Category: politics

The Exhausted Bodies of the Colonial Spectacle

Photography creates a power imbalance between photographer and subject. As Susan Sontag has said: ‘To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge — and, therefore, like power.’

When we reuse, post/share, or repurpose problematic photographs we should be aware of our own enmeshment and responsibility in that sensational and exploitative relationship.

Here is a fantastic treatise on the subject by Collectif Cases Rebelles. It’s their response to the publication of ‘Sex, Race & Colonies,’ a 544-page coffee table book filled with sexualized images of indigenous people being abused by white colonizers. The book is a lurid reproduction of colonial, racist, and misogynistic violence.
“To the question of whether these photos should be shown or not, we respond unequivocally: shouldn’t the people in the photographs be the first to answer?”

Farmers’ protests in India

In complete solidarity with the farmers’ protests in India.

Simran Jeet Singh: “The pandemic has shown us that there are two economies. Essential workers across the world are suffering. The farmers in India represent all of them, and their resistance to unjust legislation that privileges the uber-wealthy corporations is a resistance that speaks to so many of us all over the world.”

for my birthday this year

thank u for all the warm and lovely birthday wishes dear friends. so i’ve been on fb since 2007. it’s been a while. i’ve never asked people to support a cause on my birthday before, but this year yemen has been in my heart and on my mind.
pls donate any small (or large) amount u can. it’s people like us who have to show up for one another.

here is an IRC link.

i’m sure u’ve heard about the humanitarian crisis in yemen, man-made famine-like conditions that are devastating the country, along with an ongoing, merciless war (in which we americans are complicit). i also wanted to share some history with u, so u know how beautiful yemen is.

‘Located in the southwestern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen’s earliest excavated village settlements are dated to c. 5000 BC and the first urban settlements on the eastern deserts date from around 1200 BC. Sana’a lies in a fertile basin over two thousand meters above sea level, on a major communication axis that crosses the mountains of Yemen. As part of the African Horn where the Red Sea meets the Indian Ocean, it is often described as the ancestral heartland of the Arabs. Sana’a is one of the most ancient surviving cities in Arabia and arguably the longest continually inhabited city in the world.’

The Unvarnished Truth about Obama, Harris and Diversity without Accountability

Jordan Elgrably asked me to flesh out my post about Obama for The Markaz Review. I was trying to keep the post private, lol, but here it is with more thoughts about representation without accountability. Pls recommend/comment on the Markaz website if you like this column:) More here.

Obama’s new book

Obama’s new book has been making the rounds. It’s everywhere on social media, much like Michelle Obama’s book a couple of years ago. Both book covers glow with the same photoshop finish, two attractive people a bit shy about the power of their own magnetism. Smart, effortlessly debonair, moneyed. Diametrically opposed to Trump’s vulgarity, civilized in their discourse (“to protest a man in the final hour of his presidency seemed graceless and unnecessary,” he’s written about protests against Bush), and confident in the gushing response from their stans. Obama, the drone president. The man who dropped 26,000 bombs his last year in the White House. Literary rock stars like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Zadie Smith fangirl over his remarkable writing and unimaginably difficult presidential decisions. The decency of his character is assured, in spite of his war crimes. He’s got the Netflix deals after all and the power to gift us Biden. He makes us feel nostalgic for the good old days, when America was truly great. Everyone knows he killed almost 4000 people in 542 drone strikes, deported more than 2.5 million others, and force-fed Muslim men categorized as non-human in Guantanamo. Yet here we are. He didn’t just do the broadly brutal, presidential butchery we expect from American presidents, to keep us safe, he made it more personal. He handled kill lists, droned a 16-year-old American kid in Yemen along with his 17-year-old cousin, started spanking new wars, and called the president of Yemen to halt the release of a journalist reporting on drone casualties in that country. But the boring repetition of these atrocities can easily be set aside. Pictures of dead children or their wailing mothers don’t really register if they’re not wearing the right clothes or speaking the right languages. We can say sensibly that collateral damage is a price we are willing to pay, as long as someone else is actually paying that price. Would we be equally understanding about the droning of our own children for the greater good of the world? Why is that a crazy question? Maybe that’s just how it is these days. Everything whitewashed, packaged like an Apple product, branded like a captivatingly effete IG influencer, and placed adroitly like sponcon. It’s hard to tell the news from the ads or Hollywood films from military propaganda. Everything ground together into a bland paste of vacuity. Makes one hungry for guerrilla filmmaking and some raw, unvarnished truth.

lecture at UR on multiple feminisms

earlier this week i taught a UR class on gender, sexuality and women’s studies about islam and feminism. thank u tanya for inviting me. these are the three women whose work i used to make a case for multiple feminisms.

i talked about saba mahmood’s ‘politics of piety’ and the need to self-parochialize by acknowledging the specificities and limits of one’s own position in the world. she reminds us that western knowledge is not self-sufficient or neutral, that it is divisive, exclusionary and complicit in harm.

i relied on francoise verges for an understanding of decolonial feminism and the problematic relationship between bourgeois women in the global north and women in the global south as well as WOC in the global north – the ones who take care of their children, clean their homes, and do their nails. she questions the meaning of ‘autonomy’ under oppressive systems of militarization, surveillance, obscene inequalities, precariousness and disposability. to her, decolonial feminism is about constant questioning and curiosity, and about decolonizing oneself (examining one’s own prejudices).

finally, houria boutelja confronts savior feminism and the privilege of solidarity. she refuses to answer the question: ‘is islam compatible with feminism?’ and tells us that the submissive muslim woman is a myth – she’s never met one. i cannot thank these women scholars and activists enough for their sharp analysis and powerful work. so many of us stand on their shoulders.

Frankenstein in Baghdad

Halfway through Ahmed Saadawi’s ‘Frankenstein in Baghdad’ – macabre, surreal, comical, poetic. Also heartbreaking in how it portrays life unraveling under war and occupation – how our sense of ‘normal’ can shift precipitously. Masterful writing. Thank u so much Mazin M Hameed for recommending it and thank u Muna Lisa for reminding me of this book.

The Pandemic Is Entering A Dangerous New Chapter. Here Are The Week’s Big Takeaways

‘The latest prediction from the modeling group at the University of Washington predicts that more than 2,000 people will die each day from COVID-19 by mid January, and that the total U.S death toll will reach about 440,000 by March. The modelers say that changes in behavior could still prevent that from happening.‘
More here.

I am part of The Changermakers exhibit at RMSC

Hey everyone, I’m thrilled to be featured in this new exhibit at RMSC. It’s called ‘The Changemakers: Rochester Women Who Changed the World?’ and it highlights stories of women visionaries and trailblazers from Rochester.

It’s opening at the Rochester Museum and Science Center on November 20. You can visit the exhibit in person (no worries, there will be safety protocols in place). It’s a historic representation of woman power.

Learn more about The Changemakers: RMSC.org/changemakers #BeChangemakers