{"id":17122,"date":"2019-07-24T17:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-07-24T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/?p=17122"},"modified":"2020-05-25T17:02:40","modified_gmt":"2020-05-25T22:02:40","slug":"a-man-in-the-sun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/2019\/07\/24\/a-man-in-the-sun\/","title":{"rendered":"A Man In The Sun"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>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\u2019s 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 \u2018sensitive\u2019 or \u2018petty\u2019 or \u2018spoilt\u2019 and unwilling to accept a \u2018hard, tough education\u2019. These critics assume a \u2018correct\u2019 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\u2013precisely 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 \u201c\u2026a matter of pointing out what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest upon.\u201d<br \/><br \/>[\u2026] 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 \u201c\u2026the hidden complicity between the rhetoric of modernity and the logic of coloniality.\u201d Here, in this interview, we see how a \u2018modern\u2019 discourse of \u2018peace\u2019 and a framing of a narrative that places parties into \u2018good\u2019 and \u2018bad\u2019 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 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.asimrafiqui.com\/tsh\/2019\/07\/14\/a-man-in-the-sun\/?fbclid=IwAR3w6hdvH5P4HVsM7h0tx0x6_bWYMniPDkrQgQ_ZbI0ogX5dLF30hG9XOLI&amp;utm_content=buffer85528&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;utm_source=facebook.com&amp;utm_campaign=buffer\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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\u2019s suffering, colonial historical teleologies, concocted &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/2019\/07\/24\/a-man-in-the-sun\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">A Man In The Sun<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[12,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17122"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17122"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17123,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17122\/revisions\/17123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}