Dr Shakeel Anjum

RACE.ED Archival Research Fellow
Dr Shakeel Anjum

Dr Shakeel Anjum

RACE.ED Archival Research Fellow, August 2022- May 2023

Home Institution: Jawaharlal Nehru University

Dr Shakeel Anjum’s scholarship concerns the relation between love and politics in the decolonial imagination. His work engages with the structures of love as a counterpoint to the biopolitical conditions of restraint, adopting an intersectional framework to look at the relations, tensions and possibilities for the future. Dr. Anjum’s scholarship focuses on the peripheral geographies of wound, addressing the affective relation between people and political movements, cutting across spatio-temporal structures and forms, notions of subjectification, violence, and writing. He is deeply moved by and interested in the intertwining of aesthetic forms and politics, cultures of resistance, hermeneutics of love, and sensuous spaces of decolonial sovereignty, geographically tethered to Black radical traditions and Palestinian Sumud (steadfastness).

Dr Anjum has written and published in journals of repute, including his essay on the Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh titled, “Geographical Conditions: Memory, Rift and Time” appearing in the Indian Journal of Politics and International Relations (2016), and “Jean Genet: Flanerie, Mimesis and Journalism” published in Summerhill Journal by the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla (2015). His book titled Politics of Space and the Question of Palestine (New Delhi: Adroit Publishers, 2018) is a weave-work of memories, time and space on the political and historical subject geographically torn into shreds. It is attentive to the problematiques of spatial representations of violent geographies in the autobiographical works of the Israeli and Palestinian writers Amos Oz, Raja Shehadeh and Mourid Barghouti. Dr Shakeel Anjum earned his PhD from the School of International Relations and Politics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Project Title: Frames of Sovereignty and Love: Palestinians, Jean Genet, and the Blacks

At the intersection of Black and Palestinian lives, as an emergent thought of decolonial imagination today, the figure of Jean Genet appears as one who has lived through the intensity of these two inventories of radical traditions. Decoloniality, love and sovereignty constitute critical geographies of enquiry for this project, which arises out of interest in seeing “Love as a Method” of sharing life and politics together, how it creates little disorders through its sensuous movement of thought and practice, challenging the static gaze of the forensic settler-colonial state. Through the frames of sovereignty and love, I am interested in reading Genet’s memoir and late political writings (Prisoner of Love and The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews) as an overlapping and intertwining subject of political love and resistance found in the expressions of Palestinian ways of life and Black radicalism. In his writings, Genet expresses the philosophy of these two revolutions in a singular communicative gesture of his own solitude, sexuality and life. This project seeks to draw a methodology of loving and being within the frames of intimate structures of decolonial textuality, by reading Genet's corpus and corpse as a living community of unrestrained language embodying radical structures of passion and protest.