IASH alumnus Dr Ali Kassem has published an article with E-International Relations, exploring how, amidst a wider decolonisation debate, racialised communities across metropoles have contested, and protested, questions of the ‘past’, of history and of memory. The article emerges from his time in Edinburgh as IASH-Alwaleed Postdoctoral Fellow in 2021-22.
Over the past few years, as the decolonisation movement has gathered pace in the UK, a number of reviews, campaigns, and efforts have been made to challenge some of these narratives and celebrations. While the University of Edinburgh renamed its ‘Hume Tower’ to ‘40 George Square’ in 2020, the city council has decided to erect (small) plates in relevant locations ‘explaining’ the histories in question. The plaques, hardly noticeable and at times hardly legible, stand as reminders of a past that, also here, refuses to be past.
The material presence of the colonial and the imperial, coupled with a significant ‘whiteness’ systematically lends to feelings of unbelonging for western modernity’s negatively racialised subjects with accompanying narratives of indebtedness, gratitude, and exclusion. This is made all the more potent in light of the UK’s hostile environment, rising populist fascist politics, as well as reactive right-wing assertion. All of this is only possible with this specific narrative of time and relationality to the past. Had Edinburgh’s past been understood along the lines sketched above – where this ‘wealth’ is understood as being of a global imperial constitution rather than of a national citizenry – questions of rights, claims, and belonging would take on different valences.
Read the full article at https://www.e-ir.info/2023/01/17/reflections-on-decoloniality-time-history-and-remembering/