Professor Priyamvada Gopal on Anticolonial Resistance
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Welcome to the New Books Network. As-salamu alaykum, listeners, and welcome back to a new season of Radio Reorient, the podcast where we explore the Islamosphere and illuminate the post-Western. Your hosts this season are myself, Hizamir, Claudia Radovan, Saeed Khan, and Chella Ward.

This season is another packed season full of brilliant guests and this time we will be looking at the theme of reorienting history. We will be asking why it has for so long been the case that Muslims were considered a people without a history and ask what the relationship might be between new history of the world and a more liberatory future.

We're kicking off this season with an interview with Professor Priyamavada Gopal, Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the University of Cambridge, who has been asking questions about the relationship between history, literature, and the decolonial in her many important books, including Insurgent Empire, Anti-Colonial Resistance, and British Descent.

Together with Salman Syed, I had the chance to catch up with her about the work she's doing now and how it relates to her long interest in the literatures of dissent and resistance. It was such a fascinating conversation that could have gone on for much longer than it did, given all of Priya's important work in this area. So to kick off the very first episode of this new season, let's listen in.

As-salamu alaykum listeners and welcome to another episode of Radio Reorient. We are really excited today to be joined by Professor Priyamvada Gopal who is going to be talking to us about some of her work. My name is Chilla Ward. I am joined today by Professor Salman Syed and we're going to be having a wide-ranging conversation about decoloniality and some of the questions that haunt it into the present day. So

if I could start, Priya, by asking you whether you could tell us, in a sense, a little bit about your academic biography, or in other words, how did you end up working on the areas that you're interested in? That's a good question. I'm not sure that I've ever had a planned or coherent programme. My PhD dissertation, which I did at Cornell University in the United States, I

I developed after quite a few years of thinking and it was on writers, largely Muslim writers writing in Urdu, who were self-consciously challenging the project of nations as they unfolded. And by challenging, I don't mean they were against nations, but they were

raising questions about equality, about power, about subjugation within nations. And they were largely part of the formation known as the Progressive Writers Association, influenced by Marxism very heavily, but by no means only Marxist.

And that came out eventually in a book called Literary Radicalism in India, Gender Nation and the Transition to Independence. I was interested, I think, early on without knowing it, in the question of what decolonization meant.

And I was interested in these writers. They included very well-known names like Saadat Hassan Manto and Ismat Chukhtai and Rashid Chahan.

I was interested in the ways these writers, in part of course because of their community background, in part by virtue of being minorities within British India, they were at a sort of an angle to the project of nation.

And they raised questions about class, gender, sexuality, power that I think were not addressed within mainstream nationalism. And I think I was interested then, and it's something I've only realized now,

Now looking back on the work I did as a young person, I was interested in the question of dissent and particularly the difficult project of dissenting from a movement that is itself claiming oppositionality, that is claiming resistance. So what does resistance to resistance in a sense look like? And that was my early work.

Subsequently, I wrote a book which, I mean, in all honesty, was a kind of project that was commissioned. But even there, I found myself returning to the question of nation. This was a book commissioned by OUP on, they wanted something on Indian literature. And I said, look, I can't do that. But I certainly can look at the specific formation that is known as Indian English literature.

And I want to look at this very broad canvas, specifically through the lens of history.

and nation. And one of the arguments I make in that book is that the question of Indian-ness is not really something you see addressed in the vernacular literatures, the Bhasha literatures that I was familiar with. But Indian English writing, and also I think Pakistani English writing, is

is kind of very self-consciously interested in, you know,

what does it mean to be Indian, what does it mean to be Pakistani? But certainly on the Indian side, it's an almost obsessive theme that runs through very early writings from the late 19th, early 20th century, very much into the 21st century. What does it mean to be Indian? And I thought that that was a specific theme that is addressed in Indian English literature.

writing, partly because there's an anxiety about not being, as it were, indigenous, of being a once foreign language that is now finding its feet in this country.

So I think I again return there to the questions of nation and how literature, Indian English literature, the novel in particular, engages with the question of history. There is a kind of obsession with the question of history that I thought was interesting. And then my sort of last book, Insurgent Empire, is

The genesis of that book, I think, was partly in the fact that I was getting involved in discussions about empire, memories of empire, history of empire, uses of empire in British public discourse. And I had been, I think, by then living in Britain for about...

12, 13 years by the time I began that project and I'd been sucked into some of the less than edifying public discussions on colonialism and British public engagement with colonialism.

And I'd been approached by editors and agents to see if I could write a kind of counter history of empire, a counter history to the sort of histories written by Neil Ferguson and other conservatives or conservative liberals. And I didn't want to do that in part because I'm not a

a historian by training. I am situated in an English department. And I didn't want to just do a straightforward, well, you say this and I say this, which I think is a kind of unfortunate binary that we still inhabit in Britain. I wanted to think about this differently. And I think what happened, and again, this is stuff that I realized retrospectively, I again became interested in the question of dissent.

And I became interested in the question because I was frequently hearing, as anybody who gets engaged in a discussion in Britain does, that we cannot judge the past by the standards of our time. So therefore, to talk about racism or extraction or violence is anachronistic.

And I wondered if that was true, because it seems extraordinary when we cannot agree on things in Britain in the present today, and there are such divisions in the public sphere, that somehow 18th and 19th century Britain were of one mind on how to treat other people, how to engage with people.

you know, racialized others or how to deal with cultures that you encounter.

And I think, sure enough, I did read a very small body of historical writing on the question of critics of imperialism and critics of empire. And I realized that there was actually more to it than meets the eye when these grand claims are made about how the Victorians didn't really see it as racism to treat people badly or to see themselves as superior.

That's not true. Yes, dissidents are a minority as they are anywhere. Dissent in a sense by definition is a project of resisting the norm.

And as I then returned to these texts which historians had looked at, I thought many of them deserved closer reading than they had received in historical contexts or contexts of historical studies. So that's what I did. I picked and in a sense one has to make selections. I didn't look at all of them but I looked at some of the

really interesting texts that I thought had been not looked at sufficiently. But I also wanted to think about something else. And that was this idea, again, this comes up in the British public sphere a lot. In fact, it has just come out. I think Keir Starmer has said something to this effect of, you know, well, basically, you know,

Empire wasn't all bad and there are things that people should be grateful for. Britain has taught people things. This is a, I mean, I'm talking about a recurring trope, not any particular person's.

comments. And I thought to myself reading some of these critics of empire that what emerges there in many cases is a sense of wanting to learn from the cultures they encounter, wanting to learn from the colonized, but also I think very specifically many of them witness

anti-colonial movements in different places and many of them write quite self-consciously about their views being changed by witnessing anti-colonial resistance or by being in contact with anti-colonial figures from the colonies. So I guess I brought these two kind of broad themes together in thinking about British descent on empire.

And I think, I mean, in a sense that is so far the connecting thread in my work is the question of nation, of our relationship to history and the question of dissent. And now I'm working on a project very explicitly on the question of decolonization, which I think will pull some of these threads together.

Well, maybe we can ask you something about the decolonization work in a way, because what you describe, and I think, you know, at certain moments, your work would have been posited as being post-colonial, would have been described as perhaps

linking with that kind of critical tradition, which is often associated with South Asia, the kind of post-colonial. And you talked about your dissertation being on the progressive writers, et cetera. And one of the ways that decolonial thinking often...

differentiated itself was in response to being different from the post-colonial in a way. And some people could have said it's a fetishism of small differences, but they actually saw themselves as being very, very different around that. And I was just wondering whether you would want to, whether you think you have changed by changing or what you've been doing is the same thing and the labels have just got changed in a way. Do you think there's actually something different when you do decolonial or you do post-colonial?

So I don't identify as doing decolonial work because I tend to be a bit of a stickler for precision. And my sense is that the decolonial tradition, which comes out of Latin America,

and all sort of Latin American academics based in the United States is very different, as you suggested, from the post-colonial tradition. Those differences have been discussed in some of the literature and criticism around the topic.

I think many people use decolonial as the adjectival form of decolonization. I don't because I do think it's a distinct tradition and I don't want to make claims to working from that tradition. So, I mean, this is, it is difficult because

It's difficult to write a book about decolonization, and you want to use an adjective, and you're reaching for an adjective. And this is the adjective that everybody uses. But I say decolonizing in the verbal and adverbial form rather than decolonial.

I think there are very substantial, and do I think of my work as post-colonial? I mean, I think I was formed by that tradition, but I think that that tradition has some quite serious gaps. I think it also has, apart from being very South Asia dominated, which leads to its own set of problems, and one of them I will mention in a minute, I think that...

I don't think that I am necessarily working within what I would call post-colonial theory. Even my first book, I mean, going back to that moment, which you've had me do now, I remember that I started thinking about that project when Ajaz Ahmed's book, in theory, came out.

And that was, of course, a very sharp and sometimes heavy-handed criticism of post-colonial theory as it was unfolding in the United States, you know, academia. And I remember me and several others being kind of really, you know, worried.

wowed by that criticism because here we were we were young people who had come to work you know with all these great post-colonialists and work with post-colonial theory and here was this book saying you know basically there are class problems here there is the problem of you know eliding actual South Asian literature there is the problem of obsessing uh with you know with the colonial center ironically even while you're saying you're being post-colonial and I

I think my project on the Progressive Writers Association very much evolved from an engagement with Erma's work. I mean, I have had and have my own disagreements

with that work, but I think it was very useful to be steered in a slightly different direction. And one of the things that he talks about in that book is the ways in which non-Anglophone writers writing in South Asia is often less interested in the question of colonialism than it is in the question of kind of our culture

our problems, our silences, our ways of loving and living, our hatreds. And so I think I went to look at these literatures sitting in an English department, which wasn't a simple thing to do necessarily, to see, well, okay, what is it? What does South Asia, what does post-colonial South Asia look like when we're not just reading Salman Rushdie, right? Then you have a kind of different take.

So yeah, I was formed by that tradition, partly formed against that tradition. The decolonial tradition in Latin America, I am still studying and getting to know, but I think I very much do not work in that tradition. And now I slightly lost track of your question, but maybe I'll leave it there for now. That's fine. I don't want to say anything.

I'm thinking about also how that question about the decolonial versus the post-colonial in some ways also asks a question about literary study specifically, because it seems like there are certain ways of

of studying writers who might now get called decolonial, but at a certain point in literary studies would have been called something like subaltern or, you know, there's been a kind of shift, hasn't there, between seeing colonized writers, essentially, as simply subaltern voices that were comparable with, let's say, working class voices or for a period of time, women's voices or marginalized voices in another sense.

And it seems to me that part of what has happened, and I think it seems to me just looking from the outside at your work, that one of the shifts maybe that it's been responsible for is also thinking about the position or the logic of colonisation not simply as something that creates identity categories of writers, but as something that's also responsible for producing

discourses that are much broader than a sort of individual identity group of writers. Or we might, another way to put that might be establishing alternative versions of history that weren't told. And I think what, what for me is, is really interesting looking at something like your insertion empire book is that it

it's not so much about saying in the way that subaltern studies often did, this group was left out, so let us now give voice to that group in a kind of identitarian way. It's almost about identifying a sort of politics of history or a version of history that has gone undone, not because we've left out particular people necessarily, but something broader than that about how we construct history.

so I just wondered whether um whether you think there's something kind of particular to literary studies here about how writers have also shifted in terms of how we've understood them does that make sense sorry that was a very large question yeah that's I mean it was some very good points in there I think um maybe I'm slightly coming at your question from from an angle uh I think the

When I was writing "Insurgent Empire," I kept thinking, well, what am I doing here that a literary critic does that a historian doesn't necessarily always do? But of course, these are artificial disciplinary boundaries in one sense.

But I think that, you know, like the late great Edward Said, I'm very interested in dialogue and I'm very interested in lines of influence and the ways in which kind of cultures and civilization, as he puts it, have conducted, have engaged with each other and have conducted over the centuries dialogue rather than retreating into silos.

And the question of history is important here because history also operates in that way. We can't really study history in silos, you know, whether we, you know, like to tell ourselves that we're doing a particular national history or a particular national literature study.

That becomes a very self-defeating project at the end, as anybody who has tried to deal with curriculum construction in English departments, and I'm sure that's true for history also knows. So I'm interested in lines of influence and lines of conflict, lines of conflict.

both dialogue, but also dialogism when, you know, something new comes out of the encounter of multiple ideas and multiple characters and cultures. I do think that literary training does teach you to be a little bit more attentive to voice.

and a little bit more attentive to how stories, you know, merge and generate new ideas. I don't think I'm making an overstated claim here, and I'm not at all saying that, you know, historians can't do that. But I think...

I like to think that what I did or brought to the text that I looked at in "Insurgent Empire" was exactly this kind of, you know, in part Bakhtinian sense of the voice. And, you know, he would theorize it, of course, eventually in terms of heteroglossia and so on. But the clash and engagement

and coming together of discourses interests me. And I think that is the literary dimension for me. Does that at all? Yeah, I think that does answer the question. Yeah, thank you. No, I just wanted to just follow up on the question there. I mean, it is the shift from insurgent empire to a history of decolonization. And what you've just said about

the D word. Um, and one of your writings, you talk about the D word in a way, and you already talked a little bit about that. Can you just explain to our listeners a little bit more about how you see that development? So we're trying to get, it's really arcs of your work that rather than, because people often read things, um, nowadays in kind of isolation in a way. And we're kind of interested in that kind of intellectual journey, uh,

as well, so how you move from one to the other, knowing in fact that things may be quite random or contingent upon those things. So maybe you could tell listeners a little bit about that shift from history of the work on decolonization compared to Insurgent Empire.

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My friend's still laughing me to this day. Not everyone gets B2B, but with LinkedIn, you'll be able to reach people who do. Get $100 credit on your next ad campaign. Go to linkedin.com slash results to claim your credit. That's linkedin.com slash results. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn, the place to be, to be. Yeah, so to be quite clear, I am not writing a history of decolonization. Those exist, right?

in the sense in which historians have looked at decolonization, right? So, you know, how does Britain give up power in Kenya? How does Britain give up power in India, in Nigeria, wherever? I mean, there's just some vast literature on decolonization. And I wouldn't dare. I mean, I think the truth is I wouldn't dare present myself as writing a history of decolonization. In fact, there's a recent book that came out that is more or less

I forget which press. And I think what I'm doing, and this may well be contentious, is picking up on the idea of the anti-colonial and thinking, well, where does the anti-colonial lead us? What happens to the anti-colonial in the age of decolonization, the age of decolonization,

historically being described as the kind of effectively the post-war period, the second half of the 20th century. And in 2021, I published a piece in Textual Practice, which I think is the one you're alluding to, where I talk about the D word. And in that piece, I talk about

exactly what you raised earlier, you know, between the kind of post-colonial, between the colonial and the post-colonial or between the post-colonial and the decolonial, what happens to the anti-colonial? And I've actually,

Actually, I think if I had to put my stakes down somewhere, it would be in the anti-colonial, which I see as something that is a process, that is ongoing, that is very necessary to our present, that is not simply divided along racial or cultural lines. I see it as a process. I see it as an idea that is, you know,

still being developed and articulated in different sites, including obviously and very clearly in Palestine today. And so I think for me the question of decolonization is really bound up with the anti-colonial. What do we learn from anti-colonialism? What do we learn from anti-colonial struggles?

I think that I'm very much of the view that none of us, when we talk about decolonizing our institutions or decolonizing this or that, are entirely sure what we're talking about.

about. I think we're all coming, you know, like that famous, you know, the cyclist and the elephant, we're all coming at the creature, you know, from our positions, our disciplinary and our cultural positions and trying to articulate something. I'm hoping in this book to slightly develop a more global and comparative understanding of the term. But I also think I'm writing

not a history, but perhaps a kind of intellectual historical engagement with the term as it emerges out of struggle. So it is an idea. The book is provisionally called Decolonization, the Life and Times of an Idea. And I know that having presented some of that work to historians, some were up in arms about the idea.

the fact of treating decolonization as an idea. And by idea, I don't mean something that is divorced from practice, quite the opposite. It emerges from practice. But for us in the 21st century, what does that mean? I mean, given that, you know, a large number of once colonized nations are effectively independent nations and have been so,

for the larger part of the 20th and 21st centuries. What does decolonization mean? And it is an idea, I think, for us today when we're grappling with it. And I think that it is an idea that only makes sense if we think about anti-colonialism and what do people who struggle against colonialism think

What are they struggling against? And what does it mean beyond the relatively easy binary of native and foreigner? That's easily dealt with. It has been dealt with, right? The foreigner leaves, the native takes over, end of story. But we all know that that is not the end of the story when it comes to decolonization. So what does it mean today? And I am very genuinely, I think, just kind of grappling with the idea.

I mean, one of the things, just very quickly, just to follow up on that, is that there is a kind of a pool of people that people, whether they call themselves post-colonial or they call themselves doing decolonial, they work on certain anti-colonial figures, like, for example, Fanon or César or etc. So there's a kind of common pool. And just interesting to see how the same kind of pool is then mobilized

into different kinds of intellectual positions and intellectual critiques on that. So that's just, and I just want, I know, Shelley, you wanted to come in there. So I just wanted to just see that in relation to also what you said that, yeah, the question about history, in a sense, history is too serious to be left to historians. I think it's also another issue.

So there's a problem with that. But just reflecting a little bit on that and going back to the first of your answers when you talked about the progressive writers, and I was really struck by one of the things you said. You wanted to look at dissident writers who were writing concerns against the kind of formulation of the nation state, in particular what's going to emerge and the notion of minorities, etc. And the reason why I mean is that

One of the things, obviously, one of the people writing at the time was also Madhudi. He's not a writer per se, but he was also writing in a very kind of complicated way about

both as a Muslim, but also a Muslim who didn't want at that time, who was against the idea of Pakistan, but at the same time against the idea of the closure of a nation state. And I think one of the configurations that come up with the way that we think of these different writers later on with anti-colonial, et cetera, who is anti-colonial, who is not anti-colonial, seems to be quite a complicated relationship. And I wanted to see if you wanted to say something about that, because the initial anti-colonial project was quite clearly linked to a very clear idea

let's say, very clear line between the colonized and non-colonized. What we're then dealing with now is a much more confused picture about the decolonizing of the mind, but decolonizing of ourselves in relation to where those boundaries don't exist. And we get into all these very kind of complicated permutations about what is colonial and what is not colonized and where we stand in relation to that. As you know, many of the BJP activists think of what they're doing in India is decolonizing India from

Islam and colonialism. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, actually, it's funny you should, if I can begin with where you ended, I'm working on a chapter right now

which is looking on the one hand at Dr. Ambedkar, who is not usually seen as somebody writing about decolonization, and then I'm looking at some of the great kind of theorists of Hindutva, including Savarkar and Golwalkar and their claims about the nation. I actually think, without going on at great length, that the Hindutva claim to decolonization is very easily dispensed with.

Particularly if you take somebody like Dr. Ambedkar, who, and this is what I mean by people who are criticizing the project of nation at the time in which the project of nation is oppositional. It takes a particular kind of courage to do that. And he does that. And he says, you know, it's all very well saying that, you know, get the British out, quit India, blah, blah, blah. But

Here we are, not even as Muslims, but as, you know, what were known as the depressed classes at the time, but people who we would speak of as Dalits today or OBCs, other backward classes. He says, we have already been colonized for 2000 years by Hinduism.

And so this so-called independence that we're hurtling into is going to be completely meaningless for us unless there is a massive effort to liberate so-called untouchables and other castes at the bottom of the caste pecking order.

So I think you're right that in a sense decolonization is seen as aliens and foreigners, but it is seen as that by a particular kind of decolonizer. But really, if you look at not just the progressive writers or Ambedkar, but also if you look at some of the more canonical figures like Césaire and Fanon, they're not

saying it's enough to change hands. I mean, this is a very clear sense that it is not enough to change hands and that unless there is a wide-ranging liberation, this is not anti-colonialism. I had meant to say something earlier, I think when Chela was asking me about the South Asian post-colonial tradition, or perhaps you were, but one of the things that struck me as really interesting is how little

theorizing on decolonization there is from the South Asian, the Indian subcontinent. There is some, and if you ask people to give you something for the syllabus, they'll stick Gandhi in front of you, most likely.

And, you know, Gandhi is an interesting thinker and a problematic one. And I certainly wouldn't dismiss, you know, Gandhi as contributing to what we might, you know, widely call a body of thought on anti-colonialism and decolonization. But, you know, compared to what is coming out of Latin America, out of Africa, out of the Caribbean, this vast subcontinent doesn't generate very much at all.

So when you take that fact and then you look at how post-colonial studies is dominated by South Asians, you have to say, well, what's going on here? What are you pulling on? And of course, at that point, you get you get subaltern studies entering the

the picture in one strand of that. But Subaltern's studies kind of cleaned up and made presentable to Western academia by presenting them as effectively as Derrideans, as giving them the theoretical backing that Western academia can give it. But yeah, this is something that interests me. Like writing this book-- and I'm trying to write it comparatively across contexts--

how little I have to pull on from South Asia. I mean, I think your allusion to Maududi here is really helpful. And there are other figures that I need to be kind of looking at and bringing in the same kind of qualified way in which one might bring somebody like Ambedkar into the frame.

I'm thinking about maybe the way that perhaps the reason why it was so easy for Hindutva supremacists to, you know, to make this argument that they are doing something decolonial is maybe also to do with the paucity of conversation or the kind of underdeveloped way that we talk about empires in a kind of

overly simplified comparative sense because one of the things that's interesting about, you know, the sort of work that we do with a project like Reorient is that, you know, it's often around questions of Muslimness and decoloniality and one of the poorly thought through critiques that you often receive when you go and talk about this work is, well, you know, the Ottomans were colonizers too, the Arab empires were colonizers too. Yeah.

I'm thinking about the way that we haven't really developed historians to be able to talk about racial colonialism as something different to empire. We have this tendency to talk as if

the Roman Empire, you know, and the Ottomans and the British Empire and, you know, contemporary American imperialism and the so-called state of Israel, you know, are all doing the same, this same racial colonial logic. And of course, you know, that's often not the case. Empires are not always, you know, designed as racial enterprises. And I'm thinking about that in connection with, you know,

special issue of new formations. I'm sorry to kind of bring this one out of the back catalogue, but a special issue of new formations that you co-edited, I think, in 2006 that was called After Iraq, that was about, you know, I think the first words of the introduction make reference exactly to this idea that something is different in our understanding of post-colonialism after the invasion of Iraq.

And I'm thinking about the way that what's interesting to me about that special issue, I meet that special issue in my students' work when they often cite it as kind of the moment when Zionism becomes understood as colonialism. And of course, it's not the case that that's the initial moment where that happens.

But it's an interesting, what's interesting about that special issue is that it uses, you know, ideas of the colonial, the post-colonial to think about American imperialism, ongoing American imperialism, contemporary American imperialism, alongside, you know, Israel's illegal occupation of Palestine. But it also brings in, in doing that, the idea of the Muslim imperialism

as a sort of decolonial figure and a resistant figure to the project of colonization in a way that in a sense has been sort of difficult for other framings of decoloniality that for the reasons I you know I began with have sort of struggled with you know this figure of the Muslim understanding this figure of the Muslim decolonially so I guess um I've used the I've become aware of how often I've used the adjective decolonial now that you've told me you don't like it but um

Yeah, I just wondered whether you could speak a little bit about the role of the Muslim and coloniality, anti-coloniality in your work. Oh, gosh, yeah. I'm not sure I've written about the Muslim per se or the figure of the Muslim per se, I think.

you know, there is in my early work, the fact that I was looking at writers who were Muslim, but who were also, it has to be said, who saw themselves as dissidents within their communities as well. And so they were Muslim writers, but they were also writers who had, you know, critiques of

things happening in their own communities, their own kind of Muslim, North Indian background. And I'm not sure that I engaged with the figure of the Muslim per se in that text. And I certainly, in the second book, I look at

literature written by minorities, including Muslims and Parsis in India and the ways in which they saw themselves in relation to the project of the nation. In "Circumstant Empire," of course, I looked at the figure of Wilfred Blunt, who is, I think, the figure in British history, who's one of the figures in British history who's most

influenced by Islam. He thought of converting. He was very, very plugged into the scene at the Azhar in Cairo. I think, and for him, in that point,

He's somebody who is interested in Islam, who's interested in the figure of the Muslim, but also very much seeing himself as an Egyptian nationalist in that context. And that's about nationalism rather than Islam in the wider sense, in the sense in which you, Salman, are talking about.

You know, I've written about it when you've written about the caliphate. And so I think some of that comes up in Blunt's discourse and the discourse of Afghani's discourse that Blunt is engaging with. I'd forgotten about the special issue on Iraq. Again,

Again, I think that was thinking in terms of kind of Western discourses on Islam, you know, the West versus Islam, the whole kind of clash of civilizations model that we get from Samuel Huntington. I wrote another piece around that time on,

on liberal imperialism in Britain and the USA and the ways in which the figure of the Muslim was, of course, post 9/11, there's a resurgent, not a resurgent conservatism, but a resurgent liberalism, which is kind of obsessed with the figure of the Muslim. And that's very much situated in post 9/11.

So I suppose I have dealt with the figure of the Muslim. I'm not sure I have dealt with the figure of the Muslim as a decolonial figure so much as the target of colonial and

you know, a war on terror discourse and the discourse of the clash of civilizations that we get with the invasion of Iraq and so on. I think now, with the last year of the unfolding genocide, I think we have to

you know, yet deepen our understanding of how the figure of the Muslim has, you know, kind of taken on more vulnerable, disposable, and kind of exceptional forms in that context. But I will say one thing, I think I would not normally talk about a figure

as decolonial in and of itself. I think this is where I would go back to the first half of your question and where you're talking about

very, very rightly about the ways in which very different kinds of empires are conflated. One thing I do do in the first chapter of the book on decolonization is precisely lay out the differences between the post-1492 project as I see it,

and other empires. And I make the point there that, of course, we want to be looking at the Ottoman, the Roman, the Mughal, the Mongol, whatever empires, but the word empire is misleading there because what we are talking about is colonialism. And we are really talking about a specific form of colonialism that emerges from the 15th century onwards as Europe heads into the world on a project of conquest.

And that is, as you suggested, Chela, it is racialized, but it is also capitalism. And you cannot actually separate racial capitalism from the project of colonialism, of the kinds of colonialism that we're talking about in relation to Iraq, to Palestine, and so on. And I think that once you start getting into the specificities of how you're talking about colonialism, then I think...

you know, you become more specific about the kinds of figures that you're talking about as the targets of that colonialism. And it is, and I think in as much as we identify the figure of the Muslim as part of the, and very much and very clearly a target of the post-1492 dispensation, the project of American empire. Again, you're talking about a

particular kind of Muslim and you're not talking about the Muslim elites and the wealthy and the petro-billionaires who are actually very much in hock to the project of 1492 and for whom Islam is a kind of a shield and a kind of a subterfuge. So I think we have to be kind of, we have to

perhaps carefully historicize this figure that we're calling the decolonial Muslim because it's also shaped, and I know I don't need to tell you both that, by class and location and relationship to racial capitalism.

I think one of the key things really is that we need to be able to recognize that the British Empire, the Dutch Empire, the French Empire were racial states and the project of colonialism and racism was the same thing. So, I mean, often we need that hyphen between the colonial and the racial because often people think of the colonial and they don't think that has anything to do with the racial. And of course,

The emergence of the category of racism itself is really, as César and others pointed out, what is really shocking about National Socialism is the fact that it brings the logic of the empire, which was supposed to be abroad, into the heart of Europe in a way. And that's where the horror really locates itself. So I think what you said is really, really interesting because one of the things that we have, if you start thinking about the racial state,

as being part of these imperial formations, these imperial formations being the racial state, then I think this continuity between these various states

configurations becomes more realizable. Because one thing you could argue is that currently, for conjunctural reasons rather than anything else, there is probably a global Islamophobia that allows people like, for example, Netanyahu, Modi, Trump, and even Xi to be combined. They may have many, many differences, but on these sorts of things, they can be very, very similar.

And I think that's quite interesting in itself, that how that acts as a way of stitching together what are supposed to be really nationalist projects, but actually in many ways have a certain kind of valency. And I think perhaps one gets too locked up into the idea of the Muslim rather than a Muslimness. As we know, the first victim of the violence after 9-11 was a Sikh, Balboa

Singh Sodhi, for example, who was shot because he was thought to be a Muslim because he had a beard and a turban. So in a sense, this category of Muslimness, I think, does a lot more work in terms of allowing us to think how the colonial racial order and how the ethnocentrism within that

perpetuates itself in a way. I don't think that was a question, unfortunately, but anyway. No, no, that's a very good and very welcome point, I think. Yeah, I think we have to be kind of clearer about what it is that we're talking about, the formation that we're talking about. Mm-hmm.

I'm wondering whether that might be the place we have to stop. I don't really want to say that because I think there are lots more interesting things that we could discuss and lots more threads that we could pull on. But I wonder whether that might be the place for us to finish. So let me say, Priya, thank you so much for such an interesting conversation and for giving us your time. And thank you also to all of our listeners for listening.

We hope, inshallah, that we will see you again on another episode of Radio Reorient. Thank you. Thank you. So one of the things I really loved about that conversation is that it really made obvious something that is really, for me, what is the most interesting thing about the Reorient project. And that's the relationship between

that the Reorient project has with an idea of history. And I remember reading in the editorial when the Reorient Literary Journal, when the Reorient Journal, sorry, was launched. I remember reading in that editorial in the first issue, this idea that Reorient is really about writing a new history of the world because of the fact that Muslimness has been, you

you know, for such a long time considered to be kind of outside of history. You know, Muslims are people who are seen as not having an antiquity. In fact, I think antiquity itself is often defined as the pre-Islamic. So there's that separation there between antiquity and the Muslim. That means that how we understand history is this kind of fundamentally Islamophobic grand narrative of history that has just seeped into normative ways of telling the history of the world. And

what's amazing about Priya's work is that it's really

gone into that question about how we do history, you know, even though her work is kind of based in English studies and literary studies, her work has really gone into that question of how do we tell the story of history, not just in terms of representation, whose voices are we hearing and whose are we not hearing, although I do think that's important in her work, but also in terms of these grand narratives, how is the story told, who is empowered and disempowered by different ways of telling that story?

I think what was really interesting about this interview or about her work more broadly, certainly from a UK context and I'm sure many others,

is the kind of sort of narratives that we're experiencing on a near daily basis in the UK at the minute around identity, immigration, citizenship, in relation to a number of different topics. This idea of the so-called Muslim takeover, the narratives around grooming gangs, and the ways that this is discussed among...

the establishment, among politicians, among the media, is of UK history as something exclusively white. So that these notions of Britishness versus Muslimness are entirely incompatible, mutually exclusive, that sort of thing, to a point that you have to wonder if Muslims in

European contexts or Western contexts can ever attain that kind of equal standing um or if we're sort of condemned to them being perpetually outsiders never part of that nation's history so I kind of want to pick up on a couple of things both what Chella and Claudia said and I want to start by uh bringing in the work um of Professor Tate obviously the editorial board um

was mentioned of the journal Reorient. And I want to bring in the idea of the Plato to NATO history, the idea of Westernies starting from Plato and coming all the way up to NATO and this being a grand narrative of history, which not only

feeds itself into certain empires being preponderant or being focused upon, but also one could argue is a history of whiteness, is a history of the construction of whiteness. And I would want to think about the figure of the Muslim and Islam, again, bringing in Professor Said's work, as a sort of a scandal against this, and maybe this is what

can help disrupt the Plato-Teneto history is the figure of Muslim, Muslimness and the Islamic. I think that we have to be a bit cautionary about looking at this as being a history of whiteness because one of the things that Gopal's book does so deftly is it actually cuts the trifle at a different angle. And what she shows through these various case studies in the book of resistance

is that you actually have sympathy from some of that very whiteness in the metropole, in a place like the UK, for some of these resistance movements in the colonies. For example, she mentions the Chartists and how in the middle of the 19th century they had tremendous sympathy for those who were rising up as part of the Sepoy mutiny in 1857.

Similarly, we see this later on in the independence movement in India when it came to textile factory workers who showed sympathy for Gandhi and the Quit India movement despite it being against their own economic interests.

She goes on similarly to talk about, for example, the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya, talking about the West Indies and West Africa. And it shows them this wonderful pastiche that perhaps when we're looking at this binary between empire and the colonies, perhaps we also need to see the tensions, as she shows us, between the state and its citizens and subjects.

and how therefore there's actually a resistance within that she very effectively then illustrates. I think there's a number of really interesting themes there that in a way kind of

make the case that the conversation we had with Professor Gopal has kind of set up this whole season where we're going to be interested in the project of reorienting history. But across what we've just talked about, you know, in the last 10 minutes, we've talked about how those histories relate to contemporary productions of whiteness, of Europeanness,

of Britishness, of Muslimness. Also, we've talked about that relationship between the Muslim and the decolonial. We've talked about grand narratives, Plato to NATO. We've talked about finding ways out, using Muslimness epistemologically as a way of speaking back against that history or rejecting those grand narratives of history. And all of those, I think, inshallah, are going to be conversations that we continue to have across

this season. So perhaps that's a place then for us to draw this conversation to a close, to say how grateful we are to Professor Gopal for her time, and also how grateful we are to you listeners for listening. We hope to see you again, inshallah, for another episode of Radio Reorient.