Read Between The Covers

Some ideas find you in the middle of something else and refuse to let you go. That is what happened when I encountered Charisse Louw's work.Charisse is a South African scholar, creative practitioner, and Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Sociodigital Futures, completing her PhD at Stellenbosch University at the intersection of African film, new materialisms, and indigenous epistemologies. In this conversation, we think together about what the zombie actually is. Not the Hollywood monster, but the Haitian figure whose soul was stolen, whose body still moves and labours without will or selfhood. We ask what that figure reveals about racial capitalism, digital extraction, and the condition Achille Mbembe calls Brutalism. And we ask what healing looks like when the wound is not only historical but structural.Charisse brings grief, rigour, somatic practice, and a refusal to offer false comfort. Her closing question will stay with you long after the episode ends: what relation are you inside of, and what is that relation asking of you?