The Funambulist #52 Prison Uprisings Mar – Apr 2024

Welcome to the 52nd issue of The Funambulist! This issue focuses on the many ways through which prisoners invest the full extent of the agency they have within the walls to organize, resist, revolt, conquer the prison, or escape from it. If we are to believe that this carceral power is one of the most ruthless forms of oppression, then liberation is never practiced as much as during prison uprisings.
This issue features articles about Kurdish women prisoners organizing in Turkish colonial prisons (Berivan Kutlay Sarikaya), the revolts in Colombian prisons during the Covid-19 pandemic (Alejandro Rodríguez Pabón), the escape of 49 Chilean political prisoners from Santiago’s Public Prison under Pinochet (Yasna Mussa), and an experience-based analysis of prisoners’ engagement with the carceral space-time in Tunisia and France (Meryem-Bahia Arfaoui).
Two long formats accommodate Orisanmi Burton‘s (with Millenials Are Killing Capitalism) in-depth description of the 1970-71 Long Attica Revolt in New York State, and a conversation between former Irish Republican political prisoners Síle Darragh and Laurence McKeown about the various forms of body resistance practiced in British prisons in 1980-81.
The cover artwork was commissioned to Lilia Benbelaïd. You can read Léopold Lambert’s full introduction to the issue here.
In the News from the Fronts section, you can read a short essay on Indigeneity and the State in Mexico (Elis Mendoza), a solidarity bridge between South Africa and Palestine through June Jordan’s poems (Amanda Joyce Hall), and a thesis architecture project on the influence of radios and magazines in the 1994 Genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda (Patricia Mhoja Bandora).