Rania Masri's Speech at "Crisis in Gaza and West Bank: Context and Action" Forum

Poetry for Palestine

Nine Butler, The Con

The street is empty

as a monk’s memory,

and faces explode in the flames

like acorns –

and the dead crowd the horizon

and doorways.

No vein can bleed

more than it already has,

no scream will rise

higher than it has already risen.

We will not leave!

-       Exodus, Taha Muhammad Ali

Gaza: Words and Weapons

Richard Pithouse, The Con

Words are the raw materials for building a house. Words are a country.

-       Mahmoud Darwish, Absent Presence

In The Jerusalem Post, articles on Gaza report that Israeli “soldiers” have engaged Palestinian “terrorists” in battle. In our colonial historiography, “soldiers” were often reported to have fought “warriors”. In the 1980s, “soldiers” were reported, much like in Israel today, to have been deployed against “terrorists”. Today, as state murder is increasingly normalised as an acceptable tool of social control in our deeply compromised democracy, the police are, we are often told, at war with “criminals”.

Land-grabber Rhodes still honoured all over SA

Adekeye Adebajo, Business Day

THIS year marks the 110th anniversary of the founding of Rhodes University, which was created with Cecil Rhodes’s wealth and named after him.

It is also the 86th anniversary of the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) relocation to Rhodes’ estate, which he bequeathed to it. Both universities continue to grapple with transformation, even as they largely ignore these lingering historical connections. While many symbols of Afrikaner supremacy have been removed, the legacy of the greatest symbol of British imperialism — Rhodes — remains surprisingly uncontested.

HARDtalk Speaks to Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe

How Colonial India Made Modern Britain

: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain by TigersEye99

Silvia Federici: An Interview on capitalism, colonialism, women and food politics

Silvia Federici: An Interview On capitalism, colonialism, women and food politics by TigersEye99

Paige Arthur: Unfinished Projects Decolonization and the Philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre

Unfinished Projects Decolonization and the Philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre by Ananyo Mukherjee

Pilloried as a 'conchie' after serving in Kenya, I now feel vindicated

The Guardian

I doubt if all the secrets of the Kikuyu uprising will ever be known. Young soldiers were brainwashed into believing they were fighting in Kenya for our glorious empire. Sixty years ago I was there as a 19-year-old national service officer. I am delighted that the government has given some token compensation for Kenyans who suffered torture (Britain's brutal past exposed, 6 June). I still suffer from memories of the British apartheid system there and numerous instances of arbitrary killing and brutality by British forces, Kenya police and Kenyan African Rifles. In reality we protected land-grabbing British farmers and enriched UK companies.

The sun is at last setting on Britain's imperial myth

by Pankaj Mishra, The Guardian

Scuttling away from India in 1947, after plunging the jewel in the crown into a catastrophic partition, "the British", the novelist Paul Scott famously wrote, "came to the end of themselves as they were". The legacy of British rule, and the manner of their departures – civil wars and impoverished nation states locked expensively into antagonism, whether in the Middle East, Africa or the Malay Peninsula – was clearer by the time Scott completed his Raj Quartet in the early 1970s. No more, he believed, could the British allow themselves any soothing illusions about the basis and consequences of their power.

Settler Colonialism: Then and Now, A lecture by Mahmood Mamdani

Counter Power and Colonial Rule in the Eighteenth Century Cape of Good Hope: Belongings and Protest of the Labouring Poor.

by Nicole Ulrich, 2011

Framed by an anarchist reading of Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s The

Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the

Revolutionary Atlantic (2000), this study examines the dynamic nature of colonial and

class rule in the eighteenth-century Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa, and the

forms of belonging and traditions of political protest developed by the labouring poor.

This study draws on archival material from national and international repositories,

focusing on government records, criminal court trials, and travellers’ accounts.

Colonial rule, the under-class, and resistance in the Cape are located in a global

context, with special attention being paid to changes associated with the ‘Age of

Revolution and War’ and rise of the modern world. Breaking with the tendency to

treat different sections of the motley (many-hued) labouring poor in the Cape as

discreet, often racially defined, and nationally bounded population groups, segmented

also by legal status, this study provides a comprehensive study of labour in the Cape

that includes an examination of slaves, servants, sailors, and soldiers recruited, or

imported from, Asia, Europe, and other parts of Africa.

‘Crafting epicentres of agency’: Sarah Bartmann and African feminist literary imaginings

by Pumla Dineo Gqola, 2008

Abstract. ‘Crafting epicentres of agency’: Sarah Bartmann and African

feminist literary imaginings. The story of Sarah Bartmann has been one of

the fascinations of academic writing on ‘race’, feminism and poststructuralism in the late twentieth and early twentieth-first century. An enslaved Khoi woman, she was transported to Europe where she was displayed for the amusement, and later scientific inquisitiveness of various public and private collectives in London and Paris. Her paradoxical hypervisibility has meant that although volumes have been written about her, very little is recoverable from these records about her subjectivity. In this paper I am less interested in tracing and engaging with some of the debates engendered by this paradox and difficulty more broadly. Rather, I want to read and analyse how African feminist literary projects have approached Bartmann’s absent presence. My paper then tasks itself with exploring the possibility of writing about Sarah Bartmann in ways unlike those traditions of knowledge-making that dubbed her ‘the Hottentot Venus’. It analyzes a variety of texts that position themselves in relation to her as a way of arriving at an African feminist creative and literary engagement with histories which fix representations of African women’s bodies, via Bartmann in colonialist epistemes.

John Locke: The Philosopher of Primitive Accumlation

by George Caffentzis, Bristol Radical History Group, 2008

John Locke is the most famous philosopher born and raised in the vicinity of Bristol. He born in Wrington, Somerset about 12 miles from Bristol on August 29, 1632 and he was brought up in the market town of Pensford, about seven miles south of Bristol.

Locke is also not only the main intellectual founder of liberalism, but also of neoliberalism, the “ruling idea” of the ruling class of today.

What is a tribe?

by Mahmood Mamdani, London Review of Books

A new form of colonialism was born in the second half of the 19th century, largely in response to the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Of its many theorists by far the most influential was Henry Maine, a brilliant historian of jurisprudence, barrister, journalist, colonial civil servant and eventually master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Maine made an eloquent case for the historicity and agency of the colonised, as part of an attempt to reconstitute the colonial project on a more durable basis. In doing so, he distinguished the West from the non-West, universal civilisation from local custom and, crucially, the settler from the native, thereby laying the groundwork for a theory of nativism. If the settler was modern, the native was not; if the settler was defined by history, the native was defined by geography; if modern polities were defined by legislation and sanction, those of the native were defined by habitual observance.

Hlonipha Mokoena: 'Zuluness on trial'

The Prose of Counter-Insurgency

by Ranajit Guha, 1983

When a peasant rose in revolt at any time or place under the Raj, he did so necessarily and explicitly in violation of a series of codes which defined his very existence as a member of that colonial, and still largely semi-feudal society. For his subalternity was materialized by the structure of property, institutionalized by law, sanctified by religion and made tolerable-and even desirable-by tradition. To rebel was indeed to destroy many of those familiar signs which he had learned to read and manipulate in order to extract a meaning out of the harsh world around him and live with it. The risk in 'turning things upside down' under these conditions was indeed so great that he could hardly afford to engage in such a project in a state of
absent-rnindedness.

Partha Chatterjee: The Black Hole of Empire

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; 'Narratives for Europe'

Nelson Maldonado-Torres on Fanon