Sandeep Bakshi

🙏

How many times am I allowed to swoon for being invited to join the advisory board of a journal whose editorial director is *the* Jennifer C. Nash and past directors include outstanding feminist scholars?
I feel so humbled.

Absolutely. We need to decolonise decolonisation itself and interrogate the frameworks, the gatekeeping, and who gets to speak for the South.

It is such a rare instance! Kalmoucia is an amazing person.

From 2022 -

Epistemologies of the South without the South is not the decolonial option, it's the careerist option that several academics have been defaulting to in our era of decolonise-all.
Citational prevalence from the South is an ace start.

PS: There are pockets of global South in North.

All details here. It is amazing that this community event will be a reality. Folks connected in anticolonial struggles will deliver their testimonies. So looking forward to it.

Absolutely invaluable clip of Kalmoucia who fought alongside Amilcar Cabral for decolonisation of Guinée Bissau. With French subtitles.
Kalmoucia will intervene via video on 13th Sep for the event planned on Cabral. See next post. Can’t believe my luck that I’m involved in such an important event.

Me posing with the new bookshelf

Me another pose to the side of the bookshelf

View of the durry and the bookshelf

The new shelves are in. The durry is over a century old. The imprint of the British factory in Calcutta faded. It’s a relic from another age.
I’m sporting the uber straight boy look - only canonical nothing queer about the contents of shelves either 😂

#postcolonialstudies #genderstudies #bookmark

Book cover Claudia Rankine, *Just Us*

Back cover of *Just Us* A TLS, FINANCIAL TIMES, NEW STATESMAN, GUARDIAN AND OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR 'One of our time's most incisive, brilliant and necessary intellectuals ... Just Us challenges binary thought to such a degree as to break the world (and the reader) open in new ways SEÁN HEWITT, IRISH TIMES Photogrophy: John Lucas Cover design: Tom Etherington 'Timely and powerful... pierces the abstraction of whiteness as Rankine confronts it in real, fraught physical spaces - airports, schools and suburban neighbourhoods - by asking simple, devastating questions FATIMA BHUTTO, FINANCIAL TIMES 'Rankine is a writer of genius ... Read each exacting page as closely as a poem, and it will read you' JEREMY NOEL-TOD, SUNDAY TIMES 'Brilliant' GARY YOUNGE, NEW STATESMAN, BOOKS OF THE YEAR A skyscraper in the literature on racism'

Reading in progress

Difficult to describe this viral picture of white Hollywood stars seated for dinner.

Berlin conference 21st century:
Diversity, sexuality, feminism …
Yay!

Thank you for listening to my ramble.

My partner tells me I don’t speak the same English when I’m in the UK and when I’m in France. I kind of make it easier for non-anglophones I suppose. I don’t know.

It’s ridiculously jarring to ‘have a home’ in France and ‘be at home’ in Britain (for me, read as a PoC).
Is it the saturation with white French uncivilised, uncouth folks with their in-your-face racism or my colonial hangover? Can’t seem to place my finger on it.

I like London for its bookshops :-)

Manzu Islam sipping mint tea

Hastings Street in Bloomsbury

Manzu and I sitting in a café

With the author-friend Manzu Islam. Manzu’s laughing because we’ve just realised that we have Hastings in common. The street is Hastings street!

Red brick building

Those who know know where I am. Let’s just say it’s London being London. I’ve had to wear a sweatshirt. Summer whatever!

Sara Ahmed makes a similar point of becoming a feminist killjoy 'broken record' and finding connection in our discomfort. And that no, we aren't willing to 'move on' or 'get on with life' as we encounter ongoing iterations of injustice distributed by heteropatriarchy or revisit past grievances. 2/2

A thought that stuck w/ me from our 6hr-long conversation(!) is our relation to what we perceive as injustice in our SA family set up. Moon discusses it at length in her book (plugging intro here, www.dukeupress.edu/archive-of-t...). We shared stories of the rough deal served to our mothers. 1/2

Moon Charania and myself sitting at a table.

Love the generosity of Moon Charania, an excellent queer studies & feminist scholar. Learn so much about our South Asian communities, our complicities in structures of power. We relished the food at Faubourg Daimant in the 10th district in Paris.
Lovely summer day today.

#postcolonialstudies #genderstudies #bookmark

This is a matter of life and death. Please do not stop sharing or donating.
linktr.ee/thesameerpro...

Focus on cover of book titled I Phoolan Devi on a shelf of feminist books

Shelf with various books on feminism

Insurgent feminist Phoolan Devi (1963-2001) was assassinated today in 2001 in Delhi. Phoolan Devi, a Dalit feminist icon, resisted the compounded violence of caste oppression and patriarchy. She was an acting MP at the time of her murder.
My feminism shelf holds her in high esteem.

Tamale's book is essential. Get it!!

darajapress.com/publication/...

a rough translation of the final sentence: “Since AFP was founded in August 1944 we’ve lost journalists in conflicts, and have had wounded and imprisoned co-workers, but none of us have any memory of having to watch a colleague die of hunger.”

This is a worrying trend on the increase across global north universities. I received my PhD studentship by directly applying to the AHRC as well. It wasn’t a great idea to delegate AHRC funds to universities and organisations who dictate types of research in several cases.

God grant me half the confidence of the mediocre white men telling the first black woman elected to parliament she doesn’t understand racism in Britain.

Yay! Caster Semenya’s victory shines in our bleak times.

Plugging one of the best analyses by Sylvia Tamale (2020) of how the global racialised sex/gender/sexuality system suffocates us all (ch.4). Tamale contrasts the differential response to Phelps and Semenya. Highly recommend it.