points.of.crossing

“Decolonization … continues to be an act of confrontation with a hegemonic system of thought; it is hence a process of considerable historical and cultural liberation. As such, decolonization becomes the contestation of all dominant forms and structures, whether they be linguistic, discursive, or ideological. Moreover, decolonization comes to be understood as an act of exorcism for both the colonized and the colonizer. For both parties it must be a process of liberation: from dependency, in the case of the colonized, and from imperialist, racist perceptions, representations, and institutions which, unfortunately, remain with us to this very day, in the case of the colonizer … Decolonization can only be complete when it is understood as a complex process that involves both the colonizer and the colonized.”

- Samia Nehrez, as quoted in Black Looks: Race and Representation.

“One trend we have noticed, with growing apprehension, is the ease with
which the language of decolonization has been superficially adopted into education and other social sciences, supplanting prior ways of talking about social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches which decenter settler perspectives. Decolonization, which we assert is a distinct project from other civil and human rights-based social justice projects, is far too often subsumed into the directives of these projects, with no regard for how decolonization wants something different than those forms of justice … [T]his kind of inclusion is a form of enclosure, dangerous in how it domesticates decolonization … When metaphor invades decolonization, it kills the very possibility of decolonization; it recenters whiteness, it resettles theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler future. Decolonize (a verb) and decolonization (a noun) cannot easily be grafted onto pre-existing discourses/frameworks, even if they are critical, even if they are anti-racist, even if they are justice frameworks. The easy absorption, adoption, and transposing of decolonization is yet another form of settler appropriation. When we write about decolonization, we are not offering it as a metaphor; it is not an approximation of other experiences of oppression. Decolonization is not a swappable term for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. Decolonization doesn’t have a synonym.”

- Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor.”

Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review.

Searchable page-scan PDF edition here. (Zip file password: archive)

“Discourse was never intended to be a road map or a blueprint for revolution. It is poetry and therefore revolt. It is an act of insurrection, drawn from Césaire’s own miraculous weapons, molded and shaped by his work with Tropiques and its challenge to the Vichy regime; by his imbibing of European culture and his sense of alienation from both France and his native land. It is a rising, a blow to the master who appears as owner and ruler, teacher and comrade. It is revolutionary graffiti painted in bold strokes across the great texts of Western Civilization; it is a hand grenade tossed with deadly accuracy, clearing the field so that we might write a new history with what’s left standing. Discourse is hardly a dead document about a dead order. If anything, it is a call for us to plumb the depths of the imagination for a different way forward. Just as Césaire drew on Lautréamont’s Chants de Maldoror to illuminate the can­nibalistic nature of capitalism and the power of poetic knowledge, Discourse offers new insights into the consequences of colonialism and a model for dreaming a way out of our postcolonial predicament. While we still need to overthrow all vestiges of the old colonial order, destroying the old is just half the battle.”

- From the introduction by Robin D.G. Kelley.

Tageldin, Shaden M. Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt. Berkeley: University of California, 2011.

PDF edition HERE. (Zip file password: archive)

‘If attraction, assimilation, even love are dominant refrains in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Egypt’s literary and cultural response to a colonizing Europe, why is this so? How do the emergence and the persistence of this ideology of “love” challenge the domination/resistance binary of empire and postcolonial studies? And given the centrality of translation in modern Egypt’s cultural encounter with the West, how might translation be connected to this ideology of “love”? These are central questions that I engage in this book. Disarming Words explores why the colonized tend to “love” their colonizers as often as they hate them and how seduction haunts both empire and decolonization.’