In times of Catastrophe and Struggle: Reckoning with UoE's Past as Present
Dear RACE.ED community,
As you would have seen by now, there is an open call towards taking on RACE.ED’s directorate responsibilities, which we’re excited about as we turn a new chapter. Accordingly, this note will be one of the last ones I write to you in this particular role within RACE.ED, for which of course there is much to feel ambivalent about.
Firstly, let me thank you all sincerely for your trust with community building over the past four years. It has been an honour to serve as associate director, co-director and director during this time – and my commitment to our network will continue in different ways. Together and with the expansive vision and committed labour of my colleagues Nasar Meer, Katucha Bento and those supporting behind the scenes (big shout out to Michaelagh Broadbent), we put into motion an anti-racist and decolonial research and teaching repository that confronts the very real violence of race and colonialism and its psychic, material and epistemic reach globally and within the intimacy of our everyday lives. We did a lot of this work in friendship, dedication and comradeship with many here at UoE and allied communities across the globe. Confronting race – not as a social variable, identity marker or diversity checkbox – but as a historical and structural project means confronting the colonial and imperial legacies of modernity and importantly late liberalism, both of which have given rise to particular forms of race-thinking and racial violence alongside a human rights and humanitarian regime that would serve and protect Western imperialism. Understanding these twin processes as deeply entangled and perhaps one of the paradoxical challenges of decolonization in the 21st century is not without its challenges.
The formation of RACE.ED from its inception, made a commitment to building literacy on precisely such subjects, which we’ve done over the years through engaging with a range of issues across various platforms (our workshops and lecture series, podcast programming (Undersong), blog series and more quiet and sporadic events like workshopping monographs from our colleagues in the field. Thematically, we scaffolded widely: Sudan’s relations with Pan-Africanist and anti-imperialist circles, Henry’s Dundas’s position on the abolition of the slave trade and the renaming of UoE buildings, abolition politics in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, pedagogy and ethics of care under Covid-19, race-equality in Scotland, Feminist parenting from Africa and beyond, intersectionality debates, the politics of the Rhodes Statue and British academia’s investment in Southern Africa, migrant health, representations of slavery in Black British women’s plays, antisemitism and the proxification of antiracism, the abuse of Sebastia, Palestine and the Harvard excavations of 1908, how Black women transformed citizenship in the French empire, black lgbtqi poetry and quilombo, and Sylvia Wynter and Frantz Fanon’s writing on the human. This is merely a snapshot of all the important work that has been engaged with through this network. This work has been replenishing and uplifting in the most difficult of circumstances and sincerely, I thank all those who have worked closely with us over the years and entrusted this network to carry their work forward into the world.
During this time, we have also navigated rough waters (as our dear friend Dr Salman Abu Sitta nicely put it in his centenary lecture on Balfour and British Mandate in Palestine). Any network committed to the substantive work of anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism and anti-racism would naturally confront such turbulent tides in the face of backlash. This is no less true for a network that sprang from an institution with a historical legacy marked by the violent chains of empire, with direct epistemic and material involvement and investments in transatlantic slavery, the advancement of racial eugenics, scientific racism and craniology, Indigenous dispossession including the dispossession of Palestine, economies of displacement and settler colonial expansion and ongoing investments in the dispossession of Palestine and Palestinians today.
On multiple occasions, we (those committed to anti-colonial and racial justice) confront the limits points of liberalism’s promise of anti-racism and decolonisation. Within global north institutions of higher education, these limit points often look like ceremonial ‘task and finish committees’, EDI directives and ‘decolonizing the curricula’ away days. And while these endeavours are sometimes earnest attempts to get it right (in the best of times) and perhaps even a reprieve from the blatant fascist backlash we confront within this institution, this political moment we’re in right now is calling on all of us to rethink these strategies for change. Just a few weeks ago, our dear friend and colleague Rama Salla Dieng brought the “Palestine Exception” series to UoE. On a panel discussion between Samer Abdelnour, Zaki El-Salahi, Nicola Perugini, Bayan Haddad, Mezna Qato and myself, we engaged earnestly with this question: what makes Palestine the exception? If Palestine represents the litmus test for how we can address anti-racism, anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism in a so-called era of reparations, then let us study from the lessons that the struggle for Palestinian liberation affords. One of such core lessons this political moment brings into full view is the entangled relationship between liberalism and fascism.
The world owes answers to the people of Palestine: close to 35,000 (of those counted) have been crushed and slaughtered in Gaza, with their limbs broadcasted live on social and news media. To the Palestinian men and boys rounded up, stripped down to their underwear and paraded in Yarmouk Stadium, a sports centre turned into a makeshift interrogation and torture camp. To those children made orphan overnight, with no living members of their family to hold them tight as they heal from a lifetime ahead of wounds. To the 65,000 whom have been injured in a place whose healthcare system has been bombed and decimated out of operation. Scholasticide by means of targeting academics and students, while destroying every university in Gaza and key archival sites. By the end of December 2023, 70 percent of the homes in the Gaza Strip were destroyed, leaving 90 percent of people displaced – over one million of whom are now living in makeshift shelters, a kind of tent city akin to the images of those first expelled during the onset of the 1947-48 Nakba. We are talking about the displacement of a people who have spent their entire lives rebuilding life after the Nakba, only to now have their children and grandchildren inhabit a parallel reality. To the entirety of the people of the Gaza Strip subjected to Israel’s policy of starvation and depravation akin to collective punishment, this falls on all of us. And even this snapshot of horror inflicted on the people of Gaza barely provides a full picture of the unprecedented scale of harm and destruction we are talking about. To those killed and buried alive, with their hands zip tied together, the world owes you an explanation and a response. The litany of Israeli war crimes are obscene and the receipts of war criminals and their supporters are in plain sight. What is also in plain sight are the institutions that have been complicit in this on-going genocide either by means of actively circulating Israeli propaganda or by way of silencing and criminalising dissent against these horrors inflicted on Palestinian life and land.
I do believe we stand today at a crossroad that requires much deeper introspection than that which can come from neoliberal logics so tightly embedded within institutions of higher education. We cannot at this time accept easy resolve meant to sanitise the situation and absolve institutions from their historical and on-going ties to empire’s violence. It is too late for that. To decolonise beyond metaphor and to do so from the United Kingdom and Europe, we must begin with the concrete – examining precisely how our own heritage and inheritances are tied to obscene realms of violence from which there can be no easy return from. But, as the student-led movement for divestment is teaching us in live time, there is another way. While divestment is only the tip of the iceberg and not a substitute for reparations, it is the essential and most honest first step. The call on this has remained clear and consistent with the ICJ’s ruling on plausible genocide and recommendations.
Our incredible students, a broad-based coalition of multiracial and multifaith community comprised of EUJPS (Edinburgh University Justice for Palestine Students), Kehillah, Student & Staff Assembly, and other groups have remained morally consistent and clear in their objection to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. They have communicated their objections and demands to university leadership through various means including formal inquiries around our university’s investment profile, peaceful library sit-ins, occupying building actions and the on-going solidarity encampment at Old College. As noted and signed in a letter by over 618 people and 13 networks, many of us wholeheartedly stand by our students in this movement towards freedom for Palestine as we see it inextricably linked to a freer future for all. This future is one that must be untethered from the normalisation of a political order defined by colonial and imperial racial subjugation. While the work ahead of us remains and our students are putting a lot on the line – not just their degrees but their bodies by way of hunger strike, I say with confidence that our students have also become our teachers in this joint struggle. The seeds are blooming wild and free in ways that offer a glimmer of hope in an otherwise very bleak moment. Let us support them and work together as a network committed to the real labour of anti-racism and decolonisation.
I thank you again sincerely for entrusting me in the service of RACE.ED. I look forward to our continued work ahead.
With solidarity,
Shaira