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Contents
editorial
IMRAAN COOVADIA
Living with sorcerers
ZEINAB SHAATH
The Urgent Call of Palestine
ALLAN BOESAK
“HOW LONG FOR PALESTINE?”
MAKHOSINI MGITYWA
The Crux of the Matter
MALAIKA MAHLATSI
On the genocide in Palestine and the death of academic freedom and democracy in Western universities
BRANKO MARCETIC
Israel’s Gaza War Is One of History’s Worst Crimes Ever
CHRIS HEDGES
American Sadism
ARYAN KAGANOF
On Power and Powerlessness: Genocide in Gaza Through the Lens of Afropessimism and Decay Studies
MICHAEL SFARD
We Israelis Are Part of a Mafia Crime Family. It's Our Job to Fight Against It From Within
Theme Gaza
ZEENAT ADAM
Gaza and the Graveyard of Excuses
MAHMOUD AL SHABRAWI
Writing Between Fear and Survival
GOODENOUGH MASHEGO
Why I can’t condemn October 7
GARTH ERASMUS
Lamentations for GAZA
SALIM VALLY and ROSHAN DADOO
Africa’s strong bonds to Palestine
ZUKISWA WANNER
A Common Humanity
MUHAMMAD OMARUDDIN (DON MATTERA)
A Song for Palestine
TSHEPO MADLINGOZI
Ilizwe Lifile/Nakba: Le-fatshe & Crises of Constitution in (Neo)Settler Colonies
SINDRE BANGSTAD
Palestine, Israel and academic freedom in South Africa
GWEN ANSELL
Resistance music – a mirror reflecting truth; a hammer forging solidarity
FMFP (FREE MUSIC FREE PALESTINE)
Listening as an anti-colonial way of engaging
ATIYYAH KHAN
A movement against silencing: What the genocide in Palestine has taught us about journalism
ASHRAF HENDRICKS
Visual Memoirs of Solidarity with Palestine in Cape Town
ATIYYAH KHAN
GAZA: Where wearing a PRESS vest is a death sentence
VISUAL INTIFADA
NARRATIVE REPAIR
SHARI MALULEKE
A Prayer to the Olive Tree
THANDI GAMEDZE
Jesus of Occupied Palestine
NATHI NGUBANE
MALCOLM X IN GAZA
MARIAM JOOMA ÇARIKCI
The dark side of the rainbow: How Apartheid South Africa and Zionism found comfort in post-94 rhetoric
CRAIG MOKHIBER
The ICJ finds that BDS is not merely a right, but an obligation
ROSHAN DADOO
South African coal fuels a genocide: BOYCOTT GLENCORE NOW
IMĀN ZANELE OMAR
From the ground
DEAN HUTTON
Who would you be under Apartheid?
galleri
SÍONA O’CONNELL
Keys to Nowhere
SAMAR HUSSAINI
The Palette of Tradition and other, earlier works
SLOVO MAMPHAGA
Chronology of the Now
DEON MAAS
The Resistance
OLU OGUIBE
A Brief Statement on Art and Genocide
CANDICE BREITZ
8 may 2025 Berlin
ADLI YACUBI
A Moment Is On Its Way
TRACEY ROSE
If Hitler Was A Girl Who Went To Art School (2024-2025)
borborygmus
CHARLES LEONARD
Zeinab Shaath : the famous Teta
THE ALDANO COLLECTIVE
Withold
DIMA ORSHO
Excerpts from Half Moon, a film by Frank Scheffer
GARTH ERASMUS
Where is God?
LOWKEY FEATURING MAI KHALIL
Palestine Will Never Die
CHRIS THURMAN
Intertexts for Gaza (or, Thirteen ways of looking past a genocide)
KEENAN AHRENDS
The Wandering Dancer
NATHAN TRANTRAAL
‘D’ is vi destruction
INSURRECTIONS ENSEMBLE
Let Me Lie To You
RODRIGO KARMY BOLTON
Palestine’s Lessons for the Left: Theses for a Poetics of the Earth
MARYAM ABBASI
Drums, Incense, and the Unseen
frictions
HIBA ABU NADA
Not Just Passing
NICHOLAS MIRZOEFF
The Visible and the Unspeakable (For Mahmoud Khalil)
MPHUTLANE WA BOFELO
Before You Kill Them
ABIGAIL GEORGE
4 Struggle Songs for Palestine
MIKE VAN GRAAN
4 Poems for Gaza
EUGENE SKEEF
To The Demise of War Mongers (a suite for the people of GAZA).
ALLAN KOLSKI HORWITZ
Gaza: two poems
MALIKA LUEEN NDLOVU
At the end of a thread, holding my breath, beading
NGOMA HILL
From the River to the Sea
JESÚS SEPÚLVEDA
Gaza 2024
ARYAN KAGANOF
GAZA (body double)
VONANI BILA
Under Rubble
JACKSON MAC LOWE
Social Significance
FRANK MEINTJIES
5 poems from A Place to night in
DIANA FERRUS
Burdened man
claque
FINN DANIELS-YEOMANS
‘If Cannes did not want to go to Gaza, Gaza had to go to Cannes’: Institutional Censorship at Film Festivals post-October 7.
FRANK MEINTJIES
Abigail George’s SONGS FOR PALESTINE - "struggle poems" in an age of livestreamed genocicde
PHILLIPPA YAA DE VILLIERS
ukuphelezela and Nida Younis’ Two Bodies/Zwei Korper
RUTH MARGALIT
Writing the Nakba in Hebrew
NATHAN TRANTRAAL
Ons is gevangenes van dit wat ons liefhet: Magmoed Darwiesj gedigte in Afrikaans
HEIN WILLEMSE
Frank Meintjies: a mature poet, intellectually astute with a refined social, political and ecological consciousness
M. SOGA MLANDU
'Tell Them I Am Dead’: Sithembele Isaac Xhegwana’s Dark Lines of History
NIKLAS ZIMMER
Détourning the cut
ekaya
LYNTHIA JULIUS
I believe the children for the future
JENNIFER KESTIS FERGUSON
Nikita
CHERYL DAMON
No Ordinary Rage
SKHUMBUZO PHAKATHI
Don’t forget Phila Ndwandwe
INGRID ORIT HURWITZ
SHATTERED
STEVEN ROBINS
The blindspots of Zionist history and the ‘ancient scripts’ of primordial Jewish victimhood
LIESL JOBSON
Sorrowful Mysteries
herri
Towards a Preliminary Archaeology of herri
off the record
STEPHEN CLINGMAN
The Voices in My Head: Reflections on South Africa, Israel, Palestine, Gaza
ANNI KANAFANI
Ghassan Kanafani
FILMS
by Palestinian Women
STEVEN ROBINS
Re-reading Jabotinsky’s The Iron Wall in the time of genocide in Gaza.
JANNIKE BERGH in conversation with HAIDAR EID
Even Ghosts Weep in Gaza
ASHRAF KAGEE
Three friends in Gaza
AMIRA HASS
"Resist the Normalization of Evil": On Palestine and Journalism
GEORGE KING
Fields, Forests and Fakery: ‘Green Colonialism’ in Palestine
HEIDI GRUNEBAUM
The Village Under the Forest
MEIR KAHANE
Jewish Terror: A JEWISH STATE VERSUS WESTERN DEMOCRACY
FRANK ARMSTRONG
Ireland and Palestine: A Crucial Vote Awaits
NIKHIL SINGH
The Siege of Gaza 332 BC
feedback
DENIS EKPO
1 April 2025
DEON-SIMPHIWE SKADE
23 March 2025
LIZ SAVAGE
10 January 2025
CEDRIK FERMONT
10 August 2024
AZSACRA ZARATHUSTRA
6 August 2024
FACEBOOK FEEDBACK
Facebook
PhD
COLE MEINTJIES
Power in Relation to Life and Death: Israel's genocide in Gaza
the selektah
CHRISTINA HAZBOUN
Palestinian Women’s Voices in Music and Song – 2025 version
ATIYYAH KHAN
IQRA!
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the back page
MICHAEL TAUSSIG
Two Weeks In Palestine
GEORGE STEINER
This is called History
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    #11
  • editorial

ARYAN KAGANOF

On Power and Powerlessness: Genocide in Gaza Through the Lens of Afropessimism and Decay Studies

The genocide in Gaza, witnessed in real-time through live feeds, fragmented testimonies, and algorithmically suppressed grief, unfolds as a catastrophe of both visibility and abandonment. Power is enacted here not only through bombs and sealed borders, but through the architecture of epistemic annihilation.

In this essay, I propose to approach the unfolding violence in Gaza through two critical frameworks: Afropessimism, with its foundational claim that Blackness constitutes a position of social death; and decay studies, which interrogates the processes of deterioration, disintegration, and the afterlives of matter. When held together, these frames allow us to consider how power functions not merely as domination, but as the slow, recursive wearing away of the world itself; and how powerlessness, in turn, might be misrecognized, weaponized, or even refracted into forms of radical endurance.

The Ground Zero of Powerlessness

To speak of Gaza is to speak of a geography of entrapment; a space rendered both hyper-visible and structurally abandoned. Palestinians in Gaza do not merely endure military occupation; they exist within what Achille Mbembe has called a regime of “necropolitics”, where sovereignty is exercised through the capacity of the occupation forces to dictate who may live and who must die. But the genocide currently underway exceeds even the logic of death, it enters the register of annihilation, of total erasure. It is not a matter of bodies slain in war; it is the attempted deletion of a people’s past, future, language, earth, air.

Afropessimism offers a resonant lens here. Frank Wilderson’s concept of social death, drawn from Orlando Patterson, posits that Blackness in the modern capitalist world is structured by an ontological exclusion from the category of the Human. This exclusion is not contingent; it is foundational. What this means, provocatively, is that suffering does not signal a deviation from normative structures: it is the structure.

Gaza, in this light, becomes not a crisis to be solved but a site where a certain modality of the world system is laid bare: the expendability of lives deemed ungrievable. Palestinians, like so-called “Black” people under racial capitalism, are positioned not as victims of failed ethics, but as structurally antagonistic to the very logics that produce and protect Western liberal subjecthood. Their fungibility and disposability is not a failure of democracy, but a condition of its coherence.

Ruination as Method: Insights from Decay Studies

If Afropessimism provides a structural analysis of powerlessness as inescapable positionality, decay studies allows us to think about what happens after abandonment: how things fall apart, and what remains. Decay is not merely a process of rot; it is a field of temporal and material complexity. Scholars like Anna Tsing and Kristina Lyons have shown how decay marks the breakdown of systems, but also how life continues within and through ruination.

In Gaza, decay is not metaphoric. It is infrastructural, literal. Water filtration systems have collapsed. Hospitals reek of blood and antifungal despair. Bodies cannot be buried fast enough. Yet decay here is not natural entropy; it is engineered decomposition: a deliberate targeting by the Israeli government and the IDF of not just life, but the systems that sustain life. In the words of Decay Studies, this is not “natural death” but “compounded ruin.”

The people of Gaza are not merely starving, they are being starved.

This famine is not a natural disaster, it is being clinically engineered by Netanyahu and his genocidal cohort. This is their “power”.

But paradoxically, it is within this landscape of collapse that the persistence of Palestinian life asserts itself most fiercely. Children continue to draw. Songs continue to be sung. The internet flickers with fragments of love, memory, rage. In Afropessimist terms, this is not “resistance” in the liberal sense, it is not a path out of social death, but it is a kind of endurance that troubles the neat boundary between powerlessness and power.

Power, Not As Capacity, But As Ontology

We often imagine power as something one can hold, exert, or lose. But Afropessimism demands a more radical understanding: power as ontological relation. To be Black under slavery (and its afterlife) is to be positioned as the anti-human: the object against which the human is measured and maintained. Palestinians in Gaza experience a structurally analogous position: rendered outside the scope of protection, of recognition, of value.

The genocide thus becomes a scene of ontological policing. It is not about the loss of rights but the denial of the capacity to have rights. Humanitarian appeals fail, not because they are ignored, but because they are addressed to a system in which Palestinians were never included. A system where some deaths matter as tragedy and others merely as statistics.

Power, in this reading, is not the tank or the drone. It is the grammar of the world. And powerlessness is not the absence of force, but the condition of being untranslatable within that grammar.

Toward a Poetics of Residual Power

Yet we must tread carefully. To speak of powerlessness risks romanticizing despair, or reducing the lived horror of genocide to a theoretical abstraction. This is where decay studies reorients us. If Afropessimism reveals the totalizing logic of exclusion, decay studies opens space to think about what lingers, what resists disappearance, even when not recognized as resistance.

Decay is slow. It smells. It transforms. And within it, new ecologies form. To say that Palestinians survive is not to offer hope in the traditional sense, but to insist on the obstinacy of life even when stripped of futurity.

The power of Gaza, if it can be called that, lies in its refusal to vanish. In a world that thrives on disappearance, to remain, even in fragments, is a kind of counter-spell. A refusal to be unspoken.

Echoes in the Rubble

Power and powerlessness are not opposites. They are intertwined, recursive, layered. The genocide in Gaza exposes this knot, as both spectacle and absence. Through Afropessimism, we understand that certain populations are structured outside of humanity itself. Through decay studies, we witness how life decomposes, but also how it decomposes into something else: a grammar of pain, a mouldy lullaby, an echoing scream that persists beneath the rubble.

Perhaps the question is not who holds power, but whether genocidal erasure will become fertilizer for the next regime of forgetting? We live in the ruins of a world that has already decided who matters. But sometimes, ruins whisper. This is their power.

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