CG1

COM M ON GRO U N D J O U RN AL cg1

4

Contents

Legacies and Lessons of Decolonisation Work in Oxford Beth Davies-Kumadiro

8

Bilingualism Esther Jeon

10

The Burden Louise Osie

12

Language is the only homeland Claire Soh

16

Curriculum must fall: decolonising Oxford Lev Crofts

20

My salwar kameez Sanaa Asim

22

The Surveyed Kendya Goodman

24

Living between two worlds: finding identity as a British Indian Priya Vempali

26

I merely belong to them Hannah Arendt, Edward SaĂŻd and the value of rootlessness Thomas Lambert

30

Why my Grandmother loved the fairer Grandkids more Hakim Faiz

34

a note from the Working Group on Oxford University and Colonialism

Editorial team: Myah Popat, Joe Higton Durrant, Eimer McAuley, Sanaa Asim Illustration team: Mark De Courcy Ling, Isabella Rooney, Tara Chandrasekharan, Denise Lai, Carolina Earle

The Common Ground Journal is the first of its kind – a publication centred around discussions about race structures, class and colonialism at Oxford, written by students, academics and the wider community. This issue focuses on Common Ground Oxford’s core mission to better understand and challenge the continuities of colonialism at Oxford represented by: the chronic underrepresentation of BME people both within the student and academic bodies of Oxford, the colonial iconography that pervades the University, the Euro-centric curricula, and the systematic discrimination faced by people of colour at Oxford. We continue to put on insightful events and symposiums, but this new medium seeks to provide a space for students to write about their experiences and ideas, from articles on personal identity to poems in response to colonial writers. We hope that you will enjoy our first issue and support us in pushing for an Oxford free of class and race based oppression.

Legacies and lessons of decolonisation work in Oxford Beth Davies-Kumadiro

4

A

ctivism in Oxford is a generational activity. Students leave every year and new ones replace them. As such, any successful movement needs to find a way of passing down the tactics and knowledge it accrues. I thought I would take this space to share with you the progress I saw during my time as an undergraduate at Oxford and my thoughts on how students can take the work done by RMF and Common Ground forward.

Firstly, it is important to recognise just how important the work of Rhodes Must Fall was in Oxford. RMF has been much maligned and misunderstood, even within activist circles. This became apparent during the ‘Making Rhodes History: Taking the Decolonisation Project Forward’ panel at Common Ground’s July symposium. I remember the moment when Dalia Gebrial, an activist who had been involved with Rhodes Must Fall, said that if Oriel College had privately taken down the Rhodes statue – while continuing to exclude black students from the decision-making process, and without recognising the legitimacy of any of RMF’s other demands – she would not consider it a moment of success for Rhodes Must Fall, but a useless concession. There were intakes of breath from a lot of the white people in the room. Many did not realise that for RMF, the statue was a symbol of imperialism, a banner under which to display other complaints about racism and eurocentrism at Oxford, a pressure point. Many

had clearly misunderstood RMF as somehow unsophisticated and snowflakey, and failed to realise their effectiveness in challenging the university. Students today should be under no illusions about the grind the RMF put in and the amount of ground that they covered.

Still, RMF in Oxford was an imperfect campaign. It was often slow to make decisions, and struggled not to reproduce sexism and anti-blackness in its own hierarchy, as pointed out in the letters written by black women within the movement. However, it had marked successes. It showed up Oriel College, shining a light on its glorification of an imperialist, and its embarrassing subservience to its donors. It shone the same light on iconography at All Souls. This sort of college-level attention – three years later – helped to create a scholarship for Caribbean students at All Souls, and forced other colleges to examine themselves. That portrait of Lord Curzon never quite made it back to pride of place at Balliol.

They left both legacies and lessons in terms of challenging iconography: we have more to do. Statues of Rhodes fell in Zambia in the 1960s and Zimbabwe after independence was declared in 1980. Rhodes fell at UCT in South Africa in 2015 due to the radical efforts of student protestors (including vandalism of the statue with spray paint and faeces). Rhodes was an imperialist who famously declared that he “preferred land to

5

niggers,” and a PM of the Cape Colony who acted to limit Black franchise because Africans were “like children.” His company, De Beers, exploited African workers in its mines and dispossessed the continent of its natural resources on a massive scale. His statue still stands in Oxford, home of the British Empire.

The institution will not remove it from a wall to put it into a museum. Imagine if the Germans refused to take down statues of Hitler, or put a picture of Josef Goebbels on a €10 note – what would that symbolise?

RMF also exposed cracks at a university level. Campaigning for implicit bias training (along with much work from CRAE and OUSU) has shown some success, as tutors are trained to try and counter their own racist and class-related prejudices before interviewing students. The ACS Annual Access Conference and their other access initiatives have also broken huge ground in encouraging black students to apply to Oxford. However, there is still more that the university can do to open the space up, and make black and working-class students feel more comfortable within it. In challenging the eurocentrism and white-supremacism of the curriculum, RMF joined students across the country involved in campaigns like Why Is My Curriculum White?, the Decolonising Our Minds Society, LiberatED and Project Myopia, among others. This has seen some progress: the History Faculty, for example, launched a new global history paper option last year, and have ensured that every student studies at least one paper outside of Europe.

Still, curricula reform requires far more work and pressure. As a former historian

myself, I want to know why the empire isn’t taught as a major part of the British history modules, why historians of colour were rarely on my reading lists (especially when I was doing a module entitled Imperialism and Nationalism, now discontinued, but without a replacement paper examining the relation between the global north and global south), and why papers which specialise on aspects of Western history and culture far outweigh those on the rest of the world. Funding is not an excuse: Oxford is one of the richest institutions in the world. Britishness is not an excuse either: if Oxford wants to be a world-leading institution, it should reflect its international peers by teaching a global curriculum. So you must ask yourselves – how do we achieve these aims? How can Oxford students work now to decolonise curricula across multiple faculties?

Perhaps RMF’s biggest achievement was inspiring the next generation of students to continue its work. I and my friends went on RMF protests, heard what was said and then read the racist, twisted reportage in the press. We saw Ntokozo Qwabe hounded. We went back to our JCRs to try and pass motions in support of the movement. Some of us were successful, others of us felt isolated in our Common Rooms as we saw the latent racism of the majority of our peers come to the fore. We learned that sympathy was not support, and that sympathy was useless. We felt the frustration of seeing Oriel College blatantly ignore our demands, we felt the bitterness of seeing the University absolutely reject our concerns. We knew that Oxford did not care for us. And we were angry.

6

Following the collapse of the ‘listening period,’ at Oriel, and the complaints of women within the movement, a significant number of the leaders of RMF graduated and the movement seemed to lose energy. As I entered my third year it started to seem that all of the lessons we had learned were being forgotten with the students who had left. That’s why we started Common Ground. Our purpose was to radicalise the next generation of students. It was necessary that Tobi, Shreya, and Blue were on the core team; it was necessary that first and second years from across the university were involved from the start, in organising events, creating art work, writing articles. Because now RMF has faltered, and my friends and I have gone. Decolonisation in Oxford is up to you now. Common Ground belongs to all of you. Please take ownership of it.

Think about what decolonisation means in Oxford. How huge a task it is. Michelle Codrington-Rogers, a descendent of one of the people enslaved by Codrington, said that as a black working-class woman in Oxford, she knew the porters, the cleaners and the cooks. Decolonisation in Oxford is about making inroads into that inequality; into the systems of empire and capital which have been evolved for our dispossession and marginalisation over the past four centuries. Decolonisation is not just about putting up plaques. Don’t say ‘thank you for the plaque,’ to an institution which informs rich white people about the supremacy of rich white culture while working-class people and PoC

cook and clean. Instead say, ‘I see that you have put up this plaque. And now what? What are you doing next to address your legacy of profiting from exploitation?’ Do not be placated by a plaque when Oxford’s libraries are closed to the public, and so are its colleges, and so is its research in those expensive books and subscription-only journal articles. Don’t shrug when students use sponsorship and college endowments to fund expensive balls in a city of extensive homelessness.

As students at Oxford you have immense privilege. You work in a library, not a factory; you work with knowledge, not cotton. Oxford tells you that your mind, your voice is special: you have agency. Contrary to popular belief, you have a lot of spare time.

So, please, use your agency and your time to try and take hold of the knowledge and the power it produces in you and in your peers.

Even if only for a term or two. Journalists at the Telegraph will always hate you but next year’s freshers are open to your influence.

And who knows what they will go on to do.

So strengthen each other, but reach out to people. There is a reason that we held our core symposium events at Trinity and Christ Church last year rather than at Wadham and St. Peters. Anybody can be involved in Common Ground; anybody can organise an event, invite a speaker, spark a conversation, share an article. Support each other, balance enthusiasm with experience, allow for debate. And be efficient, because soon, you’ll be handing over to someone else too.

7

Bilingualism:

An essay by Esther Jeon

8

A

s an East Asian born in England, my ethnic minority experience is twofold. The external manifests itself most overtly in every day experiences. From a stranger crooning ‘Nihao!’ or ‘Konnichiwa!’ into my face once-a-month, or a Bodleian library assistant assuming that I was a tourist and greeting me with, ‘The toilets are over there.’. The internal experience takes the form of a conflicted relationship between dichotomized identities and cultures, and this experience is significantly manifested within the dynamics of bilingualism.

Initially, the cultural dissonance between my Korean home and an English classroom meant that despite my early fluency in English, my earliest years of school were spent in stony silence. This silence was perhaps cemented by the fact that few of my classmates had even heard of south Korea. Growing up, my proficiency in English skyrocketed compared to my Korean, and my patriotism for the latter wizened into disillusion. Korea’s alarming suicide rate, the countries rigorous education system, and the internet of trolling and doxing, facilitated by the fastest internet connection in the world, all contributed to my feeling of cultural alienation. More painful still, was the harsh reality that I was unable to be fully korean in the eyes of other Koreans.

The word for an immigrant from Korea is a‘ ’ (gyopo). It is a term now tainted by native disapproval of the ways in which diasporic Koreans have become disconnected to their heritage. I had never recognised myself as a gyopo until I heard it being used by others to describe me. Emotionally frustrated by the trip-hazards of grammar and spelling, the thousands of words I did not and would never know, and the paralysing fear of speaking to other Koreans, I began justifying my negligence through the argument that I was more psychologically British than Korean.

One effect of never hearing certain English words being spoken aloud meant that there was the odd word I would mispronounce in polite company – Beethoven, gauge, lichen – and

would have to mentally scratch out and recast.

With Korean, the problem was inverted: that I had only heard rather than read Korean. A page of Korean text comes across as sheets of brick, the words crumbling into sense only when I focus on individual words, unlike the waterfall of meaning that floods my eyes upon skimming English. The Korean I knew was restricted to a subset of colloquial words heard at church or at home. Reading aloud was for many years a process of slow-burning embarrassment. With hindsight, I regret this reluctance to learn, now I feel acutely the loss of a whole other realm of meaning; adjectives, lyrical turns of speech, the names of different types of rain, the exquisite and inexhaustible supply of onomatopoeic words. I am reduced to picking up fragments, one at a time – a Korean (‘bul-kkot’, ) – onerous, yet infinitely inspiring. There are words that encapsulate a whole mood, colour and emotion that can only be lassoed in full by stringing together a whole sentence in another tongue.

Fluency in more than one language has been shown to have cognitive benefits. For me, it means also the attainment of a greater sensitivity and respect of difference. Where one sees a tongue, another may see a flower.

My parents too, I have come to realise, are also experiencing a struggle of tongues. They try hard to pick out the meaning from the English prattle that they hear on the daily, and their frustration mirrors my own. I wonder what it must be to have children that speak an alternative first language. Now, I try to see Korean as a work in progress, rather than as a regret or a loss. It is this prospect of progression and learning that should be one’s motivation, rather than a sense of duty or shame.

I do still worry that there is an expiration date for how long I can get away with asking point-blank for the meaning of a Korean word, but I remind myself that the day my sense of pride outweighs my desire to learn more is the day I give it up for dead.

9

The Burden

I We needed not your teaching Nor did we bid you ‘come’ You tell us to be civilisedTo then put shackles on my sons Gold ornaments tricked from our landTo make the wealth you own Indoctrinating subservience Those are the seeds you’ve sown

Louise Osei

What burden have you white man when all by you are burdened?

My children are not simple, nor heathen, nor sloth Should we thank you for bondage?

For loss of sovereignty?

Though educated our pigment stains So, they’re still they and we’re still we But ah it must be your duty to free us from the wild From savages to civilians And aristocrats from ‘child’ The white man is the ‘saviour’ who bid the sickness cease ‘Burdened’ to feed the mouths he made hungry Forgetting he’s a thief He stole our tongues and gave us his Stole our freedom and made it his to give to those he colonised but for the colour of their skin cast aside

10

II Negro, Coloured or Black Or a Negro Coloured Black?

Separate but equal under the law Yet my child’s school is a shack This lack of both equality and equity Yields the strange fruit I see that’s my brother hanging next to me A bench embellished with my label, the toilet and theatre too Only the ‘white folk’ votes is counted Still the burden cannot be you It must have been difficult to teach sullen people Who no longer live in trees ‘But still we cannot possibly respect them though they know their ABCs’To you we are still uncultured Uneducated we will remain You may have abolished slavery But we are still bound by invisible chains

III So, you will have many thankless nations and more thankless years to come We have carried this load through generations Responsibility for which you have taken none I ask you now burdened white man Who bears the weight of oppression?

Who can wear their skin with pride?

You taught us to be less but still like air we will rise

11

12

Language is the only homeland Claire Soh

I

t’s a nationwide joke that fellow Singaporeans are extremely easy to identify in a foreign land. All it takes is for someone to whine in our distinctive accent, “It’s too cold to walk around lah!” to know that we’re in familiar company. Milosz’s quote is especially relevant to Singapore, a nation fifty years young, and seeking its ever-elusive identity in language -- one of the most prominent emblems of the Singaporean identity.

In 1819, the British arrived in Singapore, then an island of indigenous Malay fishermen.

By 1826, Singapore was grouped with nearby Penang and Malacca to form the Straits Settlements, which then became a Crown Colony with an English-medium administration in 1867. The city continued to grow into a bustling metropolis as the 19th century saw immigrants pour in from China, India, and neighbouring Malaysia. In 1965, when Singapore gained full independence, English prevailed as the language of administration, but few Singaporeans were actually fluent in the language, and instead spoke their native

languages, which included Malay, a number of Chinese dialects, and Tamil. With such diversity, a common language was necessary to unite the ethnic groups and facilitate inter-race communication. This choice was also strategic and pragmatic; a young country with no natural resources had to make its only asset – its people – as globally competitive as possible.

English is one of Singapore’s four official languages, alongside Chinese, Malay and Tamil, and the language of administration.

Today, the majority of young Singaporeans are proficient in both English and their mother tongue, with a growing number adopting English as their first language, due to a standardised national education policy. Throughout the 1980s, non-English-medium schools which once dotted the education landscape were closed down in favour of English-medium ones that teach a national curriculum and lead to British-style General Certificate of Education qualifications, where ethnic languages are taught as compulsory subjects. The true

13

form of English is problematic, as it actually borrows the grammar and syntax of Chinese and Malay. “Here got food or not?” may sound like a wildly incorrect version of “is there any food here?”, but Singlish users, it is intuitive and in line with Malay syntax – “di sini ada makanan tidak?” (literally “here have food not?”). It is also common to hear borrowed vocabulary in conversation – one can’t tahan (Malay for “endure”) the heat; a tough assignment is cheem (Hokkien); a stressed student is gan cheong (Cantonese/Hokkien) because he buay tahan (“can’t endure” – a combination of Hokkien and Malay) the idea of falling behind. Although the variety of vocabulary used in daily conversation is sibeh (Teochew for “very”) complex, these terms have been assimilated into the conscious of Singaporeans, and used seamlessly alongside Standard English vocabulary.

Most emblematic of Singlish is the particle “lah” – often included for a Singaporean touch to advertising campaigns, with Cantonese and Hokkien origins. Simple particles like “lah”, “leh” or “meh” drastically modify sentences. A widely circulated Singapore meme shows nine sentences starting with “can”, and different particles following it, with meanings

rise of English among the people of Singapore hence originated in the classroom; a trend set in motion by colonial rule.

Education has transformed a largely monolingual population to a bilingual one, and inevitably led to mixing of English with the ethnic languages that occupy just as important a role in Singapore’s linguistic landscape. A typical Singaporean neighbourhood is abuzz with conversations in a variety of languages. Yet to argue that English, or any other language, is the glue that linguistically unifies our diverse population is technically, but not entirely correct, as it is our unique brand of English – our creole – that dominates our social spaces.

Singlish (a portmanteau of Singapore and English) is a creole borne partly of our colonial heritage, but more importantly of our diversity. It is a constant in our ongoing struggle to define our national identity, where attempts to capture it in cartoon characters and local hawker dishes have not lasted the test of time. Singaporeans have combined English with other national languages, forming a dense network of vocabulary and grammar close to the hearts of Singaporeans, but almost impenetrable by outsiders.

To argue that Singlish is an ungrammatical

14

Singlish is to infringe on the performance of our identities as Singaporeans” that range from “yes!” to “can or cannot?”. Just two syllables can replace ten in Standard English because of the altering effect of particles.

These features of Singlish skim the surface of its richness, spanning tense variation, initialisms, and much more. Combined with its tricky nuances and multiplicity of meanings, immersion is necessary to grasp the complexity of Singlish.

Yet neither Standard English nor Singlish exists in isolation. Linguist Lesley Milroy argues that Singaporeans occupy various positions on the post-creole continuum, with acrolectal Standard English and basilectal Singlish at its ends. Singaporeans often find middle ground, artfully combining the two and switching between them in different environments. Yet the relationship between the two is highly contested, especially with differences in attitudes towards Singlish. In 2000, a nationwide Speak Good English Movement aimed to “correct” Singlish to Standard English, featuring posters that marked Singlish sentences as “WRONG”, while Standard English versions were exemplars. Showrunners of local sitcom Phua Chu Kang were asked to change the distinctive habits of its titular protagonist, because he spoke “too much Singlish” for primetime television. Such efforts have had little success at clamping down on

the creole, because it is so entrenched in our linguistic habits that it prevails in the face of opposition.

To wage a war on Singlish is to infringe on the performance of our identities as Singaporeans, and shows the ongoing struggle to embrace it not as a competitor of Standard English, but instead as an important milestone in the ongoing creation of a national identity – just like how Phua Chu Kang would have lost much of his uniqueness had he conversed solely in Standard English. It unjustly vilifies a creole that cannot be judged against the standards of Standard English, and casts shame on our expression of our diversity. This elaborate set of code binds the community, and dares to defy ideas of how English “should” be spoken.

Singlish is our attempt to take ownership of a language left to us by our colonisers by transforming it into something to call our own.

Standard English has connected us to the world beyond our shores, but Singlish is what distinguishes us from our colonisers. We have made a safe home in the community that our creole gives us. Our use of the English language originates from our colonial past, but cannot prevail as the only form of English used in Singapore, for Singlish is a representation of who we are, and fearless assertion of our Singaporean-ness.

15

Curriculum must fall: decolonising Oxford Lev Crofts

C

his statue sits at the heart of University of Capetown. The BBC has offered the explanation that “he bequeathed the land on which it was built” as a justification of the statues presence.

Who bequeathed the land to him remains an avoided question.

Oxford’s colonial history is literally carved into its walls, yet the effects of empire extend far beyond the dents in our buildings.

It even goes beyond the university’s questionable academic decisions, such as backing the imperialist project “Ethics and Empire”, an attempt by Nigel Biggar to create a balance sheet reducing British colonialism to a list of pros and cons, intellectualising and dehumanising the suffering of colonial oppression, all whilst fattening the academic wing of British nationalism.

However, Oxford’s colonial legacy is woven most insidiously into our very curriculum.

Our subjects are defined from the moulds of

ecil Rhodes gazes all too proudly out into Oxford’s High Street, imperiously straddling an apex over Oriel college’s highgate. The figure immortalised in alabaster is an uncomfortable one. Despite attempts to recontextualise him, Rhodes was decried as an imperialist over a hundred years before the “Rhodes Must Fall” student movement formed to relieve Oxford of his stoney gaze. Through altering voting and land ownership laws, he paved the way to South-African apartheid, and was known to consider the English as a “master race”. “At best his conception of civilisation was empirical, if not vulgar,” read the Guardian’s 1902 obituary of Rhodes, “and in course of time most other ideals had for him to be subordinated to that of keeping up dividends”. The Rhodes that surveys our High Street is a symbol of colonialism all around the world. The Rhodes Must Fall movement began in South Africa, where

16

the colonialists who built the Oxbridge education. Even individual modules are spooled from the perspective of academics who in turn were shaped by their own western educations. “My physical anthropology option still teaches us about craniology,” Archaeology and Anthropology student Dalva Gerberon explained, “despite the fact that using cranial criteria to determine an individual’s ethnicity does not always bring accurate conclusions.

Our lecturer made it quite clear that she thought this aspect of physical anthropology was dodgy.”

When I applied to study Arabic at Oxford—a degree I switched out of—I should have been more troubled by the course title.

My subject was bracketed as “Oriental Studies”: an example of the multiplicity of cultures within North Africa, the Middle East, Turkey, Iran, China, Japan, Israel, and India being crushed together with enough force to make Edward Said crumble. Word choice divulges everything: French language was marked by the university as “modern”; Arabic was “oriental”.

The Islamic Studies element of the course had the breadth of perspective you might expect from an amoeba. It was infused with an underlying racist sense that there was some

general ‘Arab’ collective psyche to tap into.

The emphasis on studying MSA, (A constructed form of Arabic, which is spoken as a first language by precisely zero people) reminded me of an apocryphal tale where an Oxford-educated spy was unmasked after he tried to use Ancient Greek to speak to the locals of Athens. The course handbook kindly reminds students that they are allowed to use colloquial terms in their spoken exam as long as they do so “in a style similar to that of educated Arabs”. My first year of Arabic and Islamic Studies taught me a western conception of the Middle East, one that probably never existed.

The English literature course at Oxford seems to show a similar panache for gilding colonial perspectives. As one finalist Stephen Rose explained, the “Texts get treated as if they were written in a vacuum”. Stephen specificed that “This tends to be an issue with pre-20th century texts where a lot of colleges use the excuse of ‘everyone was racist back then’ to ignore the colonial history and context in which these texts were written”. Professors stunt the intellectual growth of their students when they fail to acknowledge that power structures such as racism exist within the texts they study. Stephen elaborated on

17

this issue, arguing that, “Robinson Crusoe has racist shit in there. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad book. It doesn’t mean you are a bad person for enjoying it. It means it has racist themes that can be backed up with quotations and understanding them is essential to understanding the text.”

Colonialism in our curriculum doesn’t just impose western views on a multicultural world, it conversely ignores multicultural educational perspectives. Christine Jiang, a student of History and Politics, recounted her experience of Eurocentrism in our curriculum: “The Eurocentric bias in the history course is apparent. Beyond Eurocentric, it is Anglocentric. My own tutorial experience has been mostly focused on English history, with four other nations’ history mentioned only in passing.” By blocking out marginalised voices, the university is sending out a clear message, as Stephen further described: “Omitting PoC authors and critics from course outlines is a statement. It means one of the world’s leading institutions does not believe the contributions of PoC authors are essential to an understanding of English literature.”

Though it may sometimes seem out of reach, the path to a more comprehensive education begins at the feet of the individual.

Another humanities student Dalva, outlined

how: “First of all we can educate ourselves.

We have access to any literature on solo, and are free to include them in our essays or discuss them with our tutors, lecturers, or fellow students.” Christine offers similar advice: “Question the imperial bias embedded within the topics studied. Seek out non-Western sources. Talk to students who have been affected by colonialism about their, and their family’s experience.”

The path is too long to finish alone, and it is clear that there is a need to organise ourselves in order to reform our education. Our curriculum isn’t as tangible as the limestone buildings in which it is taught, and just as with Rhodes’s statue, it cannot be dismantled without a collective. Yet this is a movement that is gathering pace across the UK. The original curriculum decolonisation movement, Decolonise SOAS, has been a proud standard bearer of curriculum change: organising their student community effectively to shape the education they’re paying for. They have ignited a new conversation and broadened the works and perspectives that are studied in universities to extend beyond the white male perspective.

Curriculums can change and statues can fall, the quiet patter of single footsteps build into a marching drum roll—it’s just that, in the end, enough people need to take that first step.

18

19

My salwar kameez Sanaa Asim

E

the first non-uniform day, I happily donned a bright red pair of salwar kameez, excited from the reaction from new friends. But as I walked around school, I remember people turning around, laughing, whispering and pointing.

And for the first time, I felt ashamed.

I share this memory and I recall it so vividly, because that day was a turning point.

From then on I realised being different isn’t “cool”. It was “weird”. I felt isolated that day, like an outsider looking in. I knew I couldn’t deal with that again. That day was the day I left Pakistan behind. I stopped wearing salwar kameez, not even just at school but outside the house in general. I told stories insulting life there to my friends and when I was actually there I never stopped to appreciate it.

I spent hours in my room, trying to connect to shitty wifi so I could moan to people back home about it. I wholeheartedly rejected as much as I could about it and I regret it deeply.

That day affected my teenage years so greatly, that sometimes even now I feel paranoid, wearing salwar kameez outside my home. People stare; I feel embarrassed.

I’ve lived in a white majority area since I was 5, but still felt a strong connection to my culture and heritage despite this. I remember being so excited to show off my mehndi, or feed my friends mithai. After secondary school, this changed and while being more “British” did make me more popular, I felt empty. People accepted me then, but it wasn’t really me. I couldn’t retaliate with an “I-don’tgive a-fuck” attitude because I really DID care immensely about how other people perceived me. More often than not, that was as

very non-uniform day, I carefully picked an outfit to wear. I chose matching shoes and got my mum to do my hair a little bit nicer than usual. With pride, I stepped in the room, as all eyes turned to me, curious. At break times, I would feel excited for the questions and comments - “ That’s so pretty Sanaa! What’s it called?”. “Salwar kameez” I would answer, emphasizing every syllable.

Non uniform day was my favourite day. I never thought that would change.

As I graduated from Year 6 and entered the big, scary world of secondary school, my outlook didn’t change. Come

20

the “brown girl”, the “paki” and I did my utmost to try to change this. I tried to copy the clothes they wore all the time, listen to music that was popular, just so I had a place in conversation, because outside of my “exoticness” I felt that people really didn’t give a shit about what I had to say. So instead I played on that, I emphasised my exoticness because when my stories didn’t match the exotic fantasy they had of me, then they became disinterested. I felt like a walking exhibition, no matter what I was wearing.

In sixth form, I felt I began to appreciate my heritage again, or maybe I just stopped caring about what people thought. Despite this newfound hope, I found it hard to revert back to my childlike joy. I found myself reacting negatively to wearing salwar kameez , as if on autopilot. The rejection I felt from my peers throughout secondary school and the repression I imposed on myself couldn’t vanish in a day or a week. I’m still trying. I still find myself emphasising the negatives of Pakistan, because that’s what catches people’s attention. Playing on stereotypes. In freshers week , I unconsciously found myself doing it again, talking about some crazy story, the bad wifi, “weird things” about Pakistan and afterwards I cried, because that isn’t how I feel.

That isn’t what I want to tell people. Have things really changed from secondary school?

It had such a toll on my mental health, as I rushed to please others and become someone I wasn’t. I have always felt so guilty that I’m like this. I have had the opportunity to experience things many people could never dream and I took it for granted.

I am constantly trying to revert to 5 year old me , to be able to feel pretty and proud in my salwar kameez again. I felt like 5 year old me had a stronger grasp on her identity than I do now. I knew I was Pakistani and I knew I was British, and I appreciated both. Right now I am still lost. But it’s getting better. Having

just one or two friends that appreciated my differences, who genuinely asked questions out of curiosity, meant the world. Being exposed to more people from my background at Oxford has definitely helped. I think I’ve finally begun to reconcile my confidence to my heritage again. I went salwar kameez shopping the other day and I felt excitement rather than dread. I’m actually looking forward to showing off my clothes next year. This is such an important step for me and I’m so thankful I can begin to feel like this again.

I don’t think people realise how important something as simple as what you wear can be to your identity. I can’t go back in time and tell myself “ DON’T LET IT GO!” and the fear of presenting my culture as something to gawk at is always there but at least now, I know I won’t reject my heritage again.

21

The Surveyed

A

KENDYA GOODMAN, DISGRUNTLED ATTENDEE OF MUNROE BERGDORF’S MEET AND GREET 21/11/17

TREATISE ON MISTREATMENT BY

“It is the expression of a woman responding with calculated charm to the man who she imagines looking at her - although she doesn’t know him. She is offering up her femininity as the surveyed” Man: Excuse me asking – as a member of the ‘patriarchy’, but munroe how do you think Brexit has altered the agenda? munroe: The agenMan: Well its made everyone racist hasn’t it?!

munroe: Well, I mean… well they were already racist weren’t they?

A unitary exhalation compresses full chests, eyebrows return to homeostasis but eyes continue to convey the scene to the disquieted minds of black undergraduates. This time, my lower-melaninated companions in femininity get the privilege of feeling that tense squeeeeeeeeze that freezes the heart when one’s identity and one’s dignity is infringed upon. For this #NotAllMen, old white man has not only interrupted our hitherto esteemed speaker with his speech but now with his actions. He has begun capturing her natural treasures to be devoured at home, a 21st century Hawkins with a DSLR camera.

Don’t worry, that first rapist of my mother’s irrelevant little pays, Guinea, will not feature in your lectures on Tudor England. You will not be made to feel uncomfortable sitting comfortably in his legacy. How amused I was to see Dr Biggar’s calls for a more balanced and nuanced approach to colonial history. I wasn’t aware we discussed the baddies?

I just want to see To what extent did Tudor foreign policy lay the foundations for the Atlantic slave trade? on a past paper. Okay I’ll stop making it all about me. Heaven knows the only input munroe’s caribbean countrymen and forefathers warranted on La Amistad was physical.

Why do the women speak again?

“To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the

keeping of men”.

We, the kept women, could see a familiar dynamic play out before our eyes. We, the kept women, are to be the seen and Man the seer, our words subsidiary to our appearances.

A simple proof test: which tool did Man use to record his impressions of woman in the sophisticated continent’s history? Paintbrush evolved to camera but pen and paper were never in hand. Caveat: black man, you don’t get a seat at the table either. Old White Man did not whip out a recorder with the same comfort he had asserting his Canon and reducing her barricades. Munroe had not come to natter or nag in the style of a petulant wife but from a place of knowledge, of intellectual engagement with her country’s betrayal of her identity. Even I, the indignant, cannot remember what she said so much as the dress she wore. Orange. Sequins. But then again, munroe has made a career out of being seen. If you can’t beat ‘em make ‘em pay you for it. Smart girl. Pretty girl.

“You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure”.

Here’s a secret – I condemned Munroe.

I condemned her reciprocation of Man’s advances. I condemned her calculatedly bemused smirk, her distress at the angles Man had chosen to capture her from, I damned her profession. For I, perfect product of prodigal Brittania’s conditioning have swallowed the maxim wholeheartedly – to be effortlessly beautiful is the highest virtue. We women are our greatest captors, disparaging so venomously the slightest variance from seamless carelessness. We would have fared better as Hermione; flawless, vital and ageless statues of grief to be beheld but not outspoken. But whose tears would serve to shatter us into reality again? The symbol for a male organism depicts a shield and spear, Mars’ weapons. Venus, our glyph, gives us but a bronze mirror with handle to take into the fight. Who do you think won?

44 years earlier, our little menagerie wouldn’t have been allowed to sit in the back of the King’s Arms. How I love these little inversions of rosa’s struggle. Dominus illuminatio mea?

Living between two worlds: finding identity as a British Indian

I

Priya Vempali

remember the first time I was called a ‘coconut’. It was said to me with a smile, followed by the explanatory phrase: “you know, brown on the outside, white on the inside.” It hurt more than the times I had been called a ‘paki’ or ‘literal shit’, and told to ‘go back to where I come from’. I looked back at the person who had aimed that epithet towards me, swallowed my discomfort and uttered a polite laugh, just long enough to cut the tension. I was used to hearing slurs from white people, but when it came from a fellow Indian, I was unsure how to react.

Growing up in this country, I have had many similar experiences. It seems to me that even within a community which should supposedly express a kind of racial or cultural solidarity, identity is treated as a kind of competition. I feel a deep, unanswerable shame when I have to confess to family friends that I don’t speak Telugu or Hindi, and often pretend to understand cultural references just so that I’m not labelled as ‘other’ within my own community.

I exist, as many second generation immigrants do, between two worlds; constantly spreading myself so thin between my two homes that

ingly call me a ‘race traitor’. The irony of the situation would almost be funny, if it didn’t hurt so much.

This is not just the story of myself; it is the story of an entire generation of people, who moved to the West trying to embrace the culture which had been beaten into them over a century. India was not simply conquered by the British; it was colonised. White men and women came to the home of my ancestors and forced us to adopt a culture that was completely foreign, to contort ourselves until we resembled their likeness. They forced assimilation upon us until we began to see them as the ideal, and then a hundred years later, when we came to their country and tried to act like them, they told us that we would never be British, that we should ‘go back home’.

How can we go back to a home that hasn’t been ours for decades? After being taught for years to assume British civility, language, morality and monarchy, we had our supposed ‘heritage’ repossessed, and were left rootless, foreign in a culture which had been forced upon us.

Where does that leave us now, then? It seems to me that the term ‘foreign’ is entirely subjective; I may be ‘exotic’ in the eyes of my white peers, or a ‘coconut’ according to my brown friends, but in my eyes, I am simply me. My identity is not a performance, and I will not play up to the stereotypes of either culture just so that I am easier for others to understand. I am British, but I am not; I am Indian, but I am not; I am a part of both of my cultures, but I am also so much more. I am finding out what it means to be a British Indian on my own terms, and I do not care what others, British or Indian, decide to label me.

I’m almost at a breaking point. In private, I eat curry and rice with my hands, listen to my parents speak in their mother tongue and reply in my own. In public, I listen to rap music, read ‘classics’ written by old white men, and sip tea rather than chai. I balance two vastly different cultures, and in the process I am barred entry from both.

Conceptualising one’s identity often centres around feelings of opposition and alliance; I am part of this group, I am not part of that one. However, it has been my experience that as a British Indian, the feeling of resounding identification with any particular group has always been out of reach. My day-to-day life is characterised by a kind of cultural dissonance; whereby I am made painfully aware that I do not fit the mould of either ‘British’ or ‘Indian’. Each time I get the question “where are you really from” or “why are you not following your parents’ footsteps”, I am further pushed out of either group, and into the liminal space where people like me are forced to find belonging. Its space between spaces, where nothing exists and we are grasping at straws trying to ground ourselves in emptiness. I have become accustomed to the jarring experiences of living in a brown body amongst predominantly white bodies, and from an early age I taught myself to see my own difference before it was even articulated to me. I can anticipate phrases like “sorry, I’m just not really into brown girls” and “ooh, is that an Indian thing” by the look in someone’s eyes, or the way their head cocks as I utter a foreign phrase. I am simultaneously exotic, cool and different to my white friends, and a ‘fake Indian’ to my brown friends, who jok-

25

‘I merely

belong to them’ and the value of rootlessness

Thomas Lambert 26

“the status of the Palestinian refugee, even in an age of displaced persons, is unique”

W

hen Hannah Arendt died in New York City in the winter of 1975, several obituarists suggested she had not quite lived long enough. This sentiment was not due of any lack of experience on Arendt’s part; born to a family of of Hanoverian Jews in 1906, Arendt spent her childhood at the epicentre of a political earthquake, fleeing Nazi Germany in 1933 and traversing Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, France and Portugal before settling in the United States in 1941. Nor was it the product of a lack of influence; Arendt was as divisive as any academic doyen could hope to be, derided by many as the worst kind of ‘Continental’ charlatan, with a breezy disregard for all things empirical, and yet still studied across the globe half a century later. Arendt’s death was too soon because her unique conception of ‘belonging’ appears arguably more appropriate than ever, as postcolonial societies across the world threaten to collapse into a fissiparous mess of cultural tribes, political factions, religious denominations and ethnic groups.

To many, the great author and critic Edward Saïd does not belong in the same breath as Hannah Arendt. There is some truth to this assessment: born in Jerusalem in 1935 under British mandatory rule, Saïd was himself the scion of a dispossessed Palestinian family, and all his life an advocate of the Palestinian cause, whereas much of Arendt’s reputation on the issue of Palestine is influenced by her flirtation with Zionism in the 1930s and 1940s, when European persecution of the Jews was at its cruellest. In 1935, she commended Martin Buber’s establishment of various socialist

kibbutzim, and even briefly in the early 1940s declared support for the temporary emigration of Ashkenazi Jews into Palestine.

As Arendt grew older, her support for Zionism dwindled. In her review of an English edition of Arendt’s The Jewish Writings, Judith Butler describes how following the 1948 UN partition of Palestine, Arendt argued for the existence of a ‘federated state’ which, she believed ‘would have the advantage of preventing the establishment of sovereignty whose only sovereign right would be to commit suicide.’ The ‘federal’ model, to Arendt, is in large part a blueprint for the avoidance of the resurgence of nationalism in the postcolonial vacuum. This view also goes some way toward explaining Arendt’s occasional support for a Jewish army: an army could belong to the diasporic ‘nation’ of Jews irrespective of the Jewish nation’s territorial claims. This proto-one-state-solution appears in many ways hopelessly naïve in hindsight. However, Arendt’s doubt in the potential of pure nationalism to quell division and bloodshed was all but vindicated.

Following his death from leukaemia in 2003, Saïd’s reputation has suffered an even more egregious distortion than that of Arendt;

27

during his life, however, much like Arendt, Said’s association with a national movement never gave way to blind national tribalism or irredentism. The famous photograph of him throwing a stone across the Blue Line Lebanese–Israel border led the journalist Edward Alexander to label Said ‘The Professor of Terror’, a moniker which haunted him for years.

As he got older, his pellucid commentary was often drowned out by less sophisticated acolytes, and tainted by the nationalist jingoism that Saïd himself rejected. In fact, a closer look at Saïd’s work reveals a sense of utter deracination, as well as a lifelong scepticism towards all forms of group identity.

As Tony Judt points out in his chapter on Saïd in Reappraisals, the status of the Palestinian refugee, even in an age of displaced persons, is unique. Most diasporic communities have fatherland, either remembered or misremembered, which tethers them together in exile; the Palestinians lack even this, Palestine never having been formally constituted. The lack of such a reference point is acutely felt in Saïd’s writing: as he noted just a few months before his death ‘I still have not been able to understand what it means to love a country’.

It is from a similar sense of statelessness that Arendt draws her most refulgent insights.

Judith Butler dubbed Arendt’s worldview a ‘diasporic politics, centred not on a Jewish homeland but on the rights of the stateless.’

Butler even draws a direct comparison with Edward Said’s Freud and the Non-European, in

which he suggests that a shared history of exile and dispossession might form the basis of mutual Israeli-Palestinian understanding.

As a matter of practical policy, of course, Saïd’s suggestion seems absurd. However, this is its great strength: Said’s rootlessness emancipates him from tribal resentments and the petty irredentisms that are so attractive to postcolonial nationalists. That is not to say that he was ever ‘soft’ on the Israeli abuses he perceived; quite the opposite: his commentary was simply less concerned with the restoration of a remembered homeland than with the eradication of actual oppression and cruelty. As is evident from his most famous book Orientalism, Saïd was perennially sceptical towards what he saw as ‘us and them’ ontologies. Indeed, upon rereading the introduction to Orientalism, the reader is confronted with the fact that the only group that is repeatedly invoked with any confidence is ‘humanity’.

Edward Saïd’s humanism was unfashionable: he was forged as a critic in the crucible of post-structuralism, with its dead authors and ‘author functions’, and his work spawned many an exercise in postcolonial obscurantism (see ‘writing the other’). Nevertheless, Saïd eschewed radical antifoundationalism as ‘facile’, and for all his Foucauldian talk of ‘discourses’ maintained the idea of an author’s creative individuality, remarking ‘I do not believe that authors are mechanistically determined by ideology, class, or economic history’.

For Saïd, the strongest ties of fealty ought to

28

be those actively created by the individual, a kind of ‘humanist’ solidarity which overcomes domination by eschewing nationalisms altogether. As Butler points out, it is this sense of ‘belonging’ which Hannah Arendt most stringently supported. For Arendt, a ‘polity’ was not built in the image of some imagined historical progenitor; rather, it ‘requires the capacity to live with others precisely when there is no obvious mode of belonging.’

It is this conception of belonging, a noble kernel of what has since mutated into a less straightforward doctrine of multiculturalism, which carries with it the most emancipatory potential. It has long since ceased to be original to remark that we live in a world obsessed with identity, inhabited by a clutch of polities each groping for an imaginary heartland. To most of us, this is an inalienable condition, and we would not have it any other way: rootlessness is traumatic, disorienting, and robs us of many of the structures which make the world intelligible. Yet perhaps we should keep in mind that two of the most lucid writers on the postcolonial condition, not to mention two of the most dazzling intellects of the twentieth century, were rootless, stateless, internationalists. And perhaps if, like Arendt and Saïd, we questioned some of the allegiances and fealties we cling to most adamantly, the trauma of rootlessness might be avoided for generations to come.

29

Why my Grandmother loved the fairer Grandkids more, and other remnants of colonialism Hakim Faiz

A

pa always insisted that you have another plateful of whatever was cooked at her place that day, as if she hadn’t seen you wolf down the last two. Apart from being a grandmother and a diabetic with an insatiable sweet tooth, she was also a product of her time – a time of confusion during which both nations were expected to forge new identities. Though geographically and linguistically blessed to have been administratively and politically kept out if the spotlight, Quetta may not have been Delhi or Lahore, but still felt the cold winds of imperial influence, complete with heightened greed and intolerance. Apa may herself have been of wheat-ish complexion, and her husband even darker, but her children and grandchildren had come out fair-skinned and bawling. And no gift was greater than giving your offspring that much needed head start in life. After almost a century’s worth of colonization, it would be pitiful if there weren’t any remnants of the overlords – given how hard the British government worked to impose civilization on a populace who had never shown the slightest desire to be honoured as such.

The caste system of India, dating back centuries in the making, held the colour of ones skin as an important distinction of class.

The Brahmins downward, the hues darkened until they reached the Dalits, and so did the intensity of discrimination against each class. And while those who adhere to Islam oft pride themselves on inclusion regardless of the colour of ones skin, monetary status, ethnic associations and many more, racism is a stubborn weed, rearing its ugly head everywhere and anywhere. The fairest are born advantaged, be it fair or unfair, it is the way things have been and will most likely continue as. Their trump card comes in handy for courtship and marriage. And while marriage is not the end all and be all it used to be, it still holds an esteemed status in the third world, as much as we hate to admit it.

And aware of the importance of appearances, my mother ensured that sunblock and hats were an inescapable part of my early life, anything to prevent the possibility of the ‘tan’.

And with all the swimming and rowing I did in the sun, its safe to say I swallowed sweating and runny sunblock, and water in equal pro30

portions.

The obsession with being fair skinned, evidenced by the continued and even increased sales of the infamous Fair and Lovely face and body lotion, as well as other whitening products, is an ailment of the native mind. Now available for both men and women, this skin whitening lotion is proven to destroy layers of skin in an attempt to get you as pearly a complexion as can be desired.

Pregnant women hang up pictures of fair and healthy babies in their rooms, hoping that by looking at such children, almost always Caucasian and strangely amiss amongst all the melanin, will ensure that their bundle of joy too is just as porcelain skinned and rosy cheeked. They are also encouraged to eat foods that are white in colour, and those containing dairy. Pre-wedding preparations 31

consist of homemade concoctions of turmeric and yogurt smeared anywhere the sun shines, hoping to lighten any exposed skin in time for the big day.

The natives of the land of spices and silks had never encountered a creature quite like the British – one so self-assured and certain of their way of life as being solely representative of modern civilization. This may have seemed a laughable notion at that time, with a member of the royal court later mourning about how people who had no concept of washing themselves after answering nature’s call could have become their overlords.

The greatest and gravest error of the imperialist was ignorance, disrespect and an unwillingness to understand the lands they were unwelcome monarchs of. The use of the stick, and very rarely the carrot, may have bought them prestige and riches beyond their wildest dreams, powered their Industrial Revolution, plumped and added to the ranks of their rich, bejeweled their monarchs, financed their armies, filled their museums, and won their wars – and yet their cuisine remained bland, their weather unsavory and their clothes drab.

I jest of course, but how humiliating and tiring must it be for entire generations of these imperialist nations to be reminded of their ancestor’s crimes, the doctored body counts, the hidden reports, the unspoken horrors they committed? Heavily biased accounts and blatant omissions in history books can only be so effective and educational.

The nature of colonization is such that it coerces the people from a subordinated culture to denigrate themselves. The self-dislike and sense of inadequacy is damaging and has effects that last several generations. A broken horse is a willing and pliant horse, and so the British ventured forth to create as Macaulay put it, a ‘class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in morals, in opinions and in intellect’. The British therefore, cannot be blamed for starting this trend, but by insisting and forcibly executing the image of having mastered civilized life, they set themselves up as examples to be followed.

Those who fell in line, spoke the right language, had the right manners and looked and dressed the right way were kept an arm’s length away, but still accepted. With no agency of self in their own country, the people faced pressure to adapt in any way possible to survive. Examples were made of those who adapted and also of those who refused, and the natives had no doubt of what was expected of them.

32

Urdu is an amalgamation of Persian, Arabic and Sanskrit, originating as a common tongue spoken by the armies stationed in what is now Pakistan – a language that they all understood. A language of romance and mystery, of mammoth dramatic and poetic capabilities; one for which translations do more damage than good, unable to capture the magnificence of its form. The colonizer may have used and abused language as an effective tool to create necessary and destructive divisions serving their purposes, but for us to do the same to our own people is a strange concept. Apa was oft apologetic and ashamed of her inability to read or speak any English, completely discounting the fact that she could speak multiple other tongues, tongues that spun romance and mystery into golden yarns of dramatic prose and breath-taking poems. And there were and are hundreds just like her. We have internalised the racism and bias’s used against us, so why bother to throw off the yoke of the colonial oppression if only to regress back into the same unhelpful mindset – even worse for its unnatural familiarity.

In conclusion, despite my obvious issues and concerns with the posited theories and proclamations of Mr. Biggar, I do stand by his advice to ‘move on’; a message for the previously colonized third world, especially Pakistan and India. We must make like Shashi Tharoor and start taking every remnant of colonization with a pinch of salt, we must educate ourselves about our history so that our present and our future are better informed, but most of all, we must move on from our damaging and backward colonially-influenced mindset. Accountability is best left to a higher power, but forgetting and emulating is unforgivable for a people so resilient. For the Subcontinent was and will always be the wild colt whose spirit no mere mortal can break.

33

The Working Group on Oxford University and Colonialism

By Kalypso Nicolaidis, Department of Politics and International Relations Laura Van Broekhoven, Pitt Rivers Museum Co-Chairs of the Working Group

T

he Working group was created in the Spring of 2016 to respond to the obvious need to create a bridge between the student involved in the “Rhodes Must Fall” movement and the rest of the University. The working group functions as a network and meets on a termly basis to share ongoing activities and ambitions of departments, collectives and GLAM (Garden, Libraries and Museum) sites and includes both internal and external members. Since the fall of 2017, the working group is co-chaired and is working more closely with Common The project aims to bring together – specifically through meetings and a website activities taking place at Oxford with regards to addressing the relationship between our University and colonialism.

We have asked how best to reflect on the University’s historic ties with Great Britain’s colonial past and how the University’s colonial legacies has affected and continues to affect the collegiate University’s architecture, admission and recruitment processes and curriculum throughout. In doing so, our group’s ambition is to encourage debates around issues of colonialism in the University, and address past and present-day colonialism and coloniality. The group brings together students, academics and staff to discuss practical ways forward, including through the creation of a dedicated website, the sponsoring “courageous conversations,” and setting up exhibits and spaces reflecting this engagement.

We share an agenda with many other universities, particularly in the United States, which have recently addressed issues of legacy and memory especially regarding slavery.

It is fair to say that while Oxford University

has a policy on race and diversity issues, it has taken a back seat in debates over colonial legacies until now even though the RMF movement and other initiatives have led to numerous debates in Colleges, departments, and across the city- sometimes acrimonious, sometimes constructive.

This working group does not seek to duplicate other efforts already taking place around the University to redress this lacuna. Rather, its aim is to effect change by linking projects, initiatives and events across the University, ensuring visibility and communication and suggest University-wide initiatives that are practical, sustainable and relevant both internally and with the wider public. If we succeed, the University will dramatically increase its attractiveness as an inclusive global hub for students from around the world, and will become a more welcoming space for all.

Moreover, it would also increase our attractiveness for British students from minority groups contemplating an application to Oxford.

Substantively, this means dealing with historical legacies in an open, scholarly and creative way - while also acknowledging and honouring past initiatives undertaken at the University and in particular by activist groups herein. Institutionally, it means respecting subsidiarity – that is, the existing division of responsibility prevalent in this University -whereby colleges and departments deal with i) maintaining their walls and artefacts (things); ii) the recruitment of students and staff (people); and iii) issues of curriculum and diversity (ideas). The grounds for dealing with these issues can vary from issues of recognition to diversity, integration or reparation. The Equality and

34

Diversity Unit at the University, for example, already works with Colleges on issues related to fairer recruitment, diversification of College-held portraits, inter alia.

We believe that our University needs to signal that it is listening and recognizing the importance of colonial legacy, but at the same time, we do not want to make this project, which is contestatory in nature, too formal and official, losing the radical contestatory nature of the issue. We hope that the University can empower without constraining agents for change, thus combining a bottom-up and top-down approach.

A decentralised approach In this configuration, we believe that the University as a whole has three complementary roles to play: BE A FOCAL POINT: To serve as an inter-disciplinary and inter-collegiate hub to debate and address the issues related to colonialism.

MAINTAIN AND IMPROVE REPUTATION: To represent and project the University’s stance on these issues for the outside world.

PROVIDE INCENTIVES: To provide incentives and inspiration as well as possible outlets for actions otherwise taken at College or department level, including above all issues related to curriculum diversity and faculty hiring.

In short, achieving our goals will require a broader process across the University than this or any single group can achieve. We therefore ask: how we can, as a group, make a positive contribution to a larger public discussion that no one “controls” and which is larger than any given set of activities (e.g. website, exhibition, space, lectures, or any combination thereof)?

Such a project relates to (at least) two massive sets of issues: Oxford’s colonial legacy and how Oxford today engages with the pluralistic community around the University.

These are of course deeply intertwined, and while our starting point is the first, there is a Venn diagram where these overlap. In other words, this project cannot address all the larger issues related to the University as a multicultural environment but we hope that our focus on Oxford’s colonial legacies will contribute to the broader conversation.

Most generally, some have expressed the concern that whatever our group can achieve, it risks justifying inaction in addressing the structural issues faced by the University mentioned above (diversity in the curriculum, recruitment, retention etc). Against this risk of tokenism, we stress that our initiative is part of a broader whole and should be understood in the context of subsidiarity in the University. Moreover, we hope that our proposals will be more than pure symbolism and stress that to the extent that they are also symbolic, symbols do matter in debates around post-colonialism. All the partners involved, including the students’ Common Ground will thrive to maintain a critical relationship with the University’s actions towards decolonisation and will hopefully find that the space created here empowers them to do so.

To sum up: we hope that a great deal of the action at Oxford University related to colonial legacies will happen at the departmental, GLAM and College level, from initiatives both formal and informal, emerging from staff and students alike. Here we ask what the University – and a pan University network like ours - can do: Autonomously; To showcase or encourage actions at all levels.

You can find some of the ideas that have been discussed already at http://kalypsonicolaidis. com/2017/11/01/working-group-on-oxford-university-and-colonialism/ If you are interested in joining the group please write to one of us.

35

revisiting the past; envisioning the future