Decoloniality, Communality, and Anti-Semitism

In this Keynote Address from the 2015 Annual Meeting of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies, I historicize and problematize the concept and uses of civility when considered within a constellation of other associated concepts. Civility is not an abstract absolute concept that has only one available meaning. Given the context of an overarching coloniality of language and communication in which our discourses operate, too often we reproduce and reify that which we claim to be challenging. As such, civility also produces particular conceptions of incivility that can challenge, but can also serve to reinforce the problematic and often taken for granted idea of civility as tied inextricably to a colonial project. Instead, I propose a re-reading of the concepts of civility and incivility that explodes the limits of our understanding of both towards a distinct decolonial horizon that attempts to evade the logic of coloniality, which has restricted our ways of thinking the two concepts outside of a reinforcing of colonial power. I take serious the question, inspired by the Zapatistas, “Is another civility possible?

Journal of Latin American Studies, 2021

This paper focuses on three of the most canonical Irish nationalists of the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries – Daniel O’Connell (1775-1847), Michael Davitt (1846-1906) and Eamon de Valera (1882-1975) – and the various claims they made that the Irish nation was analogous to the Jewish nation. In his recent work on Anti-Judaism, David Nirenberg has shown how abstract “figures of Judaism” have been used in large swathes of European political thought. Such abstract “Jewish” figures, Nirenberg argues, have been utilised in debates over secular authority, the perils of capitalism, even modernity itself. Following Nirenberg, this paper argues that O’Connell, Davitt and de Valera engaged in a comparable Irish nationalist “thinking with Judaism”; this was a means of thinking about Irish statelessness and about where Ireland fit into a broader white, European world, whilst simultaneously attacking British rule as analogous to the worst excesses of violent anti-Semitism.

Citizenship Studies , 2022

Focusing on Israel/Palestine, this article explores the role of anticolonial settler-citizens, discussing how they may advance or impede struggles to dismantle the settler state. It shows how in settler states citizenship is founded on, and functions through, violence. It then analyses how the settler colonial condition imposes a set of paradoxes on those settler-citizens who wish to resist the colonial condition, thus limiting possibilities for settler solidarity and coresistance. Overall, the article presents a critique of the role of citizenship in decolonisation struggles, including through the framework of ‘acts of citizenship’. It shows that the role of violence and non-violence in the (anti)colonial project is key to unravelling the impossibility of bridging the inherent fault line of being anticolonial while remaining settlers. Lessons from other past and present decolonisation struggles teach us that settler solidarity and coresistance must centre indigenous struggles and take leadership from them, in ways accepting the uncertainty of the settlers’ future after decolonisation. Only such recognition can allow genuine allyship and solidarity and with it hope for such a future.

Editorial, Decolonial Subversions, 2023

This is an introduction to the 2023 general issue of Decolonial Subversions in which authors engage in a dialogue about colonial racial capitalism from different locations and by looking through different critical lenses. Instead of the working backwards of Eurocentric research and cultural consumption/production, with its assumption of a universalist god-eye-view that closes/forecloses thought, in this issue, there is an authentic generative journey of grappling with social, political, and economic forms of domination which operate on a global scale and manifest in local structuring of access. The works in this issue use different methods in their critique and praxis: research, poetry, visual expression, a digital archive, thought exercise and theory, personal narrative, and translation. Collectively, they develop methods to Thinking Otherwise as a process of generating knowledge that challenges the racial order without being tethered, consumed and constituted by it. They cultivate to unmask domination and root in communality. In doing so, they reclaim authority over the narratives and histories that have been coopted and distorted in the colonial imaginary to locate self-determination that brings about futurity for people subjected to colonial and racial domination. This authority and self-determination are part and parcel of decolonial subjectivation out of patriarchal objectification, state exploitation and cooption, and settler-colonial elimination.

Ethnicity comes from the Greek ethnos translated into Latin as nation. Thus, in both cases, it could be self-referential, as "the people that belongs to a given community" of knowledge, language, memory, faith, habits, taste for certain food and celebrations of the season or of "national" symbols, etc. In that sense, "ethnicity in Latin America" invites a description of the different ethnic configurations that exist in a given place. However, ethnicity today is not just a neutral conglomeration of people that recognize themselves as belonging to a given ethnos. In the modern/colonial world, ethnicities have been racialized. And racialization means that there is a given discourse, and a given ethnicity that identifies itself with that discourse, that has the power to classify ethnic groups. In other words, to what ethnicity it belongs the discourse that classifies ethnicity? In "Latin America" is not the discourse of people from Afro-descent or Indians, in all the diversity that characterizes these two grouping, from Brazil to the Caribbean, from the Andes to México. The discourse that names and classify ethnicity is, today, the discourse of the disciplines and the discourse of the disciplines has been put in place by ethnic Europeans (since the Renaissance) and by Creoles and Mestizo elites in "Latin America." Now, "Latin America" is not a neutral place, a subcontinent naturally named as such by God or by some Hegelian Spirit that emanated from the Big-Bang. "Latin America" is an ethnic and facial invention of the Creole elite from European descent, in the nineteenth century, in complicity with French imperial (Latin) designs (Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America, 2005). In other words, "ethnicity in Latin America" is the site of a struggle, the site of the coloniality of power, of knowledge and of being. However, this scenario is in a rapid and radical process of transformation due to the fact that the colonized and racialized

Dublin Review of Books, 2018

EXTRACT: Irish history writing has often suffered from an inward-looking perspective. The twenty-six counties' assumed status as a sacra insula post-independence finds an odd analogue in the bulk of the work on that state's history. That events in Ireland might have been profoundly influenced by goings-on further afield has been downplayed in favor of what R. M. Douglas aptly calls, in his contribution to this volume, "an unarticulated Sonderweg thesis for modern Ireland." Irish historians reassured themselves "that nothing that happened on the European continent need disturb the tranquility of their scholarly lives." Indeed, much of the literature on the so-called Irish Revolution of 1912-23 has had surprisingly little to say about other contemporaneous revolutions, not the Bolshevism of Russia, Hungary, or Germany or the anticlericalism and land seizures of Mexico or the colonial transfer of power to the Wafd in Egypt. More recently, thankfully, this edifice has shown some cracks. The recent transnational turn in Irish historiography has done much to place Ireland into broader geographies and to show how porous are the borders of what James Connolly called the "combination of chemical elements [we are] pleased to call Ireland." The essays in this collection emphasize the value of placing Ireland in broader global currents. R. M. Douglas's contribution shows how a comparative European perspective does much for the study of antisemitism in Ireland, and Sander L. Gilman's essay highlights the structural similarities and shared trajectories of anti-Jewish and anti-Irish rhetoric in the nineteenth century. Dan Lainer-Vos highlights the comparabilities and key differences of Irish and Jewish American political activism and how, in both cases, a diasporic longing for home collided with the American realities of these two prominent white ethnic groups. In almost the same vein, Muiris Ó Laoire's chapter explores how much the revival of the Irish language can be better understood when we compare it to the roughly contemporaneous revival of Hebrew. Seán William Gannon, in his contribution, reveals how large numbers of Irish people continued to operate within transnational British imperial networks well after 1922; Irishmen serving in the Palestine Police in the 1940s drew on both nationalist and imperialist ideas to understand their role as gendarmes in a Jewish Arab society on the verge of civil war. And George Bornstein's chapter, a creative approach to autobiography, is a comparable commentary on how one "Irish" life was lived within transnational frames.