on pre-Civil War education and contemporary discourses and practices of historical memory in Spain. Benaiges embraced the pedagogical principles of Célestin Freinet, who advocated the use of manual printing presses which students used to create their own publications. By conducting a close reading of the film alongside the historical record, this article posits that Benaiges was a transgressive pedagogue, one who challenged the status quo and ultimately paid with his life. The article ruminates on Benaiges’s transgressive approach and use of Freinetian methods to argue that the film enhances our understanding of educational innovation in pre-Civil War Spain and the ongoing efforts to recuperate the memory of victims of Francoist violence.
In 1986, a mysterious young girl claiming to be “Yūko,” the daughter of the Japanese ambassador to Thailand, appeared in Bangkok. The girl in question, Kantiya Asayot from Chiang Rai province in Northern Thailand, named herself “Yūko,” forging for herself a new identity from Japanese media circulated in Thailand. Traversing the increasingly “Japanized” Bangkok cityscape as Yūko, Kantiya discovers the increased mobility that her new identity affords. Retrospectively named “The Yūko Incident,” this event sparked a national media frenzy and became an entry point for competing anxieties over gender, national identity, and Japan’s intensifying economic and cultural presence in Cold War-era Thailand. This article examines representations of “The Yūko Incident” in two primary texts: the initial 1986 newspaper coverage of the incident by Thailand’s newspaper tabloid Thairath, and Yoshioka Shinobu’s 1989 literary non-fiction Nihonjin gokko . Within the context of escalating Thai (and Japanese) anxieties about Japan’s presence in Cold War Thailand, I argue that Kantiya emerges as a deviant figure of the monstrous feminine in these texts, revealing the gendered and racialized dimensions of Thailand’s grappling with Japanese influence, and paradoxically, Japan’s own grappling with its influence on Southeast Asia and the world, thus underscoring how female bodies become critical sites for the negotiation of Cold War era anxieties and identities. Excavating different layers of anxiety revealed by the event, I trace the unevenly shared experience of intertwined material and geopolitical histories that the mischief of a thirteen-year-old Thai girl exposes in Cold War Thailand.
Departing from the ongoing US base construction in Okinawa’s Henoko area, this study reckons with what contemporary art can do when provoked into addressing Okinawa’s sociopolitical and environmental conundrums. It focuses on the multimedia works of Naha-born artist Yamashiro Chikako (1976–), foregrounding her shift from early performance videos to experimental short films. Among these, the article closely examines two short films, Chinbin Western: Representation of the Family (2019) and Reframing (2021). Building on thinkers such as Imafuku Ryūta—whose envisioning of archipelagic thinking gestures toward transversal interconnectivities between sea, islands, (non)human and more-than-human beings—this article first leverages “Infrastructural Okinawa” as a critical lens to contextualize Yamashiro’s intervention. This perspective views the island chain as a (post)colonial dispositif produced and unevenly distributed by the US–Japan security–extractive regime, comprehending Okinawa not only through its entanglements of infrastructural–logistical networks, but also as a regime of aesthetics and affect that channels war trauma and the brutalism of colonial governance across Asia and beyond. Further, turning to Yamashiro’s short films, this study uses “archipelagic fabulation” to foreground her speculative, place-based method and aesthetic intervention that reassembles interconnected island–oceanic geographies, temporalities, and imaginaries to critically engage the in/visibility of Infrastructural Okinawa and its necropolitics. Yamashiro’s art awakens island archives, enacts anachronic temporalities, and forges trans-geographic imaginaries that entwine Okinawa with other postcolonial places—thus provoking an archipelagic vision that contests continentalist spatial–temporal logic and infrastructural brutalism.
This forum explores the geopolitics of infrastructure in the context of Israel’s war on Gaza, situating the current genocide within longer histories of settler colonialism, spatial control, and transnational complicity. As homes, hospitals, and schools are reduced to rubble, this destruction is not only military, but infrastructural – an assault on the material conditions of Palestinian life. Infrastructure emerges here not as background, but as a primary mechanism of governance, dispossession, and colonial reordering. From roads and borders to electricity grids and telecommunications, the systems that organise everyday life in Gaza and the West Bank are also those that fragment space, enforce dependency, and suppress self-determination. Rather than viewing this destruction in isolation, contributors trace how it is sustained by regional and global circuits of capital, logistics, arms, and energy. Gaza’s collapse is embedded in a broader political economy of militarism, where supply chains, defence industries, and financial infrastructures turn dispossession into profit. Yet, this forum also foregrounds counter-infrastructures and practices of resistance: from survival networks and subterranean spaces of refusal, to workers’ strikes and transport disruptions that challenge the flows sustaining Israeli militarism. Together, these essays ask what it means to ‘follow infrastructures’ in a moment of mass atrocity – what such a method reveals about power, complicity, and potential rupture. The forum moves beyond documenting destruction to consider how infrastructure is both a tool of domination and a terrain of struggle. Across scales and contexts, it highlights how Palestinians resist infrastructural warfare and how international solidarity movements can intervene in the systems that enable it. In doing so, the forum contributes to a growing body of politically accountable scholarship, mapping not only how infrastructures sustain violence, but how they might be reimagined.