Recent commentary on the Eurozone crisis has started to pick up the grammar of colonial rule. The centre for Research on Finance and Money at SOAS, for example, has published an influential report wherein northern Europe (Germany especially) is framed as the core and southern Europe (especially Greece) as the periphery. Meanwhile, Ulrich Beck, European cosmopolitan par excellence, wonders whether the European Union will become “a European Empire with a German stamp”. Beck notes that Merkel’s sense of power “conforms to the imperial difference between lender and borrower countries.” At stake, agree many prominent European intellectuals in the pages of The Guardian, Eurozine and Der Spiegel, is no less than the promise of freedom and democracy immanent to the European project itself. All variously agree that, against the imperial sclerosis spread by capitalist and bureaucratic functionaries at the highest levels of governance, what is needed is a rejuvenation of meaningful democracy at a grass-roots level.

Faced with a dismantling of democracy Jürgen Habermas mounts a plea to save the old “biotope of Europe”. The constitutive components of this threatened ecosystem are freedom and democratisation, and its genesis lies in the Second World War and the fight against fascism and “internal” barbarism. The president of the European Central Bank has himself proclaimed that Europe now faces its “most difficult situation since the Second World War”. Alternatively, for many social democratic and leftist commentators, the danger of the situation lies in the loss of the “internal” struggle of labour and capital that defined the Cold War landscape. In the new context of EU institutional “empire” and its neoliberal tentacles, the defeat of labour quickens the erosion of social democracy, thus deciding the fate of the European project.

Europe, then, is perceived to be “colonizing” itself and in the process destroying freedoms and democratic structures that had been hard fought for by the general populace against political oppression and economic exploitation. But this angst-ridden imaginary of European crisis has very little to say about the substantive historical and global dimensions of European colonialism. Does cosmopolitan and social democratic angst cover these legacies and contemporary effects? In fact, in most recent treatises on the crisis the struggle for decolonization is given no integral status, even though these particular struggles were inseparable to and spanned the formative time period of the European project – the Second World War (and the Cold War). Some do mention current issues of migration and xenophobia. Nevertheless the implication, in general, is that colonial legacies are derivative of, or additional to, the core struggle for democracy and freedom in Europe. Fascism, Cold War, class struggle: yes; colonization, imperialism, decolonization and liberation struggle: not really.

Not all intellectuals suffer from this colonial amnesia. A number of scholars including Robert Young, Pal Ahluwalia, Paige Arthur and Alina Sajed have argued that in some key strands of post-War French thought, the issue of colonialism and decolonization was integral to discussions of European re-democratization and humanist concerns. This engagement reached a peak in the Algerian war of independence in the late 50s before falling into abeyance. And this was precisely the same time, we should note, as the Treaty of Rome, which bound European countries together in a tighter economic union simultaneoulsy sought to re-bind (post-)colonial African polities, peoples and resources into this union.

More generally, there has accumulated a significant amount of scholarship that reveals the colonial influences that shaped and were woven into quintessentially “European” intellectual/political movements such as Enlightenment and modernity. These influences continued to have a generative effect in the interwar period and during World War Two and afterwards. In a soon to be published paper, for example, Sabine Broeck shows how Adorno and Horkheimer’s famous critique of fascism rests upon a refusal to concretise the “auto-aggression” of the modern subject within the history of Atlantic enslavement even though this is briefly gestured to in their text. Instead, the substantive inter-weaving of three continents through slavery is deferred for a mythical Greek heuristic so that the European subject does violence only unto itself. Moreover, a similar deferral occurs in the historiographies of fascism, where the 1904-1907 genocides of Herero and Nama in German South West Africa, bureaucratically planned from Berlin, are removed from narratives of the Shoah and contemporaneous European holocausts.

However, when it comes to the works of “native intellectuals”, the weaving together of anti-fascism and anti-colonialism is even stronger and more intimate. For example, Siba Grovogui has examined the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA), a diverse collection of intellectuals and politicians from the French African colonies who contested elections for various bodies of the French Union. One of their members, Gabriel D’Arboussier, the son of a white French colonial administrator and Malian woman, proposed a democratisation générale of the Union in the aftermath of the War, wherein the republican ideal would be shifted to embody principles of sovereign reciprocity, equal competency and non-exclusionary political identity across the various governing entities. D’Arboussier’s post-national republic was buried under de Gaulle’s determination to resurrect the old imperial hierarchy. Habermas supposes that if Merkel has her way, the European project will be transformed into its “opposite” and “[t]he first transnational democracy would become an especially effective, because disguised, arrangement for exercising a kind of post-democratic rule.” Situated alongside the remembrance of D’Arboussier’s project, Habermas’s current speculations concerning European democracy seem naïve and even bigoted.

We must also remember the Senegalese writer Alioune Diop and his Paris based journal, Présence Africaine. Its pages were open to all who might help “to define African originality and to hasten its introduction into the modern world.” The intellectuals and artists involved in the journal is characteristic of its “catholic” orientation, including prominent white French scholars such as Sartre, Camus, Emmanuel Mounier, and Andre Gide, as well as those of African heritage including, of course, Richard Wright, Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire. Sartre’s proclaimed desire for Présence Africaine was neither melancholy nor paternalistic. He hoped that it “would be among us, not like that of a child in the family circle, but like the presence of a remorse and a hope”.

Alioune Diop also planned for a Black Writers and Artists Congress, to be convened in 1956 in the heart of the intellectual colonial-metropole, the Sorbonne’s Descartes Ampitheatre. The president of the conference, “elder” Haitian writer Jean Price-Mars, alongside a front table of Wright, Diop, Senghor, Césaire, and Haitian novelist Jacques-Stephen Alexis, began proceedings in a packed room decorated with portraits of Descartes, Pascal and other enlightenment figures that now had to share their wall with Picasso’s stylistic “negro” head that he had drawn for the Congress poster. However, the presence and voices of women were almost entirely missing, save for a supportive yet cryptic letter from an undefined group that read: “according to a tenacious legend, the black woman is just a slave of her husband and her children. But black women exercise moral leadership within families”. It should be noted that, although not present on the front bench, Alioune Diop’s wife Christiane had undertaken crucial work, behind the scenes, for the successful publication of her husband’s journal and the organization of the congress.

Brimming, then, with the stuff of politics – discord, solidarity, difference, absence, presence, testimony, anger, hurt, pride and ethics – (mostly) men of various African heritage were discussing with themselves – and to/with others – their cultural contributions to reclaiming humanity from within one of the metropolitan centres of knowledge production.

The participants did so, moreover, in a decolonial political and philosophical register, rather than through colonial ethnographic and comparative frameworks, and with an intention to self-determine despite the geo-politically mediated Cold War economy of knowledge production. James Baldwin’s report of the congress noted that “hanging in the air” were the spectres of America and Russia, especially when W.E.B. Dubois’ message, read out at the beginning, contained an apology for his absence due to his being unable to get a passport (on account of his recent Communist Party membership). Nevertheless, Alioune Diop proudly proclaimed that while “it can be said that the Bandung Conference was the most important event … since the end of the war, I believe that this first world congress for men of black culture will be the second major event of this decade”. Both Alioune Diop and Senghor baptized the event as the “cultural Bandung”.

Moreover, although focused on black and African culture and arts, the congress was framed as a contribution to the general post-war intellectual project of retrieving humanism from the fascist barbarism of the war. Alioune Diop, for example, exhorted the congregation to remember that they were not the only victims of racism, and that tribute had to be paid to “Hitlers victims”. Levi-Strauss, who, like Andre Breton, had touched down in Césaire and Fanon’s Martinique during the War en route from fascist Europe to the United States, sent a letter addressed to the congress that “there can be no true humanism if it excludes any part of humanity” and that therefore “your humanism is democratic, not only in purpose, but also in its method”.

Baldwin noted that the participants finally emptied out onto the streets wherein the general population of Paris were focused on finding bread. And this raises the question of how we remember the year, 1956. The bread shortage was caused in large part by escalating financial costs of fighting the Algerian war of independence. Amongst political circles at this point in time there was fear that Nasser’s recent nationalization of the Suez Canal would inflame further anti-colonial sentiments in the Maghreb. Meanwhile the French Communist Party was struggling to suppress Kruschev’s “secret speech”. Soon after the Congress, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in part causing Aimé Césaire to resign from the Party, citing its stubborn resistance to attribute specific forms of oppression beyond class exploitation to the colonial condition. One year later, in 1957, the Treaty of Rome was signed; and the same city hosted the Second Congress of Negro Writers and Artists two years after that. Remembering the 1956 Congress provides access to a radically different biotope to the one bleached by Habermas’s (and others’) colonial amnesia. However, the French press chose the bread shortage as front page news, while the Congress was marginalized to a few lines. Shall we remember the bread alone?

No. We must expose and resist the colonial amnesia that so regularly and instinctively accompanies angst over the direction and fate of the European project. We must retrieve another past of intellectual work and debate on freedom and democracy that understood the European metropoles and colonies to be tied together in a community of fate. We must subvert the understanding of old Europe’s “biotope” as consisting of enclosed, emergent democratic matter bleached of colonial power and peoples. We must challenge cosmopolitanists, social democrats and critical thinkers to narrate the current crisis in a way that treats the colonial dimension as formative, present, integral and persistent. Deconstruction of discourse is not enough. Neither is melancholic allusions to absence or lack. We must positively retrieve the memories, peoples, relations, ideas and effects of a colonially mediated discussion on European democracy and freedom. This positivity can be a great pedagogical aid to sense out a more adequate politics of resistance to the fascism – molar and molecular – quickened by current austerity policies.

A little background info and some thoughts on the student crisis in Quebec, which has been going on for 101 days now and shows no signs of waning in the face of the government’s disturbing intransigence. The recent adoption of Bill 78, which circumvents the right to protest without prior notice and gives the police the right to change a demonstration’s itinerary, among other things, has shocked and angered many Quebecers and made the news worldwide. On Tuesday May 22, over 250 000 people expressed their discontent with the current government and it was quite a sight.

Ever since the ‘quiet revolution’ in the early 1960s, which saw the institution of important social provisions and the attribution of several socio-economic entitlements to the francophone majority, Quebec has been holding fast to its social-democratic heritage. Jean Charest’s liberal party, in power since 2003, is determined to fight off the modern-day antichrist of debt and rationalise state activity. The Charest government’s attack on hard fought social entitlements, including accessible post-secondary education (Quebec has the lowest tuition fees in Canada), has been going steady since 2003 but has intensified since 2008. Quebecers were told that it was no longer reasonable to expect affordable public services and that it was high time that we join the pay as you go party.

What is at play in this conflict is no less than the fate of social-democratic expectations in Quebec. These expectations are actively discouraged and discredited by the current political elite. The demands for a tuition freeze by sizeable portions of Quebec’s students are considered unreasonable in many quarters, and seen as a plane expression of bad faith and overindulgence by a majority of Canadians, seemingly stuck in a Stephen Harper induced stupor. The words ‘pragmatic’, ‘realistic’ and ‘rational’ have been duly appropriated by the partisans of deregulation, free-enterprise and individual responsibility. Any suggestions that the latter orientations are based on an ideological choice are ridiculed; they simply express a sounder and more logical way to manage society.

Up to now, there seemed to be a dour resignation to the decimation of our social programs. This young generation of Quebecers, which many had touted as completely apathetic and apolitical, has taken a resolute stand against restricting access to a public good, against the further commodification of knowledge and against the uncompromising law and order approach of an arrogant and irresponsible government. Those that have taken to the streets day after day and sacrificed their terms and put their professional lives on hold for the students that will come after them, have shown extraordinary resilience and bravery. It came as a surprise to many, because they did it on their own, with little or no help from their political science professors, who have long abandoned critical thinking for functionalist replications of reality sanctioned by government money.

Here is the latest cover photo for Maclean’s magazine, showing continuing love for Quebec and its people.

Having said that, it would appear that a majority of Quebecers are in favour of the hike, if you believe what you read in the papers and in the various public tribunes. However, most people disapprove of the government’s handling of the crisis and believe that negotiations are the only way out of the crisis. What is most striking for a famously indecisive people with a dislike for confrontation is the fierce passion exhibited on both sides of the argument. Apart from independence, I cannot think of a more divisive issue in the history of our province. Myriads of commentators, journalists, politicians, professors and ordinary citizens have been having it out, sometimes quite virulently, in countless blogs, tweets, syndicated columns and tv programs for over 17 weeks. Sifting through it all can be overwhelming, tiring and in some many cases deeply depressing but most of us will have repeated peaks at the news in the course of a day, worried that we might miss a game-changing twist.

The strike has also sparked a wave of left romanticism, which, for someone steeped in the tradition of radical doubt, sits somewhere in between the comical and the genuinely inspirational. I admit I’ve been forced to reconsider the power of an ironic moustache versus good old street protest. I think that the current generation of students, equipped as it is with a more sophisticated understanding of power, will nonetheless try and reclaim the terms of political discourse instead of spending its time deconstructing them. Words like democracy, equality, rights and freedom seem to have a less hollow ring than before in various parts of the world. Amongst the Quebecois urban youth, there is a genuine sense that signifiers like “democracy” and “fairness” have been totality baffled by the current elite and by several decades of persistent neoliberal admonishing. Since it is already faced with high unemployment and pretty grim prospects, the youth of today might also just decide that to be led to destitution by an uncontrollable machine that requires more and more sacrifices to potentially return to its ineffective best is no longer an option. Young people might just reclaim the terms of political discourse with less cynicism than slightly older folk but also the resources they need to flourish. They might just shake us out of our irony-draped slumber and fashionably noir pessimism.

Beyond flights of fancy and dubious parallels like the “printemps érable” (a nod to the Printemps Arabe = Arab spring), what is happening in Quebec and more particularly in Montreal has a very precise context, even if some parallels can be drawn with what is happening elsewhere. The cartography of protest is often complex, and this one is no exception.

There are four large universities in Montreal, two English language ones (Mcgill, Concordia) and two french ones (UQAM and Université de Montréal), each steeped in their own institutional cultures, with their own social, economic and linguistic demographics, with varying propensities to protest, Mcgill being the least militant, l’UQAM the most. There are also many CEGEPs, French-Canada’s very own institutional pit stop in between high school and University, on strike. As it stands, roughly a third of all post-secondary students (154,855) are on strike. Many CEGEPs and Universities (and specific departments within the latter) have voted against such a course of action but have expressed a degree of sympathy for their colleagues. Amongst the key players in the conflict are the three main student associations, the more conservative and conciliatory Fédération Étudiante Collégiale du Québec (FECQ), the moderate Fédération Étudiantes Universitaire du Québec (FEUQ), and the more firebrand Coalition Large de l’Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante (CLASSE).

Whilst they do not see eye to eye on the means of protest or the ideal ends, they have kept a relatively united front on the core issues and have all unreservedly condemned the government’s handling of the crisis. We have certainly seen and heard a lot of each of the organisations’ representatives over the last 102 days. One of the CLASSE’s spokespersons, Gabriel Nadeau Dubois, has emerged as a crowd favourite with his special brand of eloquence and poise, which has attracted the praise of poets, university professors and hordes of screaming fans. Well, those who oppose the student movement hate him with a burning passion. It is ironic that the CLASSE, with its complex horizontal structure, has the more inspirational ‘leader’ of the lot (no offense to the other ones). Perhaps Žižek’s assertion that no self-declared horizontal protest movement can completely do without the considerable elocutionary and organisational force that some individuals represent is right.

Now for some hard facts and a timeline. Tuition fees in Quebec currently stand at $2,168. Jean Charest’s liberal party is firmly intent on an 82% increase over the next seven years (these figures are part of the government’s latest ‘improved’ proposal), which would take the fees to nearly $4,000. This rather sharp increase is the reason why over a third of all post-secondary students went on strike in the first place. Over the last three months and a bit, the government has been extremely reluctant to engage in whatever dialogue with the representatives of the major student coalitions and has deliberately avoided the issue of tuition fee hikes. Shockingly, the PM himself has yet to sit down with the students.

Bowing to public pressure and repeated calls from the opposition, Line Beauchamp, the province’s education minister who has since resigned, invited student representatives, union leaders and university rectors to negotiate a settlement. After gruelling overnight negotiations, which involved the tried and tested wily tactics of sleep deprivation and shift negotiation, the government announced that a deal had been struck. The result was a highly convoluted, technocratic and most importantly conditional agreement over the notion that some money “could” be saved from a more efficient management of University budgets and that these savings could be used to reduce the ever-increasing administrative (not tuition) fees. In what some heralded as substantial gains for the students, the government also proposed improvements to loans and bursaries.

The next day, Prime Minister Jean Charest, the object of passionate dislike by important sections of Quebec’s population, made yet another faux pas by displaying more than a hint of triumphalism in front of the TV cameras. Worse, state officials and rectors publicly expressed their doubts about the already severely underfunded Universities’ ability to find extra money. As the agreement was diffused in the media and studied a little more closely, muted enthusiasm was replaced by incomprehension and disappointment verging on anger. The student representatives took the proposal back to their respective assemblies and the answer was a resounding NO.

As a result of the government’s obstinate refusal to go back to the negotiation table, students initiated a series of night protests in Montreal’s downtown core. The government’s response to the student’s determination was to pass Bill 78, a blatantly anti-democratic measure that flies in the face of our fundamental right to associate and demonstrate and of our socio-political culture. Under this new legislation, demonstrations are restricted to 50 (10 in the original proposal) people and an itinerary must be provided to the police eight hours in advance. Draconian fines are to be imposed for students and organizations that violate provisions of the law. An individual blocking access to a CEGEP or university could face a fine anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000. Student leaders could be charged up to $35,000, while student associations and federations could face a penalty of up to $125,000.

The avowed intention behind these measures is to break traditionally strong and organised student unions. The bill was passed on Friday 18 and has since done everything but endear public opinion and restore calm. As soon as the news broke out, thousands of people took to the streets, and the tone was notably angrier. Up to 300 arrests were made on Saturday night. Last night alone, there were 700 arrests between Montreal and Quebec City. Still the protesters keep coming, and many fear that a tragedy is imminent. Bill 78 is an ultimate showing of irresponsibility; the state has effectively delegated the responsibly for social order and cohesion to the police, and calls on it to apply and enforce the law with discernment. Needless to say, cops are ill equipped for these pursuits to begin with and are getting less and less discerning with their truncheons, pepper-spray, tear gas bombs and rubber bullets, as the 31 nights of overtime and little sleep take their toll.

The protests themselves have been largely festive, creative and peaceful. They are usually made up of a majority of students, the inevitable Black Block contingent, a few disenfranchised youths from impoverished suburbs (although not as many as in England as the class structure is different), the odd weekend reveller and an increasing number of ordinary citizens. Demonstrations have been declared illegal at the slightest hint of disturbance, particularly in the last few days. The vast majority of clashes have taken place after the demonstrations were declared illegal, when police tactics veer from relative passivity to an aggressive and indiscriminate rounding-up of whoever’s in the way. After a three and a half-month long strike, close to 2,500 arrests, dozens of injured police officers and demonstrators (two of whom have lost an eye to heavy-handed police tactics), everyone is starting to feel a little cranky and tired.

In the last week, downtown Montreal has been plunged into an actual state of exception, warranting the full force of the law (send the tape to Agamben). Very worryingly, the authorities had recourse to anti-terror legislation to prosecute four students who detonated smoke bombs in the Montreal Subway a few weeks ago and the police used their newly-found discretionary power in the application of an ancient municipal rule last night, which resulted in the arrest of over 500 people, who were fined 600 bucks each (somebody’s got to pay for all that overtime). With the government discharging itself from the responsibility to govern and treating what is initially a political and social problem into a juridical/public order one, one wonders how a deep and lasting social fracture can be avoided. Within its new purview of responsibility, the police can now choose from an extensive menu of legislation to force protesters into submission.

The language used by government officials to describe the principled stance of some sections of the Student movement is equally troubling. Quebec’s minister of Public security minister, Robert Dutil, claimed that civil disobedience was just a pretty word for vandalism. Raymond Bachand, Finance minister of finance, came out saying that the student movement was led by a handful of radical Marxists. Most of the big corporate-owned media outlets (Journal de Montreal (the equivalent of The Sun in the UK), La Presse, etc.) have been pumping out disinformation, twisting statistics and putting out inflammatory editorials. It would appear that Quebec’s establishment dramatically underestimated the resolve and conviction of the youth. The current generation’s sensitivity to diffused power and to surreptitious prejudice turns into an appreciation of the full force of the state apparatus. Many young Quebecers now know what the state does when it is shaken to its core. In a desperate attempt to preserve its own biological existence against adverse life forms, it convulses and lashes out. One thing is certain, there nothing like police brutality to politicise and radicalise a whole generation.

It is difficult to see what the future holds. The government is now showing signs of faltering as a majority of Quebecers expresses its indignation with Bill 78 and mass arrests in the Province’s main cities. Quebec’s reviled minister of Education, Michelle Courchesne, has confirmed that talks would re-open with Student Associations in the next few days.

In spite of Wednesday’s mass arrests, people have come out in force again tonight in a massive show of civil disobedience. In clear defiance of Bill 78, no itinerary was given to the police. Thursday’s demonstration was the biggest and most diverse yet; we seem to have reached an apogee of enthusiasm and popular support for the students. If Bill 78’s purpose was to silence protest, it has failed miserably. Since the weekend, Quebecers from various corners of the province and various parts of Montreal have also embraced an old Chilean protest method against Pinochet’s dictatorship, by banging on pots and pants from 8pm to then swell the ranks of on-going or impromptu noisy processions.

There is a certainly a risk that a negotiated settlement will, apart from leaving some of the protagonists frustrated, dampen the collective impulse expressed in the last three months. But over the course of the last three months, which has seen the biggest mobilisation in Quebec’s (and probably Canada’s) history, hundreds of thousands of people including trade unions, community groups, environmental groups and women’s groups have all said no to corruption (of which the Charest government is widely accused), the unrestricted exploitation of Quebec’s northern territory, cosying up to corporate interest, clientelism, business models for higher education, repression over negotiation and all around irresponsibility. In what many have heralded as a new dawn or as the left’s long-awaited awakening in Quebec, it is my sincere hope that we will continue to march until our institutions start to reflect these principles and convictions. We may have to buy some good solid boots for that.

Now, Quebec is not the only place where it’s kicked off. Whilst the economic situation here is certainly not as bad as in many European countries, what is happening in Quebec can be seen as one more struggle in the global fight against austerity and against the obstinate and highly damaging reliance on finance capitalism as a model of socio-economic development. Ultimately, any significant transformation of the current model requires that it be a global initiative. As of now, and even if solidarity travels more easily than ever before, the people of Egypt, Syria, Greece, Spain and a whole host of countries about to or that should join in, are still directing their anger at their own heads of states. Perhaps the first steps in this struggle are going to have a primarily local and national character, even as we need to keep the Occupy Movement alive.

Finally, I am proud of my students and of all the others, I thank them for giving me a little tiny bit of hope and I ask them to keep demanding the impossible. And if you want to show solidarity with your comrades in Quebec, wear the little square-shaped piece of red cloth. We’ll need it for at least a few more days.

Do elite institutions teach the global politics of gender and sexuality on any scale or in any depth? Emma Foster, Peter Kerr, Anthony Hopkins, Christopher Byrne and Linda Åhäll (all of Birmingham, at least when they did the research) have an Early View piece up at The British Journal of Politics and International Relations addressing just this question. Surveying the course content of the 16 top Politics and IR Departments in the UK (‘top’ meaning either in the top 10 in student satisfaction scores or in REF scores), they give some empirical confirmation of what many of us might have known anecdotally:

Our findings…show, in our view quite strikingly, that few political science and international relations departments offer extensive or in-depth coverage of gender and sexuality issues. As a result, many political science and international relations undergraduates merely experience a brief introduction to ‘feminism’ as their only encounter with key debates over gender inequalities and sexual identity.

Of 629 modules in IR and Politics identified across those Departments, only 9 existing full modules related to gender or sexuality (increasing to 12 if Aberystwyth’s ‘forthcoming’ courses are included). That’s 1.4%. Only an estimated 8.9% of all surveyed modules offer at least one week on feminism/gender as part of their wider sweep. The study also shows up some noteworthy cases where there is Departmental expertise but no teaching provision. Warwick and Oxford both have seven staff listing gender/feminism as a core research interest, but Warwick hosts only one gender-related module and Oxford none. Although the paper does not pursue this in great detail, the suggestion is that the relative paucity of courses is not a result of absent expertise, since the progress of feminist and gender studies has been sufficient that all Departments surveyed (with the exception of de Montfort) have staff members with a gender interest. Indeed, on the average of these 16 elite institutions, there are some 3.9 gender specialists in each one (although numbers are always, of course, shifting).

The overall picture, then, is of some progress (perhaps surprisingly limited) in getting gender (but not sexuality) included as the spectral “week on feminism”, presumably primarily in theoretical survey modules. But this vague and introductory inclusion is not supported by more concentrated work either theoretically (as in a module on different perspectives on gender) or empirically (as in an issue-by-issue survey of gender in global politics). Although Foster et al. do not map changes in Faculty composition, this appears to be happening at the same time as gender and feminist academics are increasing in strength within IR.

As is to be expected, this leaves a number of issues unaddressed. By focusing on the narrow elite, we lose out on a view of politics and IR as a whole, and of the potential differences across the sector (do less prestigious Departments teach gender and sexuality more, less or the same?). Similarly, the paucity of data on courses and content requires some informed guesswork. There is some comparison possible with other countries (thanks to TRIPS, etc.), but the dynamics are not clear. Perhaps most interestingly, the authors focus on undergraduate teaching alone, on the completely defensible grounds that this is where the interaction of the vast majority of students with politics and IR ends. My guess is that the more specialist nature of graduate study means more gender/sexuality courses (there is at least one gender-and-IR-dedicated masters-level module at LSE), but this probably also varies significantly by Department.

Extracted from Foster et al., ‘The Personal is Not Political: At Least in the UK’s Top Politics and IR Departments’, THE BRITISH JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, Early View, 10 May 2012

Three other questions seem important. First, the numerical distribution of weeks in modules may not matter so much as their placement, their context, and their content. Placement because if the week on feminism and gender is placed at the very end of the course (as has been my experience on several occasions) it makes little impact. Students already pre-disposed to it will do the readings and write the essays, but others will be able to safely ignore it on grounds legitimate (too close to the test to prepare for) and illegitimate (who cares about feminists anyway?).

Context because running a course on the familiar pattern that there are a core group of theories that matter (Realism, Liberalism, Constructivism, sometimes Marxism), and then a bunch of outlier challengers (post-structuralism, post-colonialism, feminism), exacerbates problems of placement. The historical narrative of conventional IR locates traditions like the English School closer to the core (in its connection to Realism and Constructivism) than its relative strength may otherwise suggest. For example, a quick analysis of the 2012 International Studies Association conference in San Diego shows 26 panels sponsored or co-sponsored by the English School Section against some 55 for Feminist Theory and Gender Studies, but I would wager that the English School is taken more seriously as a central part of IR than feminist and gender theories.

Content because there are ways of teaching gender or sexuality that do not involve the kind of critical theory/politicising approach that Foster et al. desire. There may well be a week on female heads of state or diplomats in a foreign policy course without it constituting gender or feminist theory in any meaningful sense. Likewise, a consideration of gender that implies that feminists think that women are naturally more peaceful than men (a common enough assumption in the discipline as a whole) will actually be subtracting from student understanding of the material. And these kind of elisions are also easier to get away with when the topics under discussion are marginal.

Second, what of other peripheral movement-theories? The general reception of issues of race and postcolonialism in IR would seem to suggest that they suffer even more than gender in this regard, even if issues of sexuality are more marginal still. As has been suggested in discussions elsewhere, this is also in part about the inclusion of women, LGBTQ people and persons of colour within the academy, as well as about the class profile of academic communities. Replications of this study would likely confirm the difficulties faced by all kinds of non-mainstream perspectives, but this also raises a hackneyed trade-off dilemma: what would it mean for each of these intellectual clusters to be given their due? Do we speak only of theoretical tendencies, or also of topics? The study of revolutions, after all, is fairly neglected too. The answer, I suspect, is that many of the marginal under-labourers of IR and Politics want not so much to replace hegemonic subjects as to engage in what Robbie called ‘generative incorporation’, a revisioning and rewriting of the whole enterprise.

Third and finally, what are the causes of this pattern (frequently significant Faculty representation, slim-to-moderate intra-module inclusion, and almost no dedicated provision)? The gap between teaching capacity and actual teaching presumably comes from somewhere. Is it a standard consequence of Heads of Departments not taking gender and sexuality seriously enough to allow for the courses to be taught? Of a perceived or real lack of student interest, reflecting prior understandings of what is properly international politics? Of the greater pressure on marginal academics to publish and self-justify, leading to less concern with teaching? Or of some internal self-disciplining, in which gender and sexuality specialists don’t suggest courses because they assume that they won’t be taken up by those beneath them in the academic hierarchy or valued by those above them?

Answers on a postcard.

As the inevitable Greek exit from the eurozone seemingly approaches, it’s worth comparing current statements about Greece to how the financial press and regulators considered Lehman Brothers the week before its collapse set the global markets into panic mode. (See below for a selection of illuminating comments from officials about Lehman Brothers pre-collapse and about Greece pre-exit.) Reading these misplaced predictions, one thing becomes clear: the contemporary financial system is far too complex and opaque for anyone to determine the precise consequences of a Greek exit. Add into that the unpredictable nature of crisis politics (e.g. today sees rumors of Greek governing coalitions flying all over the place), and one has a system that quickly surpasses our capacities for forecasting. In this regard it’s interesting to read reports about the current Greek exit fears versus the reports in February when it also looked like Greece might leave (prior to the second of ECB’s long-term refinancing operations (LTROs) that managed to calm markets for a short while). In the earlier reports many commentators considered that French and German banks had largely separated themselves from Greek exposure, while the initial LTRO had purportedly given the financial system the flexibility it needed to survive any temporary disruption. Intriguingly, today’s fears about Greece, after the failure of the LTROs to significantly improve the situation and combined with fears over Spain’s banking system, are much more apocalyptic than in February.

The unfortunate truth is that while a Greek exit will be devastating to the Greek people (of this everyone is confident), it is still a better option than the continued austerity regime. Even the most optimistic IMF estimates of Greece’s economy under the austerity regime only see them returning to 120% debt-to-GDP ratio by 2020 – i.e. the same level that so worries commentators about Italy today. What is being asked of Greece is a state of permanent austerity and permanent social chaos. 

Milos Bicanski/Getty Images

September 9, 2008 - http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/10/business/10place.html?pagewanted=all

Unlike Bear Stearns, which effectively collapsed when customers fled for the exits and the firm could not finance itself, Lehman Brothers has more sources of long-term financing and like other broker-dealers, access to emergency financing from the Federal Reserve. Mr. Fuld said that the existence of that lending facility should take any question of Lehman facing a liquidity crisis “off the table.

September 12, 2008 - http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/b3506214-80d5-11dd-82dd-000077b07658.html#axzz1mXeJ33ET

While the crisis at Bear stunned the markets, other financial institutions have had six months to prepare for the possible failure of Lehman. In the Bear crisis, the risks were extreme in part because they were unknown and unmanaged. The New York Fed has conducted extensive stress tests in order to attempt to evaluate the impact of a Lehman failure on markets such as the CDS market and it believes the systemic risk is quantifiable and lower than the risk that was posed by the imminent collapse of Bear back in March. Regulators have also evaluated the risk mitigation strategies put in place by other banks and the authorities believe them to be robust. That suggests the risk that a Lehman collapse could trigger a domino effect of failures at other financial institutions ought not to be great.

September 14, 2008 - http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f3586ede-80ca-11dd-82dd-000077b07658.html#axzz1mXeJ33ET

Mr Paulson believes that the systemic risks associated with the potential failure of Lehman have been reduced because the market has had time to prepare for its possible demise, and a new Fed funding facility would assist an orderly unwinding of its positions.

February 15, 2012 - http://blogs.channel4.com/faisal-islam-on-economics/eurozone-reaches-its-lehman-moment-as-germany-insults-greece/16278

All the while, the chatter in euro policy circles, as I wrote on Monday, is that the Greek rot will not infect the rest of the euro area. A default could be managed. Even the odd French bank has managed to dispose of much of its exposure. We’ve had months to prepare. And, so the Lehman moment comes full circle. Three and a half years ago we were told exactly the same by Hank Paulson and co re Lehmans: The system, we were told, was strong enough. Finns, Dutch and some Germans increasingly think the same about a Greek default.

Music is a world within itself
With a language we all understand
With an equal opportunity
For all to sing, dance and clap their hands
But just because a record has a groove
Don’t make it in the groove
But you can tell right away at letter A
When the people start to move

-          ­‘Sir Duke’, Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life (1976)

Music is an old and effective technology of politics. This was highly visible in both the recent uprisings and the attempts at counter-revolution; whilst from the beginning Tunisian activists sang their national anthem in the street in anti-regime protest, Assad blasted the Syrian anthem into the cities as a reminder of his position. Rappers and older musicians shared platforms in Tahrir Square, and DJs parodically remixed Gaddafi’s final public speeches into technotronic nonsense. Whilst not all political music is sung of course, songs and the act of singing are particularly powerful in political situations as means and symbols of mobilisation and unification.  Moreover, songs tend to linger in the brain.

But there are at least two ways of thinking about the relationship between politics and music. The question which is perhaps most often asked and answered is: how, when and where is music political? So, why did the Tunisian protesters sing the national anthem in front of the courthouse, how did music support the anti-apartheid struggle, and why did the Haitian revolutionaries sing the Marseillaise? How did the musical character of these expressions facilitate a particular kind of political act? Lots of excellent writers, both scholarly and otherwise, have turned their attentions to the nature of political music, and especially protest music, in a variety of times and places.

However, the question that I want to focus on mainly here though is slightly different: how, when and where is politics musical? This question was stimulated by the general observation that when we try to make sense of politics, we often use metaphors related to music. A common phrase is that a political statement or value ‘struck a chord’ with an audience, or that protesters are ‘banging a drum’. Politicians may or may not be ‘in tune’ with publics, and relations may be ‘harmonious’ or not. Coups will be ‘orchestrated’.

Perhaps surprisingly, in moving from vernacular to scholarly modes of understanding politics, the metaphors of music are no less important. In fact, in some cases they seem to be more important. The genre-defining work of the historical sociologist Charles Tilly in the study of contentious politics is a revealing and fascinating case in point.

Tilly’s work on contentious politics seeks to explain the emergence and occurences of episodes of contention – meaning collective, visible claim-making directed against political authority (see Tahrir Square above). Throughout his body of work, from 1978 up to his last publications in 2010, Tilly employs two crucial analytic metaphors to help him make sense of this politics – ‘repertoires’ and ‘performances’. In arguing that there are particular ‘repertoires’ of contention, Tilly argues that the ways in which people make contentious claims is by drawing on a limited set of known actions, such as marches, strikes and riots, which form a ‘repertoire’. These repertoires evolve alongside social structures and regimes; Tilly’s detailed work about Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries argues that industrialisation and ‘modern’ forms of national government coincide with substantial changes to the repertoire (e.g. from parochial to national targets, from ad hoc contention to organised strikes etc). Tilly sees this as the ‘invention’ of the social movement in Britain. For Tilly, each instance of claim-making is also a ‘performance’ from the ‘repertoire’, involving a performer, an occasion and an audience.  Whilst Tilly had been prinicipally concerned with tracing the relationship between particular repertoires and regimes, in his later work, Tilly sought to systematise the recording of the elements of the performance as well. He also argues that within the context defined by the repertoire and the performance, people ‘improvise’ like jazz musicians or street artists.

As his close collaborator Sidney Tarrow notes, these metaphors are fundamental to establishing the important contributions of Tilly’s work within historical sociology as a broader intervention in social theory. The first is in the establishment of what Tilly and his co-workers term a ‘relational’ ontology of the social world – that is, a move towards thinking about social entities as constituted by their relations with one another and processes of social change, rather than as ontologically separate and static beings. The ideas of the ‘repertoire’ and ‘performance’ do this because they emphasise the co-location and co-constitution of political acts, performers and contexts. Second, and relatedly, these metaphors are intended to allow for the emergence of a non-deterministic mid-level social theory in which elements of given social structure such as culture and history interact with human agency. Thus the performer can improvise, but only within the parameters of the repertoire. Third, Tilly argues that the ideas of the ‘repertoire’ and ‘performance’ allow the analyst the necessary analytic distance from the phenomena under consideration to make claims which are causally coherent on their own terms, and not dependent on the terms of the participants. Tilly notes that this is crucial if social theory is to be primarily explanatory rather than interpretive. Tarrow notes that one of Tilly’s achievements in logging ‘performances’ is to offer grounds for ‘systematic qualitative inquiry’ in a way that would permit explanatory claims to be made.

In short, these metaphors are doing a lot of heavy lifting in terms of the ‘social scientific’ contributions of Tilly’s work. Neither are they at all unsuccessful; the popularity of Tilly and the massive uptake of this framework amongst students of contentious politics across different disciplines seems to indicate that people find them convincing. But we still need to understand why it is that these musical (and theatrical) metaphors are helping us make sense of the political world, and what else this can tell us.

Metaphors we think by

George Lakoff has famously argued that metaphors are modes of thought, which allow us to make sense of one domain by mapping another onto it with which we are more familiar. As such they are not communicative flourishes but central to the possibility of cognition and contemplation. For example, we often think of time (something more abstract) in spatial terms (something more tangible), e.g. time is running out, I am squeezed for time, the year ahead. Lakoff argues metaphors allow us to think when a) there are systematic correspondences between the source domain for the metaphor and the target domain, b) that reasoning and behaviour can be understood through the metaphor, and c) we can extend the metaphor to understand new elements of the target domain.

The key questions are, then, how should we understand these ‘systematic correspondences’ between music (the source domain) and contentious politics (the target domain), and how do/can they help us understand the latter? Although Tilly is aware that ‘we confront a metaphor’, he does not ultimately pursue the significance of this metaphorical explanation.

To cut to the chase of a longer and more complex response, my sense is that we have a much more sophisticated, intuitive and sensitive understanding of music as a field of purposeful and creative relational human activity than we do of contentious politics. There has been a tendency, above all in attempts to ‘scientise’ the explanation of political behaviour and agency as rational or predictable responses to particular circumstances. Yet, where these modes of explanation run into walls, we see musical metaphors take over to make sense of what is happening in a more or less accessible way.

Importantly for Tilly, although he doesn’t really address this, they allow him to begin to make sense of practices of creativity and mimesis in politics through the metaphor of jazz improvisation. As such, this seems a neat way to mediate – and indeed avoid – some of the problems associated with debates about the place of agency and structure in the conduct of political action. For Tilly, it allows him to include ‘culture’ and ‘history’ as descriptive reference points without giving them particular explanatory weight – it allows him to treat the musical metaphor as a mapping exercise.

But, as we see in Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, this is not the only way to understand the politics in jazz improvisation – indeed the metaphor is much richer. In his reading, we can understand this improvisation as enacting the unsteadiness of the relationship between the performer and the structures presented by the repertoire. Yet this repertoire is not understood as a space which is necessarily limited by various regimes, but also deliberately cultivated as a space for critical consciousness linking past and future players and audiences. Here the content and the history of the repertoire are perhaps not best understood as strategic responses but as the ways in which players ground themselves in forms of shared identity, whilst simultaneously innovating around and re-articulating its content and meaning.

As noted above, good metaphors also let you think in new ways about your area of interest. Yet, here we only scratch the surface of the ways in which music can help us to think about the world. Tilly himself played with the idea of history as having different ‘rhythms’ - shorter, quicker ones in which human lives were lived, and longer, slower ones in which grand processes of social change took place. Edward Said however famously suggested that we could also read histories ‘contrapuntally’ in the musical sense. In counterpoint, different melodies run simultaneously but interweave and interact to produce the overall sound.  Said’s musical metaphor for history seems to improve upon Tilly’s insofar as it captures the possibilities of plurality and relationality rather better.

We can think of the history of the strike as an example from contentious politics. For Tilly, the strike is intimately linked to processes of industrialisation, and is therefore ‘born’ with the social movement in Britain in the nineteenth century. These then spread in a modular way to different parts of the world as they are influenced by spreading industrialisation. On Tilly’s reading, we might see the mass strikes or hartals in India in 1919 as the spread of a particular repertoire of contention in response to a European regime. However, if we read the Indian hartal contrapuntally, it is notable that organised shut-downs as protests featuring prayer and fasting were occurring more than two hundred years before this, albeit on a smaller scale. Figures like Gandhi can be understood as creatively and consciously linking different kinds of struggles and traditions in the pursuit of political goals. Thinking of history in terms of a kind of contrapuntal music gives us a way to grasp the possibilities of historical similarity without sameness, of relationality without repetition, of autonomy without irrelevance.

Other modes of sense-making

There is clearly much more to say, and to think about, in terms of understanding the linkages between music and politics. John Street’s book, Kevin Dunn‘s article and Naeem Inayatullah and Phil Weinrobe’s conference paper were particularly interesting and useful as starting points for me. But I cannot map out this important material here. Instead, to close, I will suggest two concepts which might be helpful from the world of music to help us think about the political.

One concept which remains underexplored in terms of music and politics, but is central to the usefulness of the metaphor, is the concept of ‘resonance’. For all kinds of commentators, the notion of ‘resonance’ is very important in talking about how political ideas and values affect people, or how and why people relate to political action.  But what does this word mean? In terms of its acoustic sense, resonance is used to describe what happens when particular natural frequencies (of which any object has many) are amplified via interaction with another object. This is interesting insofar as it relates largely to physical properties of the object; not all resonances are possible but variations are. Moreover, the production of sound via resonance is an inherently relational endeavour.  This might help us begin to think about how and why different political ideas ‘resonate’ at particular times through their interaction with actors’ physical situations, as well as their ideas.

Another notion which might be helpful  in thinking about politics is the notion of ‘appreciation’. When we think about music, we are alive to the idea that it is a fundamentally complex and expressive / communicative practice which requires us to listen to it carefully to make sense of it. We also understand it as a domain of pleasure and pain, and see the necessity of engaging emotionally to understand it as such. If the metaphor between music and politics holds to this extent also, we should be making sense of politics in a similarly sensitive way. Yet, so often, our engagements with the political world involve the more intellectually distant activities of observation and explanation rather than an engaged listening and appreciation.

Making sense of the world, then, can take many forms. Historical sociology, in which Charles Tilly has been a major figure, is but one mode of sense-making which seeks out what it sees as systematic regularities and attempts to connect them to others. Yet it seems to me that Tilly’s dependence on musical metaphors is neither incidental nor esoteric; rather it speaks to the ways in which political behaviour and structures are intimately connected and related to other forms of expressive human relations.

Uganda, August 2010: I am here to do interviews and I spend most of my day setting them up, preparing for them, travelling to or from them, or conducting them. The rest of the time I hang out, people watch, trying to piece together a picture of how life outside heteronormativity survives in a climate that seems—on the surface at least—as inhospitable as Uganda is supposed to be. On Friday, Al (name changed, and this account provided with permission) invited me to a strip-tease. This was going to be a straight strip-tease, but one that some of the gay men went to so that they could watch the straight men getting off on watching the women strip. It sounded convoluted, but unmissable. Plus, I’d never been to a straight strip-tease, so it seemed important to plug this gaping orifice in my sexual history. We entered a dimly lit hall and took seats at the back in a group near the bar. I think I was the only brown man there. There was also one white man in the whole place, in our group. He had evidently been to the place before, and because he came with the same motivations as Al, he had been traumatized on a previous occasion by the way the women flocked to him (money?). So Al was instructed to tell the emcee (a short guy dressed in a white track suit) to make sure that the women didn’t come to our corner. The real attraction, from the point of view of the gay guys, was that the women sometimes got the straight guys to get on stage and strip. Al told the emcee to do his best to encourage this possibility. Call it Straight Guy for the Queer Eye. I was impressed by the brazenness with which Al communicated all this to the emcee. As for the show, let’s just say it took the ‘tease’ out of strip-tease. The first woman (girl? all the performers looked like they were in their 30s, but they could have been younger and prematurely aged by their work) danced to some vaguely familiar Western pop number. She was followed by another woman with bigger hips. Somebody in the group, setting himself up as my informant, tells me that she is ‘a real African woman’. She danced to Shania Twain’s ‘From this Moment On’ (a song I played to my last (and final, I think) girlfriend on the first day I met her, after a year-long correspondence). Just when Shania reached the second verse, the woman dropped her panties. None of the performers took off their bras. ‘African men aren’t interested in breasts’, my self-appointed informant intones. The next half-hour is a blur of female anatomy. So here I am, in a country that people have been calling ‘conservative’ and that American evangelist Rick Warren has decided is ripe for transformation into the world’s first ‘purpose driven’ nation, looking at more naked women in ten minutes than I have seen in ten years, to the soundtrack of my failed romantic history.

In an article entitled ‘On Representational Paralysis, Or, Why I don’t Want to Write About Temporary Marriage’, Lara Deeb reflects on her reluctance to write about the phenomenon of temporary marriage among the Shia community in Lebanon—a practice that allows for (often) undocumented marriages between a man and a woman for a specified time period. While Deeb understands the phenomenon as an attempt by a new generation of young people to find ways to live moral lives while also dating, she laments the proliferation of literature on the subject that purports to explain it in more sensationalist terms as a form of religiously legitimated sex-work and, even more cynically in a transparent attempt to discredit Hizbullah, as a device by which militant Islamists recruit soldiers to their cause. While insisting that there are good reasons to write about temporary marriage in Beirut—its potential to deconstruct received ideas about sexuality, its illustration of contemporary youth-driven social change, its usefulness in undermining the ‘otherness’ of Lebanese youth in the eyes of US undergraduate students who come to see the former as wanting to date ‘just like us’, etc.—Deeb’s reluctance to contribute to the burgeoning literature that sensationalizes Islam and Shi’i Islam in particular eventually wins out, perpetuating the representational paralysis of which she writes so eloquently.

I feel an analogous paralysis in writing about sexualities in Uganda. Like Deeb, I think there are good reasons to want to represent Ugandan sexualities in all their variety, complexity and possibility. Contemporary Western representations of sexuality in Uganda portray a scene of utter abjection out of a purported solidarity with queer Ugandan subjects. Exhibit 1: the BBC3 ‘documentary’ made by British DJ Scott Mills, describing Uganda as the ‘World’s Worst Place to be Gay’—a claim that is fairly typical of this genre of reportage which presents the country as a sort of gay heart of darkness (it helps that Uganda is geographically contiguous with that original heart of darkness). Given this representational landscape, it seems important to say that subaltern sexualities exist and thrive despite the odds, to recognize the agency of queer subjects who have created a ‘scene’ for themselves—albeit one that might be utterly unrecognizable to a foreign visitor—out of the scraps offered them by an otherwise heterosexist landscape. Indeed the genius of their strategy is that the production of this scene does not rely on the creation of segregated queer-identified space (although that too has been done, with mixed results).

Yet a host of countervailing considerations militate against the representation of subaltern sexualities, inviting the very paralysis of which Deeb writes so insightfully. First, what are the consequences of representation? Subaltern studies scholars have yet to confront adequately an ethical dilemma that sits at the heart of their enterprise. If subaltern agency and transgression relies for its success on quietness, what does the scholar’s explication of these modes of agency do to their very conditions of possibility? Might not writing about spaces of (hidden) pleasure bring them to the attention of hostile authorities who would then be able to shut them down? One can be scrupulous about how one does this (no names, no places, full consent) and still generate unintentional consequences. Nor are ‘hostile authorities’ limited to those in Uganda. Were a UK asylum judge to read this account, might s/he conclude that since spaces of sexual entertainment—however circumscribed and dangerous—exist in Uganda, applicants for asylum from persecution on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity could reasonably be returned to the country notwithstanding claims about the difficulties of living there as an ‘out’ queer person. Demands for ‘expert’ evidence about countries of origin in asylum claims themselves pose tremendous representational difficulties: discharging one’s duty to the court by representing the country honestly in all its variegated complexity, risks legitimating the perpetuation of receiving countries’ refusal of asylum in the vast majority of cases.

Second, who is being represented and, more specifically, being represented as ‘subaltern’? To represent a sex show as a space of play and a space of emancipatory play at that is troublingly incomplete, seeing as the pleasure of some is clearly premised on the labour of others. (This is not to preclude the possibility that sex work can be emancipatory for those engaged in it, but one would need to know a great deal more about the conditions and terms of work to conclude this). For a brief instant, it seemed to me that the gay men in the room—however vulnerable in so many dimensions of their lives—were participants in, and co-producers of, a male gaze, in which the women on stage were a means to the end of their sexual gratification (no subaltern alliances here). Watching Ugandan women taking their clothes off for an audience of (mostly) straight men infiltrated by a few intrepid gay men, it occurred to me that scholars of subaltern studies ought to cease using the term ‘subaltern’ in its stable noun form. There are no subalterns. There is only the condition of subalternity – a contextual and relational condition that must always prompt the question ‘subaltern in relation to whom or what?’

Third, and possibly most troubling for me, who is doing the representing and why? Doing fieldwork brought on a certain degree of what I can only describe as identity confusion. For one thing, the superficial familiarity of my surroundings (despite this being my first trip to Uganda) seemed to interpellate my Indianness—the same Corbusier-inspired government buildings, the same way of painting curb stones, the same sorts of motorbikes, the same trees planted in road dividers (gulmohars—but also acacias, jacarandas, bougainvillea, casuarina), the same businesses (Bata! Bank of Baroda!), the same vocabulary (‘load shedding’—scheduled electricity power cuts, for those of you with minds in the sewer). When talking to activists, it made more sense to me to present myself as an activist from India, able to share experiences of a queer movement in another British colony that was also struggling to overthrow laws criminalizing homosexuality that were a legacy of colonial rule. (On what it might mean to be both queer and Indian in Uganda, 40 years after Idi Amin’s expulsion of Ugandan Asians, I cannot pretend to have any idea: I met no one who could speak to this.) Yet however I presented myself in the field, I was clearly received as a researcher based in a First World institution—which indeed I am. In the space between these two positionalities, multiple anxieties.

For a whole host of reasons, many of which can be grouped under the sign of ‘empire’, it is difficult to study the global South from other locations in the global South. Notwithstanding talk of shifting, emerging and rising power, the means of production of knowledge about the global South continue to remain located disproportionately in the North. To sketch the problem in very crude brush strokes, libraries, funding, flight paths continue to reflect a colonial political economy, the structures of which left colonies more integrated with, dependent upon, and interested in, the metropoli than each other. Recent developments in regional integration have only just begun to alleviate some of these problems. These structural factors—alongside more frankly self-interested motivations—underpin the migration of scholars from the global South to the North, even if they remain interested in studying the South. Edward Said called this ‘the voyage in’ and celebrated the contrapuntal double vision that a migrant, exilic perspective could afford. Homi Bhabha has written about the productive potentials of hybrid third spaces in which new cultural production takes place. But what if the liminal space is a dangerous one—from the point of view of producing progressive scholarship—threatening both the loss of Third World positionality as a result of immersion in the protocols of First World Knowledge, and the acquisition of First World imperial baggage by the migrant scholar of colour? Could I write about what I was finding without reproducing the prurient, imperial gaze of a Richard Burton describing the ‘sotadic zone’? What distinguishes—and what connects—my description of a sex show in Uganda in 2010 to the display of Saarrtje Baartman‘s genitalia in London in 1810? Why do people based in the First World continue to be interested in Third World sexualities? (It does not help that I work for an institution called the School of Oriental & African Studies that takes for its motto the aphorism ‘knowledge is power’—think Lord Curzon (to rule them you have to know them) rather than Foucault.) Surely the colour of my skin (or my passport) cannot rescue me from these complicities; indeed, there is something especially disturbing about the internalization of the colonial ethnographic gaze by the person of colour.

Many analysts view the infamous Anti Homosexuality Bill as the product of a growing nexus between US evangelicals and African clergy. Miranda Hassett has shown how, as conservatives in the US increasingly feel that they are losing the ‘culture wars’ on their home turf, they have begun to forge alliances with what they perceive to be the more conservative national branches of their denominations (in countries like Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda and Nigeria) with a view to forging global conservative alliances that can block progressive initiatives such as demands for the ordination of women as bishops or the blessing of same-sex unions. The Zambian priest Kapya Kaoma has shown in almost forensic detail how these relationships culminated in the Bahati Bill.

I wanted to attend church services to get a sense of different liturgical and worship styles as a way into thinking about tensions between high church and evangelical strands of Christianity that show up quite clearly in discussions about sexuality. I wandered around the great brick edifice of the Anglican Cathedral at Namirembe, perched high up on a hill with an expansive view of the city around it. The cathedral is beautiful and very simple: plain brick (a small historical display near the entrance tells the story of previous structures made of mud and thatch that were destroyed by wind, termites and fire), high vaulted ceilings, stained glass windows depicting the coming of Christianity to Africa and the translation of the Bible into Luganda. There are a bunch of SUVs—even a police car—parked near the entrance. The Primates of the African provinces of the Anglican Communion are meeting in nearby Entebbe. Rowan Williams has flown in to meet with them and, if the news reports are anything to go by, is being told in no uncertain terms that his liberal views on sexuality are anathema to the African churches. As I walked past one of the many smaller structures surrounding the cathedral, I heard a gospel choir rehearse an arrangement of ‘The Lord’s My Shepherd’ that I had never heard before: familiar and utterly unfamiliar at the same time. It occurred to me that the Communion could be a beautiful thing, if only it could get its act together: a model for the secular world of unity in diversity, even if that unity was itself originally forged in imperial embrace. A flashback: to my childhood in a school in Bangalore run by the Church of South India, a postcolonial successor to the C of E in India. Dressed in cassock and surplice, six years as an agnostic Hindu choirboy have steeped me in the liturgy of this strange institution that is not quite mine. I remember the tensions, snarky comments and sometimes open warfare between the conductor, organist and pianist over what we would sing: high church baroque versus the more pop music-influenced tunes that guitar-wielding American-accented ‘Bible uncles’ were being trucked in to play for us during school hours. As a ten year old growing up in not-yet-booming Bangalore, I had already been exposed to the rifts that now threaten to tear the Anglican Communion apart. This is why when I ran into Grace (an old lady, not the Holy Spirit) who asked me sternly ‘Are you an Anglican?’, I mumbled hastily ‘I went to an Anglican school.’ ‘Come to the church this weekend and we can baptise you.’ Erm…here’s to chucking the observation out of participant-observation?

Then some options-cum-recommendations for Faculty are laid out:

1. Make sure that all of your own papers are accessible by submitting them to DASH in accordance with the faculty-initiated open-access policies.

2. Consider submitting articles to open-access journals, or to ones that have reasonable, sustainable subscription costs; move prestige to open access.

3. If on the editorial board of a journal involved, determine if it can be published as open access material, or independently from publishers that practice pricing described above. If not, consider resigning.

4. Contact professional organizations to raise these issues.

5. Encourage professional associations to take control of scholarly literature in their field or shift the management of their e-journals to library-friendly organizations.

6. Encourage colleagues to consider and to discuss these or other options.

7. Sign contracts that unbundle subscriptions and concentrate on higher-use journals.

8. Move journals to a sustainable pay per use system.

9. Insist on subscription contracts in which the terms can be made public.

Note in particular point 3. Harvard is asking its academics to seriously consider resigning from major journals if substantive good-faith moves are not made towards open access or “sustainable subscription costs” (read: a major reversal of current practice). As previously suggested, only serious insurgencies within major centres of academic prestige will undo the private stranglehold on knowledge-in-common. On those grounds, I’m tempted to giddy excitement. The question, of course, is which other major institutions (and which serious academic figures) will have the solidarity and good sense to follow this example. As a rallying point, social sciences and social theory need some version of The Cost Of Knowledge manifesto that spans the entire issue of journals and knowledge production. At the very least, we now have a new rhetorical device: open access is good enough for Harvard: why isn’t it good enough for you?

So what would be the normative-political case for the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC)? As Ledbetter notes, the defence industry never had a shortage of defenders, proponents, beneficiaries, and apologists. Various critiques of the MIC notwithstanding, numerous American commentators are now firmly united in the belief that their country needs a large defence budget in order to protect and project its identities and interests in the world. According to Maddow, this collective belief had a lot to do with the discursive and institutional success of the infamous “Team B” reports on Soviet power, which so profoundly enthused Ronald Reagan and his administration, leading to the gigantic military buildup in the 1980s. Maddow’s assessment is worth citing at length:

The #occupy practice/meme has antecedents. Physical manifestations of a ‘public’, horizontalism, prefigurative politics and more can be traced in all sorts of histories. One such lineage is the foreshadowing of Zucotti Park in recent struggles over education. Take the slogan in March 2010 over privatisation at the University of California, which was ‘STRIKE / OCCUPY / TAKEOVER’. Or Middlesex, where students resisting the dismantling of the Philosophy Department in that same year unfurled a banner during their occupation, one that proclaimed: ‘THE UNIVERSITY IS A FACTORY! STRIKE! OCCUPY!’.

I want briefly, then, to think about the space of the university in our discussions of #occupy. There have been rich and suggestive calls to re-politicise ourselves as academic-activists, to look again at our work and its claims, and to turn our abilities, such as they are, to projects of resistance and transformation. But we risk a displacement. When we talk of ‘the street’, or politics enacted in the reconfigured space of #occupy, or of the ‘real world’ that we must be relevant to, we already miss the university itself as that factory in which we labour. We are tempted by a view of ourselves as leaving ivory towers to do politics, instead of seeing those towers themselves as spaces of politics. As if our institutions and practices were not already part of the world.

Whether you see #occupy as transformational or nor, or whether you simply prefer a different vocabulary, I think a demand remains: a demand to politicise our own positionality. This politicisation can have many dimensions, but I want to suggestively highlight four, each being a sphere in which we should be diagnosing and transforming our own practices.

Precarity and Intellectual Labour: The contemporary in its Anglo-American template is increasingly a nexus of debt, extraction and segregated community. The gulf between the tenured and the precarious, the elite and the rest, continues to grow. Our spaces of discussion are nominally egalitarian, but pay, resources and value are anything put. Paul Mason’s sociological type of the ‘graduate without a future’ needs to be treated with some care here: our conditions are not those of the most marginalised and exploited. The solidaristic connections between various facets of global struggle are rich sources, analytically, politically and emotionally, but we are not Tahrir Square. Precarity is everywhere. True, yes, but this is our precarity, and we are entitled to own it. We are too in thrall to a view of academic work as a privilege, and hardly attentive to who pays, at what levels of interest, and who subsequently profits. A strange kind of self-loathing.

Workplace Democracy: Our commitments to free and equal intellectual exchange have no real counterpart in our actual workplaces. Some institutions have democratic bodies of academic congregation, but they seem few, and certainly neglected. Votes of no confidence in Ministers notwithstanding, we need to look afresh at what it is we should be able to collectively decide, not just in our professional organisations, but in Departments themselves. Who allocates scholarships, and on what criteria? How is it that complaints about the narrow stories of our teaching so seldom change how we end up delivering that teaching? Who determines the true value of our increasingly precarious labour, and on what authority?

The Academic Production Machine: Most of what we write has already been paid for: by increasingly debt-ridden student-consumers, by the state, and by benevolent and not-so-benevolent funds. Yet almost without exception we allow these products to be transferred from the intellectual commons to private profit. Our work is pay-walled and sold back to our own institutions at monopolistic margins. The average annual increase in journal prices has been over 7% since the mid-1980s. 10% of all research funding distributed by HEFCE in the UK is spent by libraries on journal and database access. We resent the transfers of copyright, the unpaid labour of peer review, the limitation of our work to a particular audience, but we don’t allow this to trouble our daily practice. Scientists and mathematicians boycott Elsevier, but we ‘political’ scientists are quicker to embrace the content analysis of Twitter than Open Access. Imagine for a moment that a handful of the top journals took down the pay walls. Or that we advanced a collaborative university press able both to support infrastructural demands and to return academic products to the realm of the public.

The Research Collective: Constrained by the demands of advancement in a context of precarity, and by the model of purist intellectual gestation, we stand atomised. Intellectual moves in politics are overwhelmingly carried out by think-tanks, not by academic thought collectives. Many in IR thrive on moving between the worlds of the university and of policy, but similar border-crossings to the benefit of non-elites seem to founder. There are of course bold projects and activist scholars, but nothing on the scale of the researcher-lobbyists. We are too distracted to engage in common. What might it mean to reverse that?

These four dimensions have their own tensions, of course. Nor is there any reason to suppose that we will all agree. In one obvious #occupy-like conundrum, we must consider whether to make demands. And, if so, to whom? Do we need anything so brazen as manifestos? And what of space itself? Is ours merely a mental topography against #occupy’s physical one? The university is not, and never has been, the clean realm of pure speculation. It is connected and integrated with the social fabric, and thus requires of us some account. We in no small part constitute it. To take the spirit of #occupy, by whatever name and with whatever caveats, must them mean not only that we discuss how we should think, but also what we should do.