Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

A book review Warning: it is a long review, but scathing “Why, after all, is there so little to be found in  PDCI [ The Politics of Decolonial Investigations ]   — and generally throughout the decolonial screeds of Mignolo — concerning the specifics of colonialism itself, its material basis and conditions, not to mention the actual, practically inexhaustible details of its historiography, anti-colonial movements proving no exception to this rule? Whatever the deeper reasons for it, this factual deficit is crucial to the critique and critical decipherment of the jargon of decoloniality — almost as if its terminological extravagances and redundancies and its flat-out rhetorical hubris were ironic compensation for an underlying historical vacuum. Part of the answer will no doubt also reflect the typically contemporary and cosmopolitan purview of more vernacular calls to “decolonize.” While, as a slogan, the latter does not necessarily ignore the historical impact of colonialism o...

“ The paradox of the Egyptian left is not by any means unique. The gradual sidelining of class by identity conflicts in national politics has been part of a global trend, or what I describe in  Classless Politics  as ‘ more identity, less class’.” —Hesham Sallam, 2022 The root of it – although Sallam does not mention this is the theoretical dependence on the Stalinist approach to change and the ‘national bourgeoisie’ – was “ the communists’ capitulation to Abdel-Nasser in 1965.” That “would shape the left’s political fortunes for decades. More immediately, it meant that as the era of  infitah  commenced, the left was in disarray, lacking the leadership to unify the dispersed (albeit troublingly loud) opposition to Sadat’s right-wing administration.” “The legacies of Islamist incorporation (and their role in centering battles over the religious identity of the state) steered many sectors of the left, as epitomized by Al-Tagammu, toward culture wars and away from...

A military operation “ was described in Paris as in Tel Aviv as a terrorist attack. This parallel reveals the differing ethnic perceptions of bodily suffering, legitimate violence and the right to resistance, depending on whether people are assimilated to the West or not.” Condemning violence to legitimise one’s own

The pandemic may have subsided, but the epidemic of ‘identity culture’ carries on. Reactionary nationalism is openly expressed in comments

Thirty-three years after the fall of the Berlin wall, bloc-thinking is back. The democratic “West” against the authoritarian “East”. Authoritarian alliances in the “West” recede into the backdrop, critique of liberal democracy’s chronic shadows grow silent. States recently accused of threatening democracy and the rule of law are embraced. They belong once again to the democratic “We”. With the war in Ukraine, authoritarianism in the “West” is externalized to the Putin regime. But authoritarian populism has been growing in Europe for a long time in the midst of liberal democracy, in states that claim to be illiberal, but not only there. The pandemic has intensified this neoliberal-authoritarian transformation. When uncertainties increase and bring about the compulsion to control, all sides take recourse to identitarianisms, as if there had never been a critique of it. If we want to understand democracy in a fundamentally different way — without the nation, without the people, without bl...

An invasion that has little to offer to Ukrainians, Russians and the world

How French politics has ended up being a politics of culture. Excerpts from Daniel Zamora’s article on Catalyst The shift is due to the long-term decline, beginning in the early 1980s, of class politics and alternatives to capitalism. In a post-ideological France, class struggle has been displaced onto the terrain of identity. Politicians, media commentators, and scholars from both left and right all seem to agree that the French political debate has been contaminated… What they’ve been labeling ‘Americanization’ is a certain kind of identity politics they believe is threatening French republicanism.  Despite Macron’s professed disdain for identity politics, his alternative can scarcely be construed as anti-identitarian. To understand this state of affairs, we need to look at the recent history of identity in France, a history that begins not with woke concepts colonizing French universities but rather with the long-term decline, beginning in the early 1980s, of class politics and ...

Beaud and Noiriel have no problem with the concept of race. They merely feel that it must remain in its proper place and be dealt with only as a  “variable or special case, understood as part of a broader scientific problem”  (p. 192). We are in complete disagreement with this, but we do agree with the authors when they assert that there is no such thing as pure racism, independent of inter-class domination. But this is also true of class relations, which never exclude racial or gender domination, which inclines us to  “conceive both the irreducibility of the racial question and its inextricable link with relations of class and gender.” Now while race and class are closely associated, the injustices and wrongs suffered by racial minorities can nonetheless not be reduced to class relations, to capitalist domination. To reduce everything to class locks us into an interpretive framework which is both Eurocentric and economistic (precisely the one used in Race et science...

This is good! “Most critics are hardly capable of identifying the major problems of identity politics: firstly, its widespread disregard for the importance of intersectionality, knowledge and expertise (that is independent of the respective identity) and secondly, the lack of a critique of capitalist structures and socio-economic inequalities (beyond specific identities), which, in turn, prevents a comprehensive understanding of discrimination, oppression, exploitation and emancipation.” The poverty of mainstream universalism and exclusive identity politics

You should be able to access this article when you type  “Universities challenged FT” on google search rather than through the FT website. Universities Challenged