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Showing posts with the label “anti-colonial struggle”

Rejecting the Conversation Between the Sword and the Neck

“The  written record of Israel’s cut-and-paste  Nakba  policies on the Palestinian people is longer and deeper than the past five days. Operation Al-Aqsa Flood is not a momentary or one-off attack: it is the latest stage of an anti-colonial struggle for self-determination. Expectedly, the immediate reaction to these words from Western academia, human rights groups and funding organizations will be to demand a condemnation of the killing of Israeli civilians, women and children, by Palestinian fighters in the uprising. In our respective spaces, Palestinians, activists, students, scholars, artists and human rights defenders alike, will again be asked to declare their opposition to violent resistance, and the direct targeting of Israeli civilians and civilian institutions. By extension, the friends of Palestinians and voices of solidarity will be asked to tell an occupied people how to resist their oppressors, and dictate acceptable methods for their liberation movement.”

The New Algerian Revolution as a Fanon Moment

“[Frantz]  Fanon urged us to invent and make new discoveries and not blindly imitate Europe. The struggle of decolonisation, Fanon tells us, must challenge the dominance of European culture and its claims of universalism without being trapped in a romanticized and fixed past. It is these two alienations that colonised people must overcome in their cultural struggle. Decolonising the mind also means deconstructing Western notions of ‘development’, ‘civilisation’, ‘progress’, ‘universalism’ and ‘modernity’. Such concepts represent what is called a  coloniality of power and knowledge , which means that ideas of ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’ were conceived in Europe and North America and then implanted in our continents (Africa, Asia and Latin America) in a context of coloniality (Mignolo, 2012). These Eurocentric ideas and culture have reinforced the colonial heritage of land confiscations, resource plunder, as well as domination of ‘other’ peoples in order to ‘civilise’ them.” Gene...

Ten Days in Harlem

“We have driven Cuba inch by inch into alliance with the Soviet,’ Norman Mailer wrote, ‘as deliberately and insanely as a man setting out to cuckold himself.’ Castro never wanted to be beholden to the Soviets. He had downplayed the role of the local Communist Party (Partido Socialista Popular) in preparing the ground for his own revolution. But there were only so many options for a single-crop economy of seven million people ninety miles from the Florida coast.”  Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s