In colonial conquest, language did to the mind what the sword did to the bodies of the colonized…Use English but don’t let English use you. — Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
Decolonize That! is a collaborative space for reflection and intervention with regards to all things decolonization. We remain committed to a critique of imperialism through a focus on gender, sexuality, capitalism, race, ableism and nation. We stand with the liberation of Palestine, freedom for Kashmir, the movement for Black lives, Indigenous movements, the abolition of prisons, police, caste, race, patriarchy and nation-states, de-gentrification and struggles of workers worldwide.
We are currently hard at work on two projects.
Decolonize That! Handbooks for the Revolutionary Overthrow of Embedded Colonial Ideas is a short books series published by OR Books and Warscapes magazine. The books will engage the urgent and politically charged push towards “decolonization” underway worldwide today through incisive and focused analyses of the coloniality that has seeped into many aspects of our lives. Our first volume Decolonize Hipsters by Grégory Pierrot is now available. Get your copy here!
Radical Books Collective takes its cue from Toni Morrison’s provocation: “Canon building is empire building.” RBC is a collaborative initiative that responds to the need for an alternative, inclusive and non-commercial approach to books and reading. It will bring together a community of readers from around the world to discuss books that are unapologetically political and deeply engaged in narrating and envisioning radical transformative futures. Friendly online book clubs will feature a recently published radical book followed by a public conversation with the author/s.
We consider this website to be a working space and will continue to consolidate readings, visual material, music, and new writings on decolonization. Help us by suggesting books or essays or music or by sending us a blog or a podcast. Keep us posted about protests, events and seminars. We are a work in progress and look forward to amplifying your projects, ideas, events and activism.
Pandemics, aging mothers, decolonization, menopause, and anthropology may seem disparate topics yet anthropologist, human rights lawyer, and activist Dolly Kikon deftly weaves these concerns into a tapestry of interconnectedness for UCLA’S Center for South Asia (CISA) speaker series. Pulling from W.E.B DuBois and bell hooks’ intellectual threads, Kikon foregrounds the bigger albeit ironic image of incomplete decolonization in the world’s largest democracy: India.
Kikon’s insistence that new theories emerge “when we are able to write about the complexity of connections, relations, and fractures” link neocolonialism to her childhood memory of Dimapur’s haunted sports complex stadium, her cousin’s death at the hands of a rival armed group, and her experiences of marginalization in the land of her birth. Evoking the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Kikon extends the poet’s lamentations in “Subh-e-Azadi” or “Dawn of Freedom” to mourn an incomplete decolonization while also searching for Faiz’s “promised dawn of independence.”
Despite over 70 years of Indian independence from British colonialism and an impressive charter of rights that is the Constitution, not all of India is free. Using Du Bois’ interrogation of “how does it feel to be a problem?” from The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Kikon explains that to be a “problem” means to have the government deem one’s home “disturbed areas,” as is the case with the majority of North East India and the state of Jammu and Kashmir. To be a problem means to be an exception to the Constitutional promises of rights and freedoms, as evident for those living under the threat of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which offers legal impunity for the Indian army to commit Constitutional and human right violations. To be a problem, in Kikon’s terms, means to “kill” one’s soul for education, to remain an unconnected and marginalized story, yet the primary subject of the state’s discipline and punishment, to lack intelligence; inhabiting a worldview that requires constant “correction” because it is deemed “weak and childlike.” For Kikon, a racist education’s pedagogical violence is not too far off from anthropology’s assumptions of speaking and writing norms undergirded in access and privileged education which then leaves behind the first generation, tribal student like herself.
There is no margin when it comes to violence, it is a poison that creates monsters, monsters that travel from the margins all the way to the center. And for India, over the decades these marginal and disturbed areas were the fertile experimental sites for impunity. Colonization stuck to these places like a stubborn stain.
Dolly Kikon, ““Are you still studying?” Anthropology, Decolonization, and Practice” at UCLA CISA
Intertwining narrative threads of her childhood with that of her single mother’s life, experiences of neocolonial violence, and anthropology’s shortcomings as a discipline, Kikon points to decolonization, and especially the decolonization of language as a means of healing. Using bell hooks’ idea on the importance of language as a mode of expression, Kikon calls for dismantling language and knowledge systems used to oppress others. Like many postcolonial trauma scholars, Kikon firmly holds onto possibilities for healing, reconciliation, and co-existence wherein a renewed decolonial praxis means a return back to “land movement, spirit, and meaning.” The road to healing and decolonization is long but rewarding, and here, Kikon charmingly equates the effects of decolonial work with menopause. While both induce emotional surges in her body, decolonization sets her free from the “conditions of a shackled world.” The urgent question then, in Kikon’s words, remains, “What does it do to you?”
On Green, Red and International Abolition Geography
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a prison abolitionist and scholar, delivered the keynote for the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy’s inaugural event coordinated with “Sanctuary Spaces: Reworlding Humanism,” a Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar on October 9, 2020.
Here, Gilmore grappled with the contradictions of “abolition on stolen land” by mapping out the ways in which carceral geographies inform racial and economic inequalities along with environmental degradations. For the uninitiated, carceral geographies refers to the complex interplay between geography/land, environment, natural resources, policies, control of people via jails and other forms of detention, and the collective impact on human lives, the environment, and the economy. Gilmore traced the origins of modern policing as emerging from a mode of “organized violence” meant to uphold the outright exploitation and thievery from “plantation slavery, mineral extraction,” commodification from “stolen land, and industrial manufacture.” These historical instances exemplify capitalistic exploits of human and environmental violence. Gilmore places well-known examples of US police brutality such as George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade in this history of organized violence.
“Give us back our lands…Let’s move beyond the land acknowledgment.
Charles Sepulveda
While expanding abolition’s scope, Gilmore interweaves three narratives of violent and systematic carceral geography that demonstrate the interconnectedness between capitalism, racism, and environmental abuse that enable a cycle of human suffering. For instance, in her vignette about Michael Zimzun, the Black Panther Party member for self-defense, Gilmore recounts that Zimzun’s fight extended beyond police brutality. Having won a lawsuit against the Pasadena police officers who blinded him in one eye, Zimzun used the money from the payout to study the premature deaths from asthma in black, brown, and poor communities. His work revealed that developing asthma was enabled by the unhygienic environments made possible through organized abandonment policies where housing authorities and private landlords left the inhabitants to fend for themselves in rodent and rat feces infested houses. The cycle of combatting poor living conditions with noxious pesticides adversely affected children’s developing lungs and contributed to asthma development. Thus, Gilmore’s emphasis on environmental wellbeing underlines her politics of a green abolition.
Abolition geography is the antagonistic contradiction to a carceral geography
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Since carceral geography concerns itself with the economic impact on human life, Gilmore’s next example examines the hurdles in making a livelihood in the US given that the paradoxical cycle of access to health care, unemployment benefits and pensions is dependent on having a job. Added to this mix are the structural barriers to employment such as lack of qualifying documents that permit work or discriminatory factors such as a history of arrest or conviction. Financial precarity is not merely an individual’s or a single community’s problem but one that produces systematic pressure on everyone’s income. Even for the highly skilled profession like nursing and health care, Gilmore argues that the essential workers face economic precarity in the absence of unionized representations. Her call for abolition asks for change via collective action using social wage, the income that gets “skimmed in one way or another” from state and local treasury. She further explains that a green revolution also has to be a red revolution since both the environment and the market, as colonial exploitation has demonstrated well enough, are irrevocably interlocked. Juxtaposing Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, the “planet’s lungs” alongside the Goliath business, Amazon, Gilmore argues that the company “defines the geographer’s task, by combining people, place, and things.” The firm’s vast profits are a result of propagating environmental and human precarity. For example, the company’s namesake is destroyed via clearing stolen land and eroding biodiversity to produce ethanol that fuels machines that in turn help circulate Amazon products.
Meanwhile, the “essential worker” in Amazon’s human workforce depends on food stamps and other means of income support to make ends meet. Thus, the excess of material capitalism is nourished through laying waste to land and people’s lives. Lest one find comfort in Jeff Bezos and his contemporary’s philanthropic largesse, Gilmore offers a stern reminder that philanthropy is not charity but rather a “private allocation of stolen social wage” on stolen land. Lastly, Gilmore’s emphasis on the intersecting forces that control and dictate the quality of human life calls to mind gender theorist Judith Butler’s work on precarity where the latter explains that all human life is precarious given that all are dependent on each other, the environment, and systems to some extent or the other. Of course, the degree of precarity varies. In recognition of the unequally shared precarity, Gilmore offers an ambitious and hopeful intervention through an abolition which is green and red but also international and reparative.
“The decolonizing of the mind is very, very important for Africa and the formerly colonized world. Even Europe needs to decolonize itself because the Europe and the West that we have is the Europe which grew out of slave trade and colonizing other people and so on.
Many European cities…say London, Paris, Lisbon…were made from profits made out of the African body, out of the enslaved African, from the labor of the African people. It is what built the modernity in many European cities. So modernity in Europe is rooted in African enslavement. The people of Europe have occupied more land than any other continent. Right? The Europeans are the ones who moved more into other continents more than any other people. If you compare that with the few immigrants from Africa or from Asia, they are miniscule by comparison.”
Toronto Abolition Convergence: A World Without Jails
The Indigenous Abolitionist Study Guide by the Toronto Abolition Convergence offers a comprehensive guide to decolonizing and abolishing punitive practices of carceration and social work rooted in settler-colonial ideologies. The guide compiled by the collaborative engagement of Indigenous and Black people as well as POCs, white folx, activists, queer, trans, 2-spirit people, subjects of and activists against the incarceration and deportation system reflects an interlocking approach to the overlapping grid of racial, gender, and sexual violence.
The guide while acknowledging the significance of the first Prisoner’s Justice Day (PJD) of August 10, 1975, as the stimulus for reflecting on the violence of the criminal ‘justices’ system, traces the genesis of police, prisons, and social workers as a means of enacting settler-colonial violence on indigenous lives. With an emphasis on Canada’s historical and ongoing subjugation of indigenous peoples and cultures, the guide adds to a rich corpus of abolitionist literature by Black feminists, thus explicitly connecting the intersecting histories of violence and terror on brown and black bodies by European settlers in the West. Combining anti-colonial activism with abolitionist praxis, the guide broadens an urgent conversation around the need to analyze the material, social, cultural, and physical violence meted out by the penal system on Indigenous peoples.
Prisons are a colonial imposition on Indigenous lands
Toronto Abolition Convergence
Offering an introduction plus study materials for seven weeks, the guide provides an overview of the ways settler colonialism displaced the pluralistic “political, legal, social, cultural, and economic systems” already in place across hundreds of Indigenous nations spanning what is now Canada and the U.S. The forcibly enforced, singular interpretation of settler onto the Indigenous peoples took the form of creating the North West Mounted Police (NWMP) force in Canada, which later became the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), meant to oppress the indigenous populace of the prairie provinces. The settler legal system undermined and punished indigenous ways of living by breaking down communal ways of living through removing and isolating individuals away from their land, families, and communities. While the penal system is the ugly and obvious face of settler colonialism, the study guide identities the role of the social worker as the covert mechanism of “white supremacy, superiority, benevolence, and salvation.”
A liberated and decolonized future, according to the activists and contributors of the Indigenous Abolitionist Study guide is founded upon a feminist, “Two-Spirit, and Trans justice” praxis.
Andrew Ryder: Jean Genet’s Marxist Writings on Palestine
Jean Genet’s work in the 1970s, inspired by his experiences in Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon, has long been recognized for its effects on the French cultural climate as well as its visceral exploration of the intersection of a variety of forms of oppression and identity. This essay revisits Prisoner of Love in a Marxist context, in particular with regard to the understanding of primitive accumulation, and with some remarks on contemporary queer theory. We might see Genet’s attention to the experience of violence, resistance and displacement in the Levant as an expression of a dynamic transformation in relations of production and popular resistance. Karl Marx revealed the reproduction of capital as imposing a modern discipline that polices bodies as well as land. Drawing on analyses by Ghassan Kanafani, Silvia Federici, Jasbir K. Puar, and Jason Read, I suggest that Genet provides a poetic illustration of the biopolitical necessities of Palestinian national liberation.
Genet in the 1970s By the 1970s, Jean Genet was already a widely known author, playwright, and cultural figure. A vagabond and delinquent from a very young age, Genet wrote his transgressive classic, Our Lady of the Flowers, while imprisoned in 1943. In 1949, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, and Jean-Paul Sartre had him released from prison (he was threatened with a life-sentence) in recognition of his accomplishments. For most of his life, Genet was apolitical – his work revolved around themes of evil, betrayal, fantasy, crime, and eroticism. However, he developed a fascination with and close personal connection to the Arab world as early as 1929 when he journeyed to Syria with the French Foreign Legion. He began an explicit concern with themes of racism and oppressed nationalities with his play, TheBlacks, published in 1958, and subsequently his epic theater devoted to the Algerian War, The Screens, published in 1961.
Jean Genet
The events of 1968 led Genet to embrace a more direct political engagement. Largely giving up literature, Genet instead traveled throughout the United States in support of the Black Panther Party, speaking alongside their representative at various engagements, as well as working with Michel Foucault’s Prison Information Group. At this time he also became a fellow traveler of the French Communist Party, although he never officially joined in order to avoid embarrassing them by his membership. Most significantly, he lived in Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan between autumn of 1970 and May 1971, returning through 1972. He also visited the Lebanese refugee camps in Sabra and Shatila immediately following the massacre of 1982. His posthumously published memoir, Prisoner of Love, is dedicated to these experiences.
I am interested in relating Genet’s very particular experience of the Palestinian movement to more contemporary developments of the Marxist concept of primitive accumulation. While Genet was not directly aware of this conceptual framework, I argue that Genet’s Palestinian writings can be re-read as records of primitive accumulation as it affected the Palestinian people during the period of the early 1970s, that is, following the June 1967 War, sometimes referred to by Palestinians as the Naksa, and the end of the Jordanian Civil War known as Black September.
Primitive Accumulation in Palestine Marx develops the concept of primitive accumulation in the final chapters of the first volume of Capital,and the notebooks entitled “Precapitalist Economic Formations” in the Grundrisse (Read 20). The idea develops from a basic problem; as Jason Read summarizes it,
"To accumulate capital it is necessary to possess capital. There must then be an original or previous accumulation, one that is not the result of the capitalist mode of production but rather its point of departure and that constitutes the originary differentiation between capital and workers." (21)
Marx argues that there is a conventional moral explanation—some people save while others squander—but this is an ahistorical myth. In his description, capitalism requires
"contact between two very different kinds of commodity owners; on the one hand, the owners of money, means of production means of subsistence, who are eager to valorize the sum of values they have appropriated by buying the labor-power of others; on the other hand, free workers, the sellers of ‘their’ own labor-power, and therefore the sellers of labor."
Rather than human nature, the development of capitalism rests on an artificial construction of social relations. In order to produce this new relation of production, Marx argues that capitalism must enact the “extinction of a whole series of older formations of social production” (qtd. in Read 24). So capitalism begins in violence rather than free association. Further, in the Grundrisse Marx says that “The propertyless are more inclined to become vagabonds and robbers and beggars than workers.” For this reason dispossession must be followed by penalization; a whole set of coercive measures must continually be exerted so that the population will form a pliable working class. While Marx sometimes presents primitive accumulation as relegated to the distant past, he also links it to ongoing processes of colonization. For this reason, some contemporary Marxists argue that primitive accumulation is an ongoing feature of capitalist modernity; as Jason Read defines it, “the manner in which a mode of production is constitutive and constituted by desires, forms of living, and intentions: subjectivity” (26). In this sense, where primitive accumulation describes all of the processes of disciplining human potential and action for the most efficient exploitation by capital, it begins to communicate with the theory of biopolitics developed by Foucault.
Silvia Federici has developed a feminist approach to primitive accumulation that draws on Foucault’s descriptions as well as criticizing them. According to Federici, primitive accumulation does not create the proletariat as a homogeneous whole; rather, it also introduces various racialized and gendered hierarchies (63-64). These instrumentalized identities rests on procedures of disciplining the body; she says that “the human body and not the steam engine, and not even the clock, was the first machine developed by capitalism” (146). In her description, primitive accumulation includes “the mechanization of the proletarian body and its transformation, in the case of women, into a machine for the production of new workers” (12). Federici also argues that a fundamental violence remains an ongoing part of the process, according to which force, pain and death are necessary in order to eliminate non-productive elements of the populace. While Foucault argued that bloodshed decreased as a characteristic of modern power, Federici argues that he can only make this argument by ignoring the brutal violence meted out to women and racialized groups.
I would like to bring this contemporary understanding of primitive accumulation and its biopolitical corollaries to bear on the ongoing process of ethnic cleansing in Palestine. The Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, produced by the Second Congress of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in 1969, is a particularly helpful Marxist analysis of this situation. The primary author of this document, Ghassan Kanafani, was also a great novelist and playwright who, like Genet, was strongly influenced by Sartre. While I do not think that Genet was aware of Kanafani’s literary writings, he certainly read the political analyses developed by the PFLP.
Kanafani’s analyses are distinguished by their emphasis on the Palestinian predicament as essentially bound to capitalist expansion. For this reason, he avoids the ideological mystifications in which many other commentators indulge (for example, notions of religious war, simple pan-Arab nationalism, or abstract human rights). Kanafani does not use the language of primitive accumulation, but his analysis of imperialism in the region implies an awareness of this basic process. For example, Kanafani describes the Palestinian masses as “reduced to a state of misery and poverty which they experience daily and which deprives them of their human character and life value.” This reduction occurs not as the result of simple religious passions or culturalized racism but because it serves an economic purpose.
The determining factor of capitalist expansion explains the lack of unity among Arab peoples and within the Palestinian nation itself. It is worth quoting Kanafani’s description at length:
"It is true that large numbers of the Palestinian people were driven outside their country in 1948 and found themselves in almost identical conditions of homelessness. It is also true that the remainder of the Palestinian people who stayed on were at all times threatened with the same fate. However, during the last twenty years, the Palestinian people have settled down into certain well-marked class conditions so that it would be wrong to say that the entire Palestinian people are without a territory, or that they are entirely revolutionary. In the course of the last twenty years, certain well-defined class interests have arisen and have become the basis for defining positions. The bourgeoisie has come to have its own interests and is consequently concerned with stability and the continuation of its preferential class conditions."
For this reason, class-consciousness is a basic pragmatic necessity for any Palestinian national liberation. Kanafani complicates any simple antagonistic relationship between Palestinians and Israelis; rather, the Palestinian masses are first in conflict with their own bourgeoisie, who can profit from the occupation, as well as Arab capitalism at large, which collaborates with imperialism. Kanafani also argued the Palestinian question could not be considered outside the struggle of the Arab masses as a whole. This interest led to their attempts to overthrow the Hashemite monarchy during the period that Genet resided in refugee camps located in Jordan, which led to their bloody repression. Alongside this internationalism, the PFLP described means of overcoming the “weak and meager political, economic, social and military structure” that had hindered Palestinians in their attempts to resist occupation. To do this Kanafani advocated a means of guerrilla warfare. However, this military outlook coincided with a whole proposed transformation of the Palestinian people, which Genet witnessed and championed. As Kanafani puts it,
"The habits of underdevelopment represented by submission, dependence, individualism, tribalism, laziness, anarchy and impulsiveness will change through the struggle into recognition of the value of time, order, accuracy, objective thought, collective action, planning, comprehensive mobilization, the pursuit of learning and the acquisition of all its weapons, the value of man, the emancipation of woman – which constitute half of our society – from the servitude of outworn customs and traditions, the fundamental importance of the national bond in facing danger and the supremacy of this bond over clan, tribal and regional bonds."
In other words, Kanafani saw the goal as the creation of a new form of life that would be both unified and cosmopolitan, opposed to reactionary atavisms of the past. We should first draw attention to the way that this seems to mimic apparently Eurocentric or productivist conceptions of modernity—while the Arab past is characterized as lazy, irrational, and repressive, the future promises to be advanced, scientific, and liberated. Orientalizing Arab society and traditions, presenting them as fundamentally backwards, is often propagated by Israel as a means of delegitimizing Palestinian popular demands. However, in this manifesto Kanafani employs the control of time and discipline to the democratic needs of the people themselves—this type of biopolitics flows from the emancipation of a new national autonomy, rather than imposed from without by the expansion of capital.
We can also describe this biopolitics as linked to contemporary notions of the cosmopolitan, modern form of life, imagined to be implicitly or potentially queer, as opposed to its restrictive other. Contemporary capitalism not only disciplines the body but prescribes new freedoms of movement, association, and erotic possibility. Jasbir K. Puar has described an ideological construction of LGBT communities in the U.S. and Israel as serving a new norm of “homonationalism,” where a societal image of sexually liberated individuals is applied to better enforce patriotic commitments and denigrate enemy nations as in the grips of repressive superstition. This functions alongside instrumentalized feminism, according to which the United States and Israel are imagined to have liberated their female population, in contrast to an allegedly highly patriarchal and chauvinist Muslim other.
Genet’s description of the Palestinians in the camps, who formed the base of the fedayeen guerrilla movement, complicates these notions in a manner that complements Kanafani’s vision. In his essay of 1971, “The Palestinians,” Genet writes: “The Palestinian women, the ordinary women of the people, are beautiful; their beauty is a sovereign beauty. They are very independent in relation to the men. They know how to cook, sew, fire a rifle, read Mao. After the massacres at Amman, they are the ones who first came out of the ruins and out of the trauma.”
He opposes the women of the Palestinian masses to those of the Arab bourgeoisie who are only apparently liberated, with vain voluble voice and fingers heavy with rings. Consider for example the female presidents of this or that organization, in Amman or in Beirut, lingering in their sitting rooms over a deck of cards they no longer even have the strength to cut. But in the ruins, squatting or standing, the women of the people, prophetic or sibylline, say how things will be–or already are–with Amman, with Hussein and his palace, with the Hashemite family. The women of the people are terrible in the sense that they speak the truth.
Ghassan Kanafani, 1970
I think that Genet should be read together with Kanafani, because Kanafani provides the description of a strategic countermovement against the violent dispossession attendant to primitive accumulation, whereas Genet supplements with this with the poetic fullness and carnal realism that undergirds this strategic moment. Hadrien Laroche has pointed out that Genet’s notion of beauty in the 1968-1971 period becomes increasingly disciplined—from North American white hippies to Black Panthers to Palestinian guerrillas. Genet constantly emphasizes the “physical elegance” and “courtesy” of Palestinians; rather than a schematic political argument, he fleshes out the new practices of life that support the movement that Kanafani advocates (introduction to Prisoner of Love). This movement is fundamentally the resistance to social death. In his essay of 1982, “Four Hours in Shatila,” inspired by his witness to the immediate aftermath of the camp massacres in Lebanon, Genet speaks of “affection” for the “rotting corpses” of the soldiers who had been his friends (they had been driven into Lebanon from Jordan). Fundamentally this affection isn’t born of morbidity but rather of Genet’s appreciation for the will to live in the face of enormous and implacable opposition that confronts the Palestinian resistance. Genet submits:
"I believe it was Hannah Arendt who distinguished between revolutions that aspire to freedom and those that aspire to virtue--and therefore to work. Perhaps we ought to recognize that the end pursued--obscurely--by revolutions or liberations is the discovery or rediscovery of beauty, that is, something that is impalpable and unnamable except by this word. Or rather, no: by beauty we should understand a laughing insolence spurred by past misery, by the systems and men responsible for misery and shame, but a laughing insolence which realizes that, when shame has been left behind, the bursting forth of new life is easy." (Declared Enemy, 225)
Bibliography
Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2004.
Genet, Jean. The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews, Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004.
Genet, Jean. Prisoner of Love. New York: NYRB Classics, 2003.
Laroche, Hadrien. The Last Genet: A Writer in Revolt. Trans. David Homel. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010.
Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke UP, 2007.
Read, Jason. The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present. Chapter 1. “The Use and Disadvantage of Prehistory for Life.” Albany: SUNY Press, 2003.
Second Congress of the PFLP [Ghassan Kanafani, George Habash, et. al.] Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine. Trans. PFLP Information Department. 1969. <http://pflp.ps/english/strategy-for-the-liberation-of-palestine/>
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Kenyan writer and winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, was recently the keynote speaker for an international digital conference titled “Colonialism as shared history: Past, Present, Future.” Owuor ‘s keynote was titled “Derelict Shards: The Roamings of Colonial Phantoms” and addressed “shared” colonial trauma.
Notable in the keynote were her eschatological inquiries into Europe’s culture of death, framed by two contemporary events that showed immense disregard for human life and suffering. The first context informing her paper was the “grotesque, public lynching of the human being, Mr. George Floyd” whereas the second instance was a commentary from the June 2017 World Bank’s Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility, where the “would-be vampires” (the investor nations of the EU, the U.S. and Japan) were floating oversubscribed bonds that would capitalize from future “pandemic-caused mass deaths, primarily in Africa” in the “commodification of anticipated African suffering”.
Owuor claimed to have a “visceral disgust” for contemporary neocolonialism. She likened it to a “dirge” and an “introit for a requiem” and claimed that this was the moral decay of a “400-year-old cultural mindset” that lacked the foundational values of being human.
Aimé Césaire famously said that “no one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either; that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization – and therefore force – is already a sick civilization.” Here, he reminds us that the very idea of shared history has to begin with the “collection and collation of memory to come to terms with the violent past.” For Owuor, the macabre story of the pandemic bonds offered a “perfect condensation of the essential character of the European imperialism and colonization project.” Owuor argued that the shared aspect in the past, present, and future of colonialism is trauma which endures through “colonialism as continuity.” Rejecting the idea of a “shared history” Owuor likened colonialism to a psychopath’s violent overtaking of a happy family’s home, the decimation of its members, and the profiteering of the family’s suffering and material resources. Such violence, she argues, breaches the “violation of the covenant of human relationality and dignity.” While such violence cannot be easily reconciled, she suggests that excavating the memories is the starting point to begin the difficult work of confrontation, reflection, and reparations for 400 years of plunder and pillage.
Radical Books Collective responds to the need for an alternative, inclusive and non-commercial approach to books and reading. A community of readers from around the world will discuss books that are unapologetically political and that envision transformative futures. Corporatized, profit-oriented publishing structures makes it harder to find books and writers that don't fit the mainstream awards, praise, and review criteria. RBC will curate an alternative canon through a collective that includes publishers, bookstores, authors, booklovers and bookworms everywhere. Let's change how books are read, circulated, reviewed and talked about.
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September 24: Serpents Under My Veil by Asiya Zahoor
Friendly guided discussion about Serpents Under My Veil. Poet Asiya Zahoor will join us for the final half hour to chat with participants.
Click here to get a copy of your book in advance!
Published by Tethys Press
Discussion hosted by Amrita Ghosh.
September 24, Friday
12pm New York | 5pm London | 9:30pm Srinagar
About the bookIt is quite remarkable that in her very first volume, Serpents Under my Veil, Asiya Zahoor sounds like an accomplished poet with reams of poems behind her. From Medusa to Yusuf and Zulekha she cherrypicks what she wants from Greek or West Asian myth, and moulds it to her heart's desire. As helicopters fan civilizations on her head she flies with her verse, and most poems are stamped with her spontaneity. Her imagery is striking, for instance Zulekha holds the moon as a mirror, what a wonderful image. In her sombre moods she mirrors her darkness, Kashmir's darkness, but seldom into despair. Even as she traverses a militarized zone where they "lay barbed wire across my tongue," she wants to think of almond blossoms. Indian poetry in English is richer for her arrival.
About the author
Asiya Zahoor is a poet, linguist, filmmaker, and academic. She has studied Psycholinguistics at Oxford University and Caribbean diasporic literature at the University of Kashmir. She has written books, articles, and poems on issues like politics of place, diaspora, literature of exile, Muslim identity, and psychology of language learning. Her film, “The Stitch” has won awards and has been screened at prestigious festivals. She has curated a website to help document languages and literature of Kashmir. She currently teaches Literature at Baramulla College, Kashmir.
If police are the problem, what’s the solution? Tens of millions of people poured onto the streets for Black Lives Matter, bringing with them a wholly new idea of public safety, common security, and the delivery of justice, communicating that vision in the fiery vernacular of riot, rebellion, and protest. A World Without Police transcribes these new ideas—written in slogans and chants, over occupied bridges and hastily assembled barricades—into a compelling, must-read manifesto for police abolition. Compellingly argued and lyrically charged, A World Without Police offers concrete strategies for confronting and breaking police power, as a first step toward building community alternatives that make the police obsolete. Surveying the post-protest landscape in Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Oakland, as well as the people who have experimented with policing alternatives at a mass scale in Latin America, Maher details the institutions we can count on to deliver security without the disorganizing interventions of cops: neighborhood response networks, community-based restorative justice practices, democratically organized self-defense projects, and well-resourced social services. A World Without Police argues that abolition is not a distant dream or an unreachable horizon but an attainable reality. In communities around the world, we are beginning to glimpse a real, lasting justice in which we keep us safe.
About the author
Geo Maher has previously taught at Vassar College, San Quentin State Prison, and the Venezuelan School of Planning in Caracas. He is the author of five books, including We Created Chavez, Decolonizing Dialectics, Building the Commune, Spirals of Revolt, and World Without Police.
November 5: A Girl is a Body of Water by Jennifer Makumbi
Friendly guided discussion about A Girl is a Body of Water, organized with the help of a generous grant from UConn's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.Author Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi will join us for the final half hour to chat with partcipants.
Click here to get a copy of your book in advance!
Published by Tin House Books
Discussion hosted by Meg Arenberg.
November 5, Friday12pm New York | 5pm London | 7pm Kampala About the book
In her thirteenth year, Kirabo confronts a piercing question: who is my mother? Kirabo has been raised by women in the small Ugandan village of Nattetta—her grandmother, her best friend, and her many aunts—but the absence of her mother follows her like a shadow. Seeking answers from Nsuuta, the local witch, Kirabo learns about the woman who birthed her, who she discovers is alive but not ready to meet. Nsuuta also helps Kirabo understand the emergence of a mysterious second self, a headstrong and confusing force inside her—this, says Nsuuta, is a streak of the “first woman”: an independent, original state that has been all but lost to women. Kirabo’s journey to reconcile these feelings, alongside her desire to reconnect with her mother and to honor her family’s expectations, is rich in the folklore of Uganda and an arresting exploration of what it means to be a modern girl in a world that seems determined to silence women. Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s A Girl is a Body of Water is an unforgettable, sweeping testament to the true and lasting connections between history, tradition, family, friends, and the promise of a different future.
About the author
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize and her first novel, Kintu, won the Kwani? Manuscript Project Prize in 2013 and was longlisted for the Etisalat Prize in 2014. Her story "Let's Tell This Story Properly" was the global winner of the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Jennifer lives in Manchester, UK with her husband and son.
Oct 23: Radical Foundations! Annihilation of Caste by B.R Ambedkar
A masterclass on Annihilation of Caste by B.R. Ambedkar, prolific thinker and writer, a leader of Dalits and a tireless activist for the abolition of caste in India.
Click here to get a copy of your book!Get a 50% discount until the end of September
Published by Verso Books.
October 23rd, Saturday1pm New York | 7pm Johannesburg | 6pm LondonAbout the bookAnnihilation of Caste was originally written in 1936 as a speech which Ambedkar was subsequently forbidden from delivering. He went on to self-publish this text which became a powerful and gut-wrenching indictment of India's caste system rooted in the violence of Hindu scriptures. It has endured as one of the singularly most important books today and comparable in scope and influence to Marx and Engel's The Communist Manifesto or Dubois' The Souls of Black Folk.
Dr. Suraj Yengde will convene this seminar. We expect attendees to have bought and read the book, and be willing to engage in the online discussion. We will meet for 3 hours with breaks in between.
About the instructorDr. Suraj Yengde is a leading scholar and public intellectual. He is the author of the bestseller Caste Matters and co-editor of award winning anthology The Radical in Ambedkar. Caste Matters was recently featured in the prestigious "Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade" list by The Hindu. Yengde holds a research associate position with the department of African and African American Studies, a non-resident fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, and is part of the founding team of Initiative for Institutional Anti-Racism and Accountability (IARA) at Harvard University.
Nov 20: Radical Foundations! Woman at Point Zero by Nawal el Saadawi
This masterclass on Egyptian writer and feminism Nawal el Saadawi's groundbreaking book Woman at Point Zero is organized in collaboration with the Adabiyat Book Club.
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Published by Zed Books/Bloomsbury.
November 20th, Saturday1pm New York | 8pm Cairo | 6pm LondonAbout the novel
Originally published in Arabic in 1975, el Saadawi's book was plagued with controversy from the very beginning. The writer's expressly feminist activism have consistently undergirded her and even landed her in black lists and even in jail. She founded the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association (AWSA). Woman at Point Zero was rejected by Egyptian publishers and eventually published in Lebanon. The novel is criticized for its lack of literary merit and often accused of promoting Western bias against Arab society and Islam. In spite of many conflicting interpretations or perhaps due to them, Woman at Point Zero remains an extraordinary, foundational and influential text of women's literature, Arabic literature, African literature and the canon of world literature.
Professor Samah Selim will convene this seminar. We expect attendees to have bought and read the book, and be willing to engage in the online discussion. We will meet for 3 hours with breaks in between.
About the instructorSamah Selim is an Egyptian scholar and translator of Arabic literature. She studied English literature at Barnard College, and obtained her PhD from Columbia University in 1997. Her most recent book, Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nadha in Egypt (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) looks at the cultural and literary politics surrounding the translation of the novel into Arabic at the beginning of the twentieth century. She is currently working on a literary biography of the Lebanese novelist and journalist Niqula al-Haddad. She is the recipient of the Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation (2009), the University of Arkansas Translation of Arabic Literature Award (2012) and the National Endowment for the Arts Translation Grant (2018). She is currently working on an English translation of Jordanian author Ghalib Halasa’s 1987 novel Sultana.
About AdabiyatAdabiyat is a virtual book club dedicated to exploring the Arab world’s history, politics, and culture through literature. Each month, the group reads a translated fiction book from the region, with an emphasis on diversifying countries and topics. Follow them on Twitter and Instagram
Esther Armah is Executive Director of The Armah Institute of Emotional Justice, a global institute across Ghana, the US and the UK, engaging storytelling as a strategy for structural change and implementing the visionary change agent framework, Emotional Justice.
Jehan Bseiso is a poet, writer and humanitarian aid worker. She is the co-editor of Making Mirrors: Righting/Writing by and for Refugees and works on the production team of the Palestine Festival of Literature.
Jill Schoolman is the founder of Archipelago Books, a not-for-profit press devoted to publishing translations of classic and contemporary world literature since 2003.
M Lynx Qualey is a writer, translator and the founding editor-in-chief of the ArabLit which is a translator-centered collective that produces the ArabLit Quarterly, ALQ Books, a website, and a limited book series focused on Arabic literatures.
Sean Jacobs is the founder and editor of Africa is a Country, a site of criticism, analysis and new writing. He is Associate Professor of International Affairs at The New School, New York.
Decolonize That 5: If It Ain't Broke, Dismantle It
The fifth and fine event of the Season 1 of our series, Decolonize That: 5 Interventions was streamed live on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube on October 30, 2020
What precisely can we do to build a path toward decolonial freedom? A discussion about engaging research, aesthetics, organizing, and action in collaboration to dismantle structural injustices in cultural institutions and develop resistant and decolonial practices.
Featuring the MTL Collective’s Nitasha Dhillon & Amin Husain
The MTL Collective is a collaborative initiative that joins research, aesthetics, organizing, and action in its practice. They are the facilitators of the Decolonize This Place movement. It is based in New York City and organizes around Indigenous rights, black liberation, Palestinian nationalism, de-gentrification, dismantling patriarchy and migrant wage-laborers. Their actions often take place at museums and cultural institutions and engage a decolonial analytic and practice.
The fourth event of our series Decolonize That: 5 Interventions was streamed live on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube on October 23rd, 2020.
Featuring Sophia Azeb and Anthony C. Alessandrini.
Transforming the university requires demanding an end to racial injustice, white supremacy, and policing practices on every campus. Two activist scholars in English departments start by decolonizing diversity and inclusion initiatives that extract disproportionate labor from faculty of color.
Anthony Alessandrini is a professor of English at Kingsborough Community College-CUNY and is on the faculty of the MA Program in Middle Eastern Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he is also a member of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change. He is the author of Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics: Finding Something Different; the editor of Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives; and the co-editor of “Resistance Everywhere”: The Gezi Protests and Dissident Visions of Turkey. He is a Co-Editor of Jadaliyya E-Zine and a contributor to Status Audio Journal.
Sophia Azeb is Assistant Professor of Black Studies in the Department of English (University of Chicago). She has a book in progress titled Another Country: Constellations of Blackness in Afro-Arab Cultural Expression. She is currently engaged in the campaign to disband the UCPD (University of Chicago Police Department) as part of the #MoreThanDiversity collective demands in solidarity with students and organizer
Decolonize That 3: Fear, Fakery & Loathing in Journalism Today
The third event of our series, Decolonize That: 5 Interventions was streamed live on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube on October 16, 2020.
Can journalism shed its long historical links with colonialism? Engaging resistant reportage practices emerging out of Kashmir, two writers dissect journalism’s tendency to be the handmaiden of violent state propoganda and corporate structures.
Featuring Suchitra Vijayan and Parvaiz Bukhari
Suchitra Vijayan is a barrister-at- Law, author, and researcher. As an attorney, she previously worked for the United Nations war crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. She co-founded and was the Legal Director of Resettlement Legal Aid Project, Cairo that gives legal aid for Iraqi refugees. She is the founder and executive director of The Polis Project. Her book Midnight’s Border: A People’s History of Modern India is forthcoming in 2021 from Melville House.
Parvaiz Bukhari has been a journalist based in Srinagar, the main city of Indian-controlled Kashmir, since 2004. Earlier, he reported on the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq in the aftermath of 9/11, and on insurgency in southern Thailand. He has written for a range of publications including The Nation, Asia Times, Time magazine, Al-Jazeera, Mail Today, Tehelka, and The Times of India.
Decolonize That 2: A/Symptomatic: Queer/Trans Pandemic Worldmaking
The second event of our series Decolonize That: 5 Interventions was streamed live on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.
Featuring Debanuj Dasgupta and Godfried Asante.
Covid-19 has disproportionately affected Black, LatinX, and immigrant communities in the U.S, and countries such as India, Brazil, South Africa have been deemed as public health disasters. Decolonizing Covid-19 has become urgent because global media ascribe compulsory heterosexuality to the pandemic actively erasing the complexities of queer and transgender lives in the Global South.
Decolonize That 1: In the Beginning, There was Black Feminism
The first event of our series Decolonize That: 5 Interventions was streamed live on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube
Featuring Fania Noël & Yolande Bouka
What would decolonization look like if it were grounded in Black feminism? Two activist scholars trained in African and Caribbean feminisms dissect and decenter masculinist theories of decolonization.
Yolande Bouka is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Studies at Queen’s University in Toronto. She works on gender, African politics and security, political violence, and field research ethics in conflict-affected societies. She is currently researching multi-sited historical and political analysis of female combatants in Southern Africa. And also has a book in progressed titled “In the Shadow of Prison: Power, Identity, and Transitional Justice in Post-Genocide Rwanda” Yolande was a Fulbright scholar in Namibia. She is a multi-local intellectual of Togolese heritage and equally Francophone and Anglophone. She has been vocal about decolonizing fields like International relations and also about insisting on feminist approaches in political science more widely.
Fania Noël is a Haitian-born, French Afrofeminist organizer, thinker, and writer. She is an experienced organizer in grassroots movements against racism, specifically anti-Blackness and Black feminism in France. In addition to being part of the MWASI – Collectif Afroféministe, she is the co-creator of the Decolonial Summer Camp, a five-day anti-racism training course in France. In 2014, she founded Revue AssiégéEs (Besieged), a political publishing project led by women, queer and trans people of color, she am the actual publication director. In 2019 her book “Afro-Communautaire: Appartenir à nous-mêmes (Afro-Community: To Belong to Ourselves) was published by Syllepse Edition( a radical French publishing house). The impetus of this small manifesto is an afro-revolutionary and anti-imperialist utopia for the political organization of Black people in France against racial politics and neoliberalism.
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