Decolonise! Vol. 1: 2019 by camdecolmag

D EC OLO NIS E !

Vol 1: 2019

EDITORIAL & CONTENTS

Editors

his year saw a wealth of decolonising discourse and activism across Cambridge University, although so much remains to be done. This magazine intends to bring together some of these different strands of decolonising work and provide an outlet for broad discussion of decolonising within the Cambridge context. We originally intended to feature everything from accounts of cutting-edge research and timelines of activism in different departments to visual art and poetry. Time conspired against us, but we hope that next year we will be able to produce another issue with even more diverse content addressing the discussion around decolonising the university in general and Cambridge in particular. It is in the nature of decolonising discussions that they are often uncomfortable and fraught, as well as containing a multitude of voices and perspectives. Consider this a blanket content note for many potentially troubling or triggering topics including racism, colonialism, violence, mental illness, sexism, etc. Consider it also a disclaimer that the editors do not intend to present a single view of decolonising that they endorse, but to provide room for discourse and expression within the magazine's remit.

CONTENTS: English

Law

Anglophone' by Molly O'Gorman Pages 3–5

Decolonise Law Working Group Pages 12–13

Decolonisation Does 'Decolonise | 'Literary | 'What Must Move Beyond the Law' Mean?' by the

the Canon: a Decolonised | 'Rethinking | 'Imagining To Know and Be Known' Law Curriculum' by tan by Jonathan Chan Pages 6–9

Language of | 'The Identity Politics in Min

Jin Lee’s Pachinko (2017)' [Abstract] by Jonathan Chan Pages 9

POLIS

by Decolonise | Statement Polis Working Group Pages 10–11

ning-sang (on behalf of the Decolonise Law Working Group) Pages 13–15

Criminology

Fieldwork and the | 'On Need for a Decolonised

Imagination' by Laura Gutiérrez Gómez Pages 16–17

Archaeology

with Prof. | Interview Paul Lane by Marie Langrishe

Pages 18–21

Artifical Intelligence

with Dr. | Interview Kanta Dihal and Ezinne

Nwankwo by Marie Langrishe Pages 22–25

History

Please scan the QR code above or go to pastebin.com/Q2siki0B for a list of decolonising-related links relevant to Cambridge, as well as the email address at which you can contact the editors to submit writing or visual art for future publication.

Barbados | 'The Labouring Classes and

the Disturbances of 1937' [Extract] by Johari Adjei Pages 26–28

Life

Was Not Born a | 'IWoman of Colour' by tan ning-sang

Pages 29–32

ENGLISH

Molly O'Gorman

ecolonisation efforts that do not encompass non-anglophone literature mean that empire continues to live in our academia. It means that the literature we study, even if international, is written in what is for many the language of oppression. It makes the British literary tradition the norm from which language and literary form diverges, rather than allowing for individual cultures of expression. Anglophone writing caters for an anglophone audience, which allows the continuation of cultural imperialism; although international anglophone literature may not be culturally British, it is often written with an anglophone audience in mind, which inevitably leads to a trend of palatability to Western tastes, be it in terms of content or literary form. “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” is often quoted in relation to decolonial efforts; this is true of literature. We

cannot just include nonBritish names on a reading list of literature that remains in the British tradition; true decolonisation takes into account all literary forms and dismantles the hierarchy where literature that does not conform to our traditional forms is viewed as a divergence and is thus othered, rather than studied on its own terms.

Decolonisation efforts that do not encompass nonanglophone literature mean that empire continues to live in our academia. It means that the literature we study, even if international, is written in what is for many the language ofoppression. Anglophone literature has never existed in a vacuum, and to study it as though it has lessens the scope of our understanding. Current establishment gestures towards diversity seem limited to the modern paper, but this is reductive. Even if for some reason we only wished to study the anglophone, its influences have never been limited to English. Even if we go back to the Middle

Ages, the dit amoureux and the poem of complaint are forms taken from France, whilst Chaucer and his contemporaries would have translated much French poetry; their familiarity with it is demonstrated by the intertextual poetry they left behind. Not studying translated works unnecessarily limits the scope of our academia and denies us a relationship to the text closer to what the original audience would have had, unhampered by original language in our understanding of both textual references and genre development or parody. It is true that we learn about contemporary international influences, but we study them as though they are contextual detail to anglophone literature, rather than works in their own right. This inhibits our current study as well as – more problematically – denying non-anglophone works importance on their own terms; in only forming the backdrop to anglophone texts, our understanding of international literature is entirely relational. Our inability to study translated literature also hampers our ability to study postcolonial texts; without a working knowledge of cultural forms other than those of Britain and (post)colonial America, international texts will always be studied in terms of their divergence from Western culture rather than in terms of their place within their own tradition. It is often argued that international literature on a large scale only appears in the modern period; this is blatantly false, as evidenced by the ample historic literatures of countries all around the world. In only studying the

imperial mindset promoting the superiority of European culture.

anglophone descendants of these literatures, we displace them from their history. Erasure of culture in this way is not only placing an imperial slant on the past, it is falsifying our study of literature.

We cannot just include non-British names on a reading list ofliterature that remains in the British tradition; true decolonisation takes into account all literary forms and dismantles the hierarchy where literature that does not conform to our traditional forms is viewed as a divergence and is thus othered, rather than studied on its own terms.

The ban on translation is particularly difficult to take seriously when we see it lifted for Greek and Latin. The study of Greek tragedy is compulsory because of its effect on later literature, yet as we have seen this is true for literature of all languages. Most Cambridge English undergraduates also study translations of Utopia (originally in Latin) and Wyatt’s translations of Petrarch’s Italian sonnets. It is here that we see the double standard played out, as all of the reasons to bar translated literature are undermined. Instead, translation is allowed when it plays into a narrative whereby English literature is the inheritor of the classical literary tradition. Anglophone literature is a wide umbrella that spreads far beyond Western Europe, yet the only nonanglophone heritage we study is the neo-classical. It is compulsory to study literature’s relationship to the classical tradition. This

says a lot about how we construct our cultural identity. When we vaunt Ancient Greece, we tend to vaunt an idea of a Greek civilisation out of place with more primitive contemporary cultures, an idea which is undermined by the rich cultures all over the globe at the time. The dichotomy of civilisation and primitivism comes from the racial science of the nineteenth century used to justify colonialism. Eurocentrism is rooted in this racist ideology, whereby classical peoples and cultures are celebrated as superiorly civilised; we celebrate Rome both as the inheritor of Greek culture and as a force of empire in spreading it. Ideas of empire and civilisation are inextricably linked and both have dominated British politics outwardly until very recently, and these ideas continue to be valued in our education establishments, despite systematically devaluing non-anglophone and nonclassical traditions. We live in an age of global literature where drawing a single classical line of influence from Ancient Greece to the present day appears limited and parochial. Cambridge’s inconsistency regarding translation thus shows that the ban on translation is not an arbitrary limit but in fact rooted in an

Our inability to study translated literature also hampers our ability to study postcolonial texts; without a working knowledge ofcultural forms other than those ofBritain and (post)colonial America, international texts will always be studied in terms oftheir divergence from Western culture rather than in terms oftheir place within their own tradition. The most common argument given against the study of literature in translation is that the act of translation distances the student from authorial intention. Rhyme, metre, pun and most rhetorical techniques cannot be translated directly from language to language, and with translation comes inevitable loss – so goes the argument. Yet this is to deny the creativity inherent to translation. The Man Booker International Prize every year splits the prize money equally between author and translator, reevaluating the translator’s creative role and presenting the translated text as a work of collaboration. This reevaluation is much needed; we are culturally obsessed over ideas of individual authorship. When it comes to Shakespeare, for example, we know he was a collaborative playwright, yet editions of his complete works consistently limit the plays included to those that can be considered totally or majority written by Shakespeare, most notably to the frequent exclusion of Sir Thomas

More despite a manuscript of a scene existing in Shakespeare’s handwriting. This play is excluded because Shakespeare is thought to have been one amongst five collaborators, and its exclusion seriously undermines the idea of a complete works and questions what we mean by authorship. Culturally we still value the ‘“man and his works” approach associated with nineteenth-century hero worship of the solitary genius’, an idea which has its roots in romanticism but which has found itself entrenched through capitalism; the individualist attitudes that pervade our society also pervade our academia. It is inherently capitalist to attribute success to one person for projects that require collaboration; the romantic notion of the sole genius collides with a culture of individual success here. Tony Kushner described being a writer as performative in this way, saying ‘[y]ou become a character in a metadrama into which your own dramatizing has pitched you […] you pretend to play it solo, preserving the myth that you alone are the wellspring of your

creativity’. Works in translation are thus not allowed into the realm of our degree, as they break through the fiction of authorship that we have set up and undermine our current systems of thought – but this is exactly what we need. In decolonising, it is not enough to add more non-British names to our reading lists; we must dismantle the systems of thought that are rooted in oppressive and limited structures, in this case preserving capitalist myths at the expense of a broad and nuanced understanding of creative processes.

Ideas ofempire and civilisation are inextricably linked and both have dominated British politics outwardly until very recently, and these ideas continue to be valued in our education establishments, despite systematically devaluing non-anglophone and nonclassical traditions. We live in an age ofglobal literature where drawing a single classical line of influence from Ancient Greece to the present day appears limited and parochial. The rules surrounding anglophone literature are inconsistent and damaging to scholarship and ideas of authorship; this demonstrates that they represent interests other than the academic, namely interests of ideology. The contradiction lies at the very heart of the undergraduate course; Cambridge is the home of practical criticism, where we are taught to treat every text on its own

merits without context or knowledge of the author, yet in all other papers the idea of individual authorship is prioritised over the text. It does not matter how diverse our reading lists are; if we refuse to study nonanglophone literature both current and historical, we refuse to study these works on their own terms. Until we do that, we will not have decolonised.

Notes

1. https://www.historyisaweapon.com/ defcon1/lordedismantle.html 2. William Calin, The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England (University of Toronto Romance Series, 1994) pp. 419-424 3. Sean Elias, Joe R. Feagin, Racial Theories in Social Science (Routledge, 2016) pp. 20-21 4. https://www.thebookseller.com/ news/man-booker-306625# 5. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, ‘General Introduction’, William Shakespeare and Others, The Collaborative Works ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) pp. 23-24 6. Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators and the Construction of Authorship ed. Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2006) pp. 4 7. Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators and the Construction of Authorship ed. Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2006) pp. xi

ENGLISH Jonathan Chan, originally writing in the final entry of a column in Varsity

am in a café in Singapore. We speak casually and briskly about the ways in which our relationship with the study of English literature has changed since we began in Cambridge. I am in a dim pub by Lucy Cavendish, doing the same thing. I am in Aromi. I am in a reading room in Wolfson. I am in the common room in Corpus, and then in King’s. I am in a room in Trinity. I am at the ARC Café. These conversations have each in turn coalesced on my laptop screen, the text cursor blinking nonchalantly with every attempt to shape a sense of coherence. Drafts fly back and forth furiously in Facebook chats with Jess, my editor and friend. I don’t understand this, she says. This person should have said this. I am wary at the prospect of employing literary theory too loosely at the expense of my interviewees, I reply. I am wary of the prospect of misrepresenting another’s story. Fine, she says, red tracks continuing to stain draft after draft. This is unclear, she continues. This is too esoteric. We quibble and delete, contextualise and reflect. In the absence of weekly supervisions on the modern paper of the English Tripos, this column has become my education on modern literature. What has become readily apparent through

the weeks is that there is a shared anxiety that students of colour have: the desire to know and be known. It is not simply a case of reading narratives about people who look like you or who have had the exact same experiences as you. If that had been the case, most of us would have abandoned any aspirations of continuing this educational enterprise long ago. Rather, in the face of a continuous series of white narratives that advance narrow iterations of human experience, many of us find ourselves drawn to writers whose work better evinces an understanding of the patterns of our own lives. Literatures that grapple with questions of racial discrimination, societal alienation, dislocation, colonial violence, migration, race, empire, identity– these are the literatures that illuminate the lives that many of us have lived. To know the experiences of those who have gone before us, whether real or fictitious, and to have these concerns known by the university. Throughout the term, writing this column has been an attempt to present a more truthful picture of the English cohort today. It is one that is proudly multiracial, sensitive to issues of representational justice, and aware of the systemic role literature plays in shaping perceptions toward the world. This column has been an attempt to shed light on the ways in which the English Tripos, as it has been for decades, is no longer tenable. The poles are shifting, the world is moving on, and this bastion of learning we have the privilege of wrestling with can no longer afford to hold on to

such insularity. If not for the sake of enriching a more robust approach toward literary criticism, my column has endeavoured to illustrate the ways in which the Tripos and certain supervisors have left students feeling alienated, undermined, and degraded. The Britain we see today is not the same one that the Tripos has continued to paint, and that demands change. It is as Sarah Jilani remarked during our interview about the restless assertions of postcolonial literature, “We’re here. We’ve always been here.”

It is not simply a case of reading narratives about people who look like you or who have had the exact same experiences as you. If that had been the case, most ofus would have abandoned any aspirations ofcontinuing this educational enterprise long ago. I reflected on my struggles on the English Tripos in a past article, which emerged from my alienation in my first term reading medieval literature. The urgency of that initial piece of writing emerged after a slate of articles written by my friends and their own processes of intellectual disentanglement in their areas of study. While I wish I’d worded some parts differently, looking back, it’s clear that there was an inexpressible restlessness in my desire to make my alienation known not only to those studying English but also to those administering it. I distinctly remember the rush of validation in seeing the article shared by

people who’ve encountered the cultural dislocations of a language that never quite feels like your own. Part of my hope in writing this column was to bring to discussions a sense of nuance, one distinct from the polemics that have rattled British media or the powerful acts of resistance in demonstrations and open letters. Growing up being a mixed-race person of Chinese-Korean descent in Singapore with relatives across continents has given me a sense of what it is to grow up between places. This experience of indeterminacy has helped me better understand the experiences of other English students who have felt out of place, whether they have been international students coming to terms with alienation in a new country, or domestic students who have contended with marginalisation all their lives. In this respect, these columns have sought to examine decolonisation less as a political or academic buzzword, but as a deeply wrenching and personal process. Consolidating the concerns of the people I spoke with into coherent articles has thus proven to

be a difficult task each week, particularly given the dangers of easy generalisation. Listening carefully and intently could only provide the raw material for each article– stories of family, upbringing, and academic discomfort. Shaping them into cogent arguments demanded a continuous process of critical rethinking. There remained the constant challenge of balancing these personal stories with the literary texts they brought up, the theoretical frameworks that have shaped them, and the mediating force of my own writing style. I was particularly conscious of the privileges I’ve had in being given the opportunity to tell these stories, as well as the economic privileges intertwined with my transnational upbringing. I have not grown up facing any systemic oppression, but the impetus remained for me to listen and learn. There is a kind of epistemic violence that

To know the experiences of those who have gone before us, whether real or fictitious, and to have these concerns known by the university.

happens when you tell someone else’s story even if they’ve given you the permission to do so, one that continues to haunt the corridors of humanities and social science departments in Western universities. To be able to do justice to the experiences of each person each week was an act of emotional labour, particularly as both Jess and I have had our own difficulties with transnational families, institutional estrangement, and the intellectual disentanglement necessary in a place like Cambridge. We dug into the histories, legacies, texts, and theories that had been brought up. We messaged people to fill in gaps we’d come across. We remained honest with our interviewees in bringing them drafts that had been revised four or five times. Embedded in our editorial enterprise was an ethos of care, a desire to let each person know that they’d been heard and acknowledged. I am still astounded by the generosity of the people willing to share their stories with the wider Cambridge community and me and remain deeply grateful. In every story that has

I have not grown up facing any systemic oppression, but the impetus remained for me to listen and learn.

been shared, there is a glimmer of what a decolonised English Faculty and curriculum could look like. There is great encouragement that amidst institutional constraints, things are beginning to change. There have been essays written about the earliest colonial writing about Singapore, the poetry of Kendrick Lamar, the heart of London’s BangladeshiBritish community, black time-travellers in slaveryera America, the Caribbean writers striving against their history, and the South Asian and African artists recapitulating their identities in their art. These pieces of literary criticism strive to bring nuance, depth, and complexity to the works that find themselves neglected by the AngloAmerican literary establishment, to reclaim a literary humanity. The retelling of each story from this column alone has made its own impact in one way or another, not least in the English Faculty where I’ve been encouraged by the conversations taking place amongst staff and students. Friends who’ve been interviewed have told me about how their Directors of Studies have read the articles and committed to changing their critical methodologies to be more sensitive to the concerns of students. Some stories have gained traction and provoked discussions about the difficulties of decolonising English

curriculums in Cambridge and elsewhere around the world. There have been promises from the English Faculty itself to rework reading lists, consolidate broader materials for each paper, and reconceive the way lectures are structured and presented. The bureaucratic machine moves along slowly, but there is good reason to remain hopeful.

My engagements with decolonisation have been chiefly defined by my Christian faith. For myself, my dissertation focuses on Pachinko, a 2017 novel by Korean-American writer offering a historical sweep of a Korean family that migrates to Japan and becomes embedded in legal, societal, and material discrimination under Japanese colonial rule. It is difficult to pin down exactly what attracted me to the novel.

Perhaps it was the change to consider the questions of racial passing that the novel raises with regard to its Korean-Japanese characters. Perhaps it was a desire to consider the colonial legacies of Imperial Japan, one experienced by both my Malaysian and Korean grandparents. What followed in turn was a term spent wrestling with questions of representational agency, faith, mixed identities, and the calcification of systemic prejudice. It has been an academic endeavour that has carried more personal resonances than anything I’ve worked on during my time at Cambridge, particularly in reconciling my involvement with the Decolonise English campaign and my Christian faith. My engagements with decolonisation have been chiefly defined by my Christian faith, for it has never been the imperative of Jesus to endorse the violence that has been committed in his name, but my faith undergirds a belief in every individual’s essential worth and humanity. It is my faith that has helped me to see the hypocrisy of colonial Christianities and understand how the reclamation of the religion restored dignity to the newly faithful. Pachinko offers an alternative reading of Christianity, one in which seminary teachers, church ministers, and underground Christians drove anticolonial resistance in Imperial Japan. This fierce tenacity reveals an aversion to injustice, violence, and oppression, one rooted fundamentally in the promises of a just and

faithful God. While some difficulty remains in disentangling the intimacy between Christianity and colonialism, particularly as the worst manifestations of Judeo-Christian jurisprudence continue to provoke debates in postcolonial nations, anticolonial movements rooted in the church reveal the convergence of decolonisation and Christianity. I have found assurance in these nuances and continue to cling to faith in affirming the struggle for humanity within the enterprise of academic decolonisation and embracing the opportunities for forgiveness and reconciliation.

While some difficulty remains in disentangling the intimacy between Christianity and colonialism, particularly as the worst manifestations of Judeo-Christian jurisprudence continue to provoke debates in postcolonial nations, anticolonial movements rooted in the church reveal the convergence of decolonisation and Christianity The study of literature continues to be a powerful discipline for it is literature that often illustrates the kind of world we’d like to live in. Literature exposes the ways that we have continued to lose sight of what it is to affirm one another’s humanity. For every instance of dehumanisation, and injustice we encounter in the texts we read, there yields a deep moment of emotive identification and reflection. As Mariam Abdel-Razek has

mentioned, “Every student of English became one because they’ve been moved or touched by something they’ve read”. The hope we share is for a world in which these things are pared away, but it falls to each of us to see how our own engagements with our academic work and larger society can bring this to fruition. Our convictions may be different, but this hope continues to bind us in solidarity. To know others and to be known ourselves– perhaps this is what we believe to be the primary goal of learning to be empathetic, one that transforms the ways we treat one another. The generosity of my interviewees has offered a glimpse of the community we could hope to see in the English Faculty, one characterised by the same grace in the way we tell our stories and affirm the difficulties that our peers face. The imperative to recognise what it is to be human continues to shape what every English student, and indeed anyone who loves literature, has always aspired to do: to read, to think, to listen, and to learn.

Appendix: 'The Language of Identity Politics in Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko (2017)' [Abstract]

ontemporary literature has featured a turn toward narratives that are informed by identity political discourses, a flourishing of fiction that depicts the experiences of those historically marginalised within Anglophone literary traditions. Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko (2017) stands as an exemplar emerging from the crosswinds of identity politics, Asian American and transnational American literatures, and the desire to provide a fresh articulation of the experience of Japan’s Korean minority. I argue that the language of identity politics functions as both a contextual and hermeneutic tool in Pachinko, one that provides opportunities to examine racial discrimination and clashing identity paradigms in Korean Japan. The novel’s mechanics of sympathetic identification are constructed primarily through language, discriminatory negotiations on an individual and structural level, as well as the frustration of American identity politics. Lee’s language of identity politics is grounded ultimately in a sense of sympathy and deep admiration rather than in resentment.

POLIS Decolonise POLIS Working Group

hy should we decolonise POLIS, what does that mean, and how can we do it? Challenged by others to explain ourselves, or reflecting on our objectives and strategies, these are three core questions our working group has grappled with over the past year. There are few easy answers, but what follows is how we respond to those questions in September 2019. We put it like this, because we have always believed that this work is affective, and it is our responsibility to be responsive, not rigidly chained to a single dogmatic ideology. Taking the “what” first, we believe in a curriculum that reflects that politics doesn’t begin with the “Western Canon”, that engages more with strands of thinking that come from the Global South and allows more critique of the Western thinkers on the syllabus. It needs to recognise that the West and non-West are mutually constituted and that "Western political thought" as a discrete entity is an imagined and idealised narrative – a narrative that, historically speaking, rests on racist and imperialist foundations and that continues to perpetuate racist discourses. It is about exploring the non-Western world in a way that does not conceptualise it as a homogenous entity but allows it the same diversity and complexity as the Western world. Let

us be very clear, as this is an easy but mis-founded criticism that often gets used to shut down the conversation: no one is questioning the importance of Hobbes or Kant or Weber, and no one wants to abandon the canon. We simply believe that there is scope for questioning and going beyond the traditional narrative and broadening discussion.

We believe in a curriculum that reflects that politics doesn’t begin with the “Western Canon”, that engages more with strands ofthinking that come from the Global South and allows more critique ofthe Western thinkers on the syllabus. Moving on to the “how”, a common theme we have encountered is the following well-known tension: do you work with institutional structures to change things or do you shun these and apply pressure from the outside? The risk you run with the former is that you just reinforce the authority of the institution, giving legitimacy to the concessions that it does make, allowing it to promote your successes and work as its own, and never truly forcing it to undergo systemic change.

The danger of the latter is that you become easy to ignore, ineffective because you are too disruptive, and less powerful because you don’t have any access to institutional power. Perhaps a third option, and one we are increasingly exploring, is to stretch the institutional spaces we inhabit, to carve out new moments and places for discussion, to test and bend the boundaries and, in doing so, cause gradual shifts in where those boundaries fall. There are differences in the degree to which a structure will give – in some places, it is totally unyielding, afraid of anything which might challenge its structural integrity, but in others it is softer, perhaps more receptive to change and transformation. Our biggest successes have involved this third option. In 2019, as we continued our push for curricular changes, we also began to organise a series of "Brown Bag" talks, in which we invited individuals to speak about their research and engage in discussion with an audience. While the talks are organised under the rubric of “Decolonise POLIS”, recognising the importance of interdisciplinary approaches, we have sought to bridge academic divisions and generate a space for conversation about themes

of decolonisation relevant across all disciplinary boundaries. To this end, alongside political scientists, political theorists and IR scholars, we have heard from linguists, historians and scholars in film studies about subjects ranging from the equality of languages to the theoretical problems in relation to Islam and international relations. We will be continuing this series going forward, and we encourage anyone who would like to give a talk to get in touch – and, of course, for those interested more generally, do look out for our events on Facebook! When it comes to engaging directly with the department, things have been a little more uneven, although we are very grateful to those who have taken the time to listen to, discuss with and help us. We appreciate that academics’ time is invariably pressed, that there are many considerations to be taken into account which we will not even see, and that change is a long, complex process – just because we make a request, it does not mean it can, in that moment, be granted. All we ask is that our argument is not just dismissed on the basis of these challenges and that the opacity of institutional decisionmaking is not made a justification of our exclusion from that decision-making. What we mean by this is that as students we are neither party to the strategic objectives of the department nor the shortterm processes for making decisions. Much of that is understandable; what we hope for, however, is that our suggestions will not be

dismissed off the cuff as unworkable or unnecessary, if we haven’t been able to first understand the challenges and then propose ideas accordingly.

No one is questioning the importance ofHobbes or Kant or Weber, and no one wants to abandon the canon. We simply believe that there is scope for questioning and going beyond the traditional narrative and broadening discussion. There are other difficulties, things which will be familiar to anyone who has independently organised and promoted an initiative. People in Cambridge – both staff and students – are very busy, meaning that events have had to be unexpectedly cancelled and audience numbers can wax and wane. Everything we do is unpaid, and even more importantly, we recognise that Brown Bag talks and forums require speakers to volunteer their time. But without these efforts, we cannot generate the concrete and specific proposed changes we argue are necessary. Going forward, we wish to focus on creating spaces for all levels of those involved with POLIS to come together undergraduates, postgraduates, and academics from both the main department and the centres. This is the best way to have productive and effective conversations to generate real change. This year has been very much one of laying down foundations

for future progress, and we are very optimistic about where we can go from here. This brings us back to the first question, the “why”, which is probably the one from which most explicit or implicit criticism originates. We don’t think that there is a single answer here, as we have found that people articulate their support for decolonisation in a range of ways, from the duty to address the legacies of colonialism, to the experience of the black communities in the UK, to a more generalised commitment to hearing, valuing and incorporating marginalised voices into mainstream academic discourse. It is a broad project, one that departments across the institution are engaged in, but perhaps one uniting theme is the sense that Cambridge University will be a richer, more just community if it can be more critical about its past and its present. To decolonise knowledge, and the institutions that produce it, is not simply to engage in some abstract task; it is not a nice-tohave. We suggest that it is urgent and has real-world impact. It is about everything from making sure a non-white and/or non-Western undergraduate feels able to speak about their place in the world, to shaping international discourse about equality between peoples and polities – it is work that needs to be done right here, right now, and that is what guides us moving forward. 11

LAW Decolonise Law Working Group

ecolonisation was once a promise couched in legal terms. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 1514 recognised the right of colonial peoples to take independence for themselves. It is unlikely that the General Assembly at the time anticipated the immensity of the task before them. Now, we are starting to realise that decolonisation is not merely a political process, but is also economic, cultural, and epistemic. Colonialism is entrenched in social structures both domestically and internationally. It is the foundation of the economic and political power asymmetry in today’s world order. It is the history that underpins why black people are disproportionately overrepresented in UK prisons. It is the reason the common law system has taken root all over the world. Herein lies the difficulty of the task we move to undertake: law both creates and entrenches power. It is both a subject and object of colonial forces. To decolonise law is to interrogate the role of colonialism, broadly understood, in shaping the

law, and law’s role in perpetuating colonial hierarchies even today. The movement can trace its intellectual origins to the transfer of political control from former colonisers to colonised peoples. But it extends beyond that. It questions the Eurocentric perspective still prevalent in subjects we are taught, such as Comparative Law, Human Rights Law, and International Law. It examines and unpacks how law continues to reify the oppression of the Global South, of black people, and of indigenous communities.

Decolonisation was once a promise couched in legal terms... Now, we are starting to realise that decolonisation is not merely a political process, but is also economic, cultural, and epistemic. How should we decolonise law? The Decolonise Law Working Group is presently focused on three main aspects. The first concerns the law itself – its content, its sources, and the methods by which it is taught. We study Law not merely to know what the law is; otherwise, we could study any other subject and do a quick conversion to fulfil the bare minimum requirements to qualify as a lawyer. We study Law to understand how it has come to be and to debate what it should be. We do not merely want to confine our understanding of Law to one jurisdiction, lest we privilege one permutation of law as the ‘correct’ one. A decolonial Law syllabus should enable its students to explore how it shapes and governs communities

more broadly. For instance, the study of Family Law can be extended to the study of Muslim or Jewish codes applicable alongside the common law in some former colonies. Modules considering critical perspectives can be introduced; University of Bristol’s newly introduced course on Law and Race may serve as an example. The teaching of sources in International Law can also accord greater emphasis to the disproportionate influence of the practice of states in the Global North. These are just a few examples of what a decolonial study of the law can look like – indeed, the study of most subjects can and will benefit from a more critical and decolonial lens. The second aspect concerns the learning environment within the Law faculty. The Law faculty is a supportive space for academic activities that go beyond the traditional curriculum. We believe in an intellectual environment where critical perspectives are not taboo. To that end, we hope that reading groups, speaker events and discussion forums on decolonial perspectives can be afforded space, support and engagement by the Faculty.

The third aspect concerns the institutional aspects of the Faculty and University. In common with other Decolonise groups, we believe the poor representation of black academics and students is a symptom of a deeper problem. It reflects persistent problems with privilege and access. It reinforces the absence of minority-race and anticolonial voices in academic discourse. It undercuts the potential for sustained, systemic change in the methods of legal teaching and the structure of the Law course, which requires consistent commitment by the academic staff. Therefore, having academics from a more diverse and representative background is necessary, albeit a long-term goal that we hope the Faculty will work towards. We also see the need for institutional support for genuine reform. For instance, greater support, whether informational, financial or otherwise, for students interested in noncommercial internships and career paths should be present from the Faculty level. Public sector and human rights work is very much needed, but currently, we believe that there is insufficient support and guidance for students interested in such areas, so this is an area that needs to be addressed.

Herein lies the difficulty of the task we move to undertake: law both creates and entrenches power. It is both a subject and object of colonial forces. To decolonise law is to interrogate the role of colonialism, broadly understood, in shaping the law, and law’s role in perpetuating colonial hierarchies even today. We have met members of the Faculty and have expressed the above ideas to them, and those Faculty members and us are in agreement that a more critical approach to the study of Law, including an emphasis on decolonisation, is important. These are long term goals that cannot be achieved immediately, but we hope that over time the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge can serve as an example of a Faculty that is contentious, sensitive and critical about the UK’s colonial history, and actively aims to integrate a decolonial perspective in the teaching of law and in the institution itself.

We study Law to understand how it has come to be and to debate what it should be.

LAW tan ning-sang (on behalfofthe Decolonise Law Working Group)

n the past year, there has been increased discussion on what it means to ‘Decolonize Cambridge’. A significant aspect of the decolonization movement is to critique the way that existing courses fail to sufficiently historicize the coursework in its imperial and colonial context. While there has been much discussion about decolonizing the humanities and social sciences, there has been little discussion about decolonizing Law. This article demonstrates why decolonizing law is important and how it might be done in the Constitutional Law Part IA Tripos Paper.

Historicizing the study of law at Cambridge

The Law Tripos at Cambridge highly values the study of legal history and the development of legal systems. This is evidenced by the number of papers offered in this area: Civil Law I & II, English Legal History, the half-paper on European Legal History, Comparative Law, EU Law, International Law and Conflicts of Law. However, each of these papers only look at European or, in the case of International and Conflicts of Law, highly Eurocentric notions of law and legal developments; there is no mention of any (pre-/post-)colonial or nonEurocentric notions of law or legal development. This was not always the case. Past papers in the

Squire Library reveal that the Tripos course included papers on Hindu Law in 1932-1950 and on Mohammaden law in 1933-1984 (name changed to Muslim law in 1976); the LLM-equivalent also offered a Commonwealth Constitutional Law paper in 1949-1963. These papers clearly show that the study of non-Western and colonial laws has historically been understood to be part of the study of English law. However, it is clear that Cambridge stopped offering these non-Western courses immediately following the political independence of the relevant colonies. Hindu Law stopped being offered in 1950 shortly after India and Sri Lanka’s independence in 1947 and 1948 respectively; though Pakistan also gained independence in 1947, Cambridge continued offering Muslim law until 1984 to accommodate other colonies: Middle Eastern countries like Bahrain, Qatar, and UAE only gained independence in 1971 and Brunei gained independence in 1984. Similarly, the end of the Commonwealth Constitutional Law paper in 1963 generally corresponds with wave of decolonization in the 1960s. Following the end of colonialism, the Law Faculty replaced the nonWestern and colonial law papers with Continental European ones. For Tripos, the Faculty introduced courses on Legal Values in Western Society and Introduction to French Law in the late 1970s and early 1980s; the French law course eventually became the current Comparative Law course. In the LLM-equivalent,

both a Constitutional Laws of Developing Countries paper and an (exclusively European) History of Public Law and Government paper were introduced in 1972; however, the Developing Countries paper ended just two years later in 1974 whereas the European course stayed for a decade until 1982. In the early 1980s, a similar course called the History of European Private Law Since 1500 was introduced alongside many other courses relating to the European Community. That the Law Faculty completely replaced nonWestern papers with European law papers when colonies obtained independence indicate that they viewed the academic value of such courses as predicated on their imperial and colonial connections with Britain. This implies that these systems of law, now nonEurocentric after independence, were considered inferior and less worthy of study and reflection than European law.

That the Law Faculty completely replaced nonWestern papers with European law papers when colonies obtained independence indicate that they viewed the academic value ofsuch courses as predicated on their imperial and colonial connections with Britain. Indeed, the Cambridge Law Faculty has successfully erased all substantive recognition of colonial history from a curriculum that had included non-Western and colonial legal scholarship for decades. By

emphasizing Britain’s horizontal political connection to Europe rather than its vertical historical connection to Commonwealth countries, evidenced by Roman Law remaining an obligatory paper whereas no paper on (post-)colonial law exists, the Law Faculty is actively erasing the memory of colonialism from the construction of British legal consciousness and legal history. Cambridge’s failure to teach any course on non-Western laws, colonial legal history, and postcolonial/common law legal systems effectively means that it is removing itself from its history of having institutional knowledge in this area of law. This active erasure of institutional memory means that incoming students and academics are losing access to Cambridge’s historical expertise on this topic and the potential for future scholarship to develop new knowledge in this area is being severely limited. As this deficiency can only be addressed by actively decolonizing the study of law, this essay will turn to explore specific ways to decolonize the Constitutional Law paper.

Historicizing colonial legal structures

At the most basic level, the Constitutional Law paper offers no explanation for how the supremacy of the Privy Council over national courts of other states or the existence of an international common law network of jurisdictions came to be. Without properly historicizing the colonial legacy of these British constitutional structures, the course posits the Privy Council and common law tradition as neutral entities when

they are clearly rooted in Britain’s physical, administrative, and legal occupation of colonies. Such amnesia leaves no room for students, particularly those of us from ex-colonies, to understand the legal mechanisms that legitimated Britain’s physical occupation of our land or to interrogate the content of those colonial laws that actively segregated and repressed our ancestors. There is also no scope to question the extent to which current government administrations of previous colonies have coopted the British colonial administration’s legal apparatus to continue with unjust practices. The failure to historicize these structures causes students to have an unacceptably deficient understanding of English and international law systems as they currently operate.

Critical awareness of the role that colonial cases has in developing British legal consciousness

A more critically reflexive way to decolonize law is to explicitly demonstrate the role that colonialism has had in developing English legal consciousness. Edward Said in Orientalism, and more broadly postcolonial studies, argues that histories of the Metropole and the colonies as intertwined such that the colonies inform the consciousness1 of the colonial state. While this technique is more often employed in literature studies to critique political and social consciousness, a similar methodology of critical reflexive analysis can be employed to analyze certain colonial cases in terms of the development of English

constitutional consciousness. For example, the Privy Council’s endorsement of the “manner and form” conception of entrenchment in AttorneyGeneral for New South Wales v. Trethowan2 sits at the heart of British constitutional consciousness. This is evident within academic discussion of constitutional theory concerning Parliament’s ability to bind its successors. For example, Sir Ivor Jennings uses Trethowan as the primary case to demonstrate that “the ‘legal sovereign’ may impose legal limitations upon itself, because its power to change the law includes the power to change3 the law affecting itself”. Similarly, R. F. V. Heuston relies on Trethowan to support his “new view” that distinguishes between rules which govern the composition and procedure versus the power of a 4 sovereign legislature. In contrast, in H. W. R. Wade’s article The Basis of Legal Sovereignty, he blithely discounts Trethowan as “no more than a decision on a particular provision of the Colonial Laws Validity Act, 1865 [that]… in no way raised any question of the validity of acts of a sovereign legislature, but was rather concerned with subordinate, or delegated, legislative power.” 5 Of course, Wade was proved wrong when Trethowan was endorsed without qualification at the highest level of court in the contemporary House of6 Lords case of Jackson. That Lord Steyn used a colonial case from 70 years ago as precedent and justification to fundamentally alter how

the courts understood parliamentary sovereignty, from the Diceyan conception to the “manner and form” conception, without reservation or qualification demonstrates the central role that the UK’s colonial past plays in contemporary legal development.

Conclusion and recommendations

Beyond being a moral imperative, decolonizing law is therefore an intellectual imperative to teach law in a way that explicitly recognizes that European and specifically British colonialism played a central role in the development of modern English law, the international common law system, and the broader international legal order. This essay has demonstrated why it is necessary to decolonize the study of English law at Cambridge and imagined a few ways that the Constitutional Law Tripos paper can be decolonized. Though it is well noted that the technical nature of law means that some papers lend themselves more to decolonization efforts than others, that should not stop us from imagining, together, what a fully decolonized study of law at Cambridge might entail.

Notes

1. Said, Edward W. “Introduction.” Orientalism, Penguin Books, 1995. 2. [1932] AC 526 3. Jennings, Sir Ivor. The Law and the Constitution (5th edn), University of London Press Ltd., 1959, p152-154. 4. Heuston, R. F. V. Essays in Constitutional Law (2nd edn), Steven & Sons, 1964, p14-15. 5. [1995] CLJ 172 6. R (Jackson and others) v Attorney General [2005] UKHL 56 at [81]

CRIMINOLOGY Laura Gutiérrez Gómez

ne of the things I like most about the social sciences is that they give you the opportunity to study a wide array of places, geographies and peoples from all corners of the world. This has given me the chance, as a Colombian abroad, to use my intellectual capital to produce knowledge about and for my country, even though I left it 10 years ago. I have the sense that there are a lot of students who, like me, carry out their research in the Global South. This kind of research is important, as it has the potential to produce knowledge about and for Southern contexts while at the same time bringing some muchneeded Southern perspectives to the ivory tower that is Cambridge University (provided, of course, that the studies are not using the Global South as a mere databank to advance Northern theories).

I have heard stories of students ending up in serious physical danger because they were not prepared for the kinds of situations that seemed fairly unimaginable in the genteel offices of Cambridge.

Nevertheless, I cannot help but notice—and worry about—the fact that fairly inexperienced students are sent off to carry out difficult research all over the world with very little guidance from their

faculties or preparation for the kinds of situations they might encounter. I have known students who were absolutely stunned by the fact that their research did not proceed as per their textbooks, or as their supervisors had said it would. I have heard stories of students ending up in serious physical danger because they were not prepared for the kinds of situations that seemed fairly unimaginable in the genteel offices of Cambridge—situations that may seem inconceivable in the context of research carried out in the UK or Europe but which are not necessarily uncommon in other contexts. This, it seems to me, is the result of an approach to academia that centres the so-called universalist perspectives of the North, at the expense of the myriad of experiences from the South. I am sure that, if asked, not a single faculty member would claim that things work everywhere else in the world just the same as they do in the UK. It is, however, the laziness that comes after acknowledging difference

that baffles me. They know enough to be sure that things are not exactly the same, but this is where the ball usually stops. No effort to de-center their perspectives or to include material in their curricula that can shed some light on other contexts; no effort to inform themselves duly in order to better support students who are seeking to explore areas outside confines to the Global North. This is an issue that speaks to the importance of the Decolonise Cambridge effort.

The measures we take to anticipate and prevent danger or undesirable circumstances in our field research are partially based on knowledge, but also heavily influenced by our imagination. It is not the job of supervisors to be familiar with every single context and to foresee every type of issue that might arise while researching in the Global South, but it is absolutely necessary that they understand that their canon is built on knowledge that is not universal. More importantly, this awareness is meaningless unless it is followed by a commitment to explore other knowledges and to give them room in their curricula (in the shape of study material, but also in hiring more people with these experiences and perspectives who can occupy spaces in the university). Decolonising academia, in this sense, can help us carve out a place for voices and experiences that are yet to

be heard, but it also has the potential to make students safer during fieldwork by giving them (and staff) enough background knowledge to fuel a decolonised imagination.

We need an informed, decolonised imagination to formulate and answer the right kinds ofquestions for the context at hand, in order to keep students safe and their research sound. The measures we take to anticipate and prevent danger or undesirable circumstances in our field research are partially based on knowledge, but also heavily influenced by our imagination. In this sense, I believe that a decolonised imagination is key if we want to keep on carrying out research outside the Global North in a safe, ethical and informed way. For example, in the field of criminology we often do studies with the police, or in prisons. A seasoned professor with decades of research experience may want to ask themselves whether the type of fieldwork they undertake in a British prison, or with the British police might not play out differently in, say, Bulgaria or Ecuador. Those inmate surveys or police ride-alongs that they have conducted dozens of times in the UK can yield very different results in other latitudes. Students may find themselves inadvertently uncovering life-threatening information, or in situations that put their mental and physical wellbeing at risk. The answer should never be to ban students from conducting

challenging fieldwork in the Global South; rather, the approach should be to equip the university to adequately support research done in a nonNorthern context. When carrying out research in the Global South, it is incredibly important for both students and supervisors to, first and foremost, inform themselves appropriately about the context (that is to say, not taking a textbook written in the UK or in the US as gospel) but also to do some serious work on imaginative thinking. A decolonised university is necessary for us to properly endeavour in an imaginative exercise that does not follow the kind of exoticised avenues of thought that so often arise from ignorance and Northern-centric assumptions. We need an informed, decolonised imagination to formulate and answer the right kinds of questions for the context at hand, in order to keep students safe and their research sound.

I am hopeful that the Decolonise Cambridge movement is on the right trackâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;slowly but surely, spaces are being claimed. The way I see it, the process of decolonising academia is not a matter of simply adding a couple of non-European authors to our reading lists in order to appease some vocal groups. It is a monumental endeavour that seeks to shift the very ontological foundations of academia. The benefits of such a tectonic shift are numerous and this magazine has highlighted many of them. For me, one

of the benefits that I long to see materialised in this university is the rise of a decolonised imagination among staff and students. The lack of it has disastrous implications that range from the unethical and disrespectful engagement with Southern contexts when doing research abroad, to the very real physical and mental endangerment of students who have not been given appropriate guidance as to the carrying out of research in nonNorthern contexts. The road ahead is long and we cannot expect miraculous overnight changes, especially in the context of a sedimented and seemingly unyelding institution like the University of Cambridge. Nevertheless, I am hopeful that the Decolonise Cambridge movement is on the right trackâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;slowly but surely, spaces are being claimed. Hopefully these efforts will foster a reconfiguration of academia, its paradigms and priorities, so that it can better serve the ultimate goal of dismantling inequalities and advancing social justice.

ARCHAEOLOGY

Marie Langrishe

spoke to Paul Lane, Jennifer Ward Oppenheimer Professor of the Deep History & Archaeology of Africa, about the challenges and opportunities for the archaeological field in addressing its relationship with colonialism. We discussed the impact of the colonial legacy on archaeology and going beyond decolonising as an intellectual debate.

One’s identity and location, one’s positionality ifyou like, shape interpretation, and it seems to me actually better scholarship to understand how.

Archaeology, much like its intellectual cousin, anthropology, wrestles with the connections between the expansion and crystallisation of archaeological science in the 18th to 20th centuries and the colonialist process. The relationship is complex, and the internal dynamics of how archaeological knowledge has been produced are neither homogenous nor definable solely in terms of these connections. Nevertheless, if we agree that the production of knowledge always takes place within a specific economic, political and social context, one of the things that decolonisation demands is that those contexts are interrogated and the conclusions they produced are re-examined in the light of this new perspective. As Professor Lane put it during our

conversation, “one’s identity and location, one’s positionality if you like, shape interpretation, and it seems to me actually better scholarship to understand how.”

Asked to reflect on the effect of the European colonial perspective on the formation of archaeological knowledge, Professor Lane explained that typically the agency of change was seen as coming from outside. “In its worst case, for example like Great Zimbabwe, there was this belief that somehow Africans simply didn’t have the intellectual abilities to construct this magnificent monument of dry-stone walling, so it must have been the Queen of Sheba, or the Phoenicians or some other foreign group. All sorts of people have been proposed over the years through absolutely ludicrous arguments.” Even in less overtly racist examples, interpretations have often emphasised the role of migration rather than locate the development of complex society internally within African culture. “A classic example”, he says, “is the interpretation of the stone-built towns with mosques, palaces and elite structures along the East African coast, the Swahili coast, that began to emerge in the last few centuries of the 1st

millennium CE and then flourish. Once archaeological research started on those towns, which happened during the tail end of British colonial rule in Eastern Africa, the interpretations were always that these were towns founded by Arab merchants who had come down from the Persian Gulf and brought a knowledge of urbanism with them. Well, they probably had brought the knowledge of Islam, but the interpretation that somehow these were Arab foundations and that the Swahili were essentially an outcome from that Arab world has now been shown to be completely misfounded. We know that there were pre-existing flourishing villages that were already engaged in the Indian Ocean–Red Sea trade networks prior to the emergence of these towns, so there’s a lot of good, empirical evidence to say that the primary, driving agency comes from this African setting.”

I have long argued that all societies practise archaeology, and we need to understand the epistemological and ontological bases ofthose. By doing that we would enrich our own Western scientific disciplinary postEnlightenment construct of what archaeology is. The description of the African world as derivative of events elsewhere will be familiar to students and academics across the social sciences, but I was, perhaps naively, initially surprised by its appearance in the archaeological context. Something about the

materiality of the subject led me to expect a special kind of objectivity: if archaeology is in part a process of extrapolating inferences based on material clues, it seemed reasonable to assume that these would create interpretive boundaries. Ancient stones, after all, do not have a contemporary political agenda. Given the terseness of material culture, however, it can be tempting to fill in the gaps either by making speculative leaps or imposing a contemporary lens on the past. Nevertheless, as Professor Lane remarks, “there’s no absolute guarantee that those individuals who lived in the past saw the world with the same logic with which I may approach my everyday life.”

The emergence of Indigenous archaeology has brought the discussion to the fore, but there is a danger that by allocating such issues a discrete space they become peripheral and the practices ofthe mainstream remain uncontested. He applies this culturally relative perspective to archaeological practice in the present. “I have long argued that all societies practise archaeology, and we need to understand the epistemological and ontological bases of those. By doing that we would enrich our own Western scientific disciplinary postEnlightenment construct of what archaeology is.” While undertaking ethnographic research as a doctoral student with the Dogon people, he observed that they practised

conscious preservation efforts of particular buildings tied to lineage histories. This was, he argues, “akin to some form of archaeology in which assessments of historical value were being made to determine what was kept, preserved, conserved. They didn’t have a developed epistemology of archaeology, but it was part of their historymaking practices.” This is not just a question of good scholarship. In the past, archaeology has laid claim to certain ways of dealing with remains, including sites that have been regarded by local people and communities as sacred, but a heritage management practice that prevents people performing rituals to protect the fabric of the site prioritises one assessment of the cultural value of something over another. “If we want to live in a more socially just world,” Professor Lane reflects, “we need to understand other people’s perception of why a site is important for them and their ontological sense of wellbeing that they’re allowed to continue their practices at culturally important sites.” The emergence of Indigenous archaeology has brought the discussion to the fore, but there is a danger that by allocating such issues a discrete space they become peripheral and the

practices of the mainstream remain uncontested. Professor Lane agrees that there is a risk of ghettoising individuals who perhaps self-identify as Indigenous archaeologists. He continues, “one step forward is of course creating spaces where you hear those perspectives, recognise them being legitimate, and don’t rule out forms of understanding of material evidence as being somehow nonscientific. But there is a real danger of creating, celebrating in a sense, the ‘native’ that then always places them as distinct from the archaeologist.

We need to think about how we incorporate other epistemologies and ontologies into our own mainstream archaeological practice. “Indigenising African archaeology is not simply having more archaeologists of African descent doing archaeology. It has to be that African worldviews – and it must be plural, it’s a continent for goodness sake! – that those are incorporated into our interpretative structures. And that’s a big challenge. We need to think about how we incorporate other epistemologies and ontologies into our own mainstream archaeological practice.”

Devising practical methods for this intellectual change is a challenge in itself. One way to approach the problem is simply to engage with critical perspectives. In this vein, Professor Lane encourages his students to read contributions from African archaeologists who, by drawing on their own cultural understandings as part of their critiques, are challenging even relatively recent interpretations of the African past. He would also like to see a mechanism for inviting colleagues from other parts of the world to visit the university for a couple of weeks, run seminars, give some of the lectures, and interact with students so they get a greater exposure to alternative positions. The objective, he says, should be to “debate the different positions that people have and the weight of their arguments, and assess and reflect on them”. As a statement that could pretty well summarise all scholarly methodology, this should not be a controversial opinion, but when it becomes associated with the label ‘decolonisation’, such a position tends to provoke a surprising range of responses –indignance, apathy, amusement – all implicitly revealing an underlying resistance to change. Is one reason for this a belief in hierarchies

of knowledge, a commitment to the idea that some theories and intellectual traditions are just more valuable than others? Canons acquire their longevity precisely because of this mentality. And, in the context of an increasingly marketized education system, are assessments of intellectual value regulated by competitive impulses? An institution such as Cambridge University that partly sells itself on the ability of its traditions to assure of its excellence is surely likely to be more resistant to experimentation. Professor Lane believes there is scope to be braver. One obvious, necessary step is diversifying the faculty. Another is taking bolder steps in curriculum design. While the archaeology department makes a concerted effort at undergraduate level to address the ‘big questions’ using case studies from across the globe, and Lane describes it as “the nature of the beast” that you have to do so, the question of who is defining those big questions needs further unpacking. “I think there is still work to be done”, he says, “in trying to deconstruct earlier evaluations of what the bigger issues are in archaeology and incorporating the voices of non-Western archaeologists in setting that kind of agenda. “I think in other universities where I’ve worked there has been more of a willingness to experiment with other forms of learning, different forms of assessment, prioritising different kinds of sets of knowledge that are conveyed.” He explains that at Uppsala University, where he worked prior to

his appointment at Cambridge University, some degree programmes included student designed courses. Crucially, the programme was assigned resources so that lecturers could be brought in to contribute to the course, typically from elsewhere in Sweden but sometimes from further afield, if required. “It was great fun, and it was kind of an iterative process, so the students taking the course could talk to the student conveners and say ‘x said something about this and it sparked our interest, and we would like to elaborate on that’”.

Devising practical methods for this intellectual change is a challenge in itself. Such ideas, it might be objected, are only tangentially related to decolonisation. They could even be counterproductive, allowing students to head down rabbit holes that prop up, rather than disrupt, cognitive bias. Institutions, moreover, will likely retort that the approach would be labour intensive, require needless negotiation, and involve the thankless task of arranging yet more moving parts. But agile approaches that invite spontaneity and encourage academics – both students and teachers – to reach imaginatively across intellectual furrows set a different tone for learning that is generative, not dogmatic. In this kind of model, lessons can come from unexpected directions. As well as a discipline that was born of colonialism, for example, Professor Lane highlights that archaeology, “is an

extraordinarily powerful tool for challenging those colonial misconceptions of the African past”, on account of the unique temporal depth it offers. Its depth, he continues, reveals “the great diversity if we do take a world archaeology perspective – different social forms, different ways of living, different ways of being and understanding the world.” Arguments are frequently made and decisions justified by laying claim to truths about the nature of the individual and its social relationships. If social anthropology offers a more complex picture across space, archaeology provides the same service across space and time.

Illustration thanks to Subhadra Das.

Intellectual furrows can be frustratingly wide and deep, however, even with the current impetus for cross-disciplinary research and the recognition that contemporary questions demand broad input. Professor Lane shared with me his recent experience at a conference, in which he had hosted a panel, a minority of whom were archaeologists, in front of an audience of academics from a range of fields including political science,

geography, anthropology, art, literature. Despite attempting to position the arguments so that they reflected the breadth of the intellectual field in the room, he came away feeling that the majority of the audience had not understood what he was trying to do. “Archaeological knowledge and information has a lot to contribute to the contemporary world and to addressing contemporary issues. The knowledge we produce has value in the present, not just about how we protect the things from the past but much more about how that knowledge can be used in the present and looking towards the future. But I don’t think the mechanisms are very good for us having those kinds of conversations with colleagues who do work on more present and futureoriented issues.” Take environmentalism, for example: Professor Lane explained that his recent work focuses on operating a long-term, centennial or even millennial scale perspective of human–environment relationships to gain a more critical understanding of the sustainability of certain practices. He then uses this to critique and inform contemporary interventions to enhance sustainability and resilience, particularly within rural societies within Eastern and Southern Africa. It is not difficult to see how this kind of work could be valuable in identifying how we might collectively reduce our footprint on the environment. But politicians and natural scientists can be reticent to learn from

archaeologists, let alone the industrialised world from rural Africa.

I think in other universities where I’ve worked there has been more ofa willingness to experiment with other forms oflearning, different forms ofassessment, prioritising different kinds ofsets ofknowledge that are conveyed. How could such mechanisms emerge? We come back to universities. “We need to be thinking a little bit more about how we run our basic degrees, because different disciplines have different languages even if they are relatively close to one another. Trying to expose people and getting them to be familiar with a particular disciplinary thinking is really important for moving beyond that and breaking down those barriers.”

Once again, this is not just about good scholarship. Professor Lane begins a thought: “There are such huge challenges facing the world that if you can draw on knowledge from a variety of different disciplines…” – it’s a sentiment that doesn’t need finishing. 21

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Marie Langrishe

spoke to Kanta Dihal and Ezinne Nwankwo, who are setting up the Decolonising AI project at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. They invite others who work on decolonisation in Cambridge to get in touch.

Far from the utopian vision ofthe machines saving us from ourselves, it appears that they might just help us dominate one another that much more systematically.

At the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, Kanta Dihal and Ezinne Nwankwo have set about to answer a question for the 21st century: how do you build ethics and fairness into machine learning algorithms? It is a question with important consequences. Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are slowly being incorporated into the fabric of social and political institutions, but as Kanta explains, “AI replicates the biases of its makers and so is in a position where it can do the harms that have been done in the past but on a much bigger and more efficient scale.” Far from the utopian vision of the machines saving us from ourselves, it appears that they might just help us dominate one another that much more systematically. Take policing. In the UK, facial recognition software and algorithmic profiling is creeping into surveillance systems. Supported by

£5m of Government funding announced by the Home Office in July 2019, West Midlands Police is leading the development of the National Data Analytics Solution, which uses a combination of AI and statistics to predict the risk of someone committing or becoming the victim of gun or knife crime. The expressed aim of this project is preemptive intervention, but it is not entirely clear what this would entail, a concern raised by West Midlands Police’s own Ethics Committee, which stated earlier this year that far more detail was required around what interventions might be applied to those individuals identified. It is not hard to see why such a project might appeal to cash-strapped police forces or a Government that has vowed to take a hard line on policing. It is also possible to appreciate a degree of good intention and foresee benefits of the system, if it did indeed promote sensible interventions that benefitted individuals vulnerable to exploitation by criminal gangs. As so often with technology, its ethical status is dependent on its application – in other words, on us.

But when it comes to artificial intelligence, we are also implicated much further upstream. Kanta describes the “vicious cycle”, driven by the lack of diversity among developers and the fact that human data reflects existing inequalities, which perpetuates and compounds biases and blind spots. The process goes like this: first, a group decides they want to develop an AI system. “That group will sit round a table in the board room saying ‘what do we want’? So the expectations, the wishes, the needs of those who aren’t represented in the board room are not taken into account. It can even be the case that they can make very simple and basic errors and assumptions about people that can cause massive harm.” Second, the wish-list from developers is translated into building a system. “Lots of AI systems are trained on massive datasets, for example, the data for 100 years of crime in a city. Now, of course, if you take the data from 100 years of history of a city, it will represent 100 years of injustices, inequalities and oppression that will get worse the further you go back in most cases.” AI identifies and learns the patterns in the data, so when it is presented with a new data point it tries to predict from those patterns what might happen in the new case. “We know from social science research in the US”, Ezinne says, “that crimes committed in low income communities of colour happen with the same frequency as in other more affluent communities, but they are just not reported at the

same levels because more police officers are placed in those low income communities. Crime in more affluent communities is not always found, so that’s not going to be captured in the entire dataset. If in the dataset it’s shown that more crime is in one community versus another, that’s what the algorithm is going to learn too, and it’s therefore going to try and predict that further, continuing to perpetuate those biases that the justice system has in general.”

Kanta describes the “vicious cycle”, driven by the lack ofdiversity among developers and the fact that human data reflects existing inequalities, which perpetuates and compounds biases and blind spots. Returning to West Midlands Police’s National Data Analytics Solution, we can see this in action. Project plans state that out of 1,349 key performance indicators the most important in terms of their predictive power are, “related to the social network of the nominal.” Number three on the list is, “Months nominal known to WMP [West Midlands Police] for any reason”. For any reason? Does this mean that just being known to police, if for example an individual is tangentially related to a social network identified as containing some individuals involved in crime, is enough to be included as a data point from which the machine learns? If that individual does then commit a crime, it is easily picked up and fed back into the system.

The system looks for crime in the same places over and over again, inevitably eventually finds it, repeatedly confirming its own biases. The project’s response to a question about data reliability made by the Ethics Committee is similarly illuminating. “Changes in some datasets are apparent over time in terms of some patterns (e.g. the occurrence of some crimes) which reflect changes in law, changes in reporting practices and changes in policy/priorities as well as changes in the general criminal environment.” The system still depends on human visibility, on the direction in which we have chosen to look. AI does not correct our blindness. It learns from it.

in China, for instance, clash in terms of these cultural expectations?” The aims of the Decolonising AI project are more practical and applied, focusing on the contemporary development of AI, its relationship with injustice and inequality, and trying to identify what can and should be done. “The hope at least for this project”, Ezinne states, “is that while AI is infiltrating a lot of different sectors and communities it is still pretty new and very much in the development stage. The way I see it is that we can use the past as a framework of what not to do – and this is the time now where we can try and implement those practices that we hope will lead to better practices going forward.”

The system still depends on human visibility, on the direction in which we have chosen to look. It is this problem to which the Decolonising AI project is turning its attention. Kanta, whose research background is in narratives of science, has been working within this field as a postdoctoral researcher in the AI Narratives and Justice programme, most recently leading on the Global AI Narratives project. That research, she explains, asks, “what ideas do other cultures, other linguistic or religious traditions have about intelligent machines, which sometimes go back thousands of years? How does that then clash with technologies being imposed often with a Western world view? And how do powerhouses of AI development in the US and

Reining in the excesses of technology has never been easy, and those scientists and entrepreneurs that view themselves as innovators or disruptors have never seemed too keen to learn from the past. In part, this comes from the assumption that science is impartial and progressive. For many, therefore, the concept of decolonising AI is almost a contradiction in terms. Kanta strongly refutes this idea. “I think a huge misconception that we want to address here is the idea that, with science being progressive, the world through AI will decolonise itself, that things will solve themselves if only you set impartial science at it. This

is obviously not true.” An equally mistaken and harmful assumption, Ezinne argues, is that progress requires us to turn a blind eye. “The argument I have been given is that as long as we are making progress on the system, unintended harms or consequences are just a necessary step. But that’s a really bad answer in my opinion, because who is being harmed? It’s always the same group of marginalised people who are already always attacked when it comes to these systems. Yes, maybe we are progressing towards a greater good, if you want to call it that. But if it is at the expense of people’s lives, then we should think about whether or not these systems should be used in the first place, at least for the time being, until we can guarantee to some extent that the harms are not going to take place, or there is some sort of accountability.” “Another one of those shoddy arguments that you often get”, Kanta adds, “is ‘well, the system we have put in place now has harmed much fewer humans than if humans had done it.’ So you have humans as the baseline, and because it’s slightly better than overtly biased, racist humans, that’s why we should all stick with the system. These are things which perhaps sound pretty straight forward but can be quite difficult to communicate the

relevance of to the relevant parties.” A wellreported example is the work of MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini to point out the biases in facial recognition technology to developers, with the aim of compelling them to make their software more inclusive and ethical. It is, however, a mixed bag how companies respond and, as Ezinne notes, it is unclear how much effort organisations are making of their own accord. Reputational damage caused by negative media attention tends to have a more motivating effect.

Now, ofcourse, ifyou take the data from 100 years of history ofa city, it will represent 100 years of injustices, inequalities and oppression that will get worse the further you go back in most cases. I ask Ezinne and Kanta what they think causes this paralysis. Perhaps it is because technological development is financially driven by commercial organisations rushing to monopolise new applications and governments seeking to capitalise on the efficiency savings promised by datadriven technology. Possibly it just a matter of progress for the sake of progress, coupled with the belief that technologists, floating somewhere above and beyond messy political concerns, just need to be allowed to get on with things. Or is it that, for the vast majority of people, understanding how data is used still has the remarkably contradictory quality of being both opaque and ephemeral? “It’s probably all of the above”, they both respond,

before Kanta goes on to reflect about the role of education. “People don’t know what they can do with their data or what others can do with the data that is gathered. In the past, you have had extremely obscure systems and terms and conditions that were 300 pages long, which are on the one hand relying on people’s ignorance and on the other hand perpetuating that ignorance, nudging people towards a false sense of security. And again, people who are already struggling, who don’t have the headspace to take these things into account, who aren’t empowered to take control or don’t trust people who help them take control, are the ones who are most harmed.” The system still depends on human visibility, on the direction in which we have chosen to look. Other branches of science have recognised the necessity of engaging in sustained, meaningful public engagement on social and political themes, both because it is morally correct to inform and consult the people on whom technologies will be applied and because social licence is increasingly seen as a prerequisite for scientific development. Kanta thinks that there is a lot to be learned within the AI space from how biomedical research organises itself. “I think

one important difference”, she continues, “is the role of academia. In biomedical research, you come through university, there is a shared background of institutionalisation, whereas technology startups come from high school dropouts, students while they are still at university, people who don’t necessarily have a computer science degree, or who have a mathematics degree and think that mathematics is the purest subject there can be, so it cannot harm people. It’s all rather individualistic. Start-ups are small groups of people with massive amounts of power.”

As always, knowing how to address the problem is the challenge. It may be that the accessibility of developing algorithmic technology can be turned to its advantage. Ezinne suggests that, “one actionable thing would be democratising AI, which is actually happening now in Africa and Latin America. There are a lot of new pop up organisations that are trying to help build the next generation of AI researchers, not necessarily through the conventional ways of a

Centre for Data and Ethics has incorporated the use of AI in the criminal justice system as part of its review into algorithmic bias in decision-making, partnering with West Midlands Police to develop a Code of Practice. Its conclusions will need to be I think a huge misconception that we scrutinised. But perhaps we also want to address here is the need to go back to first idea that, with science principles. Ezinne asks, being progressive, the “should AI be applied to world through AI will predict crime? Even if we decolonise itself, that things have the most perfect is that will solve themselves if algorithm, something that we want to only you set impartial have a machine answer?” science at it. This is It appears that, for now, obviously not true. the powers that be have answered resoundingly in the affirmative, but it is crucial to keep asking the formal education but question. through community learning. I think supporting those outlets is really important.” Ezinne There are a lot ofnew pop would also like to see the up organisations that are development of practical trying to help build the frameworks that can be used when it comes to next generation ofAI deploying AI systems in researchers, not necessarily certain communities that through the conventional lack the education or exact ways ofa formal education understanding of what but through community systems are doing, as well learning. as collaboration with communities that do not have the same infrastructure as the Western world. Intervening in algorithms and datasets is another important avenue, and rules and regulations for deployment and accountability are, of course, fundamental. In this space, it is positive to see that the Government’s

HISTORY Johari Adjei

The Barbados Labouring Classes and the Disturbances of 1937 [Extract] The Narrative

cross the British West Indies the 1930s were a period of great unrest, beginning with a protest 1 march in Belize in 1934. In Barbados, the first signs of disruption were the mass meetings called around Bridgetown by Clement Payne. Payne had arrived in Barbados from Trinidad on 26th March 1937 and, with the support of existing grassroots elements, had begun an attempt to organise the labouring classes. His ambition was to create a ‘Barbados Progressive Workingmen Association’, to enable workers to strike and bargain collectively for better terms of employment. 2 Alarmed by the size of his meetings, especially given the riots then consuming Trinidad, the police targeted Payne with prosecution for concealing his immigrant status. 3 Payne gathered support in objection to his persecution4by the authorities. On the 24th July, he marched with a crowd of hundreds to Government House, seeking a meeting with the Governor to5 protest his conviction. Upon their arrival, Payne and thirteen of his followers were arrested and charged for refusing to disassemble. That same day an executive order was for Payne’s deportation to Trinidad. 6

Despite a successful appeal against his conviction, the deportation order was upheld, and Payne was removed from the island on the evening of the 26th July. Payne’s followers had been preparing to greet him upon his return from custody. Realising that he was still to be deported, the crowds had gathered around the wharf area in Bridgetown, where they were informed that Payne had already been removed to Trinidad via another port. Here began the first outbreak of lawlessness. The crowds broke street lamps and threw stones at the nearby police.7 Spreading from the wharf out of St. Michael and into other parishes, police, volunteer deputies, and British naval forces would not finally quell the violence until August 2nd.8 The use of live fire led to 14 black fatalities, but no whites were killed during the disturbances.9 Labourers in various industries carried out strikes that ran into August. 10 The upheaval of 1937 in Barbados, and other comparable events elsewhere in British West Indies during the 1930s were followed by a decisive change in the attitudes of the colonial office to managing these territories. Officials in London became greatly concerned with colonial welfare, and Local and regional commissions were ordered to determine the grievances of West Indian populations. 11 In the case of Barbados, this momentum was appropriated by black middle-class politicians to wrest a measure of political power from the white elite.

Historiography and Source Material Existing work in this area has not been extensive. Scholarship addressing the 1937 disturbances in Barbados has usually concerned itself with the West Indies as a whole. Both Richard Hart and Nigel Bolland have written important works on the subject and acknowledge the particularities of individual islands but prioritise the shared struggles of British Caribbean populations. The relevance of this approach is clear. All of the British Caribbean islands were exslave societies with export crop-based economies. As such, all underwent the process of transition away from enslaved labour, with employers attempting to maintain the grasp on the means of production that had generated their wealth. Structural similarities also meant that the Great Depression affected all of the colonies in a similar way: the demand for exports of sugar and other products fell, sharply reducing 12 agricultural revenues. Returning World War I veterans were disillusioned by their treatment overseas and later came to feel neglected by their local authorities. 13 Economic strain was compounded by the loss of emigration channels, as governments in the Americas took on more restrictive immigration policies. 14 Simultaneously, a shared black consciousness was being cultivated by the spread of Garveyism, which helped to galvanize the resentment of the black

labouring classes across the region towards the stark inequalities that characterised their societies. 15 Within this regional context, however, Barbados’ labouring classes suffered under particularly difficult demographic conditions. The island registrar estimated the population of Barbados in 1937 to be 188,294. 16 This gave the island a population density of 1,127 people per square mile, in comparison with an average density of approximately 230 people per square mile across the rest of the British 17 Caribbean. This made certain issues, such as those of unemployment, underemployme nt and overcrowding more acute in Barbados and justifies a greater emphasis on poor material conditions when examining the disturbances that took place there. Where scholarship focuses upon Barbados specifically, it integrates

Browne gives Payne far more credit than that which has been afforded him by other historians, he grounds his analysis in the ways that inequality was constructed from above, rather than in how it was experienced from below. the disturbances into a longer narrative, usually of progress towards democracy as in the case of Hilary Beckles who has written some of the most comprehensive histories of

the island. The broad temporal scope of Beckles’ work limits the potential for a deeper examination of labouring class experiences in the 1930s specifically. Like Beckles, biographers and compilers such as Hoyos and Marshall mark the disturbances of 1937 as a display of shared grievance, but one tributary to the ascen

sion of middle-class black politicians. 18 In an unpublished thesis, George Belle positions the material conditions of the labouring classes as crucial to political change. In its relation of socioeconomic conditions to political outcomes, the approach of Belle’s thesis is not dissimilar from that of this dissertation. Still, the political activity that

This dissertation’s particular focus upon using materials to foreground working class experiences, their connection to agitation and their centrality to the disturbances of1937 remains unique. Belle connects to those material conditions is the constitutional reformism of the very same19middleclass politicians. Although Belle’s approach marks the shift to a narrative that is more critical of their political opportunism, the likes of Grantley Adams have been the subject of much previous scholarship. The earlier role of other middle-class organisers will be addressed in the second chapter, so as not to position Payne and his followers uncritically as the sole drivers of the labour movement in this moment. Although they provide important components of Barbadian political historiography, the above historians make little of material conditions as motivations for the disturbances from below. They also fail to examine in detail the relationship between grassroots agitations and the 1937 disturbances. The historian who most closely explores the event is David Browne, who reveals the ‘moral economy’ of those participating in the riots of 1937. 20 Browne also discusses the material conditions of the masses, but focuses his analytical efforts on explaining how those conditions were

strategically imposed and maintained by white elites who wilfully neglected the population at large. 21 Whilst Browne gives Payne far more credit than that which has been afforded him by other historians, he grounds his analysis in the ways that inequality was constructed from above, rather than in how it was22 experienced from below. As a visiting undergraduate, my access to certain evidence during my time in Barbados was restricted. I was of course further limited by the short amount of time that I had on the island and the prohibition of photography in all of the archives. I have still been able to make use of a good variety of sources, particularly in the second chapter. Where I have found my primary evidence to be lacking the works of the above historians, particularly those of Browne and Beckles, have been incredibly helpful in bridging the gaps. Different aspects of much of the source material here have been used before, although not in the same manner. The Deane Commission Report, which informs the vast majority of the first chapter’s examination of material conditions, has been used by Henderson Carter to demonstrate the way that deliberate business practices contributed to dissatisfaction among the masses and therefore 23the disturbances of 1937. This dissertation’s particular focus upon using materials to foreground working class experiences, their connection to agitation and their centrality to the disturbances of 1937 remains unique. 28

Notes

1. R. Hart, ‘Labour Rebellions of the 1930s in the British Caribbean Region Colonies’, in Caribbean Labour Solidarity and the Socialist History Society Occasional Papers 15 (2002), p. 3. 2. Evidence of Mr. Charles Archibald Greaves in ‘The Deane Commission Report’,1937, West Indies Collection, p. 85, University of the West Indies; C.O. Payne, ‘My Political Memoirs of Barbados’, 1937, West Indies Collection Pamphlets, p. 4, University of the West Indies. 3. ‘The Barbados Advocate’, July 25th, 1937, Barbados National Library. 4. Payne, ‘Memoirs’, p. 41. 5. H.M. Beckles, A History of Barbados: From Amerindian Settlement to Caribbean Single Market (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 237. 6. ‘Letter from Sir Mark Young to William Ormsby Gore’, August 1937, Governor’s Correspondence, GH4/109, Barbados National Archives. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Beckles, A History of Barbados, p. 239. 10. Police Situational Reports, JulyAugust 1937, Reports on the Progress of the Disturbances, GH4/112, Barbados National Archives. 11. H. Johnson, ‘The British Caribbean from Demobilization to Constitutional Decolonization’, in The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume IV: The Twentieth Century, ed. J. Brown and W.R. Lewis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 597-623, at pp. 608-609. 12. N.O. Bolland, On the March: Labour Rebellions in the British Caribbean, 1934-1939 (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1995), p. vii.

13. Ibid. pp. 27-28. 14. See the United States Immigration Act of 1924. 15. Bolland, On the March, p. vii. 16. Evidence of the Lord Bishop David Bentley, ‘The Deane Commission Report’, p. 51. 17. W.M. MacMillan, ‘A Warning from the West Indies’, Seeley Historical Library, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, p. 32. 18. See H.M. Beckles, Chattel House Blues (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2004); H.M. Beckles, Great House Blues (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2004); H.M. Beckles, A History of Barbados (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2006); Hoyos, F.A. Grantley Adams and the Social Revolution (London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1974); W.K. Marshall, I Speak for the People: The Memoirs of Wynter Crawford (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2003). 19. G. Belle, ‘The Political Economy of Barbados 1937-1946 : 1966-72’, unpublished thesis, University of the West Indies (1974). 20. D. Browne, ‘The 1937 Disturbances and Barbadian Nationalism’ in The Empowering Impulse: The Nationalist Tradition of Barbados, eds. G.D. Howe and D.D. Marshall (Kingston: University of West Indies Pres, 2001), pp. 149-162. 21. D. Browne, Race, Class, Politics and the Struggle for Empowerment in Barbados, (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2012), pp. 48-74. 22. Ibid. pp. 15-38. 23. H. Carter, ‘Beyond the Great Depression: Business Practices and the Barbados Revolt of 1937’ in The Journal of Caribbean History 49 (2015), pp. 78112.

LIFE tan ning-sang, originally writing in Varsity

y life is not on pause. I’ve intermitted, yes, but my life is not on pause. Complicated as it was to get the correct psychiatric diagnoses and apply for the correct university allowances, the choice to intermit was not just a mental health thing – though the diagnosis of bipolar disorder and subsequent ‘she needs time to adjust on medication’ doctor’s note is the official reason for my intermission. Given that intermission required my deportation, it’s also a visa thing, a university administration thing, an access to services thing. Yet, still there are other factors, much more difficult to substantiate, related to my decision to intermit and eventually quit: it being a race thing, a gender thing, a migration thing, a trauma thing, a self-alienation thing. It is to these factors that I turn. Specifically, I want to describe the personal, social, and psychological consequences of the process by which I, a foreigner who was part of the racial majority in my non-white majority home environment of Hong Kong, became racialised as a ‘woman of colour’ in white-majority environments. For I was not born a woman of colour, I became a woman of colour upon migration from Global South to Global North; and it has been a deeply confusing and troubling process to undergo.

Racialisation happened for me first in California, where I completed an undergraduate degree. I had a hard time relating to other students because I knew virtually nothing about the context in which I was living – about systemic racism, sexual or reproductive politics, incarceration, immigration, or education systems. I had to start learning about slavery and black America, about capitalism, about the model minority myth, and so on. And of course, after you understand the depth of injustice stacked against non-white bodies in America, if like me your politics weren’t progressive to begin with, they certainly were by the time that you graduated.

Given that intermission required my deportation, it’s also a visa thing, a university administration thing, an access to services thing. Yet, still there are other factors, much more difficult to substantiate, related to my decision to intermit and eventually quit: it being a race thing, a gender thing, a migration thing, a trauma thing, a self-alienation thing But it’s not just a set of abstract political beliefs that change. It is change of self-perception, within oneself as self-regard and within society as political actor. In Hong Kong, I was raised self-assured because my racial, economic, and educational background put me in the ruling class. Acknowledging the rampant racism against black and brown bodies in Hong Kong, because the city is 90% ethnically

Chinese, I could reliably expect to see people who looked like myself in every rung of society. In contrast, California had a markedly different community of relations, one in which I was in the minority. That required me to dislodge my Hong Kong conception of self and, given my body, learn to position myself as ‘woman of colour’.

I was not born a woman of colour, I became a woman ofcolour upon migration from Global South to Global North; and it has been a deeply confusing and troubling process to undergo. Yet, there is no sign warning that in the process of figuring out how to exist as a woman of colour in a white and male privileging society, you have to change – and it is traumatic change. I find Hong Kong-born cultural critic Rey Chow’s description of compulsory self-debasement particularly helpful in providing me with language to articulate this traumatic process. Chow writes in Not a Native Speaker, “With the unleashing of the name comes the obligatory realisation that something... has been addressed and called into existence” – in my case, the label ‘woman of colour’. For me, this “compulsory ‘self’-recognition” as ‘woman of colour’ meant inexorably accepting “the laying-out of a trajectory of self-recognition from which the possibility of self-regard (or selfrespect) has, nonetheless, been removed in advance”: one can only be or become

oneself by “being/becoming less, by being/becoming diminished.” I do not yet possess the words to describe the cognitive dissonance and existential angst that results from working incredibly hard in secondary school to gain admission into elite overseas universities, only to be forced to accept a self-debasing trajectory – both in terms of selfunderstanding and as a socio-political agent – in which I have no choice but to view myself and act as inferior, in which I have no choice but to actively unlearn any notion of selfregard or self-respect I previously held.

I do not yet possess the words to describe the cognitive dissonance and existential angst that results from working incredibly hard in secondary school to gain admission into elite overseas universities, only to be forced to accept a selfdebasing trajectory – both in terms ofselfunderstanding and as a socio-political agent – in which I have no choice but to view myselfand act as inferior, in which I have no choice but to actively unlearn any notion ofselfregard or self-respect I previously held.

and Martin Luther King Jr., only to realise that history discarded their wives as nobodies. It is similarly trying to locate yourself in the women’s movement, only to find that white women sidelined women of colour. It is someone in college calling you racist because you’re the one who talks about experiencing racism. It is scavenging libraries and finding no books by anyone who looks like you or who shares your background, the library telling you that the postcolonial book you’re requesting ‘does not appear to be on the course list’. It is having white or male editors tell you that they’re not qualified to edit your writing, leaving you alone to articulate things that no one has articulated before. It is being reminded over and over again: you don’t belong here, you’re not good enough – and if you insist you are, we can’t and won’t help you.

When I tried to be brave and be a woman of colour who sought institutional change in this repository of British elitism, I was struck down before I could even really begin. Around the end of strikes in April 2018 when there was mounting student interest but insufficient institutional direction in doing decolonisation work, my anxiety spiralled out of control. Elected as the inaugural BME Campaign

Education Officer, I was responsible for the exorbitant task of centralising decolonisation efforts. But within the first week on the job, a rightwing newspaper reported on a closed document we were working on, publishing my name without my consent. I was terrified and did not leave my room for days. Not long after, I resigned as Education Officer for that and other mental health concerns.

For learning to become a woman ofcolour is learning that you and your story don’t exist. It is – on days when primary school children run up to you pulling their eyes taut, bowing profusely while screaming ‘Konichiwa’ – trying to take pride in ‘your history’ as a person of colour, in the legacies of Gandhi, Fanon, Mandela, and Martin Luther King Jr., only to realise that history discarded their wives as nobodies. It is similarly trying to locate yourselfin the women’s movement, only to find that white women sidelined women ofcolour. Being a student here, academic work was never the most challenging aspect – existing was. Selfalienation is not a matter of choice, it is a matter of survival. Above even the manic-depressive episodes, it was the continual nagging, every minute of every day, of counting the cost – how much of myself do I need to castrate, how much am I willing to castrate, to align myself with the interests of whiteness and patriarchy

that so vehemently go against the interests of my own being, just so I can survive here? – that is the most excruciating and exhausting part of being here. As Patricia Hill Collins wrote in Black Feminist Thought, “Much of my formal academic training has been designed to show me that I must alienate myself from my communities, my family, and even my own self in order to produce credible intellectual work.”

Being a student here, academic work was never the most challenging aspect – existing was. Chow describes how compulsory self-alienation and further selfdebasement is a social phenomenon inflicted upon coloured bodies in whitemajority societies, drawing upon Fanon’s experience as a black man encountering white civilisation: “The black man is not named as nothing. Rather, he is given a place in the community of relations as performed by the name; he is hailed as some thing – dirt, negro, [the n-word].” Yet for a woman of colour, the situation is arguably more existentially dire, for we are named as something less than nothing: we are shadow, non-existent, written out of history, faced with the abyss. I do not wish to appropriate the experience of black women, as I recognise the relative privilege I hold as someone of East Asian heritage, but I have found that what Audre Lorde famously wrote in A Litany for Survival still resonates: “We were never meant to survive.”

In case I have not been explicit enough, let me be clear now: Cambridge is invariably a white supremacist, misogynist place. No matter how progressive or leftist its individual members may be, no matter how progressive or leftist the institution may turn, its interests remain allied with a tradition of whiteness and patriarchy. A place does not have to elect an alt-right leader to be ‘certified’ as white supremacist and misogynist. Racism and sexism are not to be understood in terms of individual or corporate acts or attitudes – they are structural, historic, embedded. To succeed as a student at Cambridge requires one to ally with the interests of whiteness and patriarchy. For women of colour, the cost of this alliance is nothing short of complete destruction of any meaningful, positive conception of self. And it is in large part because I will no longer bare this cost of compulsorily selfalienation and selfdebasement that I have chosen to intermit and subsequently quit. I’ve quit, yes, but it’s not a life on pause thing – it’s a choosing life thing. When I say I ‘choose life’, I mean that I choose to prioritise my and others’ wellbeing and to do the personal and political work necessary to make such a state of being well within myself and for others around me possible. This is hard work. It demands patience, persistence, confusion, and failure to carefully disentangle each need, to identify and trial possible solutions, to evaluate the success and sustainability of each solution. I’ve

learned that some wellbeing needs are more urgent than others. My mania, anxiety attacks, depression, and psychosis required immediate psychiatric attention that I could only access in Cambridge. But as those psychiatric symptoms fade and my needs as a woman of colour resurface, I find my interactions with mental health professionals – all of whom were white middle class except for the BME counselor at UCS whom I explicitly requested – unknowingly exacerbating my needs as a woman of colour. To meet those needs, I need to go somewhere that encourages feminist, decolonial knowledge production – in other words, I must leave Cambridge.

But to be honest, instigating institutional change is not why I write – I am not particularly interested in labouring for a system that is actively invalidating my existence. Yet even as I have chosen to leave, I know it will get asked: what could be done to make things better? Part of the trouble with Cambridge is that there are virtually no institutional structures or paid positions to support minority students. There are few internal pockets of resistance, such as a physical and staffed BME, Queer, or Women’s Resource Centre similar to the Disability Resource Centre, that would both help decolonise the broader university and provide a space-within-aspace where minority students can take a break

from allying themselves with a self-objectifying gaze. These spaces existed where I studied in California, a school of only 1,600 students. In contrast, the incredibly few BME staff in Cambridge are assigned the extra burden of being ‘race champions’; teaching remains horrifically Eurocentric because the discourse on (post)colonialism, decolonisation, and reparations in this country is itself woefully underdeveloped. Insofar as Cambridge continues to pride itself on tradition – 800 years of excluding women and people of colour – it will need much, much more than a Legacy of Slavery Inquiry or the appointment of a black female Master of Jesus College to become a place that does not perpetuate white and male privilege. But to be honest, instigating institutional change is not why I write – I am not particularly interested in labouring for a system that is actively invalidating my existence. As Kenyan ’ex-’academic Keguro Macharia wrote about his process of racialisation as a black man in America, “I [am] tired of performing a psychic labor that [leaves]

me too exhausted to do anything except go home, crawl into bed, try to recover, and prepare for the next series of assaults.” Perhaps selfishly, I write because I need to find words for my story, if even just for myself. I write because I need to know that my story has value. I write because I need the depression, anxiety, daily existential crises of disassociation, of disorientation to be seen, validated, understood. But as Hannah Gadsby said in her one-woman Netflix show Nanette, “I just don’t have the strength to take care of my story anymore.” I am tired, incredibly tired, of occupying this body in this society. I have little energy to do more than write these words for myself. I do not have concrete solutions to the various problems posed in this essay. All I can do is leave you with the confusion and anguish that is the ongoing, unwritten script of my story. As Hannah Gadsby concluded, “All I can ask is just please help me take care of my story.” Help me tell my story by demanding to learn and be taught about British colonial history and its legacies, about specific

histories with regards to race and gender. Help me tell my story by learning how to identify potentially unconscious alliances to whiteness and patriarchy, unlearning those alliances, and learning how to dismantle them instead. Help me tell my story by reading stories and articles written by women and people of color. Help me tell my story by making space for all the other women of colour, especially British-born women of colour, for their brilliance and their struggle. I am done with being a woman of colour and have chosen to leave Britain but that is not an option for many of my sisters who have no choice but to brace this oppression. Help me tell my story by prioritising listening to theirs.

Help me tell my story by demanding to learn and be taught about British colonial history and its legacies, about specific histories with regards to race and gender.