Asim Rafiqui: There are many who are sceptical and critical of the current decolonial moment. There is now a widespread backlash against decolonial projects, aided and abetted by this current political moment of politically correct racism, popular authoritarianism and ethnic nationalism. Students who refuse Eurocentric histories, erasure of the Other’s suffering, colonial historical teleologies, concocted knowledge genealogies, the silencing of resistance historical and present, the elision of evidence of non-European scientific, cultural, social and artistic influences and more, are often accused of being ‘sensitive’ or ‘petty’ or ‘spoilt’ and unwilling to accept a ‘hard, tough education’. These critics assume a ‘correct’ set of knowledge, which is precisely what is being questioned. It is difficult to take this backlash seriously, emanating as it is from the pens and persons of the established, the privileged and the cock-sure–precisely the group and structures of thought that decolonial projects take direct aim at. If the first European /Western intellectual reaction to the Other speaking back was Postmodernism, the second European reaction seems to be nostalgia and racism. What these detractors reveal is a profound lack of understanding of the act of critique, which, to quote Foucault, is always “…a matter of pointing out what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest upon.”
[…] But I want to return to this interview [with Ghassan Kanafani], a transcript of which follows. I drifted to this interview while thinking about decolonisation, because it is a vivid example of the Mignolo-ian demand that we always remain cognisant of “…the hidden complicity between the rhetoric of modernity and the logic of coloniality.” Here, in this interview, we see how a ‘modern’ discourse of ‘peace’ and a framing of a narrative that places parties into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ opponents, is undermined and taken apart. I have taken the trouble to add some editorial comments to the transcript to help us see and understand what Kanafani is actually doing as he confronts this journalists presumptions and violent words. More here.