This rather long conversation with Robbie McVeigh & Bill Rolston only evokes fragments of their book "Anois ar theacht an tSamhraidh": Ireland, Colonialism, and the Unfinished Revolution, which resituates Irish history within the global history of colonialism. We talk about Gorta Mór (the Great Hunger), the Irish Revolution, the Partition, as well as the contemporary forms of struggle and internationalist solidarity in the North of Ireland. Robbie McVeigh & Bill Rolston are the authors of "Anois ar theacht an tSamhraidh": Ireland, Colonialism, and the Unfinished Revolution (Beyond the Pale, 2021). Robbie McVeigh is a researcher based in Edinburgh, who has written extensively on equality and human rights in the context of the North of Ireland. Bill Rolston is a former professor and director of the Transitional Justice Institute at Ulster University in Belfast.
For the release of Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi's book, Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine (UC Press) on April 19, 2022, we are proposing this interview of hers about some aspects of her research, in particular the articulation of this concept of "refugee settlers" or the ways through which both U.S. and Israeli governments have spectacularized and instrumentalized Vietnamese refugees resettlement. We end the conversation with the geographic image of the archipelago associated with the Vietnamese notion of nước as visions for decolonial imaginaries.
This conversation between Shivangi Mariam Raj and Steven Salaita reflects over Palestine by examining how settler colonial logics are coded within language — ranging from the limits of human rights framework to conditional solidarities, from visual grammars of sanitized victimhood to academic censorship, and more. We also discuss the defiant vocabulary of resistance, as embodied by Palestinian armed rebels, prisoners, and scholars. Steven Salaita is a Palestinian scholar and public speaker based in the U.S. He has previously taught at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and Virginia Tech. He is the author of several books, including “Anti-Arab Racism in the USA: Where it Comes From and What it Means for Politics Today” (Pluto Press, 2006), "Holy Land in Transit: Colonialism and the Quest for Canaan" (Syracuse University Press, 2006), "Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), "The Uncultured Wars: Arabs, Muslims and the Poverty of Liberal Thought - New Essays" (Zed Books, 2008), "Modern Arab American Fiction: A Reader's Guide" (Syracuse University Press, 2011), "Israel's Dead Soul" (Temple University Press, 2011), "Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom" (Haymarket Books, 2015), "Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine" (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), and "We Could Be Free: Palestine in the Revolutionary Imagination" (Haymarket Books, 2019), among others.
Quito Swan’s forthcoming book Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anti-colonialism, and the African World (NYU Press, March 2022) beautifully encompasses the type of internationalist solidarity our 39th issue The Ocean… From the Black Atlantic to the Sea of Islands would like to convey. As such, this interview about the struggles of liberation in Melanesia (in particular West Papua, Kanaky, and Vanuatu) constitutes a cornerstone of the issue, for which we are deeply grateful to Quito. Hailing from the island of Bermuda, Quito Swan is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. An award-winning historian of Black internationalism, he is the author of Pauulu’s Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice (University Press of Florida, 2020), Black Power in Bermuda: The Struggle for Decolonization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anticolonialism, and the African World (New York University Press, 2022). Pauulu’s Diaspora was awarded the African American Intellectual History Association’s (AAIHS) 2021 Pauli Murray Book Prize and a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) 2021 Fellowship Book Award Prize.
In May 2021, Mohamad Amer Meziane published his first book, Des empires sous la terre: Histoire écologique et raciale de la sécularisation (Subterranean Empires: Ecological and Racial History of Secularization). We speak with him about the ambitious work he develops in this book, linking European secularization (and Europe's definition of what constitutes religion) with colonial extractivism from the first industrial revolution to the alteration of the world's climate. Mohamad Amer Meziane holds a PhD in Philosophy from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. He is currently a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Religion Culture and Public and the Institute of African studies at Columbia Unversity. His first book,Des empires sous la terre,published in 2021 by La Découverte, deploys an eco-racial history of secularization. Inventing the concept of the Secularocene to describe aspects of the present climate crisis, he argues that orientalism and climate change can be seen as two facets of the secularization of empires during the 19th century.
When, in October 2021, we interviewed Priya Ange and Anita Kittery for our francophone show "Diasporas et Imaginaires des Luttes" about the Tamil diaspora from Puducherry or Tamil Nadu at large in France, we relied a lot on the work of Jessica Namakkal, who dedicated a book to "the making and unmaking of French India." We are therefore happy to provide you with an anglophone conversation with her about French colonialism on the Indian Subcontinent. This is part of a broader effort to render the complexity to the Subcontinent's recent history, which is usually depicted under the sole and uniform history of British colonialism. Jessica Namakkal is associate professor of the practice in international comparative studies, gender, sexuality, and feminist studies, and history at Duke University. She is the author of the book Unsettling Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of French India, published by Columbia University Press is 2021. In addition, she is a member of the Radical History Review editorial collective, one of the co-editors of the Abusable Past, and a member of the South Asian American Digital Archive’s academic council.
Durant les deux épisodes dédiés à l'histoire de la diaspora tamoule d'Ilam, nous annoncions que nous jugions crucial de produire au moins un épisode à propos de l'autre diaspora tamoule en France, celle du Tamil Nadu et, pour nombre de ses membres, de Puducherry. Ce dernier cas nous permet de parler du colonialisme français en Inde. Celui-ci, implanté dans les cinq colonies de Chandernagor, Yanaon, Mahé, Karikal et Pondicherry (Puducherry), a duré près de 300 ans, laissant des traces de la hiérarchie sociale ainsi créée jusqu'à aujourd'hui, sur le sous-continent indien et dans la diaspora.
This conversation was recorded to be published in The Funambulist 36 (July-August 2021) They Have Clocks, We Have Time. Waiting is a particular temporal praxis, whose political dimension is more likely to be missed by those who make people wait than by those who have to wait for a visa, for food, for access to the city, etc. Shahram Khosravi shares with us some of his reflections on this action of waiting; its Kafkaian dimension, but also its revolutionary potential. Shahram Khosravi is a former taxi driver and currently an accidental Professor of Anthropology at Stockholm University. Khosravi is the author of some academic books and some articles but he prefers to write stories. He has been an active writer in the international press. The past year he has been working on an art book on Waiting and two years ago he started Critical Border Studies, a network for scholars, artists and activists to interact. See also his short story in this issue.
Depuis le 28 avril 2021 une grève générale a lieu en Colombie. Les manifestations sont réprimées par l'état et la police, causant plus de 40 morts, presque 400 personnes portées disparues, des dizaines de cas d'abus sexuels, de blessures et de mutilations en seulement un mois. Si cette violence d'état devient évidente au moment de ces manifestations par la large circulation des vidéos des violences policières sur la toile, elle n'est pas nouvelle. En effet, le pays n'est pas encore tout à fait sorti du dit "conflit armé", guerre civile qui dure depuis les années 1960. Malgré la signature des accords de paix en 2016, l'opposition politique est encore persécutée: depuis cette signature, plus de 900 activistes et défenseurs des droits de l'homme (appelés les "leaders sociaux") ont été assassinés. la violence d'aujourd'hui connaît de très nombreuses ramifications et antécédents.
Pour la deuxième fois dans cette série de podcast, nous parlons de la diaspora tamoule d'Îlam. Après une excellente conversation avec Apinayaa U. en mars 2020 qui exposait de nombreux aspects de la cause tamoule et de la violence génocidaire de l'Etat singalais, voici une discussion avec Vishni Francis Jeyaratnam qui offre une autre perspective en se basant notamment sur le magnifique projet qu'elle et Simon-Pierre Coftier ont créé: le National Museum of Eelam. Ce musée diasporique consiste en une collection d'objets racontant chacun une histoire personnelle liée aux trajectoires et expériences de l'exil de plusieurs générations de Tamoul⸱e⸱s d’Îlam en France et ailleurs dans le monde.