Welcome to the 57th issue of The Funambulist. It is dedicated to a particular space-time: the Night. Both in its seasonal and daily (or rather, nightly) characteristics, the Night is of course assimilable to a particular time. But the Night is also a space, occupying about 50% of the Earth’s surface at any given moment. The space of the Night evolves in the most “equitable” way around the globe during the time of the two equinoxes (on March 21 and September 21 in the Gregorian calendar), and in the most “discriminate” way around the two solstices (on June 21 and December 21) – when the Night is constant around one pole and absent on the other. Consequently, the general idea that every “day” is divided into equal periods of 12 hours, alternating day and night, is constantly true for those of us who live in Kampala, Libreville, Quito, or Singapore. Whereas those of us living in Reykjavík, or Yellowknife (or to a lesser extent, Naarm (Melbourne) or Buenos Aires) alternate long seasonal periods of predominant nighttime and daytime.
Thinking of the Night spatially helps us part from a static relationship to space, and as such, allows us to examine the spatial politics at play in the nocturnal world through a less self-centered lens.
Similarly, this issue contests the idea that the lack of sunlight characterizing the Night, means that we “see” less in darkness than we do in broad daylight. In fact, the refraction of sunlight in the Earth’s atmosphere prevents us from seeing beyond this atmospheric layer, whereas the Night allows for a much broader vision of a multitude of celestial bodies in the Universe. Seeing the night sky decenters us at the scale of individuals, and even at the planetary level, following the cliché of “being very small in the universe” when looking at the stars. The descriptions made in this issue by D. Kauwila Mahi and Krista Ulujuk Zawadski of celestial orientation and navigation in the two distinct geographies of Hawai’i and Inuit Nunaat (Inuit Country) show us how the Night is opportune to reflect on the relations (some of which are eminently political) between living bodies on Earth and celestial ones.
Therefore, there is something profoundly impactful in the sky being obscured, whether because of atmospheric or light pollution, or because of the political targeting of people who are actively prevented (through the architectural technology we call “prisons”) from looking beyond a few meters from them. In his book Tip of the Spear (2023), Orisanmi Burton describes the 1971 Attica rebels as “stargazers” (see his interview in The Funambulist 52, Prison Uprisings, March-April 2024). Their nights “under the stars” in the prison’s great courtyard, observing the sky, can thus be understood as a particularly powerful symbol for thinking about liberation:
“This profound experience of liberation and movement while remaining in place was tied to practices of celestial observation and cosmic communion. Like abolitionist Harriet Tubman, who famously used the North Star to usher enslaved Africans to freedom, the Attica rebels were stargazers. As they lived in rebellion, they stole time to contemplate the immensity of the universe and to become intimate with that immensity.”
The Night as a liberatory space-time is a recurring theme throughout this issue. For instance, colonial and imperial forces rely primarily on daylight vision for their surveillance and control of bodies. Consequently, the Night provides conditions that evens out, or even provides advantage to guerrilla movements – in particular those who have a practice of celestial navigation that would otherwise find themselves in a brutal asymmetric warfare. This was certainly the case in the Tet Offensive (Sự kiện Tết Mậu Thân) that saw both the North Vietnamese army and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam take the US army by surprise in the night of January 30, 1968. A bit more than thirteen years earlier, it was the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) that had initiated its anticolonial revolution during the night of November 1, 1954. The FLN reiterated such nocturnal attacks regularly in the following months, as Daho Djerbal describes in this issue.
Such a vulnerability is targeted by the colonial state when it enacts counterrevolutionary legislation such as curfews. By preventing specific communities to exit their homes during nighttime, curfews invert the directional violence of the walls, moving from the exclusion of the outside – described in an evocative way by Marie Ranjanoro in this issue – to materializing the carcerality of the inside.
In other words, curfews transform people’s homes into temporary prisons.
In a settler colonial context, prisons are used to disappear individuals who are considered a threat to the stability of the colonial regime. Here, curfews can be seen as a means to disappear the entire colonized population within a space of segregation (the colonized city, the township, the shantytown, the banlieue), at a time (the Night) when exploited labor is not ongoing.
The colonial curfew is precisely what the FLN was resisting in the evening of October 17, 1961, when over 30,000 Algerians marched in the streets of Paris towards the end of the Revolution. The brave defiance of the colonial curfew was met with extreme violence through the brutal arrest of about 10,000 of them and the murder of over 200. Curfews are also common practice by the Israeli occupation army in the West Bank, in particular during the First and Second Intifadas, as well as this past year and half following the October 7, 2023 offensive. Similarly, the Night is often the space-time of Israeli light and sonic invasion of South Lebanon as poignantly described by Mohamad Nahleh in the following pages. In Palestine, curfews are often coupled with military raids to maximize the chances that individuals targeted by these raids are at home and can be arrested. In these conditions, the Night adds a layer of terror to these raids. If the Night is, for many, the time of rest and sleep, the brutal awakening by fully-armed occupation soldiers violating the sanctity of the home certainly embodies another invasion (both temporal and spatial) within the invasion.
As I have shown in my book on the colonial history of the French state of emergency, this legislation allows for both curfews and night raids to be made legal. This is how hundreds of Muslim homes were raided at night, by fully armed police special forces during the first weeks of the 2015-2017 state of emergency across France, Mayotte, Reunion, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Guiana, following the deadly attacks in Paris of November 13, 2015. Hassina Mechaï and Sihem Zine documented numerous testimonies of those who saw their homes broken into by the police at night during that time:
“Suddenly, while I was already asleep, I heard a strange noise coming from the front door. I moved towards it, then looked through the peephole. I hadn’t taken the time to get dressed. I sleep without clothes at night. Then I saw some hooded men behind the door. I barely had time to pull my head back before the door flew open and was literally ripped off, even though it was an armored door. Then they came in. There were two hundred.”
From May 13 to May 28, 2024, the same state of emergency was enacted in Kanaky, following the beginning of a new Indigenous Kanak insurrection against French settler colonial domination over the country. Kanaky was subjected to a 6pm-6am curfew (it remains active as I write these words but has since been restrained to 10pm-5am), and seventeen Kanak organizers were placed under house arrest after being subjected to similar raids. Being under house arrest in this context meant that, in addition to being restricted by nocturnal curfews, they had to visit a designated military police station (gendarmerie) three times a day, and were further prevented from accessing some other Kanak neighborhoods or tribes.
Just like the Night, curfews do not solely manifest a given time, they also materialize a space. In Kanaky, it is the space of the settler colony, 17,000 kilometers away from Paris, where decisions about the country are made. In France, in July 2023, another controlled space was that of the banlieues, where the largest revolts (since the historical 2005 one, (during which the state of emergency had also taken place) were marking the rage so many of us felt after the police murder of Nahel Merzouk in Nanterre, on June 27 that year. The following nights of the murder saw banlieue youths fighting the heavily equipped and armed police with fireworks mortars, illuminating the night sky with flares that gave the resistance a sort of festive dimension.
The fact that curfews were only taken against specific municipalities or neighborhoods shows the discriminatory spatial politics they embody, in addition to their evident temporal politics.
But perhaps the quintessential example of settler colonial spatial and temporal control through curfews is to be found in Apartheid South Africa. As we discuss with Stephanie Briers in this issue, the Apartheid’s “everynight” (to use her word) materialized an even greater racial segregation than its “everyday” (when Indigenous labor was necessary to run settler society). The 1985 state of emergency enacted various curfews in Black townships that prevented political organizing, but also cultural production such as jazz concerts. Curfews were furthermore enforced in Cape Town by the installation of 40-meter tall masts (analyzed at length in Stephanie’s work) projecting a crude light onto the roofs and streets of the neighborhoods to survey and control their inhabitants at night. As often in post-1994 South Africa, this surveillance technology remains operative today.
I mentioned a couple of times that the Night is, for many of us, the space-time of sleep in contrast with the association of daytime and labor. However, night labor is a fundamental dimension to consider when examining nocturnal politics. Some laborers (in particular racialized women) are involved in the cleaning of offices that, during the day, contribute to the good flows of capitalism. Other night workers drive freight trucks, following the weak cones of lights of their vehicles, while others ensure that the emergency rooms of the world keep running to attend, cure, and repair. Some are working underpaid in the backs of restaurants, washing expensive dishes. And then some others (with the majority being gender marginalized people) practice sex work within a drastically varying spectrum of risk and predation, as Yin Q. describes in their text in this issue.
Reaching the end of this introduction, I would like to end it on ghosts. If ghosts tend to manifest themselves during the Night, it may be because just like the stars, they are invisibilized by the overwhelming light of the day – which nonetheless does not mean that they are not here. From the way they are represented in Thailand by Apichatpong Weerasethakul in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) or in Senegal by Mati Diop in Atlantics (2019), ghosts embody a vehicle between the living and the dead. They embody the presence of their past life, but also of the political conditions that precipitated their death. In allowing their presence to be seen by the living, the Night is a particularly clarifying moment for those who ritualize communication with ghosts (understood in the largest sense), such as in the Haitian ceremonies depicted by Shneider Léon Hilaire’s paintings in this issue. May the nocturnal atmosphere they convey accompany your reading throughout this issue. Have an excellent read! ■