Peer Review: Annabel Crowley

PEER REVIEW.

Shades of Noir has been pleased to invite Kirsten Hemmy and Annabel Crowley to peer review this Terms of Reference.

Kirsten Hemmy. Chair of Interdisciplinary Studies, Philosophy, and Religion at Johnson C. Smith University, Charlotte, North Carolina; Member of the Southern Humanities Council executive board and the director of the Mosaic Literary Center of Charlotte (a nonprofit organization dedicated to the discovery, cultivation, and preservation of contemporary literature and the arts in underserved communities). As a Fulbright Scholar in 2003, she studied politics and poetry in Senegal. Hemmy has also studied in Ghana and is currently completing a book on Emma Brown, an Ibibio freedom fighter and political activist in Nigeria. She was the 2008 recipient of the Linda Flowers Literary Award for Poetry, has received the Academy of American Poets Award, and has published interviews with poets such as Yusef Komunyakaa and Ralph Angel

Annabel Crowley. Annabel is a long-time education enthusiast and advocate. She has worked in the Further and Higher Education sectors for more than a decade. She is also the co-chair of UAL’s Group for the Equality of Minority Staff (GEMS), UAL’s largest and longest-standing staff network that represents employees and workers of colour. Annabel’s main role is to develop strategic Equality, Diversity and Inclusion/ Organisational Development interventions that promote access and inclusion for UAL staff. As a Visiting Lecturer at Chelsea College of Arts, she has taught critical theory on the BA Textile Design course. Before joining UAL, she led self-advocacy projects for disabled people-led organisations in London. Annabel’s research interests are in social justice pedagogy and inclusive learning and teaching practices. She is currently studying for her MA at Central Saint Martins.

A NOTE FROM ANNABEL CROWLEY.

This opportunity to peer-review the thought-and action-provoking contents of this Terms of Reference is precious and one I do not take lightly.

I will start by thanking Rayvenn for inviting me to write this. Recent events have made me think very deeply about the body politic – how my body is political and how my body forms a part of political collectives, at different times and in different spaces.

We need collective resistance and self-representation in our post-Brexit, post-truth era. In our times, people who are racialised as “not white” must evidence ever more painstakingly why we deserve to exist, survive and thrive, while those people who hold political power are showing the most self-interest that I have ever witnessed in my lifetime.

Our world and our relationships remain dominated by the power dynamics of slavery and colonialism, even though in some very limited domains the language of those dynamics has become more polite. I witness this in the rhetoric that surrounds world migration crises; in the catastrophic effects of climate change on the Global South; in the continuing neo-colonialist trade and development agreements in post-colonial states; in the ‘racial bias’ of the UK criminal justice system that disproportionately imprisons Black people; in the anti-immigrant rhetoric I am subjected to at family weddings and ‘friendly’ gatherings; in the fear I feel for my mother when she is out alone after dark.

These power dynamics are everywhere I turn, and the violence is tangible in the language used to demean me, my body and the communities I love and fight for. As I formulate my own responses to global power structures that cling desperately to colonial power relations, I find myself looking back to the thinkers who first gave me the language to describe that violence.

I think of Frantz Fanon, who described the world as a hierarchy of colonisers and colonised, where this hierarchy is maintained through violence. Fanon accounted for both the physical and psychological harms of colonialism and advocated for strengthening the connection between all people of African descent around the world, for their collective survival and progress.

Fanon wrote of the body politic.

I think of Gayatri Spivak, and her scathing opposition to the West’s attempts to situate itself as a neutral investigating subject in contrast with the investigated non-‘Western’ object. Spivak wrote about strategic essentialism – the political tactic through which oppressed groups mobilise based on their shared gendered, cultural or political identities to represent themselves and achieve certain goals. Spivak wrote of the body politic.

I think of Edward Said, the very first post-colonial writer I read. Said wrote that although colonialism is allegedly over, the systems of thinking, talking and representing that form the basis of colonial power relations persist today. Said argued that ‘Orientals’ (or ‘the other’) should be able to construct their own image. Said wrote of the body politic.

These writers are not an exhaustive list, but they were my introduction to post-colonial resistance in the academic realm. They taught me that I had been lied to about my body, others’ bodies and where we belonged.

My body is the site of conflicts; few I have chosen and many more that I have not. My body is the product of colonialism; I would not exist without the European colonial powers’ violent theft of the resources and power they have enjoyed for hundreds of years, now with ever-hardening borders around their spoils. My body is the vehicle of my mind; when I connect with others over shared experience and resistance, my body transforms into one part of something much bigger (but still not quite tangible). My one constant, my body fluctuates between individual and collective.

Ownership over our bodies is an ongoing process of negotiation and renegotiation.

We are born into a world that inflicts so many powerful assumptions and ascriptions on us that our selves become inescapably shaped by the very forces we resist. For the racialised as ‘not white’ amongst us, it is often resistance that gives us a feeling of ownership. This leads many of us to feel that resistance is ours and ours alone. This is understandable – resistance has saved me from despair many times and it is an important part of who I am.

However, we absolutely must bear witness to the particular harms inflicted on Black people, both by Whiteness and by those communities (like mine) who would be included in the label of ‘people of colour’. Though I am technically a ‘person of colour’, and though I co-chair UAL’s network for staff of colour, GEMS (the Group for the Equality of Minority Staff), this generalisation of our shared experiences can only go so far. It is my task to amplify the voices of my Black peers and, sometimes, to position myself between my Black peers and any other who causes them harm. My light skin and ‘Western’ name carry a lot of power in a racialised hierarchy. I know from leading GEMS that my Black peers experience extreme epistemic violence, and so it is my job to see that violence for what it is and use all the resources available to push for change.

In our body politic, we must witness and resist anti-Blackness and take the lead from our Black peers on what needs to be done.

In our body politic, we must witness and resist ableism and take the

lead from our disabled peers on what needs to be done.

In our body politic, we must witness and resist transphobia and take the lead from our transgender and gender non-conforming peers on what needs to be done.

In our body politic, we must witness and resist homophobia and take the lead from our lesbian, gay, bi and pan peers on what needs to be done.

In our body politic, we must witness and resist class privilege and take the lead from our peers from low income backgrounds on what needs to be done.

In our body politic, we must witness and resist all the myriad ways that these social forces intersect and exclude our most marginalised peers.

When we do this work our body politic becomes tangible, sustainable and formidable.

Though we may share an existence outside of dominant power structures, we cannot continue to recreate ourselves according to the colonial imagination – i.e. though colonialism and slavery reinforced the ‘other’ in opposition to Whiteness, we are more than the ‘other’.

We are more than ‘BAME’.We are all the ways we resemble each other and differ.

We are all the knowledge we do not yet have about ourselves and each other, and resources like this ToR help us to grow that knowledge.

I trust you will benefit from this zine as much as I have.Salute!