Welcome to my second newsletter
I have moved to SubStack! It seems that's where all the cool kids are, so I have joined in the attempt to be cool as other people with Substacks like my friends Jairo Funez-Flores, Tom Six, or Max Haiven! Other substacks I am subscribed to and which I really appreciate are Presence by Amy McQuire and a single hail from below by Richard Hunsinger.
Teaching
This semester I am teaching my Masters course, Understanding Race, with a great group. Resources for the course are available on my website. A recent post I wrote on W.E.B. Du Bois’s ‘The Concept of Race’ that we used to discuss changing understandings of race through time, can be read here.
Events
Please join us for the 4th seminar in the Radical Antiracism Today: New books in abolitionist, anticolonial, internationalist antiracism on Wednesday September 13 at 7PM AEST and 10AM GMT. We will be discussing Abolition Revolution with authors Aviah Sarah Day and Shanice Octavia McBean. They will be in conversation with Maria Giannacoupoulos. Click here to register.
Our last seminar with Quah Ee Ling in conversation with Mahdis Azarmandi and Garrick Cooper, two of the contributors to a volume published in Aotearoa New Zealand on issues of race and antiracism there, titled Towards a Grammar of Race can be watched here.
When I was in Europe in June/July, I was fortunate to participate in a number of great events. The first took place at the Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) at Manchester University. I’d like to thank Professor Bridget Byrne for the invitation and Sudip Sen for organising my visit. Many people turned up in-person and online to hear me speak on ‘Working with and against race.’ An audio file of the event was kindly shared with me by Sudip. You can listen to it here.
I also was delighted to share space with my friend and excellent thinker, Anna-Esther Younes at Hopscotch Reading Room in Berlin, organised by Max Haiven. Thanks to Siddhant for hosting us and to the many wonderful people who came along to share an event of conversation on matters of race, Palestine liberation, and antisemitism. You can watch our conversation here:
Coming up
I am delighted to have had a paper accepted at the inaugural conference of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism in October. I recommend signing up for their updates because this is an important new initiative. You can read about the impetus for the institute in Mondoweiss.
I am also chairing an important conversation with leading Palestinian activist and writer Omar Barghouti and best-selling Australian journalist, writer and film-maker Antony Loewenstein on Australian Complicity with Israeli Apartheid on Thursday September 28 7pm-8.30pm AEST. The webinar is being organised by Jews Against the Occupation and Tzedek Collective.
Writing
I am busy writing my book, A Drop of Poison, but it is a relatively slow process which, given the pace that neoliberal academic forces us into it no bad thing! As a consequence though, I haven’t done much other writing.
However, a recent blog post you might like is Why aren’t we all crying from the rooftops about Blockade Australia? in which I note the left’s failure to link up radical climate protests and anticolonialism.
What I am reading and listening to
As usual there is so much to read and so little time!
Recently, I have been getting back into a fair amount of Du Bois, specifically but not exclusively, Black Reconstruction in America and The World and Africa.
I also want to thanks Kieron Turner for loaning me his copy of The Sociology of W. E. B. Du Bois: Racialized Modernity and the Global Color Line by José Itzigsohn and Karida L. Brown which is a great companion. Accompanying this is a wonderful podcast series on Du Bois being put together by Revolutionary Left Radio. The first two episodes with Gerald Horne and Charisse Burden-Stelly respectively are fantastic.
I have been really appreciating the writing of Ben Abbatangelo, especially his recent Indigenous X article on the Indigenous Voice to parliament, ‘Thin black veils and unity tickets’.
An article by Jamal Nabulsi on ‘Reclaiming Palestinian Indigenous Sovereignty’ in Journal of Palestine Studies was also very provocative and well-worth your time. It links with thinking I am doing for my book and also for the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism conference on Zionist manipulations of Indigeneity.
In TV, I can highly recommend The Virtues, a four-part series by Shane Meadows with some of the best acting I have probably ever seen!
From the archives!
Each newsletter I’ll share something I published in the past that links to events in the present. This time, in light of the recent FIFA women’s world cup which I surprised myself by watching avidly, I share an article I wrote on the 2006 world cup final and Zinedine Zidane’s ‘coup de boule’, ‘Responding with Rage.’ I felt under all the happy-clappiness of the women’s tournament there was a fair amount of antiblackness visible in the treatment of the Haitian and Nigerian teams as well as the French team, which has many Black players.
