Annual Cluster Conference "Spatialities": Keynote - Patricia Daley
Abstract
- Abstract
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As part of the Cluster's international conference on "Spatialities" Patricia Daley gave this keynote speech titled: "Learning Disobedience in African Studies: Producing Defiant Scholarship on Migration and Refugees".
Patricia Daley is a Professor of Human Geography of Africa at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Jesus College. Her research interests focus on forced migration in Eastern and Central Africa. In the School of Geography and the Environment, she is a member of the Political Worlds: Place, Power, Politics research cluster, which seeks to develop novel and critical understandings of the relationship(s) between regimes of discipline and violence, geographies of the South, and postcolonial, feminist, decolonial and anti-racist work. She co-edited, with Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, "The Routledge Handbook on South-South Relations", and her most recent publication is co-authored with Amber Murrey (2023) and is entitled "Learning Disobedience, Decolonizing Development Studies" (Pluto Press).
Description
- Transcript
- good evening and what a turnout oh thank you all it's a pleasure to be here um to offer some Reflections under the theme of I think I should just press a button that has not happened uh let's see okay I'm not sure where why my slide is oh okay that's perfect let's go back I think there's a time lag oh okay um well I don't think you need to see the introductory slide anyway it's a pleasure to be here and I'd like to thank the conference organizers in particular particular Dr everard um rudus and the cluster committee for the invitation to speak and also to the administrative staff Doris and renat have been fantastic in terms of facilitating my travel to broid much of this talk is based on on conversations and collaborative work with former students research assistant and colleagues and um some of my them are listed in the slides there uh uh Hano branam uh Leo Singo and Dr Amber Mari muanza kamata is a Tanzanian colleague who works at the University of Dar Dar Salam Dr maray in particular um who works in her capacity as associate professor of human geography at Oxford has um been quite uh our conversations in particular been quite generative we co- te and we co-publish and um our Publications have manifest have we have not sure why the slides I have some assistance they're not changing no I need to go back just with the okay that's great so our work has manifested in um three Publications the first um which was mentioned earlier is Defiance scholarship and it was published in the Singapore Journal of tropical geography in 2022 and it Rose our experiences of the Persistence of what we see as Colonial epistem in African universities those that we've been in um with the exception of some in a few in South Africa and also through our interaction with the Africa special Reality Group of the association of American geographers our new book learning Disobedience decolonizing development studies was published in August of this year and arose from co- teing in the school of geography and the environment on abolishing devel development studies and reimagining human sociality and well-being in the global South we are grateful Professor Sabel and Leni whose Pioneer in and sustained application of decolonial thought to Africa helped to reinforce our commitment to change and for his endorsement of our book I'm humbled to be speaking in his presence and in the presence of such distinguished Scholars uh this evening I take as my starting point the imperative for Collective projects to decolonize the academy and the curriculum part of this struggle means Define the philosophies and the set of principles that I have learned in the eurocentric academy in my field of African studies and the discipline of geography while unlearning and divesting from the knowledges within which I have been trained in the words of the guyane historian Walter Rodney I seek to occupy the terrain so as to free the whole structure not to to join and reproduce it as an African Jamaican feminist scholar I come from an intellectual tradition rooted in African people's everyday existence my own Defiance owes much to my maternal grandmother and aunts phenomenal woman who worked as Housewives Caterers nursing assistants peasant farmers and domestic workers the women in my family survived where there were not many to even Thrive they created citizenship in marginal spaces and ensured a sense of belonging that transcended Generations they made Family Life they laughed clapped prayed sang and danced by creating life worlds on the margins my intellectual flowering occurred outside the academy first questioning the significance of whiteness in the black Christian churches my mother was an in Evangelical pastor and from Reading pan-africanist women writers poets and artists such as myangelo Dion BR bran Grace Nichols lorett en kobu b Hooks and if Amadou all of whom possessed heightened awareness of injustices and intersecting oppressions recognizing the racism inherent in the UK's University curriculum I was undertaken I sought alternative spaces of learning outside the lecture halls in the undercommons in Black home bookshops at the Africa Center which was in central London and organizing in my University's student discussion forums reading groups and film societies where I encountered narratives that reflected our lived experiences in these space I encountered the work of shake anop Ms France Fannon Claude A and those of Thomas Sankara Julius nieri quami and Kuma and am KRA in the academy their intellectual contribution were dismissed of AF as Afrocentric Romanticism or empty revolutionary rhetoric my historical and political thinking was refined by the rich groundings that I received in the seminar rooms staff Club and living rooms of the University of Dar Salam when I was a visiting PhD student there I was able to understand more clearly the work of panafrican Scholars such as Walter Rodney horis Campbell Ernest wadia wamba and Patricia mcfaden these African theor theoreticians were largely outside the Western Cannon were unafraid of disrupting constantly creating new Concepts and vocabularies to express the specificities of their conditions to articulate their resistance and communicate their imaginations of a better future they recognize that the very existence of black African people and their Futures are dependent to the production of themselves as independent critical thinking beings who are able to analyze their condition and in the words of Thomas Sankara dear to invent the future to create a world otherwise beyond the colonial formulations that had been Beed to them as part of western civilizational discourse and practice and while I might and Amber and I might have adopted the concepts of defiance and Disobedience from decolonial Scholars such as Walter molo they are rooted in my intellectual development outside the academy and has that has been non-compliant anti-racist and directed at epistemic Justice the theme of this conference is spatialities a term that signifies the contribution of the discipline of geography to knowledge making it is only recently in its disciplinary history that geographers have recognized the existence of plurality inspired by the work of marxist feminist geographer Dorian Massie who makes three propositions that are relevant in our discussions of De coloniality space um is a product of interrelations space is a sphere of the possibility of Multiplicity multiple trajectories exist but also space is a production of embedded relations and material practices that always in the in process space is always under construction she argues it never finish it is never finished never closed we could imagine as space as simultaneously of stories so far and that in process and always on the construction is what gives um me hope and enable uh Scholars like me to constantly think about how we might remake the future masses theorization of space and spatialities equi geographers to challenge the dominance of eurocentrism in in the academy and its Deni of relation ality and multiplicity and recognize the myopic disempowerment produced by an unequal geopolitics of knowledge production that bequeath Imperial knowledges as universal neutral and factual without attention to their temporalities and Colonial Logics and how the ways in which they marginalize erase silence African concerns as being irrelevant to the global as a human geographer I am aware of how geographers are inadvertently implicated in Empire including because of the knowledge that are exposed we are exposed to more through more so through our disciplinary history what we understand as geography was established by a particular community of Scholars for a specific purpose the birth of modern geography took place across Europe in the 19th century in the UK was linked to the new phase of capitalist imperialism in the 1870s an article in the Times newspaper in 1899 notes that the discipline of geography was for quote men who think of entering on a political or military career or who intend in one capacity or not or another to take service in some parts of the Empire Beyond the Seas or who look forward to having dealings with foreign countries end quote the geographer Clive Barnett has shown that the exploration of Africa was inext linked to the institutionalization of geography as a discipline within the academy Alford mcka the founder of Oxford school of geography in 1899 and the holder of the first University post in geography in the UK established in 1897 had to prove had to climb kirinyaga known to Europeans as Mount Ken in 1899 to prove his credentials as a geographer according to Jer K mcka LED his expedition through a famine stricken land and fled Kenya before he was investigated for ordering the killing of eight of his Porters mcka stole uppermost tip of Kirin Naga as trophy it this it was in the school of geography's the head of Department's office in my department from the 19 from then until 2009 when we moved buildings and it seems to have been lost we want to rep some of us including Amber and I want to repatriate it back to Africa where it belongs K's right that mcka developed the subject of geography so that it might educate a generation of Imperial citizens mcka of course was not unusual in thinking of the academy as a race Mak in space and here I will I just mention Martin haiger geographer along with the AF African studies and there's been a lot of critique in African Studies by Michael West David Johnson Amina mama and Adam Branch more recently but certainly geography and the field of development geographies and African geographies that I practice in are thoroughly implicated with ongoing Colonial and capitalist formations of extraction marginalization and exploitation that I and I think am I can include Amber in this cannot even passively take part in so how can I as a UK soas and Oxford trained geographer shift from upholding the colonial Canon and uh from reproducing Colonial subjects in our article Defiance scholarship Amber and I critique some of the colonial Logics that persist in contemporary studies of African geographies in African universities and in Western un institutions we argue that Colonial persistence is is revealed in the first the historical foundations of the university in African countries including the political pressures for positivist study within neol imperialist context in which socioeconomic domination often occurs through the deliberate weakening of sovereignty this means that the continent continues to be interpreted by Western institutions as South African masculinist study scholar kapana relli and others argue places for data extraction or mere empiricism problem solving research grounds and artificial collaborations driven by external priorities and funders canian persistence is evident in the disciplinary boundaries that are carefully guarded in African universities and as Claud a notes social sciences by presenting capitalist society as the ideal legal Society inculcated an inferiority complex in Africans and deemed what is worthy to study Colonial persistence is revealed in how Africa is situated in other bodies of thought including the silences and erasures of the functions of racialization including whiteness in scholarship and African societies within and Beyond Human Geography this was even this was true even for radical geographers such as David Harvey was one of my mentors when I was an Oxford student and Dorian Massie who ignored race in their theoretical analysis of accumulation and where R and racial analysis is undertaken is often limited to Southern Africa and particularly South Africa Colonial persistence is revealed in the marginalization of Africa within Human Geography particularly Beyond southern Africa and in anglophone regions in Africa I show in in fact how non- Elite Africans for example uh of WR Place Colonial persistence is further revealed by the attempts by white africanist Scholars to disconnect the concerns of Africans and the diaspora from those of Africans on the continent and this was exemplified by the historian Christopher Clapham who dismissed who in 2020 dismissed um he says the possibility of quote meaningful connection between them that means Africans and Africans in the diaspora ignoring I argue histories of intellectual and political solidarities the critical and the common element I argue underlying the EP epistemic violence that separate these spaces and enables Colonial persistence is the dehumanization of black African peoples in European thought going back to German philosophers notably Emanuel Kant F Fredick Hegel Martin haiger and for geographers Fredick ratzel whose treaties on Race fueled slavery colonialism and racial capitalism and I'm picking on the Germans because I'm in Germany I have argued that black African lives continue to be lived as Christina sharp notes in her book in the Wake On Blackness and being under occupation whether in the west or in the militarized coloniality that exists in African or Latin American countries sharp uses the concept of the Wake the afterlife of slavery and colonialism of noncitizenship and non-status as a transboundary concept for her living in the wake at the global level means living in disastrous times and effects of continued MK migrations Mediterranean and Caribbean disasters transamerican and African migration end quote beginning with a refusal to take coloniality whiteness and his hierarchies and privileges as a matter of fact and to take African Africa's impoverishment and black marginalization for granted as a feature of contemporary life being in the world and academic knowledge making I have committed myself to the task of repair reimagining and trans Beyond it drawing on PO fer in the pedagogy of the oppressed the mission of radical ped pedagogy is rehumanization and he argues that is only possible because quote dehumanization is a concrete historical fact it is not a given Destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors which in turns dehumanize the oppressed epistemic violence is in the fact the oppressor telling you that you and your dehumanization is your fault it arises from your own inherent capacity for violence in that way dehumanization is internalized so how do we refuse unlearned knowledge making practices that dehumanize and begin the process of repair for me this is multi-prong it involves activism within the European Imperial Academy where I'm based in particular to diversify to change the faces of African studies and geography um sorry yeah in the PE lives lived differently I have shown how the introduction of women black and Indigenous and Scholars from the global South can change the concerns and the questions with within this discipline refusing dehumanization requires unlearning taken from granted theories Concepts terminologies that and terminologies that reproduce epistemic violence critique has been Central to my research on forc migration militarism and humanitarianism Eastern and central Africa my research is transboundary and transdisciplinary my research on burundians who fled the 1972 genocide and took refuge in Tanzania forced me to question taken for granted Concepts that serve to dehumanize generations of people whose life ways identities and very existence was subjected to the technicality of labeling and relabeling by the un's refugees agency and whose experience reflected Colonial continuities even in the most benevolent state in the region most research on Africans fleeing States sponsored violence or Civil War begin with the international categories of Asylum Seekers refugees and internally despac peoples and Riz Concepts such as nation state borders in humanitarianism research questions reflect the concerns and solutions preferred by the UN or the International commun Community and here I am reminded of Claude A who states quote the very fact that we Define something a problem we take for granted that it is a social problem African Mobility whether refugees or migrants were not problems until they represent they were presented as social and political problems African people fleeing the violent legacies of colonial rule and continued processes of extraction moving often to Kin folks on the other side of a colonial border have been coralled into camps Justified as enabling humanitarian expediency and never gaining their full rights even those under international law in Tanzania this was possible because National legislation post inep you know um post Independence and in particular the 1965 Refugee Control Act was a colonial hangover a revised version of the colonial 1948 War refugees control and expulsion ordinance a colonial instrument aimed at restricting mobility and prohibiting political action activities security concerns remain at the heart of the later act the 1998 Refugee act Tanzania holds two competing approaches towards African people labeled as refugees and panafrican is one that embraced them as kin as belonging and a colonial eurocentric one that constructed them as Surplus population unwanted with disposable lives the first and more radical and humanizing approach was expressed in an open door policy which ran for about 30 years and was attributed to president Julius nieri whose political philosophy Drew on auntu principles and Pana africanism nier's philosophy um was counter to that his humanism was counter to that of the International Community of the time he demonstrated solidarity with anticolonial Liberation movements and Africans fighting white domination or fleeing extreme and abhorent violence such as genocide popular discourse in Tanzania positioned refugees as wageni or guest wageni wageni were welcome by African Hospitality the second approach to refugees fleeing um violence was shaped by the security concerns of um Cold War geopolitics and the destabilization of the region by the racist apartheid state in South Africa um I think my slides are for some reason okay anyway I'll carry on um the destabilization of the region by racist aparted um state in South Africa tanzan tanzania's need for security coincided with Western donors seeking to prevent Rebels gaining communist support consequently burundian refugees had to be a political and contained they were periodically harassed criminalized and forcedly relocated or repatriated Tanzanian citizens opposed to burundians Drew on genocidal histories perceived as embodied innate and intergeneration following the 1994 Randon genocide burundian Hooter shifted from being victims to being depicted as violent people in contrast to tanzanians who exemplified peace and stability hostility to foreigners intensified with the Advent of multiparty competition with incl unscrupulous politici stalking anti-immigration and promoting Tanzanian exclusivism not surprisingly the term Refugee became stigmatized and people hid their identity whether they were Buran Hutu or Refugee some even later applied to change their ethnic status to higu and this was refused as state officials viewed ethnic identity as immutable nism influenced the government's decision in 2007 to naturalize 162,000 of the 1972 Cort a process funded by the International Community that included the digitization of Records but it enabled the state to monitor more effectively its new citizens and it enabled data sharing to facilitate the Global's north anti-terrorist anti-north south migration agenda Kamar Singo and I have argued that becoming a citizen lessened but did not REM remove the unbelonging the otherness and the pive ontological and political insecurity exper experienced by those burundians their T status in Tanzania remains contingent and shaped by enduring coloniality in interpreting the plight of burundians in Tanzania I argue that humanitarian interventions Del limit Del legitimize the forms of effective relationships such as nabess and expressions of conviviality and solidarity as in auntu or communal Hospitality these were communal Hospitality that could not be easily monitorized in budget allocations where numbers matter and they were considered not illustrative of a modern state and its relationship with foreigners Claude AK warns us again against technicism stating that quantification is used to deliver desired results and to depoliticize dehistoricized and dehumanize humanitarian inventions du and Colonial Logics of controlling natives as security problem practices of force relocations expulsions and encampments are used to silence and punish anti-colonial native activists Hannah Branham and I write that control over people's Mobility was always a technique of Labor mobilization yting back to the Colonial period we traced the continuities between Colonial legislation on labor migration and contemporary Refugee controls in Tanzania and Kenya using a sociohistorical approach we demonstrated how a system of differential Mobility under colonialism was seemlessly carried out into the postcolonial ERA with the Advent of ostensibly new security challenges that included terrorism uncontrolled border crossings and solidarities and the enduring VI violability of domestic citizenship regimes this Legacy of State enforce securitized migration reinforced The View that migration management is intrinsic the political stability in some laws governing migration between states and the categorizations of those who Moved according to the cause or purpose of their migration whether that's labor migrants labor economic migrants aliens refugees visitors Irregulars and more recently internally displaced people and protracted Refugee communities are international bureaucratic instruments that sustain ideas of racial other otherness Western opposition to Africa and mobility and human rights um dates back uh in um for some obviously during the colonial but were very evident during the um 1950s during the emergence of the human right regimes and research done by Edwin Odo abuya or crass and Lucy mablin and others have demonstrated the colonial and racialized roots of the 1951 Refugee convention its biases and at the time of its negotiation the struggle by anticolonial and those few decolonized countries who sought to make the convention Global the convention was supposed only to apply to European refugees and then Colonial um States plus the US Canada and Australia were according to ambo abuya and others quote highly resistant in private if not public to the institutionalization of a regime which might extend rights to all human beings irrespective of their country or the color of their skin so how have po postcolonial States become complicit in dehumanizing practices in my 2008 monograph gender and genocide in Burundi I challenged the new barbarism and the new Wars thesis been used to explain 1990s war and extreme violence in Africa and I explored militarism and race thinking in the formation of the modern nation state in Africa drawing on um the work of M mamdani and others I show how non- Elite Africans in Bundi were not cons citizens the rights that had to be protected they were seen as Vermin to be eliminated in political and capitalist competition in addressing the genocide that led to the displacment of the burundian refugees I explore the continued signif significance of colonial racialization the social construction and maintenance of racial and ethnic hierarchies and boundaries by the Germans and then the belgians and how they enabled the continuation of processes of economic extraction in the postcolonial period i coined the term the genocidal state to Define social formations where the politics of exploitation exclusivism racism Eugenics militarism extremism and patriarchy come together in a society where the politics of competition means the elimination of the other and results in Acts of genocide war and embedded militarism histories of genocide or Logics and violence point to the Persistence of a racist militarist state that fails to see its people as human what practicing what Patricia mcfaden terms plunder as statecraft reproducing Colonial specialities so even with ethnic majority rule right hus and are power um Bru's leaders see the majority of its citizen as Surplus to their ability to participate in global extraction regimes and therefore expend I have to commend Yolanda Wyman's PhD thesis where she shows the enduring violence of successive displacements and land dispossession and with them impoverishment in Bundi and she said that this means that the international humanitarian solution of return and reintegration is severely flawed and inhumane the treatment of refugees and migrants at the US UK and EU borders signify to us that the International Community can no longer claim to provide the blueprint for humanizing regional and National Refugee legislation and policy a humanizing agenda is at the heart of my scholarship as the few independent countries in the global South in 1950s fought to change the emerging International legislation from its racist core to that people racialized as other than white other than whites would have access to international human rights defiant scholarship challenges the inherent racism displayed in the practices of these law current laws and policies in a chapter in the recent edited book amidst the depry humanitarianism and the end of the liberal order I call for an anti-racist humanitarianism one that challenges the white supremacy embedded in H honic understandings of humanitarianism and what it means to be human and to live dignified lives in the world so what might this involve the project of abolition entails a double movement undoing and dismantling Colonial specialities while simultaneously building new liberated ones infused with solidarities and contributing to movements for reparative justice and healing that address and redress intergenerational harms perpetrated in the name of modern humanitarianism in this work I'm inspired by the prison abolition movement and Ruth Wilson Gilmore's work on abolition geographies which assert the need for the negation of the confinements borders structures and relations of carceral geographies to end the prison industrial compex and I would argue the refugee Industrial complex abolition perspectives can be directed generally towards the refugee regime architecture I'm not advocating abolition that leaves people abandoned I am looking back in history to those communities that were forg Beyond and against eurocentric social order through processes of resistance and in um learning Disobedience Amber and I draw inspiration from the emerging literature on marage autonomous black communities in the Americas and Beyond even in there are some in Africa um who Forge and make life beyond um the colonial world or the enslaved um world and I'm also inspired by pan-africanist visions of African Unity that emphasizes a common Humanity in opposition to Colonial cartographies and racial and ethnic divides panafrican advocacy for United Africa was a strategy for survival in the face of imperialism but also a recognition of the history of mobility and state formation within the continent such World Views acknowledge that racialized and dehumanizing bordering policies and practices are symbols of European modernity which African Pol political Elites have adopted and reproduced in the continuation of the practices of accumulation by dispossession African Unity indeed Global African Unity is the only way one can overcome despite rulers and extractive regimes that benefit from Colonial territories reconfigured as nation states militarism genocidal and patriarchal violence and xenophobia are the outcome of the adoption and the reproduction of colonial ideologies categorize categories and Logics as normative Pathways to modernity without questioning their relevance to African realities recognizing that space is always in flux if um Africans need to take more seriously Scholars such as M and loat sheni and enja who questioned the methodological nationalism research on Africa and the hemony of the national project as the only political Community y asks us to challenge epistemic frames that represent citizenship national identity and the nation status given and complete projects they are on they are problematic frames he argues and generate processes of exclusion and dehumanization and contri contribute to both state and personal insecurities while abolition is a long-term Pana africanist ambition in the short term we have to think more in terms of the elimination of border and policies and practices that serve to dehumanization and restrict the freedom of African people some of you might be familiar with the African open um openness Africa Visa openness index aimed at promoting freedom of movement for for Accelerated development um and international African mobility in the imagination and policies of the African Union and various Regional economic unions or the African Development Bank um and supported by the international labor organization while using the language of freedom of movement reproduces Colonial Logics on labor migration that were based as am C notes in discourse on colonialism on the thingification of the African as an instrument of production the idea of African refugees in Africa should be an aema in the context of pre-colonial histories of migration and Colonial histories of dispossession and displacement how do we remake the continent as a home of African peoples all African peoples or should we argue does Africa belong to them a humanizing decolonial approach should draw inspiration from historical moments of emancipatory practices by African States and here I'll remind you of the 1960s in the the um o the African Liberation committee which was established in the 1960s with an office in Dar Salam its goal was to harmonize and provide assistance or Aid to African fleeing AP partage regimes and um there's been quite obviously quite a liter lot of literature written but there to even within that period I would argue that short period African states were able um in the face of hostility from our parted apartate regimes and their Global not supporters found space for Africans on the continent and throughout the continent a more recent example is the African Union's Progressive stands to making the African diaspora the sixth region of the continent and Ghana opening citiship to the African diasporas these marked a significant acknowledgement of a Bader a broader and more inclusive Global African Community so I'm coming to the end time's going so um to conclude then uprooting the deeply embedded eurocentric systems of knowledge in Africa begins with a dismantling of our disciplinary and subdisciplinary areas of focus my work has been transdisciplinary and it's been transboundary people have asked do you work on trans where do you which country do you work on and I say East AF central Africa and they still want which one tell us you know um but people move I'm looking at mobility and I um you know uh whilst the nation state is important from the perspective of looking at some of the origins of this legal legislation um if I think my next project should be in fact looking at how people negotiate conviviality across these borders I invite you though to participate actively in divestment in the hgim monies of knowing and practices fostered by a colonial academies actors sectors funding and epist stem this freeing up of our labor energy and political resources allows us to direct more attention to repair reparations Justice and decolonial options de disobedience in the colonial University requires both anti-colonial critique and decolonial imaginaries as Professor uh Leni has noted such critique is not new Claude Mckay has also shown how social science has colonized those in the global South to accept scientific knowledge as signifying methodological rigor to which we should all comply and the Maris scholar Linda twice simith argues that we have colonized the discipline and the disciplined the colonized being defiant or disobedient in the academy is transgressive and may have its cost but we should be confident in that we are part of an intellectual tradition a long history of defined scholarship in Africa and the African diaspora and while some of those earlier radical projects were temporarily subdued by neoliberal thinking and overlooked within the corporate Academy we are witnessing a Resurgence of defined intellectual traditions in in response to new strategies of dehumanization we can with work within these historical and emerging Traditions to attend to the global nature of racialization and racial capitalism and the struggles of black people we urge cross fertilization between anti-racist scholars in Africa and elsewhere especially in the Global African diaspora changes have taken place in many African universities some have stalled but these need to be um Consolidated and Amplified defiant scholarly practice build upon decolonial estimate EP epistem and a powerful body of African scholarship that prends to be Universal and local that exuses the epistemic violence of colonial categorizations theorizations and methodologies through active unlearning and rethinking we can root our project in the hands in the lands and communities where we work the struggle for for defiance scholarship and a break with existing paradigms of authorative control continues beyond the colonial wound a decolonial approach to Asylum then requires a decentering of the security arguments that reproduce Colonial Logics of population control control and subjugation and exceptional levels of suffering decolonial thinking involves reducing the emphasis on Aid donor funding and Western expertise on migration management instead it would employ refugees and migrant voices and draw on endogenous and epistemologic ontologist and epistemologist that accepts um multiplicity of mobilities and spatialities it should explore the flexibilities socialities and convivialities that exist in and between African communities the limited but inspiring example of state sponsored panafrican solidarity imply exemplifies the possibilities of disrupting and transcending the racist Nal territorial focus of European concepts of belonging to one that is humanizing plural transnational and inclusive and um I've just might put the book up there where you can read more thank you very [Applause] much yeah thank you thank you very much key notes um we have H 20 minutes for questioners comments from your sides quite very high technical stuff here so we don't have micros to transport from um are there comments from your side from the online Auditorium I think we do it like this that we start with the auditorium here to see who would have a question and perhaps I would select three and then you could answer on block and then we have a look on the we would have a look at the chat perhaps we have question there um so that Patricia could read them and then answer on herself okay so okay no please uh the one who wants to say something put a push uh on your yeah okay we see here green so that is the first then the second so that we can see on the monitor who what was then you have you have the voice so we would start with number so the first down there yeah SE 101 um thank you so much uh Patricia Prof Patricia I really enjoyed firstly uh your implication of geographies in the making of the Empire I think in my observations of uh geography departments on the continent there is limited uh conversation around these origins of geography and I think they're really important when we think uh through the work but what I wanted to ask a question about is earlier in your talk and I'm paraphrasing you talked about how there's limited sort of deep interrogation of race um in spaces outside of southern Africa and I was wondering do you think that um limited inter uh interrogation is coming from northern Scholars looking at those spaces outside of southern Africa or is it also coming from uh Scholars within the continent and what are the reasons for both if they are thanks yeah thank you you want me to answer I'll take three okay um thank you yes um I think it it comes from both although I think that is changing um now uh there are some scholarship I think for a lot of Africans and there many in the room so mostly from African geographers certainly Africa I mean uh race doesn't it they don't necessarily see race as their priority right because there are other factors immediate they might say well the EnV they could say the environment you might say um food on our tables or the economic situation or whatever is is is a priority right so they um but in fact what we're arguing is that race is essential to um it's the onine factor in the in the economic situation that you're experien um and what's interesting now in the global north um not necessarily geographers started the conversation um certainly Amber myself um handled to some degree as well um by looking at the significance of race in um in in in in in you know using a racial analysis to uncover what is happening in Africa so I think African col Scholars don't you know been told really race was an issue during the colonial period it no longer matters it only matters in southern Africa and therefore we don't need we don't need to talk about it but if you go I mean I think the last time I was in Nairobi I went into a supermarket and this white guy probably an NGO worker came out and they served him first they pulled and then I said to my student former PhD student who I was with who was black Kenyan and I said what's going on on and she said yeah yeah don't make a fuss cuz she knew I was I feel this guy knows should know better coming from Europe right he should know the struggles um and yet he moved forward and was served first um and that was just that's just a minor you know example but race still matters whiteness is still significant in terms of um the global economy in terms of the treatment of refugees and so on but I I should I should say that's changing I just wish more Africans um outside of Afric South Africa um would start to you know that that sort of analysis and and you know um come to terms I mean many of them will just look at their leaders and say it's our leaders problems and to some degree it is the leaders you know yes thank you Patricia we would have now seat 140 with a comment or question thank you very much uh for the inform in um keynote um for quite some time now I have been thinking about this consciousness of OB of Disobedience and um I I have an issue with that is it possible for us to begin to look for another word other than Disobedience uh because there is a sense in which it ironically for me reinforces the hierarchies of unequal our relations uh because the moment you talk about Disobedience you are talking about a higher authority M and um and that also subjects you to that Authority so that whatever you do in the end um is still considered not to be normative um it's disruptive in a way that also make makes it illegal you know that kind of say the relationship between a father and the children or parents and the children and you talk about Disobedience can we I am like can we look for another word other so we don't end up ironically um you know reinforcing the same thing uh we think we we are shifting away from thank you very much thank you that's a really um great point and um yeah we thought obviously it's a term uh where which we feel that within the having been brought up within I I've been schooled within the Western Academy um I think it's a term that um suggests disruption it suggests um when uh I think I mean I like it with in the context in which um I'm operating because that we do have these hierarchies and we do have to challenge them and if the first step of um de colonizing yourself is to challenge these hierarchies it involves Disobedience right I mean I I mentioned that my mother was an inval Evangelical Pastor I'm have to sorry to all you Christians in the audience but I was I just looked at what they were doing and said actually I can't obey right I need to chart another spiritual life right independent of this right so um so if you know that so we can follow we follow the Norms we follow what's been we told to do in school we don't question we you know and the only way you you you create Theory the only way you you think differently is to is to disobey I understand what you mean about we we can end up reinforcing this authority figure but I think we have to start with critique we have to start with disobedience and then we rebuild and if I yeah we need a lang we need a term and I'd love an African term actually somebody can you know you know come up with you know an African concept of you know um that is different and I I mean I think uh you know but yeah I think it's the first stage I don't and and I think yeah we do um submit um we submit to donors you know we submit to all you know all all sorts of colonial Logics that we should just um say no to but I understand but I fully understand what you're getting okay okay thank you for your answer your comments we have now I think number 102 no okay this is still the previous one so it is 117 thank you um I'm Joseph cul from uh marer right here oh yeah sorry sorry for sin your work is interesting um it's interesting because you know it's speaking to a lot of approaches um but I I recognize that uh and this is something that is also disturbing me um maybe you could have a a way out of this if if if we are approaching uh uh trying to to dismantle uh these uh you know dominant epistemic orders and we approaching them from uh you know uh the universal and trying to think that uh you know even the local can be the universal um are we over valorizing the universal that is already there if you're thinking of coloniality in the dominant paradigm are we thinking of multiple coloniali in the local parad if you're investigating uh for example the the genocide in bori and Randa and we see the contestation of the Hutu and tusi and running to neighboring Tanzania are we also only looking at the way in which European or eurocentric capitalism has uh you know has reinforced the H to you know to context and therefore we become blind to the local coloniali within which the H and to have been entangled historically and so is it possible to reconcile competing uh genealogies of the colonial uh in the sense that we not become blind to one and overemphasize the other uh you know that's what's disturbing me uh thank you yes thank you for your quite long comment perhaps a shorter answer because we have still four okay sorry yeah very Oh short answer to that would be very difficult but um yeah I mean I I can see I can see the the point you're making and the aim is to I don't necessar I mean I've thought about this because people I have been asked um you know do you universalize the local right and uh I think there are some things that can be Universal wise and some that are particular to particular society I'm not saying and or particular local and I suppose I'm you know just going back to Massie and the theme of spatialities what I'm interested in is the relations right the relations between these spaces between these spheres between scales right I can also um I don't think in my discussion and you'd have to read the book um really to see in my discussion of um the conflict in Rand and Bundi I actually didn't um I I was very careful not to focus purely on um the universe or the colonial right because I understand I understood the Dynamics that were going on in those societies right um and yes there were you know uh there were um Power hierarchies prior to the colonial rule um and they remain significant but also they have been um partly pushed aside by the colonial hierarchies right that the racial hierarchies that remain within colonialism with colonialism but those power hierarchies are still there if we talk to people on the in the everyday right and in shapes their everyday lives so that I suppose that's you know I tried to show that um but I don't know if that answers your question right yeah thank you I realize I have to be very quick yes thank you so much I would say we have two questions in the online so just to have it in mind I would say we hear um C 86 okay it's me and sorry thank you so much for this um interesting presentation uh my question is I guess just a question of clarification um you put dorin mer and Harvey together but uh in my reading I looks like they are quite different because D say the concept of power geometry is pretty much relate to race and gender so I don't know yeah just a let so the power geometry is is the idea that space is dominated by power relation yeah yeah yeah yeah sorry but no the last point that you made about race and gender yeah she sort of connect to I mean I use the theory and connected to R yeah she doesn't fully actually I mean she does mention it only in relation to the fact that she Liv you know in relation to the diversity within the areas she uses the multiethnic diversity in the areas that she used or Multicultural what you would call it diversity in the areas that she she um used to exemplify her argument um I mean David Harvey also will acknowledge race but he still doesn't see it as significant um and that so I'm not I'm just saying thatc if Marxist geographers has treated race a centered race more probably there would be a greater amongst the discipline anyway there would be a greater awareness of um issues around race it took black geographers right I mean there were a few obviously before who wrote about race like um Peter Jackson but it took black the set black geographers it took you know you had to change the institutional subject of the discipline in order to um to start um the conversation race and it's still on the margins of geography is hasn't been embedded yet and that's what we're pushing for thank you thank you I would say this would be the lasts uh here in the why don't you um have Street Path them all and I'll see if I can pull them all in one answer okay so we could do but we have two questions onl check so online mhm yes please yes um thank you so so much um I'm here sorry Professor yeah sorry I my glasses I um thank you so much Prof Professor dy I really really enjoyed um this keynote um I also have a question um concerning and disob Disobedience um because disobedience is is kind of a risk right a risk taking maybe in the beginning um you don't know like in which direction you want to go like maybe you move into like towards unknown spaces or unfamiliar spaces but you just know like this is not the way I'm going to go but this is yeah um but you don't know actually like the the direction and I also think that like this can also be seen as a privilege like who can actually um dis disobey right and what and also like another question and like what aspects can like where can you disobey like like the way Academia Works maybe or like the language that is um um like the way like papers and books Etc like academic language Etc like what exactly and also there there are like kind of aspects like where you cannot like there's a limit to Disobedience and this is actually yeah my question yes please okay um yes there are limits and it is reaken um and I'm in an academy where I have to for my career I have to conform I have to publish in um journals you know and because that scene is more important but for me and I remember when I was told to do that I said actually um most Africans won't read an article in a geography Journal I'd rather publish my that book on brundy I did that against advice in my you know in my department um but yeah it's risk-taking I think you can be disobedient in the questions you ask when you um your research questions you can dis be disobedient in terms of the literature you use it has risk there's no doubt about especially if you're studying in an academy that um refuses to acknowledge um you know uh plurality or uh you know so there are risk um but what you need to to do is ground yourself in a community of Scholars and you know who share um your world view right and for me that's what I did um and remain and continue to do so and it means actually that people people who are outside of um not who don't work in Africa who are not part of my community of Scholars will come to me and want to have conversations with me you know I think the key thing is think about how our labor is often co-opted and used and become mainstream right so you just carry on developing you just find somebody who's supportive in your department and carry on developing because what you'll find is that you're you know you're representing your reality you're talking about your experiences it's not you're not doing something that's abstract okay um turn into the two questions um online just could read and then yeah the first says a comment on the possibility that Colonials spatial constructions and limitations in Africans have metamorphosed inter capitalist cyber or digital cartographies that deny or limit participation in the global economy in forms such as Internet blackout digital Shadows Etc um yeah I suppose what I'm trying to figure how to answer that one um yeah I I suppose the blackout internet blackouts and digital shutdowns are way I mean actually if you want to read about how um the colonial Scholars think about those in relation to Africa um look at the work of Amber maray my you know my colleague because she's written about this in respect to um to Ethiopia and to Cameroon and her I think her current research project is also on that because yeah I mean in some sense I mean that this is there is there there is a lot of um lot of questions I think we could talk we could ask around digital cartographies and the participation of Africa within the digital Eon the global digital economy um the second question is is it isn't it fruitless to debate decolonization given that it merely focuses on other individuals and does not assist us in reconstructing our universities right um in my University the hierarchy um doesn't like the word decolonizing right and for me that's really significant it means that it has traction okay so for me uh I I will continue um much to the annoyance of people use the word decolonizing um one it's um we you know I think whatever you we are you know I always think back about slavery right because that's where my ancestors came from well most of them um or there were the you know the pro yeah and um my immediate ancestors I mean and people fought right as a little Cog people fought in the spaces that they were they were resist they refused they resisted they suffered all but nevertheless they continued because they wanted change right one person might not make a difference but all of you in the room together can make a difference and that's what um you know it's about we can reconstruct the university you know you need start having conversations um you know on another lecture um you know uh that Amber and I gave recently we just our students in 27 2020 and mainly white students I don't know if there was um minority um Global majority student amongst them but the main why said looked at our reading list and put the faces of the authors um of all the reading list and we were shocked because they were all white apart from our our course right you know um and they said no you are talk using the word decolonizing you're talking about anti-racism the department had set up an anti-racist group and look at this okay look at what we're told to read even though some of them were Progressive radical scholar supposedly right so it is possible to to act and I think those of us on the continent who still put in um you know European philosophers on the reading list I me not saying you shouldn't read European philosopher but they shouldn't be you know the philosop philosophical texts um or the foundation ones that you read you should categorize them and provincialize them and as European philosophers you know with a different agenda from um your own so that that's what that's what I think will bring about change we can reconstruct our universities um uh but it's not something that one person can do on their own um leaders can do it if they have the power but we can collectively do it and that's what we that's that's my goal but the little time I have left before I retire thank you thank [Applause] you I just can see two more shorts directly that would be 134 and then directly 187 to post the question brief comment and then brief answer because then we can really um go further with the more face Toof face discussions with some food with some drinks so therefore I think we have still time it's just an opening and we see that there is already uh Power in it um to to get into the debate so yes number 134 quickly here well uh thank you very much for the lecture um I want to say that the intellectual Community should not be afraid of that Disobedience that that resistance which has been captured somewhere else as protest scholarship resistance scholarship however we need to be mindful because of the hierarchy within the intellectual space at what level can one begin to exhibit this resistance in a bit to avoid action and counter reactions that may Trail it mhm uh is it when you are a doctoral student for instance or when you already become a professor when do you resist so that resistance will not resist you yeah and then overtake will not overtake overtake thank you very much that's a really good point and it's one that I've consider considered personally as well obviously affects me and has um but when um I think I've always being resisting right um quietly sometimes I think when I the reason why I talked about those spaces um of learning um at the start of my talk is that I found a scholarly Community outside of the academy right where I could learn what I wanted to learn I wasn't learning in the classroom and I do sell my students who come in and say they want to resist straight away and they they actually you need to know the tools you know you you need to understand how the system works right you need to know inside out in order to be able to resist it effectively right so you start by learning how it works right what do you need for example to get a degree to get a PhD um um and right and you find obviously colleagues your supervisor you you you know who can who's supportive if not you find ways to negotiate and get support from other people within your um University so but I do understand it is you the different strategies you take on and use different strategies at different times right it's difficult when you're an undergraduate um but in my teaching um and as I said Amber and I co- teach a course we we um participate with what we call co-learning with the students right so we get them to actively participate to bring their ideas to the table and what's interesting you know o students I suppose don't know about students in Germany but if you go into a lecture theater and you ask them at the end of the lecture for questions nobody will speak nobody will say they don't raise their hands they're very um submissive and so we in our C- teaching in small group teaching we force them to speak to have discussions around these issues and it's really interesting some of the um the the baggage they come to right um the the classroom with so I think Co you know that sort of learning you can start by teach in your teaching you can start by the um the topics you uh introduced readings you introduced to students there are ways of being disobedient um but yeah I think you have to do it strategically um and I would not encourage someone in a situation which is openly hostile right an undergraduate to write a dissertation which none of the which their um professors are going to give zero because they don't believe in anything that that person has to say I just so I would never do that I mean I know there's there've been you know um minority students who've done that I would never encourage that I said you can write if one if you follow the rules you can still write on the topic but you follow the rules and you critique and so all if all the conventions are in place it's really difficult for them not to um you know not not to see the scholar scholarliness of the work right it's really difficult because even if you you protest right you have something to protest about so that's what I say you need to learn the tools in order to be able to be disobedient sorry um the next question oh for not getting tired I'm get well last question I think I want a glass of all last short question or comment thank you uh thank you very much for the very interesting presentation I'm here my name um I perfectly agree with you um as far as the precarity of the whole situation of migration and refugees is um people living one space to the other some by their power others they are actually forced to move to those spaces my question is not one I expect you to answer but one we all should go home with is does our scholarly work in our small community of academics really make a difference in the lives of those one who are being moved around in the lives of those who are actually refugees and don't have access to this literature even if they had access to it they don't have anything to do with it why I say this is because you brought a very excellent historical examples um from a long time ago but the clarity of it all is that this is still ongoing MH just to example ex Ukrainian refugees in Germany compared to other refugees the second example the UK transporting refugees to Rwanda to settle them there this is forceful Refuge you you seek for refuge in another location and you Carri to another location does it really help our intellectual discourse thank you um actually the UK the the UK transporting refugees very fits very very much with my argument it's what they did in the past when there were colonial Powers they would move disobedient people from One Colonial territory to another right so it's part of their practice of expulsion of the you know um that so I mean I didn't draw on those recent examples because I'm not writing directly on them but yeah you could you could you could look at the UK reaction to the Ukraine and or Europe's re reaction to the Ukraine and to African refugees through a well it's it's not obvious you don't even need to talk about it right um using acial analysis um you can look at the colonial you know the sort of continuities between Colonial legislation and the Contemporary reaction to refugees as I said um when I I mentioned some of the work that's been done on the international human rights regime um you know uh the the refugee uh 1951 convention and so on um you know black um Brown you or you know people weren't part weren't supposed to be part covered by those conventions right so there's nothing there's nothing unusual about their reaction perhaps there was a blip because of different leaders in power but there's nothing there's continuity and what we need to do is to expose that because they want to always stop people from thinking about the past right history is is there you know no no no one in Britain in politics in Britain want to talk about history except if it's about the second world war right sorry being in Germany but that's all they want to talk about that's all they want to talk about they don't want to talk about Colonial history any other history right so um I'm afraid it's not in the it's not in the Ivory Tower uh it's actually in the everyday I spend the everyday educating British citizens about their colonial history um about racial one of the lectures I give to first year students is about race and migration and I go back to the law the Chinese expulsion acts um in North America there's whole set of racial legislation um against migrants right that's happened in the anglosphere I Haven you looked at the FR you know France and other countries right so you know that for me is speaking to the everyday reality of of students it's so that's itri thank you thank you so very much [Applause] um it was really a pleasure to listen to you it was very very nice your critical your warm open comments for nice dialogue so let's go outside now and relax thanks again and thank Youk you tomorrow fantastic audience thank you
Origins & context
- Title
- Annual Cluster Conference "Spatialities": Keynote - Patricia Daley
- Language
- English
- YouTube playlist
- Conference Spatilities 2023
- Date
- November 10, 2023
Identifiers & sources
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