Culture and Decolonization

A revised and extended version of this blog has been published as a position paper in the journal Critical Literacy. To access the article, go to: http://www.academia.edu/2966954/Humanitarian_Relations_Emotion_and_the_Limits_of_Critique

As we enter the holiday season, the seasonal plethora of appeals to aid “needy Africa” has begun. Wandering around the campus of UBC Okanagan, and indeed the shopping plazas of Kelowna, there are posters for UBC’s Global Gala with the clichéd image of a stoic African child looking up, and the logo of a stethoscope encircling Africa, the diaphragm on the “heart” of the continent, depicting how Africa and its people as ill, and we can cure them. What are we to make of this imagery? What does it mean to depict an entire continent as ill? What does it mean to assume that we are healers? We are invited to attend the gala, where we will get a three course meal, and dance to live entertainment with the proceeds of our ticket going to the purchase of health care supplies, which nursing students will take to Ghana and Zambia. But, why is it that a clinical practicum experience for nursing students – where they will be mentored by Ghanaian and Zambia health professionals – must be presented to us in the terms of “us” helping a needy “them”?

At this time of year, there are lots of ads on TV and websites inviting us “make a difference”, “save a life”, be the change by collecting our loose change, and buy goats for needy farmers in the Global South rather than stuff for ourselves. Soon, though thankfully I have yet to hear it, Band Aid’s “Do They Know its Christmas” written to raise awareness of famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s will be played every hour or so on most commercial radio stations. In the song, the particular situation of a food crisis in Ethiopia was dehistoricized and depoliticized as a natural and normal disaster and Ethiopia became all of Africa. Now, nearly 30 years later, the context of the song is even more distant. The song’s lyrics, then, seem even more degrading and culturally insensitive than they did at the time it was first performed: There’s a world outside your window / and it’s a world of dreaded fear; there won’t be any snow in Africa this Christmas; Where nothing ever grows, or rain or rivers flow; feed the world, let them know its Christmas time. Why is it that this song is still played, and still heard as benevolent and warm?

In this context of another holiday season and the repeated inane question of whether Africa knows it is Christmas, it is particularly refreshing (not too mention entertaining) to watch and listen to “Africa for Norway”, the Radi-Aid song to save Norwegians from frostbite. The video has a group of African artists singing to raise awareness of the plight of suffering Norwegians and collect radiators to be sent to that northern country to spread some warmth, light, and smiles, as Breezy V, the leader of the initiative explains in the video. Of course, the video is a satire, seeking to denaturalize the stereotypically degrading images of Africa that are so “natural” in the pop culture of Norway and Canada too. By turning the tables (to draw on the lyrics of the song), and showing how simplistic and inaccurate the “African” depiction of Norway is, folks in Norway, and in the West more generally, are to make the connection that maybe our representations of “Africa” are similarly simplistic and inaccurate.

When you get beyond the video and check out the website, the satire, and its lesson are made overt. “What if this video was the only information they got about Norway. What would they think about Norway?”  The collective “we” is invoked for the initiative, demanding change: The changes identified in the ‘What do we want?’ section of the site include: an end to the exploitation of stereotypes for humanitarian fundraising; better information about what is going on in the world; that the media show more respect when it portrays Africa; and that aid must be based on needs not good intentions.

While we don’t get any meaningful information on the organizers of the spoof, the site doesn’t hide the fact that it is actually the project of The Norwegian Students’ and Academics’ International Assistance Fund (SAIH), in collaboration with a number of other Norwegian development agencies. While the music for the song was written by South African musician, Wathiq Hoosain, the lyrics were written by a (white) Norwegian country band, called Bretton Woods. No mention is made of any collaboration with “African” organizations. (Indeed, apart from the work of South African comedian Trevor Noah, who spoofs UNICEF ads, the inspirations for the video are all European). It would seem that Breezy V is not the leader of the initiative, and indeed he may not be an “African” rapper at all. (A google search turned up nothing for ‘Breezy V’, though there is a hip hop artist called V Breezy, from Alabama, in the USA). From what I can gather from the SAIH website (thanks to google translation to English) the organization has its roots in anti-apartheid organizing within the Norwegian academy and it describes its work as solidarity and development. It works primarily in the area of education, providing assistance and support to projects in Bolivia, Nicaragua, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. While the politics of the organization seem a little more radical than the typical humanitarian agency in Canada (in that they have campaigned against the exploitative practices of Norwegian natural resources companies in the Western Sahara, for instance) the work of the agency seems primarily focused on providing “assistance” to people in the Global South.

I must say, that it was with some disappointment that I realized this video was made in Norway, by Norwegians. Why was I disappointed? Based on how the project is described and explained on the website, it seems to function within the tradition of white/European/Western humanitarians speaking of and for the other. Today, it’s a bit more rare for white folks to literally take the voice of Africans and present it as an African voice, so I hope I’m getting it wrong, and that the credits on the website mask an actual collaboration with the folks in the video, rather than those black bodies simply being actors, performing roles created by and for white folks (again). Knowing that this is the project of a Western “international assistance” organization, I reread the video and wonder just how effective it can be in troubling the stereotypes of Africa, and to what extent it limits the problem to that of misrepresentations. The tables are turned, but only within the logic of Euro-centric constructions of Africa as a homogeneous place, without distinct nations or communities. It is, after all, “Africa for Norway”.

As the examples I refer to in the opening of this piece attest, the work of identifying and challenging negative stereotypes and misrepresentations of Africa is essential, and so my purpose here is not to criticize the Radi-Aid project so much as query its limits. Does this satire go much deeper than clichéd and demeaning representations of Africa and, perhaps the ineffectiveness and silly logic of some forms of aid (Africans sending radiators to Norway)? For instance, how are we to read the lines: “Here in Africa we’ve had our problems too / with poverty, corruption, HIV and crime / Norway gave a helping hand / they taught us what to do / and now it’s payback time.” Do these lines satirize the idea that Norway has given a helping hand, or, ultimately, do they affirm that idea, to some extent, as the focus of the satire is on the simplistic way in which Norway is represented in the video? Do these lyrics satirize the idea that Norwegians teach Africans what to do, or affirm the idea that Norway continues to need to provide such educational assistance, but in ways that are not so demeaning? And by extension, as a reader in Canada, does enjoying the satire of this video appeal to us to investigate the irony of our desire to “help” and “teach” and “care” for unfortunate others?  Does it even trouble the collective pronoun “we” for the way that “we” is often not actually collective or inclusive, and – in Canada – it reflects a history of settlement-invasion, wherein “we” are a product of colonial violence (here, and elsewhere)? How are we to interpret pay-back? Are we to see the need to understand our role not as charitable givers but people who have an obligation to redress injustice? Or, does the satire mainly allow us just to see that images of Africans in aid appeals are degrading, and maybe we should seek more positive and complex images of Africans?

Importantly, the initiative seems to want to go beyond the problem of negative or positive images of the Global South (check out Lilie Chouliaraki’s work on this). The “We” of the Radi-Aid project wants not only to know more about the “positive developments” in Africa but wants “more attention on how western countries have a negative impact on developing countries”. How effective can this satire be, if the video (its imagery and lyrics) do not so much as hint at what these negative impacts might be, never mind the western actions that could possibly cause poverty and suffering? The project challenges the “shorthand” of humanitarian development discourse – the stoic child looking up at the benevolent saviour (that would be you, the viewer of the poster) and the idea that Africa is (only) a place of poverty, corruption, HIV and crime, – but it’s suggestion that the policies and practices of Western governments might have had some negative impacts is relegated to a line in a list of demands; it remains at the level of a phrase that I’m not sure can function as a “shorthand” for the typical viewer in Canada, and I suspect in Norway as well.

What sort of negative impacts do “Western countries” have on the peoples, communities, and countries of Africa? How are those negative impacts linked to why we are in the position to provide the assistance and aid (i.e. our “wealth”).  Here is a beginning to such a list:

• Many OECD states (that’s Canada and the other rich nations) subsidize agriculture in a way that makes the produce of farmers in Africa and elsewhere less competitive; for instance subsidies for beet sugar farmers in Europe that impact what Africans can get for cane sugar
• The OECD states dump surplus grains and other agricultural products (like powdered milk) into economies in the Global South, putting producers of food products (like dairy farmers) out of business.
• Trade and tariff policies in the OECD put African products at a disadvantage;
• Debt – while the Make Poverty History and Jubilee campaigns made this a priority, for a short while, the so-called Western “forgiveness” of the debt of countries in the Global South did not go far enough, and much “aid” continues to take the form of loans that need to be “paid back” with interest.
• The industrialization of agriculture and the science of food mean that small-scale farmers in India and Malawi and elsewhere need to buy corporate seeds that require petroleum-based fertilizer and hence require loans and debt. Farmer suicide is a growing problem, producing enormous hardship.
• The military weapons used in African wars are not made in Africa.
• Folks like me expect the pleasure we get from coffee, cocoa, bananas, and computers, all of which require cheap (sometimes free/slave) labour and violent working conditions for people in the mines of Congo, the cocoa fields of Cote d’Ivoire, and the factories of China
• “Aid” and “Assistance” are often a huge part of the problem, creating or exacerbating injustice and inequality (what would it mean to use these terms instead of “poverty”?). For instance, IMF/World Bank structural adjustment plans, large scale development projects, or building schools in places where A) there is no budget for teachers, materials or upkeep, and B) few prospects for those receiving a formal education)
• colonialism – not as a word meant to invoke white “guilt” but an ongoing system that created export-driven, resource-based, primarily single-commodity economies designed to “develop” Europe; not to mention a system that affirmed white folks as humanitarians, with the best of intentions, seeking to aid, educate, uplift, and civilize those awaiting entrance into modernity

Radi-Aid largely repeats the similar spoof, HelpSweden, which appeals to people to A) question demeaning stereotypes of Africa but also to provide more and better aid to Africa; the problem is still understood primarily as Africa’s lack and misfortune and the solution is the Millennium Development Goals not meaningful transformation of the dominant global economic and political order. The Band Aid mentality is certainly a problem. But the problem isn’t only simplistic, homogenizing, and degrading representations of Africa – and I sense that’s as far as this satire dares to go. Rather, we need to do the hard, complex, and fraught work of understanding how humanitarianism serves as a structure of attitude and reference – a way we think about the world and our place in it. As long as we conceive of solidarity with those who suffer as enacting assistance and aid, we don’t question the inequality of our social positions. Our perceptions need to change, but we can’t divorce perception from position. How can we challenge or end the sort of stereotypes Radi-Aid is directed towards without also challenging and doing away with aid and assistance, as material practices and the primary lens through which we understand global problems?

Check out this zine, produced on Prezi, by a group of graduate and undergraduate students. The zine explores the idea of global citizenship from a range of perspectives and through a variety of creative and critical modes, from puppet shows, to essays (both academic and personal), to poetry…

http://prezi.com/woyrsubposcj/rethinking-global-citizenship-from-here/

Here is my contribution to the zine:

October 2 marks the anniversary of the birth of Mohandas Gandhi (1869) and the International Day of Non-Violence, one of the lesser known United Nation’s observances; indeed, the United Nations Association in Canada does not even recognize it as a UN day. Established in 2007, the UN resolution for the International Day of Non-Violence calls for the dissemination of the message of non-violence through education and public awareness and affirms “the universal relevance of the principle of non-violence” and the desire “to secure a culture of peace, tolerance, understanding and non-violence”. While the International Day for Peace (September 21) often gets some meager recognition in Canada, nonviolence is not likely to be taught and celebrated, for nonviolence, as Malvina Reynolds proclaims, “isn’t nice”. In her song of that title, she sings: “It isn’t nice to block the doorway,/It isn’t nice to go to jail,/There are nicer ways to do it,/But the nice ways always fail.”

Nonviolent direct action isn’t “nice”.  It requires getting in the way of the status quo, to make the injustice of the status quo more visible – or at least visible to those who cannot or will not normally see it. It requires refusing to consent to and support unjust systems. It often involves imagining and enacting alternative social processes and practices that tend to make people with power and privilege anxious. As a value system, it challenges the basic presumptions and practices of a consumer-capitalist society and the military-industrial-education complex (and, hopefully, colonialism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and heteronormativity, too, but often not). It requires time, risk and sacrifice, commitment and patience, and not just good thoughts and a progressive attitude.

On this October 2, 2011, activists “occupy” a park on Wall Street in New York City, and others are gathered in solidarity in other U.S. cities, not so much to demand that the “powers that be” make any particular changes but to offer an alternative order, as Nathan Schneider writes, by living it: participatory democracy, sharing knowledge rather than owning it, etc. (Although Jessica Yee notes that this alternative order, like the existing one, enacts anew the ongoing colonial occupation of Manhattan). Last Monday, September 26, hundreds gathered at Parliament Hill in Ottawa to protest the Alberta Tar Sands and the proposed oil pipeline to the United States, which will feed the continued use of the automobile and the destruction of the environment, among other forms of harm. Wave after wave of activists crossed the police lines; over 200 people were arrested. Significantly, this action was conducted in a way that acknowledged, and sought to honour, that the civil disobedience was occurring as a solidarity action between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people on occupied Algonquin territory (aka, Ottawa), and that the Tar Sands “development” is not only an environmental crime but an act of ongoing colonialism. In August, more than 1000 were arrested for performing civil disobedience at the White House, in Washington D.C., protesting the same pipeline. On September 26, clerics in Bahrain staged a sit-in to protest the arrest of dozens of women for demonstrating against the government. In Syria, activists continue to be largely committed to nonviolence in the struggle to depose the Assad regime, at the very least, and perhaps foster a new social order. There, protestors have taken to the streets week after week, with thousands killed and arrested; yet, for the most part, they have not taken up weapons in their struggle. Their will and persistence is their weapon.

Unlike the nonviolent revolution in Egypt, which was broadcast live on television earlier this year, the work of the protestors in Syria has not become a media spectacle in North America. While Gandhi by no means invented civil disobedience and nonviolent action as a mode of struggle, the 1930 Satyagraha Namak (or Salt March), which he initiated, was remarkable not just for the way in which it disturbed the British colonial order but for the way it utilized the media to illuminate an injustice. The “political theatre” of the long march to Dandi beach and the dramatic newspaper reports of the satyagrahi being mercilessly beaten has become a significant model of nonviolent action; a spectacle produced for dissemination through the media. The mainstream corporate media, however, is not a dependable source of dissemination. Indeed, in Canada the mainstream media typically seems to search for acts of physical violence at protests, and key on them, ignoring modes of nonviolent action and more importantly the issues those actions seek to illuminate – as the coverage of the G8 protests in Toronto attests. This, and increasing access to other modes of media (i.e. alternative online media, online social networks, youtube, etc), has increased the desire and need for activists to disseminate their own images and stories of their action.

Although she advocates for nonviolent action in much of her writing, Arundhati Roy contends that in order for it to be effective, it “has to be carried out in the public eye, in front of TV cameras, and for demands – like ‘anti-corruption’– which appeal to the sympathies of the middle class… If you follow what happened over the last three summers in Kashmir, for example, when tens of thousands of unarmed people faced down Indian security forces with as much courage and determination as the people of Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and Yemen, you can’t help but wonder why the Western media switches on the lights to cover some uprisings, and blacks out others.” As legitimate as this concern is – we must heed Roy’s advice to be wary of what the mainstream media chooses to describe and how – nonviolence is not only a spectacle produced for the camera. As Roy, herself, notes of the Satyagraha Namak, the action was not only symbolic: the people made salt, they used that salt, and they refused to pay tax on it. Most examples of nonviolent direct action do not enact such disobedience so specifically; sit ins, fasts, etc., tend to be symbolic rather than acts contravening unjust laws and policies.

As much as nonviolent direct action is necessarily a spectacle produced for the media, part of that spectacle, and exceeding it, is the spirit of nonviolence. It is a mode of conflict that does not figure the adversary as an opponent to be conquered or destroyed. The practitioner of nonviolence risks injury to themselves but refuses to physically injure others. Although there may not be any instantaneously iconic images of the Syrian nonviolent struggle, at least in the coverage of the North American networks and news channels – as there were of Tahrir Square in Cairo – the spirit of nonviolence produces affects, there. Those who take to the streets are not focused on an audience in Europe and North America but in Syria, itself, as they seek change from within rather than foreign intervention.  In June, and perhaps at many other moments during this now months-long struggle, in response to the committed nonviolence of demonstrators, soldiers refused to shoot and the expectation that the military take up arms against its own people has created divisions and dissension within the military. This is the impact of the spirit of nonviolence.

The constant stream of stories in mainstream media of nonviolent direct action this year has been inspiring, but it is true that many of the stories that have made the lead, and that have been presented somewhat favourably, are stories of citizens with status – in the Ottawa action, Maude Barlow and union leaders – who have undertaken civil disobedience. One wonders how this story would have been covered, or if it had been covered, had these participants not been involved. There are a myriad of un- or under-reported stories of landless peasants making their homes on land “owned” by others, farmers saving seeds in resistance to corporate monopolies, and people refusing to give up their homes to be bull-dozed for dam reservoirs, industrial developments, or new “settlements.” In some cases these struggles use civil disobedience simply as a tactic; they haven’t the means for military struggle or direct action provides an effective way to raise awareness of injustice. For others, noncooperation and civil disobedience are one mode in a larger project informed by the values of nonviolence.

Sources accessible via embedded links.

Some sources on nonviolent direct action:

International Centre for Nonviolent Conflict – (check out their news digest)

Waging Nonviolence: People Powered News and Analysis

(Transcript from a talk entitled “Stereotypes of Africa,” presented as part of African Awareness Week on the Okanagan campus of UBC, February 28, 2011)

Zikomo kwambiri amai ndi abambo chifukwa chakubwera kwanu.
Ndzina langa Davide. Ndinapita ku Malawi 1997-8. Ndinagwira nchito mphunzitsi ku Nkhotakota Secondary
Ndinakuziwa Chichewa pang’ono pang’ono.

I lived in Malawi for two years in the late 1990s. I taught English in a government secondary school. I lived in a house. I talked with friends while seated on their couch. I bought fresh beans and mkwani and tomatoes in the market. I came to see myself as part of a continuing past.

I have lived in Malawi, but I am not African, and so I am somewhat uncomfortable providing this welcome and opening. Once again, people like me, white folks, represent Africa. I want to share some critical perspectives on the “idea” of Africa that have influenced me to question my own assumptions and biases and informed my decision to take up research that seeks to expose, and hopefully undermine, colonialism and imperialism as ongoing material and cultural projects. In part, this week of events seeks to challenge the stereotypes of Africa that continue to be so prevalent on this campus and in this community. As a non-African I do not seek to speak for Africa, or even to speak about it – for instance, to celebrate the diversity of African cultures; that will happen in other events. Rather, I seek to take up the responsibility that I think non-Africans have to challenge our role in perpetuating stereotypes of Africa. When I am asked to speak at events like this, I typically just try to speak – to riff on point-form notes, but today I will primarily read, because most of these words are not mine. I utter the words of a number of African writers today not to appropriate their ideas – to present them as mine – but to bring forth from my tongue words that help me to understand my relationship, as a non-African, to Africa.

When I lived in Malawi, often, children would greet me, on my way. They would say hello, or ask me for one kwacha, say “How are you?” or ask my name. A few times, children called to me: What’s my name? What’s my name? I didn’t know their names. It was kind of awkward.

I suspect you know this name: Chinua Achebe.

Chinua Achebe tells a story of a German judge who had accepted a position as constitutional consultant to the Namibian government. He was given a copy of Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart, and read it on the flight. After reading it, the judge was no more innocent – that is ignorant – and so decided not to take the position.  Achebe asks: “How was it that this prominent German jurist carried such a blindspot about Africa all his life? Why did this novel have such a profound effect upon him? My own theory,” Achebe writes, “is that he needed to hear Africa speak for itself after a lifetime of hearing Africa spoken about by others” (53).

Chinua Achebe

A child, standing among the cassava mounds, at the side of the road, asks: “What’s my name?”

Do you know the name Binyavanga Wainaina?

Binyavanga Wainaina wrote a “How to” manual for non-Africans who want to write about Africa.

He counsels:
“Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘Sky’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Drum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’. Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’. Note that ‘People’ means Africans who are not black, while ‘The People’ means black Africans.

“Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these.

“In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country…. [Actually] Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.”

Binyavanga Wainaina

Another child, a different child, says, once I have passed by down the road, “What’s my name?”

Do you know Chimamanda Adichie?

She says: “When I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading. All my characters were white and blue-eyed. They played in the snow. They ate apples. (Laughter) And they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. (Laughter) Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn’t have snow. We ate mangoes. And we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.”

“I was 19. My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listen to what she called my “tribal music,” and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey. (Laughter) She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove.

“What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning, pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa. A single story of catastrophe. In this single story there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her, in any way. No possibility of feelings more complex than pity. No possibility of a connection as human equals.”

Chimamanda Adichie

From a UBC Okanagan media release: Nursing Students invited the public to join in song in support of needy women in Ghana.

From a speaker during Kelowna’s Global Citizen week: My name is ____, I’m a student at UBC, and I’m making the lives of dozens of poor African children better.

A group of children sit in the drainage ditch making lorries out of clay and bottle caps. As I ride by, a child sits up, yells, “What’s my name?”

Chinua Achebe:

Achebe writes: “This perception problem is not in its origin the result of ignorance, as we are sometimes inclined to think…It was in general a deliberate invention devised to facilitate… the Atlantic slave trade and the colonization of Africa…. This centuries old obsession with lurid and degrading stereotypes of Africa has been bequeathed to cinema, to journalism, to certain varieties of anthropology, even to humanitarianism” (79-80).

Chinua Achebe

Most of us know the name Hegel, but do we know what he wrote about Africa? I grew up in a city near Kitchener, Ontario. Do you know for whom that city is named, and what he did in Sudan? We study the work of Joseph Conrad, the anti-imperial novelist whose Africans yell and whirl and clap and stomp. You have heard of Craig Kielburger, I presume, whose job it is to bring Africa into the light. The list is a long one. When I lived in Malawi I realized that I am part of this continuing past. When I used to say I used to live in Malawi, people would say, “where?” When I say I used to live in Malawi, people say, “Madonna!”

A woman speaking in front of a gymnasium of children in a Kelowna elementary school is asked: Why are there so many wars in Africa? She responds: Because Africans don’t know how to get along with one another. It’s our job to help them learn.

Michel Chikwanine is asked about the causes of the war in Congo: He says, the war is being fought for the control of minerals: coltan for instance, which makes our technological existence possible. North American corporations support and abet the militias.

A woman speaking in front of a gymnasium of children in a Kelowna elementary school is asked: Why are there so many wars in Africa? She responds: Because Africans don’t know how to get along with one another. It’s our job to help them learn.

Perhaps those children know the name, K’Naan.

He says: “When they show Africa, especially in those programmes that come on late at night, pleading for help, they often show children. And when they show children, they often pan the camera to their feet, and it’s always dusty which is to portray poverty. But, I thought, I used to have those same feet… I wanted to call that child The Dusty Foot Philosopher, the one who is articulate about the universe, but doesn’t have anything.”

K’Naan

I feel so far away from Africa when I think about living in Malawi. In Canada, Africa seems so far away.
I know the name of my computer and the people listed on my cellphone. But not the names of the people who mine the coltan that makes those essential gadgets work. They are so far away. The names of those who slave in those mines or die fighting for control over them. I know the name of chocolate companies, but not the names of the people in Ghana who struggle for adequate compensation and decent working conditions, who struggle for their own human rights.

Do you know the name, Ngugi wa Thiong’o?

He writes: “Capitalism introduced plenty and possibilities of the conquest of hunger; capitalism ensured poverty and mass starvation on a scale unknown before. Capitalism and the development of science and technology introduced the possibilities of the conquest of nature: capitalism by its uncontrolled use and exploitation of natural resources ensured the virtual dominance of nature over man by way of droughts and desertification. Capitalism introduced a new medical science to conquer diseases: capitalism through its selective prescription of medical care, at least in the colonies, ensured a disease-ridden population who now lacked help from the herbalists and psychiatrists whose practices had been condemned as devilry” (66)

Ngugi wa Thiong’o

What’s your name?

In the film Bamako, the International Monetary Fund is put on trial in a residential courtyard in the capital of Mali. One man stands to testify. He gives his name, says that he was born in Dakar, 1953, and answers that he is a former school teacher. He stands at the microphone but does not speak. The silence becomes uncomfortable. And then Samba Dakite turns and returns to his seat.

What is your name? Where were you born? What is your occupation?

Sometimes I would walk along the beach and children would point out upon the blue waters and yell, nyanja! I would turn and look inland and shout back kuti? Kuti? Sindiona Nyanja! straining to see this lake they spoke of. It made me feel like Dr. David Livingstone I presume, standing on the shores of the same lake on 17 September 1859, with his guides, scribbling in his journal a discovery, Lake Nyasa. Or, Victoria Falls. Dr. David Livingstone, breaking the silence of the interior of Africa.

Marlene Nourbese Philip was here in Kelowna last year for WordRuckus

She writes: “Out of my dreams, Dr. Livingstone – go inhabit your own dreams – your own silences. I become obsessed – oppressed – impressed? perhaps, with you – a seeker like you    you – in your footsteps – or is it you who follows me – each becoming a mirage to the other. I am determined to cure myself of you, Dr. Livingstone
-    of this obsession
-    with silence
-    with the word – your word – engorging itself on my many, yet one, silence, sucking it dry – the paps, the dried dugs of my silence that haunt your turgid phallused word -” (27)

Marlene Nourbese Phillip

Do you know the name Oyeronke Oyewumi?

She writes: “The imposition of the European state system, with its attendant legal and bureaucratic machinery, is the most enduring legacy of European colonial rule in Africa… One tradition that was exported to Africa during this period was the exclusion of women from the newly created colonial public sphere. In Britain, access to power was gender-based; therefore, politics was largely men’s job… The system of indirect rule introduced by the British colonial government recognized the male chief’s authority at the local level but did not acknowledge the existence of female chiefs. Therefore, women were effectively excluded from all colonial state structures” (341).

Oyeronke Oyewumi

The child asks, What’s my name?

Have you heard of Nawal el Saadawi?

She writes: “The young men built their tents in the square to get some rest. Women with their infants lied down on the ground in the cold and rain. Hundreds of ladies and girls, never harassed by anyone, walked proudly feeling freedom, dignity, and equality among their fellows. Christians are participating in the revolution side by side with Muslims. I was surrounded by some young men from Muslims Brotherhood: they said to me ‘We disagree with some of your opinions in your writings but we like and respect you because you have not acted hypocritically with any regime or force inside or outside the country.’ During my walk in the square, people were coming to me, men and women, from different directions, embracing and hugging me saying ‘Dr. Nawal, we are the new generations who have read your books and inspired by your creativity, rebellion and revolution’ I swallowed my tears and said ‘This is a happy occasion for all of us, a celebration of freedom, dignity, equality, creativity, rebellion, and revolution.’”

Nawal el Saadawi

Nawal el Saadawi is 80 years old. She is Egyptian. She is an 80 year old Egyptian novelist. She is an 80 year old  Egyptian novelist and physician and psychiatrist who has committed her life to fighting against oppression, and particularly the oppression of women. She was among the hundreds of thousands of people in Tahrir square in January and February 2011, part of a nonviolent revolution that some of us may have watched on TV.

Dzina lanu ndani?

You may have heard of Wael Ghonim, the Google executive arrested during the Egyptian revolution. Upon his release, he said: “Dear Western governments. You have been supporting the regime that was oppressing us for 30 years. Please don’t get involved now. We don’t need you.”

And: “This revolution belonged to the internet youth, then the revolution belonged to the Egyptian youth, then the revolution belonged to all of Egypt. It has no Hero, no one should steal its thunder, we were all heroes. That’s the first thing.”

Wael Ghonim

Do you know the name, Antjie Krog? In her memoir of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission she juxtaposes quotations from numerous participants and commentators. She records:
“At Tzaneen a young Tswana interpreter is interviewed. He holds on to the tabletop; his other hand moves restlessly on his lap. “It is difficult to interpret victim hearings,” he says, “because you use the first person all the time. I have no distance when I say ‘I’… it runs through me with ‘I’”.
“Now how do you survive it?”
“I don’t. After the first three months of hearings, my wife and baby left me because of my violent outbursts. The Truth Commission provided counseling and I was advised to stop. But I don’t want to. This is my history, and I want to be part of it – until the end” (169).

I presume that there has been a dissonance between my voice and these words. I feel it. When I read literature in my courses, aloud, passages like this, often it is only in the moment of uttering someone else’s pain or anger or joy that there springs doubt. I should not be reading this aloud. The doubt arises when I realize how easy it is for me to compile these words and arrange them and to treat them as theory. The doubt that reflects my relation to that “I” – I should have no distance when I say “I”, but that “I” is not me; I am not stepping in their shoes. I don’t want to pretend to walk a mile in their shoes. It is no good to simply understand these words – for people like me to understand ‘them.’ Rather I need to understand that these articulate my history; that I am part of this story, but in a way different from those who have written these words.  I utter these words not to represent Africa accurately, but to articulate my connection to Africa differently than that single story of darkness and sunsets, impoverished dirty feet, women who need to be saved, and patronizing, well-meaning, pity – the non-African’s desire to make a difference.

Wainaina counsels to always end a discussion of Africa with “Nelson Mandela saying something about rainbows or renaissances. Because we care.”

Zikomo Kwambiri, Thanks.

Check Out:

Chinua Achebe, The Education of a British Protected Child. Knopf, 2009.

Chimamanda Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story”

Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa. Broadway, 2000.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in Aftrican Literature. Heinemann, 1986.

Oyeronke Oyewumi, “Colonizing Bodies and Minds: Gender and Colonialism,” in Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism. Ed. Gaurav desa and Supriya Nair. Rutgers, 2005.

Marlene Nourbese Philip, Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence. Mercury Press, 1991.

For the past few years I have been teaching Sven Lindqvist’s A History of Bombing (2001) in a first year narrative class. The book is comprised of 399 distinct passages, presented in chronological order, tracing a history of bombing, and primarily aerial bombardment, from 762 CE to 1999. While the passages are presented in chronological order, they are organized as a series of 22 arguments, as Lindqvist describes them, which guide the reader back and forth in time to trace a particular historical narrative. For instance, some narratives focus on the way in which bombing and “superweapons” were imagined in literature long before they were technologically possible, while others focus on particular wars, such as the Korean war, or the use of aerial bombing to assert control over European colonies. Lindqvist describes the form of the narrative as a labyrinth, requiring readers to move back and forth in time: “Wherever you are in the text, events and thoughts from that same period surround you, but they belong to narratives other than the one you happen to be following. That’s the intention. That way the text emerges as what it is – one of many possible paths through the chaos of history.”

For many students it is a difficult book. Because there is no argument per se, but a series of passages grouped together and juxtaposed against one another, it is difficult to make sense of; the text is fragmented, polyvocal, and interdisciplinary, and so it is radically different from the literature and history they have become accustomed to. The text’s content is also difficult. Students are disturbed by the testimony of survivors of the Allied firebombing of Dresden, the science fiction that demonizes and dehumanizes all Asians as a threat to Europe, and the callousness of the planning of aerial bombardment. As one student this past term identified, the representation of the horrors of bombing is not as disturbing as the quotations from those who devised the strategies of killing human beings on a mass scale. Further, every year there are a few students who express their frustration, or even anger, that after 12 years of schooling, and annual Remembrance Day ceremonies, it is only in university that they learn of the events and perspectives that Lindqvist presents.

The text, then, provides a counter-narrative to the dominant narratives of war, both in terms of form and content; in other words, the text uncovers the project of forgetting that is integral to the way in which we commemorate war and remember the past. For instance, the cultural memory in the U.S. and Canada of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that it was a last resort, designed to end the war quickly and save American lives; Lindqvist quotes U.S. government documents showing that this was not the case. Arthur Harris, the commander of Allied bomber command proudly asserted that the aim of the bombing offensive was “the obliteration of German cities and their inhabitants as such” (Lindqvist #205); this reality was excised from the official rationale and is not included in British and Canadian war museum exhibits. We remember bombing and warfare as a means of liberating the oppressed and destroying tyranny, but Lindqvist traces how historically the position of “civilian,” protected from bombing, has always been reserved to people categorized as “white”, and the development of bombing technology was fostered by a desire to protect the “white race” from the perceived/manufactured threat of racial Others. Apart from the 1939-45 war in Europe, bombs have almost always been dropped by white people on people racialized as “not white” and so not quite human. A History of Bombing disturbs by remembering what remembrance forgets.

In class, and on past exams, I have asked whether it would be appropriate to read passages from A History of Bombing at a Remembrance Day ceremony. While this question often leads to some very thoughtful and engaging debate, more often than not, students contend that the text would not be appropriate. The imagery – whether it be survivor testimony, political rationale for bombing, or descriptions of the physics of what shrapnel does when it pierces skin and enters a body – is not consistent with the purpose of this national day of mourning. After the so-called Great War in Europe, the testimony and poetry depicting the battle of the Somme, for instance, showed the horror and futility of war. The war was deemed the war to end all wars; to remember was to prevent war from happening ever again. This determination was shortly replaced by the phrase “Lest we Forget.” But what is it that we are not to forget?

This past Remembrance Day, I spoke on the morning programme for CBC Radio One in the British Columbia southern interior to discuss the history and rationale for the white poppy. The Canadian Legion has threatened legal action against the distribution of white poppies and has condemned the white poppy campaign for denigrating the memory of Canadian soldiers and infringing on the Legion’s copyright. Each year this controversy seems to arise anew despite the fact that the wearing of white poppies has occurred for nearly as long as the red poppy. The Co-operative Women’s Guild in the United Kingdom started distributing white poppies in 1933 and since then they have been produced by the Peace Pledge Union in the UK. In Canada, individuals and groups get white poppies from the PPU or make their own. The primary reasons that people choose to wear white poppies instead of red are that the white poppy is meant to commemorate and mourn all who have died in warfare, and not just British/Canadian soldiers, and to signify the commitment to fostering alternatives to warfare.

In her critical contemplation of the identity politics that informs the current “war on terror”, cultural theorist Judith Butler states: “The question that preoccupies me in the light of recent global violence, is Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, What makes for a grievable life” (20)? She argues that certain lives can be killed without mourning or consequence because their lives were never recognized in the first place; their deaths are unmarkable (35). Inspired by her discussion of The San Francisco Chronicle’s refusal to publish either an obituary or an ‘in memoriam’ for two Palestinian families killed by Israeli soldiers, in February of this year I submitted to three Kelowna newspapers/news sites an obituary for twelve civilians murdered by NATO forces in Helmand province, Afghanistan. These twelve people “died unpeacefully by rocket attack 14 February 2010” I wrote. Only one of the newspapers I submitted the obituary to was willing to print it (or even reply to my many emails), and then took a couple of weeks, and a few requests, to post it on their online addition, which is normally standard practice. My assertion on the radio programme that we should seek to honour and grieve all who have died in war and not only Canadian soldiers (among other comments) provoked much debate and consternation among listeners, as evidenced by their phone calls and emails in response.

To prepare for the interview, I downloaded the Royal Canadian Legion’s teaching guide for Remembrance Day services, which outline the Legion’s purpose to perpetuate a tradition of remembrance (11), specifically to remember those Canadians who have sacrificed themselves in war: only Canadians. The primary themes of remembrance in the teaching guide include the assertion that: Canadian soldiers have fought and died in war “to defend the freedom and democracy that we enjoy today” (ii); Canadians have taken “up arms with our allies to defeat those that would seek to subjugate others” (2); at Vimy Ridge, Canada shed its imperial origins, as a colony, and “came of age” (5); and, finally, that we have fought wars for peace (31). This practice of commemoration, then, dehistoricizes and depoliticizes particular wars and the practice of warfare. War is normalized, and indeed it is produced as a necessary, noble and honourable institution.

I might contest these presuppositions, by arguing, for instance that women’s rights (i.e. personhood, choice), labour rights (i.e. the eight-hour workday), or the right to health care we cherish were all fostered through social justice struggles in Canada and not won on battlefields in South Africa, Belgium, Korea or Afghanistan; indeed the basic liberal freedoms of thought, speech, movement, etc., are all infringed upon in times of war, especially, but more generally then we care to admit (the G20 summit in Toronto in 2010 is a recent high-profile case of these hard-fought rights being denied). I might note that on the same page as the assertion that Canadians have always fought to liberate the oppressed, the manual identifies the history of the Northwest Mounted Police, the defeat of the Riel Rebellion, and Canadian participation in the so-called Boer War; no context is provided for these wars or acknowledgement that they each provide examples of how warfare was used by Canada to subjugate and oppress indigenous people, in Canada and in South Africa. I might note that high school students learn in their social studies classes that Canada “came of age” in the Great War, and that we fight for peace, always, while in their English classes they read Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, where the totalitarian regime proclaims, “War is Peace.” The perpetuation of remembrance, then, is not about remembering; it is more about imagining identity and justifying militarism (as democracy/freedom) in the present.

Echoing a news story in 2008 that reported how the last surviving British World War I veteran shuns Remembrance Day ceremonies because “He didn’t think we should glorify war”, this year a group of British veterans formally protested the way that Remembrance Day ceremonies in the UK are an act of forgetting. They write:

“The Poppy Appeal is once again subverting Armistice Day. A day that should be about peace and      remembrance is turned into a month-long drum roll of support for current wars. This year’s campaign has been launched with showbiz hype. The true horror and futility of war is forgotten and ignored.

“The public are being urged to wear a poppy in support of ‘our Heroes’. There is nothing heroic about being blown up in a vehicle. There is nothing heroic about being shot in an ambush and there is nothing heroic about fighting in an unnecessary conflict.

“Remembrance should be marked with the sentiment ‘Never Again’.

How do we do justice to the sacrifice of Canadian soldiers in the “cause of freedom,” by limiting the narrative of remembrance so narrowly, as the Legion, and national commemorations seem to do? What kind of freedom have we won, if we foreclose spaces to discuss the horror of war, the causes of war, and the possibilities for alternatives to war?

In the Legion’s guide, they provide a number of poems for remembrance ceremonies. Each reflect the tradition of war poetry that contemplates and honours sacrifice, national belonging, and Christian struggle. There are no poems that depict the horrors of war the British veterans identify; for instance, poems by Rosenberg, Sassoon or Owen, or passages from Charles Yale Harrison’s Generals Die in Bed (1928). Among the poems the guide does include is “The Children’s Song” (the guide only provides six of the eight stanzas). The poet is not identified, which is curious. The author of the poem is the great British colonial poet, Rudyard Kipling, who coined the term “The white man’s burden” to implore the United States to colonize and subjugate the people of the Philippines. “The Children’s Song” begins: “Land of our Birth, we pledge to thee/ Our love and toil in the years to be;/ When we are grown and take our place,/ As men and women with our race.” What race is it that is referred to in these lines? What community of belonging is delineated in such a poem?

That a current teaching guide such as this should include an overtly white supremacist poem – by a poet who glorified and helped provided the cultural narratives justifying British colonialism as a project of white racial supremacy – not as a means of fostering discussion and debate over Canada’s history of warfare, but as a way to honour that history, reflects the way in which the admonishment, “Lest we forget” constitutes what Paul Gilroy describes as postimperial melancholia. Gilroy argues that Britain suffers from a melancholy resulting from the loss of their fantasy of omnipotence; such melancholy inhibits the ability to “work through the grim details of imperial and colonial history and to transform paralyzing guilt into a more productive shame that would be conducive to the building of a multicultural nationality that is no longer phobic about the exposure to either strangers or otherness” (99); postimperial melancholia “is associated with the neotraditional pathology” of what in the British setting takes on the form of “the morbidity of heritage” (99-100). Gilroy identifies, as an example of this melancholia, the chant of English football fans, “Two world wars and one World Cup, doo dah, doo dah”, a song of “fraternalistic and class-bound braggadocio” that reinforces the British national fantasy (107). This chant was used for a pre-World Cup commercial in the summer of 2010, and, in a disturbing irony, one of the few times that fan singing rose above the blaring vuvuzelas, the English fans were heard to sing, in a game against Slovenia at Port Elizabeth/Mandela Bay, the imperial hymn of British superiority and dominance, “Rule Britannia”.

Such articulations of memory are an act of forgetting, and a barrier to alternative viewpoints. Each year, Canadian school children recite John McCrae’s ‘In Flanders Fields.” When I teach it in university classrooms, however, many respond by saying that though they know all the words and have spoken those words year after year in November, they have never actually read the poem, interpreted its meaning, or researched its history. On the ten dollar bill, the first stanza of the poem is inscribed; the sombre commemoration of those who have died in war, now resting beneath the rows of crosses and the fields of poppies. However, As Nancy Holmes argues, “in the last stanza, McCrae abandons his skilful representation of the war torn, spiritually diseased soul by applying an ideological gloss that reads like a recruiting poster. The critical silence surrounding the complexities of this poem have led to its reappropriation by the Canadian government as a symbol of the military and heroism rather than a rite of genuine war remembrance.” The poem, and its use, serves to occlude the possibility of critical reflection on Canada’s participation in warfare and the imperial aspects of those wars. McCrae’s poem ends with an appeal to take up the torch passed on by those who have sacrificed themselves, and carry on the quarrel with the foe. In the present, such a sentiment rationalizes the “perpetuation of remembrance” as a glorification of, and justification for, Canada’s wars, past and present. In contrast, the first passage of Lindqvist’s book provides a reflection on childhood, and war as play. Lindqvist remembers how by the age of five he was already a seasoned bombardier, as each time he took a piss, he chose a target and bombed it. The passage ends with the wisdom of his mother: “’If everyone plays war,’ said my mother, ‘there will be war.’ And she was quite right – there was” (Lindqvist #1).

Check out…

Judith Butler. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. 2004.

Paul Gilroy. Postcolonial Melancholia. 2005.

Charles Yale Harrison. Generals Die in Bed. 1928/1974.

Nancy Holmes. “’In Flanders Fields’ — Canada’s Official Poem: Breaking Faith”
Studies in Canadian Literature. 30:1 (2005)

David Jefferess. “Responsibility, Nostalgia, and the Mythology of Canada as a
Peacekeeper.” University of Toronto Quarterly 78: 2 (2009)

Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing. 2000/2001.

Royal Canadian Legion. Teachers’ Guide. http://www.legion.ca/Poppy/teachers_e.cfm

PPU, White Poppies for Peace: http://www.ppu.org.uk/poppy/

In late August of this year news headlines across Canada announced the arrests of three men on terrorism charges, with a fourth arrested for having connections with the others but charged with non-terrorism related crimes. Canadian mainstream media widely reported the story, which the RCMP dubbed “Project Samosa”, focusing on the threat of “Islamic extremism,” and particularly “homegrown terrorism,” in the abstract. Many of the commentaries and editorials on the arrests focused on the “ethnic backgrounds” of the accused, and their place in Canadian society.  For instance, much was made of the fact that one of the accused had auditioned for the television show Canadian Idol, while another was a respected physician. As the Vancouver/Coast Salish Territories based migrant rights organization, No One Is Illegal notes: “despite the fact that the men arrested are all residents and citizens of Canada, the questioning of their ‘Canadian-ness’ reveals a shallow multiculturalism and reinforces the racialized national space”. No One Is Illegal’s response to the media’s sensationaliation of the story provides a critique of the arrests by providing a critical history of highly publicized cases of “homegrown terrorists” in Canada. For instance, in 2003 more than 20 men were arrested in Toronto. News media emphasized that all were of South Asian background and most Pakistani Muslim; ultimately all of the men were released, and none of them were formally charged, but this news did not capture headlines. While the men were never found guilty of any crime, the media’s portrayal of them reinforced the rhetoric of the so-called “War on Terror” and particularly the construction of all Muslims as potential threats. In this case, while the four men are presented as the specific threat to Canadian security, the operational name of the investigation, “Project Samosa”, reflects the way in which the discourse or narratives of “our” security rely upon notions of racial difference.

The public code names for major military operations are part of the ideological rationale, in many cases reflecting noble justifications. For instance, the official name of the United States military operations in Afghanistan is “Operation Enduring Freedom” and the highly publicized code name for the invasion of Iraq was “Operation Iraqi Freedom”.  Most code names, however, do not gain great public currency. Canadian operations in Afghanistan have gone under the names of Athena, Archer, and Apollo, for instance; the current title for these operations on the government of Canada website is simply, and benignly, Canada’s Engagement in Afghanistan. The 2003 arrests of 20 men in Toronto was code-named “Operation Thread”, a fairly generic name that did not gain the sort of public currency that “Project Samosa” has. Most often police operational names do not go public at all and certainly not as a way for the media to identify cases.

However, in most of the reporting of this recent case of arrests of Canadians for alleged plans to commit acts of military-style violence, the RCMP’s code name for the operation, “Project Samosa”, was used, and it often figured in the headlines. Why would the RCMP call the investigation Project Samosa, and what are some implications of the media using it as a short hand for the arrests, and the nature of the charges? The RCMP launched Project Samosa in September 2009, a “massive probe into a suspected Ottawa-based Islamist terror cell plotting a bombing campaign.” Paraphrasing from wikipedia, a samosa is a fried or baked triangular pastry with savory filling, and is a popular snack in South Asia, as well as other parts of Asia, the Mediterranean, and Africa. Those with sensitive tongues and stomachs may find samosas a bit spicy, but they are hardly synonymous with either explosives and destruction or Canadian security. While No One Is Illegal sarcastically questions the effectiveness of RCMP cultural sensitivity training, stating that “not many Pakistanis and Indians actually like samosas”, the power of the word in this context is not dependent on whether South Asian people actually eat samosas but its signification in mainstream or dominant Canadian culture; in Canada, the samosa is associated with Indian food. It’s a staple appetizer on the menus of Indian restaurants across the country and at “Indian” food booths at multicultural events. Within the framework of Canada’s celebration of (superficial) multiculturalism, Indian-ness is associated with bollywood, bhangra, saris, and samosas. As a result, I think, the use of this specific term, and the willingness of mainstream media to uncritically use it as shorthand for the arrests, reflects the tenuousness of Canada’s multicultural ideal.

In her 2008 book, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, Sherene Razack argues that since the beginning of the so-called “War on Terror” the Canadian nation – and most Western nations – is/are being produced, once again, through the terms of race: “we are witnessing the consolidation of a racially ordered world” (6), she argues; the national community is “organized increasingly as a fortress, with rigid boundaries and borders that mark who belongs and who does not” (6). Controversies over the wearing of hijab or headscarves in youth soccer leagues or in schools provide just one example of how these boundaries are managed. The last decade in Canada has seen a rise in discrimination against Muslims, and anyone “appearing” Muslim. Like a number of others (see Mamdani, Goldberg), Razack has identified how Islam is ever increasingly being constructed as a racial term. In September 2001, shortly after the attacks on New York City and Washington DC, a Hindu temple in Hamilton, Ontario was set ablaze and destroyed, apparently as a retaliatory act.  This act of arson was just one of a great many attacks on any one who “appeared” Muslim – “brown”, “Arab”, “Sikh”, etc. In the Hamilton case, the violence was, by some, explained away as the act of an ignorant individual who couldn’t tell the difference between Hinduism and Islam, as if it would have made more sense, or been just, to have attacked a mosque… As if Muslims, as a group, had carried out the September 11 attacks.

To organize the surveillance and investigation of people – who become “people of interest” by attending mosques or travelling to Pakistan or critiquing U.S./Canadian foreign policy in internet chatrooms (and by being categorized as not white) – under the term “Project Samosa” reframes the potential for political violence from a group of individuals, with particular political perspectives and motivations, to those associated with the otherwise benign snack food, whether they eat samosas or not; that is, anyone racialized as “brown”. So, the term, and its highly senstationalized repetition, serves to secure the boundaries of genuine Canadian-ness.

The use of the term, Project Samosa, reflects a troubling paradox in the ideal of Canadian multiculturalism. Sunera Thobani argues that “multiculturalism was to prove critical to the rescuing of Euro/white cultural supremacy: white subjects were constituted as tolerant and respectful of difference and diversity, while non-white people were instead constructed as perpetually and irremediably monocultural, in need of being taught the virtues of tolerance and cosmopolitanism under white supervision” (148). The alleged plans of these four men reflect a threat to Canadian well-being and the ideal of Canadian tolerance. As (alleged) “Islamic extremists” these men are narrow-minded and have no respect for difference or human life, the media reports. Razack contends that as a racist discourse, the “War on Terror” provides a “story that we are under siege by Muslims and that our governments must save us from this threat. We agree for the most part that stern measures must be taken against ‘those who do not share our values’” (175). In this case, the samosa, and its association with a particular group of people, is transformed from a symbol representing an Other within Canada, tolerated within the mainstream and adding spice to the Canadian mosaic, to a symbol of the irredeemably foreign (as against those who are truly and authentically Canadian), a symbol of those different values “we” must always be wary of, and indeed must “devour”.

Check Out:

Goldberg, David Theo. The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism. Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Mamdani, Mahmoud. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, The Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. Three Leaves Press, 2005.

Razack, Sherene H. Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics. University of Toronto Press, 2008.

Thobani, Sunera. Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada. University of Toronto Press, 2007.

Greetings. I’m David Jefferess, currently the chair of the Cultural Studies program at UBC’s Okanagan campus. I’m an assistant professor in the Critical Studies department, and I teach courses that are cross-listed as English and Cultural Studies. My area is postcolonial literature and culture, including colonial discourse, decolonization, and globalization.

This blog is part of the Cultural Studies blog collective, a group of blogs kept by faculty and students involved with the Cultural Studies program at the Okanagan campus. In this blog I seek to engage with current issues in a way that highlights ongoing colonial relations of power and the research of scholars working in the fields of postcolonial studies, critical race and anti-oppression studies, etc.