This account comes from Anna Tsing, who thought the story was an urban legend until a scientist confirmed its existence “in Japanese newspapers in the 1990s. I have not found it yet. Still, the timing of the bomb in August would have corresponded to the beginning of the matsutake fruiting season.” See The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015), 290.
Adapted from the counterfactual game “What If Carpathian Ukraine Survived as an Independent State from March 15, 1939–1946?” Conceived and played by Attila Hazslinszky, Anastasia Kostiv, Petro Ryaska, Anton Varga, and Tyler Coburn as part of “Counterfactuals,” a workshop for Cultural Capital Introspection / Sorry No Rooms Available, Ukraine that ran from September to October 2020. This summary takes some poetic license with the game and doesn’t capture all of its complexity.
See Catherine Gallagher, Telling It Like It Wasn’t (University of Chicago Press, 2018) and Christopher Prendergast, Counterfactuals: Paths of the Might Have Been (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).
John Stuart Mill, quoted in Prendergast, Counterfactuals, 62.
I’m grateful to Siqi Zhu for his help in thinking through this section of the text.
This project began with a class called “Counterfactuals” at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, which ran from March to June 2020. Subsequent workshops of the same name were held at Wendy’s Subway, New York (July–August 2020) and Cultural Capital Introspection / Sorry No Rooms Available, Ukraine (September–October 2020).
Adapted from the counterfactual game “What If the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty Led to Global Nuclear Disarmament?” Conceived and played by Alex Kim, Brittni Harvey, and Tyler Coburn as part of “Counterfactuals,” Wendy’s Subway, New York, July–August 2020.
This anecdote comes from Gallagher, Telling It Like It Wasn’t, 17. Much of this section draws on Gallagher’s excellent book.
See John Stuart Mill’s A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive (1843; Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Gallagher, Telling It Like It Wasn’t, 6.
David C. Gray, “A No-Excuse Approach to Transitional Justice: Reparations As Tools of Extraordinary Justice,” Washington University Law Review 85, no. 5 (2010): 1043–1103.
William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). Darity and Mullen survey reparations models from Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch (“Who Pays for Slavery?” 1990); Larry Neal (“A Calculation and Comparison of the Current Benefits of Slavery and the Analysis of Who Benefits,” 1990); Thomas Craemer (“Estimating Slavery Reparations: Present Value Comparisons of Historical Multigenerational Reparations Policies,” 2015); James Marketti (“Estimated Present Value of Income Directed during Slavery,” 1990); and Judah P. Benjamin (“You Can Never Subjugate Us,” 1860).
Darity and Mullen, From Here to Equality.
Hadja Tall, “Al Hajj Umar Tall: The Biography of a Controversial Leader,” Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies 32, no. 1–2 (2006): 73–90.
Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics (Ministère de la Culture de France, 2018).
Baajoordo Research Center on African Intellectual Heritage, “May France Want to Restitute to Senegal the Oumarian Library Undiminished!” petitions.net →.
Sarr and Savoy, The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage.
Felwine Sarr, “Restitution of African Artifacts: History, Memory, Traces, Re-appropriation, New Ethical Relation,” VIARAV8301: Critical Issues (class lecture, Columbia University, New York, October 12, 2020).
Adapted from the counterfactual game “What If, Following WWII, Artists Continued to Be Integrated into the Military through a Permanent ‘Ghost Army’ Division?” Conceived and played by Alex Kim, Brittni Harvey, and Tyler Coburn as part of “Counterfactuals,” Wendy’s Subway, New York, July–August 2020.
This workshop was arranged for Cultural Capital Introspection / Sorry No Rooms Available, Ukraine, September–October 2020.
For more information on Microscope, visit →.
Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator (Dutton, 2019).
Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Year of Solitude, trans. Gregory Rabassa (1967; Avon Books, 1970), quoted in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Duke University Press, 1995), 4.