“Revolutions enter history as extraordinary events: they mark a radical shift from an old to a new order. They are archived with turning points, famous leaders, and unequivocal ideologies. Finding this focus on the historic and the monumental blinding, I turn to ordinary people and unexceptional stories, in a memoir almost not written.”

“But to be a Black political figure in Freetown during the 1920s was nevertheless to contend with a system premised on a racial distinction between colonizer and colonized. A closer look at the Sierra Leone Weekly News gives us a sense of the precarity that existed even for elites in colonial Sierra Leone.”

“I explore three stories that are part of this lifeworld, stories that gesture towards the visceral, stories of loss and dispossession, of hope, and of mastery—stories that come up against each other in contradictory ways.”

“The monument is always just out of reach—separated by security, nestled closely to the corridors of power, a monument to an internationalism that has also been shaped by its distance from popular struggles.”

“As dusk fell over the Costa Rican capital of San José on 20 August 1968, the evening calm was broken by the drone of air raid sirens—the sign of major breaking news. Anxious, intrigued, excited, crowds gathered at the offices of La República. The message on the newspaper’s bulletin boards outside was succinct: “Czechoslovakia invaded.” ”

“…the monster is never far from even the most hefty and technical treatments of the social relations that animate these centuries. Marx’s famous metaphor, for instance, describes capital as “dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour.” “

“Forty years after the event, Hailu Ayele recalled being arrested in Addis Ababa on suspicion of political libel. When he arrived at the police station, two colonels began their interrogation: “They started by handing me a piece of blank paper and instructing me to write ‘imperialism’ on it.” “

“In As aventuras de Ngunga, the bodies of African women form the battleground over which the MPLA’s modernity and the African chiefs’ conservatism is enacted: Ngunga has to renounce his love for the young Uassamba, the fourth wife of the village chief Chipoya.”

“Could the displaced “fruits” of its revolution today tell us something about the past? And what might the condition of absence, understood in temporal terms, mean for revolution itself?”

“As they write, “Passivity is the smothering of suffering and passion is the explosion of suffering. Passivity and passion—the ways to keep living when you’re damned, even by your own people.”(P. 153) There are no tales of ascendence, of aspiration, of striving “to be somebody” here.”

“When posters for Mohamed Pack Your Bags appeared on the walls of the foyers (employer-owned housing for migrant workers) where the play was touring in France, Algerian workers reportedly panicked, thinking far-right activists had plastered their housing quarters with anti-immigrant signage.”