Son[i]a #206
Fatima El-Tayeb
Fatima El-Tayeb is associate professor in the departments of literature and ethnic studies, and Director of the Critical Gender Studies programme at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of “European Others. Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe”, published by the University of Minnesota Press, and many other essays and papers.
In her work, Fatima speaks out against racial amnesia in Europe, in the sense of the active suppression of the European origins of the concept of “race” and of the importance of race in the construction of Europe as we know it. In this framework, it appears that the concept of race and its effects are brought in from outside the continent by the racialised subjects themselves: migrant workers, Muslims, and non-white people in general.
According to this narrative that Stuart Hall describes as “internalist”, Europe is a self-sufficient, originating source that sees itself as spearheading a progressive timeline; while anything outside of the continent remains seemingly anchored in an earlier time. In this Europe that ignores its internal processes of racialisation, the European of color is an impossibility, permanently attached to another place and another time.
SON[I]A talks to Fatima El-Tayeb about the need to reassess Europe’s internalist narrative and the discourse of integration. She evaluates the role of race in the construction of this account and argues for the creation and recovery of archives as a strategy for developing other types of narratives.
Ramón Grosfoguel
In this podcast, Puerto Rican sociologist and activist Ramón Grosfoguel guides us through centuries of obscurantism in Europe: from Christopher Columbus’s meeting with Queen Isabella in Granada on 11 January 1492 to the debate between Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepulveda that laid the groundwork for the biological and culturalist racism that persists to this day. In doing so, he dismantles the Doctrine of Discovery and the universalist and ahistorical assumptions of Eurocentrism and modernity that still abound in academia.
Françoise Vergès
In this podcast, Françoise Vergès unpacks the social and environmental politics of cleaning and waste, charting and questioning temporal and spatial interactions that create a neutral site of deprivation, exhaustion and exploitation. She sheds light on the economy and politics of exhaustion, pointing out the role of racial capitalism in the climate crisis. Vergès suggests a political re-reading and understanding of vital needs and natural elements through notions of cleaning, hygiene and medicine, and raises revolutionary questions about the prefabricated assumptions of justice and social transformation through re-thinking the museum.
Hamja Ahsan
Hamja Ahsan is a British artist, writer, curator and fanzine enthusiast. He is known for his raw critique of dominant culture and power structures, particularly in the context of cultural representation and identity. In this podcast, we talk Hamja Ahsan about the language of Shy Radicals, about neurodiversity and Islamophobia, and about the fictional utopian shy people’s Republic of Aspergistan. But also about fried chicken. Yes, mostly about fried chicken, really.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Fatima El-Tayeb that we were unable to include the first time around.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Clémentine Deliss that we were unable to include the first time around.
Anti-racism and anti-colonial resistance from the perspective of people of African descent
We talk with Lucía Piedra Galarraga, Diego Falconí Travez and Karo Moret from the Study Group on Afro/Black Ideas, Practices, and Activisms about altars, ekekos, nefandos, Saint Barbara, and Valdivia's Siamese twins. They turn their attention to the politics of hair, talk about sugar as the star product plying the Caribbean routes, and acknowledge the usefulness of ashes in proving the extermination of the ancient Andean sodomite communities.
Marina Gržinić
Marina Gržinić talks about amnesia, aphasia, and seizure, about biopower and necropolitics, about borders and volumes, corpus and corpses, about deathscapes, intestines, and holograms, and about the disturbing miniaturisation of affect and empathy, as a process that runs parallel to technological acceleration.
Rasha Salti
Rasha Salti talks about the methodology of unearthing images that she uses in her research, and about some of its repercussions. Her postcolonial analysis of artistic production in modernism favours new narratives about the former East and West.
Clémentine Deliss
Clémentine Deliss, director of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, talks about about the possibility of a post-ethnographic and post-colonial museum, and about the strategies that she has tested in recent years to counteract the ideology of conservation. These include the “remediation” of objects in the collection, fieldwork in the museum, and opening up spaces for work, production and research that go beyond storage and exhibition.
Sigalit Landau
Sigalit Landau talks about her work and about the methodology she uses to develop her personal vision of the world. She also discusses the inherent contradictions and connections between biography, territory and politics in her work, and analyses the role of art as the language that can account for this convergence.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Rasha Salti that we were unable to include the first time around.