New Postcolonial Concerns Conference, Cambridge, June 15th 2019:
Reparations to the descendants ... more New Postcolonial Concerns Conference, Cambridge, June 15th 2019:
Reparations to the descendants of slaves have recently spurred debates in mainstream politics: it indeed appeared against the backdrop of the wealth gap existing between black communities and white households, and when historians were able to provide significant evidence of financial compensations received by British slave owners in the Caribbean after the 1834 Slavery Abolition Act was passed. While politicians such as Tony Blair’s refused to apologize for slavery in his 2006 infamous speech, organizations such as CARICOM (Caribbean Committee) sought to reactivate reparations campaigns along the lines of Britain’s agreement of sending 19.9 million pounds to the surviving Kenyans whom the British colonial government tortured during the Mau Mau uprising between 1952 until 1960. In the face of liberal narratives which seek to domesticate radical histories of activism and resistance to buttress white supremacy, reparative history seeks to dismantle such narrative by restoring historical agency. The primary value of such a writing of history lies in the excavation of a memory bolstered by black radicalism, anti-colonial struggles and solidarity. While exploring of the continuities between Euro-American racism, capitalism’s late-style, neo-colonialism and the legacies of imperialism and the slave trade, British –Kittian novelist Caryl Phillips’s work ‘against the undertow of historical ignorance’ (Phillips) foregrounds these politics of resistance in an intertextual dialogue between historical archives and the literary text. By examining how the ethnological orientation of his work responds to the enduring institutional racism and structural violence, this paper will highlight the way in which literary modes of expression such as polyphony or even the use of the Joycean stream of consciousness would rehabilitate the voices of those who were silenced and call for the reader to become what Barthes calls a ‘generator of (new) texts’.
New Voices in Postcolonial Studies Conference, Leeds, June 13th 2019
According to the UN report ... more New Voices in Postcolonial Studies Conference, Leeds, June 13th 2019
According to the UN report on global migration, a 20% increase of international migrants has been entailed by rising instances of conflict and poverty. Fleeing the rising levels of inequality, these migrants are often facing police brutality, deportation or the danger of crossing the Mediterranean Sea on a flimsy embarkation. Le Monde newspaper has recently reported the case of Subsaharian migrants being forcefully expelled from Algeria and abandoned in the desert, on the basis of their race and origins. Such discriminatory attitudes, mainly propelled by the rise of right-wing populist parties’ rhetoric on migrants, and the hollowing out of the middle class from weak wage growth and austerity have fostered a cultural hostility and indifference towards people of different origins. As a response to the government’s willingness to enforce the country’s borders by sending Border Force vessels, and its reluctance to account for the deaths at sea, the ‘Left-To-Die-Boat’ project was launched in 2011 by the Forensic Oceanography project to demand accountability for the deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea while the region was monitored by NATO. The pernicious silence from these institutions are illustrative of the persistence of the coloniality of power (Quijano), which consolidates the principles on which colonial societies operated: race, colour, class. Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River tackles these existing racial orders and injustices by poetic affirmation and a rejuvenating lyricism. Seascapes and soundscapes are authentic literary metaphors and tools calling for a reconsideration of borders, be it physical, mental, or between the self and the other. The novel is also an invitation to listen to the sounds of water where the voices written out of history could be heard. Water is the reservoir of hidden and lost memories: it is pleading to demand accountability for the deaths at sea, it testifies for the voiceless, the unrecorded histories subjected to neglect, it carries the characters’ laments in its bosom. It is precisely in this incremental personification of water, in this anthropologic enterprise of providing agency to an inanimate being, that the process of mental and historical recollection could be fathomed. This paper will explore how the expansion of the reader’s perception and sensibility occurs through reading as an act of re-membering and attentive listening.
Conference 'After Empire?' The Contested Histories of Decolonisation, Migration and Race in Moder... more Conference 'After Empire?' The Contested Histories of Decolonisation, Migration and Race in Modern Britain (University of Leeds, 13th and 14th of December)
New Postcolonial Concerns Conference, Cambridge, June 15th 2019:
Reparations to the descendants ... more New Postcolonial Concerns Conference, Cambridge, June 15th 2019:
Reparations to the descendants of slaves have recently spurred debates in mainstream politics: it indeed appeared against the backdrop of the wealth gap existing between black communities and white households, and when historians were able to provide significant evidence of financial compensations received by British slave owners in the Caribbean after the 1834 Slavery Abolition Act was passed. While politicians such as Tony Blair’s refused to apologize for slavery in his 2006 infamous speech, organizations such as CARICOM (Caribbean Committee) sought to reactivate reparations campaigns along the lines of Britain’s agreement of sending 19.9 million pounds to the surviving Kenyans whom the British colonial government tortured during the Mau Mau uprising between 1952 until 1960. In the face of liberal narratives which seek to domesticate radical histories of activism and resistance to buttress white supremacy, reparative history seeks to dismantle such narrative by restoring historical agency. The primary value of such a writing of history lies in the excavation of a memory bolstered by black radicalism, anti-colonial struggles and solidarity. While exploring of the continuities between Euro-American racism, capitalism’s late-style, neo-colonialism and the legacies of imperialism and the slave trade, British –Kittian novelist Caryl Phillips’s work ‘against the undertow of historical ignorance’ (Phillips) foregrounds these politics of resistance in an intertextual dialogue between historical archives and the literary text. By examining how the ethnological orientation of his work responds to the enduring institutional racism and structural violence, this paper will highlight the way in which literary modes of expression such as polyphony or even the use of the Joycean stream of consciousness would rehabilitate the voices of those who were silenced and call for the reader to become what Barthes calls a ‘generator of (new) texts’.
New Voices in Postcolonial Studies Conference, Leeds, June 13th 2019
According to the UN report ... more New Voices in Postcolonial Studies Conference, Leeds, June 13th 2019
According to the UN report on global migration, a 20% increase of international migrants has been entailed by rising instances of conflict and poverty. Fleeing the rising levels of inequality, these migrants are often facing police brutality, deportation or the danger of crossing the Mediterranean Sea on a flimsy embarkation. Le Monde newspaper has recently reported the case of Subsaharian migrants being forcefully expelled from Algeria and abandoned in the desert, on the basis of their race and origins. Such discriminatory attitudes, mainly propelled by the rise of right-wing populist parties’ rhetoric on migrants, and the hollowing out of the middle class from weak wage growth and austerity have fostered a cultural hostility and indifference towards people of different origins. As a response to the government’s willingness to enforce the country’s borders by sending Border Force vessels, and its reluctance to account for the deaths at sea, the ‘Left-To-Die-Boat’ project was launched in 2011 by the Forensic Oceanography project to demand accountability for the deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea while the region was monitored by NATO. The pernicious silence from these institutions are illustrative of the persistence of the coloniality of power (Quijano), which consolidates the principles on which colonial societies operated: race, colour, class. Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River tackles these existing racial orders and injustices by poetic affirmation and a rejuvenating lyricism. Seascapes and soundscapes are authentic literary metaphors and tools calling for a reconsideration of borders, be it physical, mental, or between the self and the other. The novel is also an invitation to listen to the sounds of water where the voices written out of history could be heard. Water is the reservoir of hidden and lost memories: it is pleading to demand accountability for the deaths at sea, it testifies for the voiceless, the unrecorded histories subjected to neglect, it carries the characters’ laments in its bosom. It is precisely in this incremental personification of water, in this anthropologic enterprise of providing agency to an inanimate being, that the process of mental and historical recollection could be fathomed. This paper will explore how the expansion of the reader’s perception and sensibility occurs through reading as an act of re-membering and attentive listening.
Conference 'After Empire?' The Contested Histories of Decolonisation, Migration and Race in Moder... more Conference 'After Empire?' The Contested Histories of Decolonisation, Migration and Race in Modern Britain (University of Leeds, 13th and 14th of December)
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Conference Presentations by Cathie Jayakumar
Reparations to the descendants of slaves have recently spurred debates in mainstream politics: it indeed appeared against the backdrop of the wealth gap existing between black communities and white households, and when historians were able to provide significant evidence of financial compensations received by British slave owners in the Caribbean after the 1834 Slavery Abolition Act was passed. While politicians such as Tony Blair’s refused to apologize for slavery in his 2006 infamous speech, organizations such as CARICOM (Caribbean Committee) sought to reactivate reparations campaigns along the lines of Britain’s agreement of sending 19.9 million pounds to the surviving Kenyans whom the British colonial government tortured during the Mau Mau uprising between 1952 until 1960. In the face of liberal narratives which seek to domesticate radical histories of activism and resistance to buttress white supremacy, reparative history seeks to dismantle such narrative by restoring historical agency. The primary value of such a writing of history lies in the excavation of a memory bolstered by black radicalism, anti-colonial struggles and solidarity. While exploring of the continuities between Euro-American racism, capitalism’s late-style, neo-colonialism and the legacies of imperialism and the slave trade, British –Kittian novelist Caryl Phillips’s work ‘against the undertow of historical ignorance’ (Phillips) foregrounds these politics of resistance in an intertextual dialogue between historical archives and the literary text. By examining how the ethnological orientation of his work responds to the enduring institutional racism and structural violence, this paper will highlight the way in which literary modes of expression such as polyphony or even the use of the Joycean stream of consciousness would rehabilitate the voices of those who were silenced and call for the reader to become what Barthes calls a ‘generator of (new) texts’.
According to the UN report on global migration, a 20% increase of international migrants has been entailed by rising instances of conflict and poverty. Fleeing the rising levels of inequality, these migrants are often facing police brutality, deportation or the danger of crossing the Mediterranean Sea on a flimsy embarkation. Le Monde newspaper has recently reported the case of Subsaharian migrants being forcefully expelled from Algeria and abandoned in the desert, on the basis of their race and origins. Such discriminatory attitudes, mainly propelled by the rise of right-wing populist parties’ rhetoric on migrants, and the hollowing out of the middle class from weak wage growth and austerity have fostered a cultural hostility and indifference towards people of different origins. As a response to the government’s willingness to enforce the country’s borders by sending Border Force vessels, and its reluctance to account for the deaths at sea, the ‘Left-To-Die-Boat’ project was launched in 2011 by the Forensic Oceanography project to demand accountability for the deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea while the region was monitored by NATO. The pernicious silence from these institutions are illustrative of the persistence of the coloniality of power (Quijano), which consolidates the principles on which colonial societies operated: race, colour, class. Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River tackles these existing racial orders and injustices by poetic affirmation and a rejuvenating lyricism. Seascapes and soundscapes are authentic literary metaphors and tools calling for a reconsideration of borders, be it physical, mental, or between the self and the other. The novel is also an invitation to listen to the sounds of water where the voices written out of history could be heard. Water is the reservoir of hidden and lost memories: it is pleading to demand accountability for the deaths at sea, it testifies for the voiceless, the unrecorded histories subjected to neglect, it carries the characters’ laments in its bosom. It is precisely in this incremental personification of water, in this anthropologic enterprise of providing agency to an inanimate being, that the process of mental and historical recollection could be fathomed. This paper will explore how the expansion of the reader’s perception and sensibility occurs through reading as an act of re-membering and attentive listening.
Reparations to the descendants of slaves have recently spurred debates in mainstream politics: it indeed appeared against the backdrop of the wealth gap existing between black communities and white households, and when historians were able to provide significant evidence of financial compensations received by British slave owners in the Caribbean after the 1834 Slavery Abolition Act was passed. While politicians such as Tony Blair’s refused to apologize for slavery in his 2006 infamous speech, organizations such as CARICOM (Caribbean Committee) sought to reactivate reparations campaigns along the lines of Britain’s agreement of sending 19.9 million pounds to the surviving Kenyans whom the British colonial government tortured during the Mau Mau uprising between 1952 until 1960. In the face of liberal narratives which seek to domesticate radical histories of activism and resistance to buttress white supremacy, reparative history seeks to dismantle such narrative by restoring historical agency. The primary value of such a writing of history lies in the excavation of a memory bolstered by black radicalism, anti-colonial struggles and solidarity. While exploring of the continuities between Euro-American racism, capitalism’s late-style, neo-colonialism and the legacies of imperialism and the slave trade, British –Kittian novelist Caryl Phillips’s work ‘against the undertow of historical ignorance’ (Phillips) foregrounds these politics of resistance in an intertextual dialogue between historical archives and the literary text. By examining how the ethnological orientation of his work responds to the enduring institutional racism and structural violence, this paper will highlight the way in which literary modes of expression such as polyphony or even the use of the Joycean stream of consciousness would rehabilitate the voices of those who were silenced and call for the reader to become what Barthes calls a ‘generator of (new) texts’.
According to the UN report on global migration, a 20% increase of international migrants has been entailed by rising instances of conflict and poverty. Fleeing the rising levels of inequality, these migrants are often facing police brutality, deportation or the danger of crossing the Mediterranean Sea on a flimsy embarkation. Le Monde newspaper has recently reported the case of Subsaharian migrants being forcefully expelled from Algeria and abandoned in the desert, on the basis of their race and origins. Such discriminatory attitudes, mainly propelled by the rise of right-wing populist parties’ rhetoric on migrants, and the hollowing out of the middle class from weak wage growth and austerity have fostered a cultural hostility and indifference towards people of different origins. As a response to the government’s willingness to enforce the country’s borders by sending Border Force vessels, and its reluctance to account for the deaths at sea, the ‘Left-To-Die-Boat’ project was launched in 2011 by the Forensic Oceanography project to demand accountability for the deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea while the region was monitored by NATO. The pernicious silence from these institutions are illustrative of the persistence of the coloniality of power (Quijano), which consolidates the principles on which colonial societies operated: race, colour, class. Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River tackles these existing racial orders and injustices by poetic affirmation and a rejuvenating lyricism. Seascapes and soundscapes are authentic literary metaphors and tools calling for a reconsideration of borders, be it physical, mental, or between the self and the other. The novel is also an invitation to listen to the sounds of water where the voices written out of history could be heard. Water is the reservoir of hidden and lost memories: it is pleading to demand accountability for the deaths at sea, it testifies for the voiceless, the unrecorded histories subjected to neglect, it carries the characters’ laments in its bosom. It is precisely in this incremental personification of water, in this anthropologic enterprise of providing agency to an inanimate being, that the process of mental and historical recollection could be fathomed. This paper will explore how the expansion of the reader’s perception and sensibility occurs through reading as an act of re-membering and attentive listening.