Working from the distinction between struggles for voice, representation, presence, and transformation grounded in anti-racist, anti-imperialist, antiWorking from the distinction between struggles for voice, representation, presence, and transformation grounded in anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist goals and expectations, and the corporate response that gave us institutional multiculturalism and diversity, Alessandrini builds a powerful argument for disordering, especially of those institutions. The second distinction he works with is slipped in briefly, almost as an aside, but is crucial – and that is the distinction between multicultural and multiculturalism reminding us of the vital difference between the simple noun and ideology.
There is a third, vital, aspect of this discussion – his refusal to define multiculturalism. This, at first, especially for those of us in a particular academic space (the be-clear-about-your-terms posse), but Alessandrini is less concerned the many ways we have wrangled the term than what it does. That is to say, he grounds the analysis very much in the activist approach of impacts rather than getting stuck in the definitional desert. That’s not to say there is not definitional critique, but it is more in a focus on institutional and managerial uses of multicultural(ism) and diversity in ways that negate and undermine the disruptive potential of those transformative struggles.
It was the fourth conceptual strand that I found most timely, where he weaves austerity into these three other tendencies. Here Alessandrini picks up not on the conventional views of austerity as only financial but echoes, for instance, arguments made by Glen Coulthard about the limitations and dangers of recognition which is woven into of a case about the ‘end of the world’. The argument is not so much that we cannot imagine the end of the world but that it is upon us and we can and should be imagining new futures and working to make them happen – there are hints of the Occupy/anarchist prefiguration idea here – while remembering that decolonization is not a cultural event.
The discussion and the associated advocacy is heavily oriented to the US university and college system (Alessandrini’s world of work) but he is careful to contextualise the approach both in some key thinkers grappling with these kinds of issues – notably Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, & Sara Ahmed so points to and draws in wider issues such as abolition and the exploitation of worker of colour in corporate approaches. Even so, the US-centric approach limits the applicability and seems at time paradoxical given the decolonial framing and approach: I understand it, speak to your audience, but be clearer about who your audience might be.
He also make sure to show how the kinds of managerial approaches we currently live with are directly linked to the struggles of the 1960s. Most notably he draws on Nixon’s commission inquiring into student protests sparked by the killing of students by the National Guard during an anti-war protest at Kent State in Ohio (which is widely known as an iconic moment) and the nearly contemporaneous killings by police of Black protestors at Jackson State in Mississippi (which is largely forgotten). He uses the work of this commission of inquiry and work done by Lewis Powell, who became a Supreme Court judge, to show how the current discourse that positions universities as defenders and sites of multicultural diversity and protestors as opposed to that diversity has deep historical roots. Equally importantly he shows how these events of the later 1960s are also the basis of not only the hyper-militarised campus police that we see in the USA, but of campus police at all.
It is in these aspects of the case and the disciplining role of managerial multiculturalism and diversity that links the case most forcefully to abolitionism. But that’s not to say that this is all bleak analysis. Alessandrini is also careful to ensure that he draws out and on current struggles that produce the sort of disordering he explores – drawing compellingly on Franz Fanon’s work here – making clear that disorder has multiple uses. In current disciplinary discourses, linked back to Nixon’s commission and intensified in the wake of the attacks in the US in September 2001, ‘disorder’ discursively and in policing links protest to terrorism, and is usually seen as verging on chaos and therefor bad thing. The approach Fanon invokes sees disorder as necessary to build the new, where revolutionary or liberatory transformation is impossible without disordering the current ways.
So, for Alessandrini, decolonising multiculturalism means wrenching it away from it managerialist manifestation in favour of anti-imperialist, anti-colonial form linked to the visions that scholar activists such Gilmour, Ahmed and Davis, as well as the transformational approaches of Fanon and others. Even with its US-focus it’s an exhilarating read for those of us based and working elsewhere. Packed full of insight, inspiration, and sharp insight. ...more
It’s not often I find myself captivated, almost cover to cover, in a book, but this did precisely that. Simpson builds on an idea developed (as in namIt’s not often I find myself captivated, almost cover to cover, in a book, but this did precisely that. Simpson builds on an idea developed (as in named) in Glen Sean Coulthard’s essential Red Skin, White Masks to unpack and elaborate the notion of ‘grounded normativity’. The power of the case is that she does not do this as an abstract, or even generically grounded, piece of political theorising, but as Nishnaabeg practice; what’s more, it is not a generic Nishnaabeg practice, but specific to Mischi Saagiig Nishnaabeg, that part of the Nishnaabeg nation whose lands lie along the northern edge of what we call Lake Ontario. That is to say the power, and therefore the transferability of this idea lies in its specificity – and that makes it all the more exciting.
She builds the case in three stages. In the first she sets up the idea of Radical Resurgence, outlining it as an elaboration of Coulthard’s argument that an Indigenous politics based in a demand for recognition and acknowledgement is destined to fail to break the bounds of coloniality. Instead, Simpson proposes, the politics begin in sovereignty, not of Nishnaabeg as a nation state, but as a way of being that she locates in kwe which she makes clear cannot simply be understood as ‘woman’ because it embodies a range of gendered ways that binary classification systems (including those of ‘colonial rationality’ – my term) cannot accommodate. It’s here that she plays out the core tactic, the practice of refusal, of ‘retreat’, of fugitivity (she uses refusal throughout). This Nishanaabeg approach is located also into two other characteristics – internationalism, exemplified by several foundational narratives, including of Nanabush’s explorations of the world, and of the Nishnaabeg treaty with the Deer Nation prompted by the deer’s sense that they were not respected by overhunting, and in anticapitalism, inherent in a non-accumulative, collectivist way of life.
She then shifts focus to the characteristics of this national struggle, and the need to ensure that women, children, and 2SQ (2-Spirit-Queer) people are at its core. This section is vital and exciting, and an important assertion of one of the all-too-often overlooked aspects of histories of colonialism. That is to say, she builds the link between assertions of a heteropatriarchal gender order and the imposition of a colonial state appropriating Indigenous land, because this order breaks the bonds of equality and the character of the intimate relationships that sustained the power of Indigenous nations. This aspect of the programme makes it both intimate – it becomes about body sovereignty, essential if we are to talk liberation – and radical, because it deals with the essential way of being, embodiment. Throughout this aspect of the case Simpson also repeatedly stresses the significance of a gendered continuum rather than a binary as vital to the overcoming of the colonial heteropatriarchal order.
It is at this point that she returns to the land, to this grounded normativity, to identify this land as teacher and as pedagogy, so that being grounded means knowing how to live, to maintain balance, with the land and all it contains – and not from or off it in a way that accumulates and extracts. This is not a quest for a return to the circumstances of old, of some fantasy of a pre-colonial utopia, but for a return to a way of old that persists, more often than not despite the colonial state. Interestingly it is here that Simpson returns to a notion of recognition as an aspect of allyship – so it is not a politics of recognition by the state, but of alliance, of comradeship with other Indigenous peoples and peoples of colour in what she calls constellations of resistance.
Simpson’s vison of what a post- or more properly de-colonial world looks like is inspiring and invigorating, not because she has planned or mapped a future but because she has outlined the character of the relationships we should work in and with to get to that no-longer-colonial condition. What is even more impressive is the multi-vocality of the book. There is very little if anything about my outlook on the world that aligns with the Nishnaabeg way Simpson draws on – my ways of seeing and being are too firmly based in modernity and European modes of rationality, even as I find approaches such as relationality and reciprocity extremely appealing, my fundamentally Euro-modern ways of making sense of the world are firmly wired in.
That said, I can recognise the elements of case she makes that are likely to resonate and articulate to the kinds of Indigenous ways of knowing she is working in and with, so I am aware that readers more grounded similar systems of thought will see and engage things I miss, or do not fully grasp. Even so, I can read and recognise elements of my (broadly defined here) ontological outlook – of ontology and epistemology, of political practice, theory, and praxis. There is no doubt that this is a case based firmly in Nishnaabeg ways, but it actively engages a very much wider readership: Simpson’s craft as a writer is impressive as she builds an approach that emphasises approaches located in diversities of outlook and practice and rejects the fetishization of already existing theory and prescriptive models.
As a form of politics this is intellectually invigorating; as a mode of analysis and writing it is inspiring and exciting. Simpson builds on story and place, on a Mischi Saagiig Nishnaabeg grounded normativity to suggest a way of struggle based in a refusal to be restricted by the rules and expectations of coloniality. I’ll be coming back to this, time and again....more
Each time I read Arundhati Roy I am reminded of the power of richly crafted writing, and the potential of the essay as a form to develop insight and cEach time I read Arundhati Roy I am reminded of the power of richly crafted writing, and the potential of the essay as a form to develop insight and critique. I’m also reminded of the sharpness and evocativeness of her turns of phrase; I recall hearing her talk at a public event one day and call neoliberal globalisation as “imperialism by email” – it’s a great image.
I started this just after it came out in 2020, but after the first essay that explores aspects of the way her recent novel engages contemporary Indian politics – the reactionary BJP government, the annexation of Kashmir and more – it disappeared under a pile of books until I picked it up again last week. In doing so I was taken through a marvellous series of pieces that unpack contemporary India.
Roy elegantly and powerfully unpacks the fascism at the core of the BJP, the crisis that is the occupation of Kashmir and with it the violation of the core agreements forming the Indian state (and its constitution), and the actions of that state as led by the BJP where nationality is becoming a weapon that has become a potent of the end of India as a multi-national, democratic state. Alongside these essays she returns to writing, to the characters in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (that recent novel) their dialogue with this condition, and to the way they allow her to explore ideas and possibilities, outcomes and hopes for the current condition.
Despite the bleak content the collection ends on a message of hope, paradoxically, given that it focuses on responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, where that state of disruption and crisis is seen as either a time to reinforce the prejudices and conditions of oppression and division, or as a potential for something new. This essay I’d read before – it did the rounds of one of my circles of lefties in the midst of the pandemic; several years later the hope remains powerful, even as lack of change bears down.
Yet even with that, it is hard not to see this as an overwhelmingly grim view of the rising power of reactionary nationalism, and view from inside India that paints a picture we seldom see in the orthodox media and discussions of the place and its diaspora.
What’s more, just as I (finally) finished this an updated edition arrived with half a dozen more essays…. More to come I guess. ...more
The thing about borders is that they seem so rational and logical – an imaginary line on the world that demarcates one political space (a state, more The thing about borders is that they seem so rational and logical – an imaginary line on the world that demarcates one political space (a state, more recently a nation-state) from another. One of the major issues, for me, with borders is that despite their artificiality they acquire a sense of being absolute and inviolable, a condition made worse by the added layer of cultural demarcation gives them extra significance and political weightiness. There are, of course, other borders that matter, but for Harsha Walia, in this fabulous book, it is national borders that matter.
Her case is compelling, and grounded in struggles over refugee rights where she works from the well-established view that the mobility of capital is at odds with the immobility of labour – that is capital, including production and consumption, moves easily across borders, people do not, resulting in a myth of Western benevolence. The ‘border imperialism’ approach however undermines that myth through an approach that rests on four overlapping factors: 1) “the mass displacement of impoverished and colonized communities resulting from asymmetrical relations of global power, and the simultaneous securitization of the border against those migrants whom capitalism and empire have displaced; 2) “the criminalization of migration with severe punishment and discipline of those deemed ‘illegal’ or ‘alien’; 3) “the entrenchment of a racialized hierarchy of citizenship by arbitrating who legitimately constitutes the nation-state; 4) “the state-mediated exploitation of migrant labour, akin to conditions of slavery and servitude by capitalist interests.” (p5) The effect of the focus on these factors then is less an emphasis on the border itself and more an exploration of the systems that determine who is ‘allowed in’, who becomes a member of the state. Walia is clear, that means that relations of colonialism are essential to understanding border imperialism, including settler colonialism, in that those systems determining nation membership are inseparable from those shaping the condition of Indigenous peoples.
Walia focuses on the coalition of groups across Canada that make up the ‘No One Is Illegal’ network, each with its own flavour, drawing on her engagements with two of the groups and calling on voices from across the network to craft a movement-based analysis and theory. She builds the case in four stages. The first is an exploration, drawing on scholarly and movement-based analyses, of what border imperialism means. She then moves on to look at the work and activities of NOII, groups and individuals they work with, and the strategic and tactical approaches is adopts. In the third section, she builds an outline of the movement theory that shapes NOII – clarity about strategy and tactics, making sure to maintain anti-oppression work, working with particular non-hierarchical and inclusive structures and forms of leadership, and finally a need to stretch the movement. The final analytical phase is a movement based discussion with a dozen or so other NOII activists from across Canada, exploring what those movement shaping approaches mean in practice: this is a powerful surrendering of authorial voice.
The framing of border imperialism in colonial relations means that Walia then draws these analytical stands together to highlight what it means to decolonize. Her focus is on structural relations and she explores in particular both wider social relations and social movements. These are, necessarily, quite broad brush discussions in that they draw together the rest of the book, which in being bottom-up, specific movement-centric is packed full of cases and instances of action and activity, giving many instances where we can see the approach she advocates played out and discussed. Walia is open and up front about the tensions of this kind of movement work, the uncomfortable alliances that often develop, and in these cases in particular the need for a clear sense of strategy and tactics.
The book is woven through the voices of the migrant and colonised peoples – Walia herself as a migrant to Canada draws on her own experience and the insights gained, but the poems, short stories, reflections, and reportage that frame the opening chapters in particular given further life to the analysis and exploration of the approaches adopted in the NOII network.
All in all this builds up to be a powerful exploration of nations and borders, as well as a social movement struggling for migrant rights. As such it should resonate with many audiences, from the on-the-ground activist to the scholarly analysts. It is a rich and vital piece and despite being 10 years old at my time of reading it remains a vibrant interjection into and increasingly fraught area of social justice. Very highly recommended. ...more
Written in late 2020 and early 2021, this eclectic set of essays on being Black British reflects its time while being able to make many wider and moreWritten in late 2020 and early 2021, this eclectic set of essays on being Black British reflects its time while being able to make many wider and more general claims. They’re part of a recent move in Black British writing that recognises the distinctiveness of Black British experience and attempts to slough off some of the risks of universalizing a Black, post-enslavement tradition that draws exclusively on the USA. Despite the timing and the circumstances, the challenges and the long path ahead several of the essays are optimistic in tone, though often not content, but more are deeply personal, richly evocative of Black British experience as lived experience.
The poet June Jordan often spoke of ‘Black Studies’ as ‘Life Studies’, and so the personal in these essays has great power; it is almost always used to make points that resonate well beyond the individual, while still remaining personal. Doreen Lawrence writes of the ways her murdered son Stephen is part of her everyday, 30 years after his racist killing, yet also powerfully makes the point one of the dangers of the dominant image of the ‘strong Black woman/mother’ is the way she is expected to cope and be a rock for others, with all the mental health dangers that carries with it. This point shows the powerful ways these essays intersect, in that I can’t think of Lawrence’s point here without taking in the harrowing evidence Marverine Cole draws out in her essay on Black mental health.
Many of the essays accentuate the significance of representation – the MP Dawn Butler and former police inspector Leroy Logan most obviously, with Butler seeming to recognise the limits of representation by keeping focus on voices at the table in the legislative process, rather than wider transformational questions. Others stress the limits of representation. Barrister Alexandra Wilson, once mistaken as a defendant – three times in the same day in the same courthouse – stresses that representation is important, but only if it comes with wider active and knowledgeable engagement with Black worlds. Anne-Marie Imafidon, however, stresses while presence matters it’s not enough to bring about effect change in the tech industries, although her critique is also woven through with criticism of what might be called the ‘celebrity representative’ – the demand for the ‘famous’ talking head.
Others have a much more structural sense; Kehinde Andrews on struggles for education rather than schooling, David Adjaye on architecture and the significance of space, Derek Bardowell on charities, and Charlie Brinkhurst Cuff on journalism all put their pieces firmly into social-structural contexts, while also unpacking the form of and experience in their chosen areas. Aside for Adjaye’s (I confess to being a bit of a spatial studies geek), two essays really resonated with me; Henry’s interview with David Olosuga on doing history (as close to a home discipline as I have) and Michelle Moore’s on athletes (much of my work focuses on histories and cultures of sport). Here were two leading vices in their fields, deeply embedded in them, sharply critical of those fields, but also highlighting as part of their personal presence the importance of ‘mixed race’ families – both have white mothers, and that gave me cause to pause and wonder on the banality of multiple experiences of Othering in systems of oppression, what we might think of the empathy of intersectionality.
What’s more, I’m impressed that when I finally get to the collection, three years after the events that gave it its impetus, it still resonates, still has power, and still reminds us of the multiple ways Black Lives Matter....more
It is now thirty years since the international anti-apartheid movement, perhaps the most significant and sustained mass-based international solidarityIt is now thirty years since the international anti-apartheid movement, perhaps the most significant and sustained mass-based international solidarity movement of the 20th century, wound itself down in the wake of collapse of the legal and state system that was apartheid South Africa. It is also a movement that has attracted a lot of analysis, both when it was at its peak and subsequently; part of the subsequent analysis seems to be attempts by tendencies in the movement to stamp their historical authority on it, especially as it is seen as successful, and as the post-apartheid South African state has been dominated by one party that is also keen to assert the Truthfulness of its version of the international solidarity movement. Alongside these analyses there is a body of work looking at national level solidarity struggles, and often sector specific explorations (with a disturbing tendency to paint all protagonists as anti-apartheid). Often lost in all of this is the in the ground experience of solidarity movement activism – and that’s one of the important things this important exploration of campaign by one group in London during the 1980s. It is in its specificity that its power lies.
The non-stop picket against apartheid ran for nearly four years, 24 hours a day, every day, as a key action of the City of London Anti-Apartheid Group, an activism oriented, non-sectarian group widely seen as at odds with the much more constrained, conciliatory, ANC-aligned Anti-Apartheid Movement. At the group’s heart was a network of exiled South African activists, who brought to campaigning the experiences working in an oppressive state regime, with the political insight and tactics those forms of activism encouraged, alongside a bloc of Trotskyist activists. Brown and Yaffe were both participants in the picket – Brown for a period was the City Group’s secretary, and Yaffe’s parents were also key activists. This means that they bring insider expertise and insight – often a vital force in good social movement analyses, and one where we often bring a much more critical eye to events that non-participant analysts might. Yaffe’s age at the time means that she also brings a child’s eye view to action that relied heavily on youth participation. I get the sense also that one of the key things about the analysis is that neither needed to prove their credentials to picket participants, and their interviewees come from a wide range of individuals around the event, including a significant number of former police officers.
The analysis is built around three primary strands – the tactics and organisation of the protest, including at times the defence of the right to protest. This strand pays close attention to the mundane aspects of organisation, such as internal dynamics of and roles within the events, the challenge of keeping the picket staffed, and more. The second is the question of youth activism, making the point that for many of the participants this was not only their first real activist experience but for many their first substantive political engagements, at a time in Thatcher’s England where young people were demonised, unemployment rates and youth poverty extremely high, and young people often at the heart of moral panics. The third strand is spatial (Brown is a geographer, Yaffe a historian), which might be expected in the case of an international solidarity campaign outside the target state’s diplomatic home, but there is closer attention paid to the spatiality of London, of being on a particular piece of footpath on a specific corner of Trafalgar Square, and all that comes with that small corner of the city.
The evidence base is impressive – nearly 100 interviews (in person or via other means), access to the City Group’s archives, still not otherwise publicly available, and other archived material in the UK and South Africa. There is a solid background to the central exiled activists including their South African experience, their problematic relations with the British Left (in large part, a consequence of the sectarianism of the movement in South Africa in the 1960s), and the ways those experiences fed into the formation of the City Group. Brown and Yaffe explore frankly the role of the organised Left (what the British insist on called the Hard Left) in the Group, as well as the strains between the City Group and AAM, especially around the City Groups insistence on support for all the liberation movements.
Throughout there is a strong emphasis on individual experience – I especially welcomed the chapter on ending the picket and sensation of loss that accompanied the movement’s abrupt ending. More so, there are the ways Brown and Yaffe wove into the discussion ways in which picket participants assessed the significance of this activism in their subsequent lives, for both those who remained active in social and political movements, and those whose lives took different paths.
It’s a decidedly academic book, theoretically rich, evidentially powerful, and very much for a specialist audience, and in those terms a vital contribution to the analytical literature expiring the anti-apartheid movement specifically and social movements more generally. This value is enhanced by its geographical aspects and attention to space and spatiality as well as historical and organisation factors. This mean it won’t be for everyone, but for those of us in its target audience, it’s an essential contribution. ...more
Liberal states and liberal practice are both extremely good at incorporating and defanging radical critique, reducing anti-racist and feminist strugglLiberal states and liberal practice are both extremely good at incorporating and defanging radical critique, reducing anti-racist and feminist struggles to questions of representation and leaning in. Our workplaces are woven through with similar demands, training in ‘unconscious bias’, and overburdening especially People of Colour with representational and advocacy work while the rest of us carry on despite the eloquent strategy documents our committees produce (Sara Ahmed is extremely good on these problems). Arun Kundnani is having none of it!
Kundnani opens his powerful critique of contemporary anti-racist politics with a two-stranded criticism. The first is of liberal anti-racism as focused in building inclusion in a tolerant but still oppressive class system, while the second is focused on the Left view that racism is a tool deployed by the class elite to divide working class struggle. The first is a criticism that class oppression is still oppressive, while the second is based in the recognition that this Left view fails to recognise racial capitalism and imperialism as fundamental to the global capitalist order.
Throughout the first half of the book there is a powerful, internationalist, perspective n anti-racism as anti-imperialist practice, and a clear sense that racial capitalism is fundamentally grounded in imperialism. Yet I couldn’t help the feeling as the argument progressed that his analysis become increasingly focused on neo-liberal capitalism as the focus of opposition, rather than capitalism per se. Thankfully, by the time he got to the conclusion to weave together these threads it was clear that the neo-liberal emphasis is a question of currency and the dominant form capitalism takes. In the last few pages it all comes together powerfully, with, on p243, the observation that “Neo-liberal ideology has been wracked by a tension between its aspiration to establish a universal market system and its well-founded fear that such a system would not be readily accepted”. In his view, then, the neo-liberal model acts against racist abuse and discrimination because it is antithetical to its idealised market, but at the same time he notes (on p246) that “recent electoral successes of racist politicians and parties are not the result of a backlash against antiracist progress; they are winning by making explicit in their political rhetoric what is already implicit in the violently racist practices of nominally liberal states”. In this way he weaves the imperialist character of capitalism into the bordering regimes and carceral states of contemporary practice.
It’s a sweeping a powerful analysis and call to action, not to immerse anti-racist struggles in wider class-based politics, but to recognise alliances, politically shared interests, and the multiple paths to the shared end. He does so with a three part sweep through key strands of 20th century thinking, action and practice. The first is the emergence on liberal anti-racist ideals in (it might seem paradoxically) Germany in the 1920s and 1930s and in the USA in work by anthropologists such as Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict. The second is the long Marxist engagement with imperialism from the mid-1910s, and the fraught debates and decisions of the Comintern in the 1920s around the place of anti-colonial, national liberation struggles in the development of socialism, with its communist goal. The third is the place of ideas of race in neo-liberal capitalism, and bordering and other carceral regimes as disciplining working class practice and maintaining oppressive regimes that become so pervasive that there is no need to explicitly enforce them.
Kundnani builds these arguments based on an impressive array of literature and engagements – drawing on key anti-colonial thinkers – MN Roy, Fanon, Nkrumah, Claudia Jones, Stuart Hall, A Sivananandan – as well as less well known or recognised analysts such as Anton De Kom, Johnnie Tillmon, and H Rap Brown. Amid this he also recovers Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King from the liberal civil rights discourse to the much stronger anti-colonial and class conscious that is obvious in their work. It’s an intriguing collection of thinkers and activists, or rather thinker-activists, that shore up his case delineating anti-racism and anti-capitalism from liberal practices of inclusivity, as well as asserting the fundamental centrality of racial capitalism to contemporary struggles, and the ways that the neo-liberal version of capitalism upholds that fundamental centrality of race.
It’s a compelling analysis, challenging us to view many of the takens-for-granted and dominant approaches in new ways – or at least more sceptically, and pushing us a more fundamental way of approaching anti-racist politics and practice. That means it’s not an easy read – it is clearly argued, well written, engaging, and accessible, but the argument is likely to be a profound challenge to many. That makes it essential reading. ...more
Yasmin El-Rifae’s Radius is in equal parts inspiring and horrifying, un-put-down-able and in places close to impossible to keep reading, and for that Yasmin El-Rifae’s Radius is in equal parts inspiring and horrifying, un-put-down-able and in places close to impossible to keep reading, and for that it is essential. It’s an exploration of a women-led resistance to sexual violence, much of it seemingly committed by allies in a revolutionary social movement. That means it explores events and their costs, tactics, actions, opportune and planned moments of defence of women’s participation in transformational struggles and strategies to strengthen that defence. It looks at the actions of social movements and of the State, and the many reasons people take action to stop that sexual violence. It is not a book of big theory, but an account of one struggle grounded in notions of feminist praxis.
It’s the story of Opantish –Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment – that grew up around events in Cairo’s Tahrir Square early in 2013, and continued with the protest movement. Harassment is very much an understatement. Many of us looked from afar at the events in Cairo, as the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ (oh, how much of our cultural world of politics is constrained by Paris, Prague and 1968) seemed to be bringing about change across North Africa. We saw inspiring alliances, well organised, fluid action with more than a hint of spontaneity at times. Yet for those who paid more attention there were worrying reports of sexual violence (including harassment, assault, and rape) within the activist moments, and indications that it may have been systemic, and at least partly organised. El-Rifae takes us into a response to that violence, and direct intervention into attacks on women that if not systemic and organised were at least mass events of the systematic isolation and sexual assault.
Crucially, El-Rifae does not shy away the experience of being in the middle of those assaults – as intervening and becoming one of the many assaulted. This happens mainly in the first section of the book, at the most intense times of protest-as-a-cover-for-assault: the detail is anything but gratuitous, essential for understanding how and why the resistance took the form it did, vital for grasping its effects, and fundamental to recognising the trauma of both the assaulted and those who intervened through Opantish. She also makes a powerful case that Opantish was distinctive (there were other intervention groups) in that it was women-led, and recognised that women going into the mass assaults was going to be essential to get those being assaulted out.
The other crucial point El-Rifae makes is that it is not possible to pin down the genesis and drivers of the assaults. For some it was easy to claim it was the military and State engineering this sexual violence – it is a not uncommon tactic in many conflict settings (look at what we know about rape as a weapon of war during the Yugoslav civil war of the 1990s, in Rwanda during the genocide, and frankly in most other military and colonial contexts). This claim may make movement participants feel better, but El-Rifae notes that there is little evidence that this was the only or even a major cause, and that many of those assaulting women were part of the revolutionary movement; she suggests that not all of them were ‘swept along in the moment’. She is also careful not to lay the blame at some sense of a retrograde Egyptian masculinist/patriarchal culture. This is a delicate balance, where she grounds sexual violence and harassment in the everyday life of growing up in Cairo – and as alarming as those banal situations she describes are, from what other women tell me about their lives there is little that is specific to that place about those experiences.
Yet this question of cause is not the focus of the work; El-Rifae, as one of the organisers of Opantish, looks at the mechanics of organisation on the ground, on the day, and at the effects of this action on activists, both men and women. She draws on her own experiences, on interviews with others from the movement, on social media posts, comments, and reports to build an alarming picture of a group of women and men who threw themselves into extremely dangerous situations, and who organised well for self-protection even if that organisation was hard, in some cases impossible, to sustain on the ground.
Amid all of this, of her frank and blunt discussions of individual and collective PTSD, of lost or strained nearly to breaking point relationships, of the patronising contempt of those she meets in New York (unlike most she is able to get away, not that that does much to minimise the trauma), there is a second equally important narrative. El-Rifae discusses tactics, action, and organisation on the ground, ways to act effectively to get into the roiling mass of men assaulting women to isolate and extract them, of acting in groups to get to the women, create a passage, and build a space for them to be taken to the relative safety of the spaces the activists were able to secure. That is to say, inside the discussion of events on the ground, of organisation, of trauma and the problems of what we’ve long thought of as self-care, there is also an activists’ training and advice manual. She doesn’t shy away from the errors Opantish made (would that more of us who wrote about social movements were this frank – there is much to learn from what we get wrong at the kind of micro-level discussed here), but she is also clear about what worked, and the challenges of making that work.
It may be difficult to read, in places it is harrowing and fully deserves trigger warnings in the strongest terms, but it is also an inspiring tale of self-organised resistance, of rescue, and of alliance and comradeship. At the same time, it is a warning about the danger of separating out struggles, of sidelining, for instance, gender or race equality to focus on the ‘more important’ structural questions of class or democracy, and of prioritising the vanguard over the coalition. With all of that it is more than reportage on an alarming aspect of a revolutionary movement, it is also a tactical and organisational guide to building effective, safer, and hopefully more successful social struggles. It is essential reading for our times....more
Written before the global resurgence of the #BlackLivesMatter movement in 2020, this remains an essential engagement with the movement, with its rise Written before the global resurgence of the #BlackLivesMatter movement in 2020, this remains an essential engagement with the movement, with its rise from the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement and the increasing incorporation of a Black elite, and with the care taken to put Black struggles for justice let alone liberation in their social and economic contexts. Taylor’s attention to the history and experience of life in a capitalist world means that she negotiates the space between several forms of essentialism and exclusivity to build a powerfully intersectional analysis not only of the core drivers of the movement for racial justice, but also of the forms it needs to engage with to survive, thrive and realise its promises.
Building out from a critique of outlooks and approaches such as idea of ‘cultures of poverty’, of the ‘colourblind’ policies of the Nixon era, and of notions of justice through incorporation Taylor explores the place of revolutionary politics through the 20th century and the common (objective) interests of workers, whatever their race or ethnicity, to explore the place and potential of #BLM as a social movement, rather than a moment (to adapt a chapter title). She is scathing of the current civil rights establishment leadership (Sharpton, Jackson and so forth) for their narrowness of vision and emphasis on incremental reform, but at the same time draws out the ways that the Foundations that fund the movement (Ford Foundation, Amazon and so forth) actively set limits that prescribe the potential for change. This is a compelling aspect of the overall case for thinking how to organise, in that these kinds of funding channels serve to undermine movement democracy and constrain the potential for change.
Her critique is not limited to the constraints imposed by funders, but also the limitations of representational politics alone. Black urban leaders, for instance, have been responsible for some of the harshest cuts to social services and brutal policing regimes. Without labelling it so, this is a powerful rejection of entry to the State to undermine that State.
Taylor weaves together the politics of race and of capitalism to build a richly informed frame through which to make sense of that manifestation of a long run struggle for justice. Crucially, also, by noting the key places women, including trans-women, play and have played in this movement, and the particular structural burden they carry she also makes clear that this is a multi-faceted struggle built around dynamics of race, class and gender. There are parts of the argument I am not entirely convinced by – the case that capitalism produced racism is less convincing than a case that capitalism gave a particular form to existing racial prejudices that became structurally essential to the ways capitalism grew – but these are comparatively minor in the overall picture of a long run struggle for Black liberation with potential for specific forms in the current conjuncture. This case sits alongside a cogent and welcome critique of the limitations of ‘whiteness’ as an explanatory approach or tactical frame.
The key question she raises, in the context of wrangling with the question of tactics, strategies and demands, is one of organisation. Noting the limitations of ‘horizontalism’ in building a coordinated national movement, exacerbating the anti-democratic effects of Foundation funding, she also notes the problem of the ‘tyranny of structurelessness’, to invoke Jo Freeman’s now 50+ year old notion. It is refreshing to see that she does not lapse into the notion that if horizontalism is flawed the only option is a verticalist form, a consequence of her critique of the reformist movement perhaps. The goal of her case seems to be a coherent organisation that builds and maintains an effective movement: if this is a ‘measure’ of success then there is plenty of potential for tactics and forms that work in the context of an overall approach.
But this is where we get to in the end, as an assessment of the pressures and demands of the now. A more important aspect of the book is its framing of the last 70 or so years of Black justice struggles in an intersectional frame that emphasises class, socio-economic alliances and the self-critical, reflexive efforts to build strategic and tactical coherence. This in itself makes this essential reading for our times. ...more
The cultural politics of boycott, or rather boycott as cultural politics, has become a topic for considerable discussion in the last ten years, both fThe cultural politics of boycott, or rather boycott as cultural politics, has become a topic for considerable discussion in the last ten years, both for artists and for analysts. This valuable collection of documents and analysis focuses on four boycott campaigns in the arts sector – the struggles around the democracy movement in Turkey and the occupation of Gezi Park as it impacted on the 13th Istanbul Biennial, Manifesta X in St Petersburg in the wake of the Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014, the Israeli sponsorship of the 19th Biennale of Sydney and of the 13th Bienal de Sāo Paulo.
The collection is a combination of archive documents and artist statements, interviews and discussions with curators and artists who engaged in various forms of action, and discussions and analyses by critics and scholars. It opens with a useful set of contextualising pieces, including Gregory Scholette’s discussion of earlier arts activism, of organising by Ahmet Őğüt – one of those taking in the Sydney case, and a valuable report on the extent and effects of the cultural boycott of Israel. This piece by Chen Tamir and a discussion with Israeli curator Galit Eliat are, for me, two of the most valuable pieces in that they engage directly with the contradictions of working in but not for a state that is the target of much of the current activism.
The real value of the collection for me lies in the three different forms of contribution that in some cases also, especially the artists’ statements, shows the ways thinking and understanding developed over the course of the development of each event. In each case, the boycott debate emerged as a result of circumstances as they developed in the lead up to each event, drew in and on those who had already agreed to participate, and who came to the issues with various forms of understanding and political consciousness and awareness. As a result, they provide important insight to what the artists themselves, those called on and calling on to take action, thought and how they responded: as such, they are valuable archival documents, and not just for these campaigns and moments.
This is admittedly a collection with fairly limited appeal beyond a group of us whose work explores these issues and questions, making me all the more grateful to Sternberg Press for the publication, and to Joanna Warsza and her summer academy participants for the work in putting it together and getting it to print. It’s an important collection in a bigger question, and all the more valuable for it. ...more
For a practice that is so widely discussed and invoked, the boycott as a tactic is poorly understood as a political tool and activist demand. So much For a practice that is so widely discussed and invoked, the boycott as a tactic is poorly understood as a political tool and activist demand. So much of the way it is discussed and invoked does little to draw a distinction, for instance, between consumer boycotts, state imposed limits and sanctions, and activist demands place limits on the ways we engage with particular situations and practices. Much of the literature focuses on state policy, yet for many activists and supporters, boycotts are a way expressing opposition, a frame and approach around which to educate and organise, and a way to assert what might be. It is hard, when looking at state policy, not to conclude that they are cynically invoked – as a way to criticise but with little effect, whereas as a tactic it means digging in for a long haul, in conjunction with many other approaches.
Consider the most well-known mass movement boycotts – the Montgomery bus boycott lasting 54 weeks from December 1955 to December 1956, during which African-Americans refused to use the segregated service – it took a year to change one company’s practice. Or the South African focused anti-apartheid movement, which working towards the total social, economic and political isolation of the apartheid regime (which was never fully achieved) but which in alignment with other tactics and struggle within South Africa, after 30 years managed to bring about the end to the system as a formal thing – culture change takes longer. The South African focused movement is important, and a key part of his important collection of essays, because it provides the model and inspiration for the Palestinian led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign targeting Israel’s settler colonial state.
This collection focuses for the most on the cultural part of that boycott movement, exploring what might be learned from the South African case, delving into the specifics of the focus on Israel and the Palestinian cause and considering how other concurrent arts-based boycott movements relate to BDS. Most of the papers were initially presented as part of a seminar series hosted by The New School in New York, giving the collection a coherence built around four themes: the South Africa campaign, BDS, the question of who speaks and who is silenced, and the wider question of engagement and disengagement.
Some of the most valuable pieces directly confront the question of who boycotts and to what end tactically. Arielle Aïsha Azoulay’s powerful piece asking what it means as an anti-Zionist Jew to exercise the right not to be a perpetrator is one of the most important in the collection, alongside pieces by Noura Erakat and by Eyal Weizman and Kareem Estefan on what they label co-resistance. These three pieces in particular pose significant tactical and political questions for wider consideration, especially Azoulay’s right not to be a perpetrator problem. Similarly, essays by artists including Tania Brugera and Miriam Ghani explore the challenging question of cultural production in times of heightened political struggle, of voice and of presence respectively. Not many miss the mark – but Svetlana Mintcheva’s exploration of the ethics of free speech finishes up being too removed from the daily character of political struggle to have much to say to the everyday and lapses into a form of liberal contextualism that sets it apart from many of the other contributions.
Most of the pieces here are valuable, raising important questions not just for those of us whose scholarly work leads us to grapple with boycotts, but also for activism and struggle. Crucially, in focusing on social movement activism, not state policy, and by refusing to frame the boycott tactic as one of consumer choice this collection helps shift both the academic debates and the activist approach. It is a valuable and important contribution that deserves wider consideration....more
Back, before Covid times, various versions of Green New Deals did the rounds. Initially driven from forces associated with Bernie Sanders’ campaign foBack, before Covid times, various versions of Green New Deals did the rounds. Initially driven from forces associated with Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the Democrat’s presidential candidacy, the Green New Deal evoked the image of the 1930s Democrats and Roosevelt’s depression recovery project of massive public lead reshaping of the US economy although that association weakened as other versions of approach developed elsewhere (in the UK, there was an invocation industrial democracy models and socially useful production, for instance). Other versions emerged, built on the same model of a gentler, greener capitalism intended to break the back of fossil fuel dependency (in its minimalist form) to a more comprehensive democratic socialist economy (in its greater form). It’s an inspiring model with bold aspirations.
The Red Deal goes a step further, welcoming the more expansive notion of the Green New Deal, and reminding its advocates that we’re not going to get far is we don’t also confront the colonialist basis of that extractivist world of which fossil fuels capitalism is the most elaborated form. So, read this as an extension of the Green New Deal, not a repudiation.
Written by group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists the programme rests on four key principles and three areas of struggle. The principles are staples of the left: ‘what creates crisis cannot solve it’ (despite the fantasies of managers), ‘change from below and to the left’, ‘politicians cannot do what only social movements can do’ and ‘from theory to action’. These are key tenets of any good social movement, working for democratic change not just as a form of governance but as a principle for how we live and work our lives.
The areas of struggle are a sign of the way this Indigenous programme orders the world. The first field of struggle – ending the occupation – links the abolition of borders and border violence, including violence around the borders of Indigenous spaces, to abolitionist activism around prisons to colonial and imperial borders and occupation. This is a sign of the comprehensive and integrated views of the world the programme builds. Similarly, the second field, calling for investment in ‘our common humanity’ links citizenship, housing, health, education, transport with food and environmental security and gender-based violence. It is, again, a richly compelling view. The third field centres on ‘our common future’ – energy, land, environmental restoration, treaty rights and so forth.
In each section, for each topic, there is a short essay (no more than a couple of thousand words) drawing out the key issues, highlighting major strands of struggle and practice, sketching a vision of how things might be. For the most part the author have sought to future proof the programme but in two or three areas, especially around treaty right, environmental and site restoration, there is a very specific set of recommendations that run the risk of limiting the usefulness of the section; this is frustrating not because of the issues raised but because it shifted the sense of the programme from a more open form of manifesto to a set of specific demands. Now, the movement needs those, but the specific focus on North American cases also has the effect of shifting away from the other North American focus as illustrative to in these cases making it exclusive.
This is however a relatively minor quibble. The Red Deal as a whole is not only an impressive decolonial extension of the Green New Deal, it also lays out an Indigenous vision of a socialist world that moves beyond the extractivist basis of much socialist model building to consider human and non-human life in a delicate balance shaped around the core principle – be a good relative. It merits revisiting and rethinking, it provides a holistic view of decolonial activism while the 20 short essays on each area of action (in those three fields) deserve reconsideration as ways to inspire us to act.
It may not be the answer, but it certainly a big part of it especially when taken alongside Marta Harnecker’s inspiring Rebulding the Left as ways to think and do. ...more
There are times when I look back many years (well, several decades) at my youthful environmental activist, focused on forest protection and seas – thiThere are times when I look back many years (well, several decades) at my youthful environmental activist, focused on forest protection and seas – things in my neighbourhood - and wonder at the ways our organisations called for public ownership through state, totally failing to recognise that it was this state that had stolen this land from its original owners over the previous 140 years. While my youth was spent in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Dina Gilio-Whitaker’s focus on Turtle Island reminds just how deeply ingrained colonialism is.
In the course of the discussion she does three key things. She makes clear the distinction between notions of environmental preservation (with its fantasy of a pristine environment) and environmental justice, with its focus on questions of oppression and inequality. Second, she grounds struggles across the Americas in histories of colonisation, marginalisation and dispossession. Third, she highlights and stresses the crucial role of coalitions in those struggles, and the ways all too often the needs and concerns of Indigenous peoples are written out of those coalitions’ narratives.
Not surprisingly, given its profile, the narrative begins at Standing Rock, in Oceti Sakowin territory, with the struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline that came to a head in 2016 and into 2017. Her sense of the long run nature of Indigenous struggles as related to environmental justice means that she does not fall into the trap others have in many media outlets of suggesting this ‘came out of nowhere’, but is part of long running struggle for justice (Nick Estes’ Our History is the Future is an excellent way into that aspect of Lakota/Dakota/Nakota history).
This, however, is a tale of an environment movement that, like my youthful associations, is firmly grounded colonialist outlooks including practices that implicitly justify the genocide of Indigenous peoples. But it is also a tale of the links between Indigenous community health and well-being and the land and wider environmental associations. It tells stories of strange and unusual alliances around things such as extractivist economic ‘development’ that threaten First Nations and settler farmers in similar ways – and at times the unexpected insight that comes from those associations.
Those Indigenous movements do not get a free pass, however, and there is a powerful exploration of the patriarchal aspects of movement politics and the ways women in Indigenous networks organised around and despite much of the ‘leadership’. This section, perhaps more than others, unpacks the exploitative character of much that styles itself as solidarity activism, partly because of the crucial role women played in leading struggles at Standing Rock, and the widespread non-Indigenous solidarity participation in the camps. Gilio-Whitaker unpacks these tensions clearly and firmly, in places showing some empathy for settler women’s discomfort, while also asserting the integrity of Indigenous expectations while in Indigenous spaces.
It might be because of parts of my working life that I found the discussion of sacred sites so compelling and unsettling (I used to work in a negotiations team focused on return of ‘sacred sites’ as part of the settlement of breaches of State-Indigenous Treaty provisions), while also reminding myself just how complex the situation is in the USA with its various forms of recognition and the persistence of legislation that is both paternalistic and controlling. More importantly, this is the discussion that shows most explicitly the complex and problematic character of some of the alliances built around issues as well as the potential for this kind of work to educate citizens and state officials about the nuances of justice in environmental struggles. It is a discussion that is concurrently uplifting and a reminder of the exploitative relations that can exist within alliances.
As powerful as these discussions are the kicker lies in the discussion that closes the book that among other things shows the continuing complicity of parts of the environmental movement in continuing the expropriation of Indigenous peoples, through land management, occupation and ownership provisions for instance that exclude traditional owners. Equally significantly her discussion of the ‘rights of nature’ strand of environmental justice struggles, which she links explicitly to amendments to the Bolivian and Ecuadoran constitutions and decisions in Aotearoa that recognise the personhood of rivers, points to ways that environmental justice can be interlinked with Indigenous struggles, while also implicitly pointing to the limitations of major modes of economic thinking underpinning capitalist, socialist and other left forms of analysis, that accentuate forms of extraction. It’s a powerful case that deserves to be further developed (the recent The Red Deal looks as if it may start to do that).
While focused primarily on struggles in the USA, so with some distinctiveness given historical and constitutional provisions there, the lessons go much wider, and not only to other settler colonial states – the rights of nature model is a compelling way to think and do environmental justice, especially when interwoven with other forms of social justice struggle. Clearly and accessibly written this is an excellent way into multifaceted contemporary social justice struggles. Vital reading, to make sense of our times. ...more
It’s often said, as a bleak, more than sardonic observation, that the forces of oppression might have won, but we had all the best songs…. Artist, wriIt’s often said, as a bleak, more than sardonic observation, that the forces of oppression might have won, but we had all the best songs…. Artist, writers, musicians and more have a long record of siding with, of being among, those seeking justice, and still they do (and some align themselves to the Powerful also). This compelling, in places difficult – harrowing and heartbreaking – collection emerged from the early years of the continuing Syrian struggle, when elements of the Arab Spring were still promising much and before the Syrian revolution descended into its full scale war by proxy between Assad’s oppressive regime and Da’esh’s own version of authoritarianism, both of which pushed the struggle for a democratic multi-ethnic Syria to the margins.
There’s a diversity of the written, reportage, analysis and fiction, with a bit of poetry and hip hop lyrics for good measure. This is blended well with the visual – with ‘high art’, protest posters, graffiti and digital dissent. These visual texts are witty and bleak, ironic, poetic, allusive and at times bluntly to the point – making some of them hard to stomach. The written work is most powerful as fiction. It has been said that in oppressive regimes like Syria the best place to find the intellectuals is in the prisons, and often these are people who have become analysts and intellectuals after imprisonment. Yet the prison literature here is brutal fiction – perhaps because it is too difficult to write as reportage. Even so, perhaps the most haunting piece is by the journalist Yara Badr about her arrest, her husband’s continuing detention and her memories of visiting her political prisoner father, who then visited her…. It’s a reminder that the Syrian frontline did not emerge in 2009/10, but has been round for many years and the struggle is a multi-generational one.
Even with the demands and difficulties of these texts, they are packed with hope and optimism, of courage and defiance, and of a struggle that was not over in 2014 and continues in 2022. There’s also humour and poetics, allusion and didactics and a sign that despite and perhaps because of the repression Syria has a lively and vibrant dissident life continually creating cracks in the edifice of Power – and even the smallest of cracks sustains hope....more
The notion and validation of the scholar-activist is an uncomfortable one in contemporary higher education. On the one hand, one of the increasingly pThe notion and validation of the scholar-activist is an uncomfortable one in contemporary higher education. On the one hand, one of the increasingly powerful ‘measures’ of academic practice is the idea of ‘impact’ – our research and so forth is expected to have resonance beyond the academy as well as without our communities of academic practice. The problem is that this ‘impact’ is not inclusive – ‘good’ impact is the kind that brings income, enhances (or perhaps tweaks) the way things are done, feeds into policy and brings to our universities (and it often seems begrudgingly us) kudos and standing crucially, it does not lead to systemic change.
This contradiction between the endorsement of impact and financialised expectations of the neoliberal university is part of the issue at the core of this fabulous ethnography of scholars who rock the boat. The other essential part of analysis is that these scholars focus on anti-racist work in institutions intimately linked to the (re)production of systemic racism and very often systemically racist in the structuring, design and operations. That is to say, with the ways that universities are intimately interwoven into existing regimes and systems of power and privilege.
A big part of the issue then is working within the institutions that play a major part in sustaining the systems of oppression of this scholarship and activism is intended to confront and change. The analysis is very much grounded in practice, with evidence drawn from work with ‘scholar-activists’ (a term they critique) at various stages of academic careers and differently racialized in the British context. In addition, both Joseph-Salisbury and Connelly classify themselves as anti-racist scholar activists (I knew Joseph-Salisbury’s work through activist networks and publications well before I knew his scholarly work) so have themselves a significant presence in the evidence and analysis. What all of this means is that while the text is theoretically rich and sophisticated, the depth and breadth of its evidence and the cases explored means that this theory is for the most part lightly worn. Joseph-Salisbury and Connelly, although working with a university press, have clearly recognised the wider audience their work is likely to appeal to. (As an aside, this is the second Manchester UP title in the last year that has really impressed me in its anti-racism activism focus –Asim Qureshi’s I Refuse to Condemn is also worth a look).
This is a compelling argument for the importance of ‘scholar-activism’ while also being alert to the challenges and limitations of that work, especially the dangers of reproducing the power regimes that are the ostensible focus of the activist work. That said, Joseph-Salisbury and Connelly conclude with a remarkably non-prescriptive manifesto, that is as much as anything centred on dispositions rather than programmatic expectations. This makes the book all the more valuable – shifting from a rich sociological analysis to a text with potential for high impact – although admittedly not the kind of income generating impact our powers that be prefer. Highly recommended. ...more
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