Welcome back to the Monkey Mind Lab. On today's
episode, we have with us Professor Amit Prakash,
a visiting assistant professor of international
and global studies at Middlebury College. Professor
Prakash also serves as the director of the Rohatyn
Global Fellows Program. A historian by training,
his research delves into the intersections of
imperialism, anti -colonialism, and migration.
He is the author of Empire on the Seine, The
Policing of North Africans in Paris, 1925 -1975,
which examines the policing and state control
of North African colonial immigrants in Paris
during the period of decolonization. At Middlebury,
Professor Prakash teaches courses on policing,
borders and identification, and anti -colonialism.
His teaching encourages students to critically
examine how state power and identification practices
shape societies. Beyond academia, He also co
-hosts the history and current events podcast,
'No Politics at the Dinner Table', and has been
featured in the documentary, 'The Price of Safety'.
Please join me in welcoming Professor Amit Prakash.
Thank you very much for having me. So let's begin
with the three questions that I ask my guests.
What do you teach? Why do you teach it? And how
did you get into it? Okay. So I teach courses
broadly conceived around, let's call it, critical
security analysis, but from a historical perspective.
So I'm trained as a historian. My specialized
work is on France and its empire, and particularly
around questions of surveillance, migration,
and security, and the discourses around it. And
I think, you know, for the reason why, I guess
one major reason that sort of transformed me
is 9 -11. So 9/11, obviously 2001 and 2002,
I started graduate school. And what I started
to understand by following politics and also
noticing the type of courses that were being
offered where I went, which was Columbia University,
were very much centered around this new age of
security. And I think the post 9/11 era becomes
kind of intelligible as such when we think about
security as the dominant theme. which I see as
mostly as ill, but one could say for good or
ill. How I got into this, the reason I went to
graduate school was basically teaching. I taught
high school for a number of years before I went
to graduate school, and I thought, who am I to
be teaching this stuff? I need to know more.
And so I needed more historical training, and
teaching is still one of my favorite things to
do about the job. All right, so shall we delve
into today's big question? Sure, let's do it.
So here's the question. If you decolonize the
mind, what happens to the culture it carries?
It's a very big question, right? So let's talk
about, let's break it up. Decolonizing the mind,
right? So this is the title of a book by a literary
scholar named Thiong'o, who recently retired from
NYU. And he basically made this argument about
what decolonizing the mind requires, which basically
means purging post -colonial societies of the
linguistic traces of the colonial masters. Because
the argument goes is that our thoughts are made
precise and possible by the linguistic structures
in our minds. So what is sayable is basically
the limits of what is thinkable. And so the argument
being that, well, in African societies, because
French and English had been imposed by the sword
and other linguistic traditions purposely crushed
or at least sidelined, the reanimation of those
traditions would allow for a full flourishing
of, in this case, African cultures in distinction
to what the colonial establishment tried to replace
it with, right? So that's one approach, which
is, okay, let's get rid of the old language.
And we've seen this pop up in various ways. You
know, Madras becomes Chennai and so on in India.
So there's these sort of elements and strategies
to try to sort of get rid of, I guess, the symbolic
power of the past masters. I'm of two minds about
how effective that is. Because sometimes it can
be all style and no substance, if you like, right?
So that, sure, you can change the name and so
on, but you've, let's take the case of India,
you'd change the names of some of the major cities
and so on. Fine, it's your country, you can name
what you want. But if you retain about 80 % of
British colonial law and retain that system,
how much actually, it seems like a cosmetic change
more so than a substantive one. So there's limits
to that approach. I understand where that's coming
from, but there's limits to that even if you
went full, you know, whole hog on it. The other
element is, and this is the one I'm sort of more
affiliated with or endorse, which is understanding
that colonialism at its base is a set of relationships.
It's producing a set of relationships that are
hierarchical in order. And in different colonies
around the world, there were different rationales
for that hierarchy. But fundamentally, colonialism
is in between things. It's not the thing itself.
It's how we organize things. And so if you get
at that, decolonizing the mind, well, that means,
first of all, doing an analysis of what colonialism
actually was. And I don't think we fully understood
that yet. No, it's percolated into nooks and
crevices, which people wouldn't even have thought
that it's influenced by colonialism, but it's
very much that. Yeah, yeah. Just the basic way
we see the world and so on is very much sort
of dominated by a colonial perspective whose
ramifications I think we still need to study.
So before you can get to decolonization, I think
you need to fully understand. the import of colonization.
So we might be jumping the gun, if you like,
to say that, oh, let's decolonize this, let's
decolonize that. It might be, I understand the
impulse, right? And I'm ethically sympathetic
to it, but it might end up being misguided or
sort of short -termist in terms of what you're
actually doing because a quick victory of a name
change or something like that, you know, while
it does have symbolic, it's not nothing. So what
I would say is this very simply that symbolism
matters. It's something, but it's not everything.
Of course. Yeah. So looking at, speaking of decolonizing,
is it, and we've kind of answered this, but is
it really about just removing statues, tearing
down paintings, burning books, rewriting history,
or is it something deeper, like changing the
way we think, speak and see ourselves? There
has been a push. even in India, to change the
name to Bharat, but also speak more Indian languages,
less of English. But before we can go all of
that, yes, we know some of it is performative.
Some of it does make a difference on a scale
of like pride or something. But let's start with
a real question. Keeping in mind that India,
for example, is a country that's been through
two series of empires. You've had the Mughal
Empire, you have the British Empire. There have
been other countries which have been ruled by
the French, the Dutch. It's all over the world.
Who owns culture? Are museums, language policies,
education systems still very, very colonial?
And it goes beyond that, like on a sociocultural
level, the way people interact, the certain customs
that people have. We looked at Hindu traditions
a while back and looking at how that's been influenced
by colonialism. I think the real question is,
culture as we know it today, is it still owned
by our colonial rulers? and overlords or is it
something that we've kind of made into our own
thing today okay so you have a couple questions
in there i'll start with the first one in terms
of is it a matter of destroying the sort of cultural
treatise left over and so on i'll just say i'm
no matter what book i'm not in favor of ever
burning a book um whatever the book is again
i think that's just sort of a misguided attempt
at erasure and is fundamentally unthinking, right?
So I'll start with that premise. In terms of
cultural transformation and sort of starting
out by uprooting something, really root and branch,
uprooting and then starting anew, I think that
is historically diluted, is how I would put it.
Colonialism happened, and it created some irrevocable
changes. Colonialism on the one hand, is probably
the most powerful form of globalization that
we've seen. It brought the world together and
knitted the world together, but it knitted the
world together just so in a hierarchical way
with asymmetric power and wealth being located
in former metropoles. And so that history can't
just be forgotten about. And there are some important
changes to the cultures that have been integrated,
quite frankly, into those cultures and are now
part of those cultures. I think the idea that,
OK, let's just for the sake of argument talk
about English, right? If, say, Nigeria or India
and so on wanted to say, you know, we're going
to get rid of English from all. aspects of Indian
or Nigerian culture. Well, what then you have
are going to be gatekeepers who are going to
decide, well, this is what Nigerian culture is,
and then this is what Indian culture is. So the
idea of an authentic culture either to return
to or to produce for the future is fundamentally
based on those who have the power to define it.
So really the question of who owns culture is
really a question of who has the power. And so
if you have the power, you have the power to
say this is this, that is that. This is Indian.
This is coming from Timur (Taimur) or something like that.
And therefore it's coming from outside. And not
so even though the cultural, political, and social
contributions of the Mughal descendants are inescapable
in India. I teach a course that has the title
of Who Owns Culture? And it's about culture and
decolonization. The title's kind of facetious
because there's a lot of things sort of assumed
in that question, which is, first of all, that
culture is something to be owned. It's predicated
on this idea of a sort of possessive liberal
subject that commodifies everything and owns
things. Culture is constantly in flux. It's constantly
being produced, and which makes it both very
democratic and egalitarian, but it's also...
within a matrix of power. And therefore those
who have the most power in the society have hegemony,
right? So, and they get to decide this is authentically
India, right? And I always sort of think about
the stuff with food, for instance, how do you
make authentic Indian dishes, especially after
Columbus, right? So that with the Columbian exchange,
you get potatoes and things like that, that make
their way to India. that utterly transformed
the cuisine there. And there's a lot of dishes
with potato in India that are seen as, you know,
fundamentally authentic, but they were only possible,
you know, 15, 16th century onwards, right? But
India has been around for a much longer. So who
decides then which is the authentic, right? It's
not been authentic to the continent because it
didn't grow there, but it's now a fundamental
part of people will eat the aloo with dosas.
People will have aloo parathas. Aloo paratha
is the biggest. thing of like, oh, Indian culture.
Is it Indian? Yeah. Yeah. And so one could say
the same thing for like the kind of Hindi English
vernacular that's developed in India. Right.
So that a lot of people speak this way, this
sort of this mishmash of let's call them indigenous
Indian languages, but with smatterings of English
and stuff like that, I don't think it's necessarily
an indication of their minds being colonized.
But they've appropriated that language, intermixed
it, and made something new. And sometimes this
is called in the literature indigenization, right,
where you sort of assimilate what were once,
let's call them foreign elements, but then you've
sort of tamed them, if you like, naturalized
them and made them your own. So, you know, in
terms of, you know, the culture, as your sort
of first question was asking about, kept in the
sort of the culture you know the only way to
actually purge a culture of elements that you
decide are foreign is through force and force
does not necessarily produce belief it produces
compliance but it doesn't necessarily mean you've
actually decolonized the mind in the way you
want to right you may have the mimicry of this
but you don't actually know what people are actually
thinking because they might well be afraid. And
we see a lot of that in the world today. Yeah,
yeah. I mean, there's a lot of nationalist movements
around the world. I mean, it's interesting. They're
all post -colonial in their own ways, you know.
So Hungary and Poland are good examples. They're
coming from the post -Soviet empire. We have
it in India. We have it in America now. Yeah.
And we have to remember that America was also
a colony. Of the British, yeah. And that's sometimes
forgotten. You know, there's a quotation from
a thinker, Étienne Balibar, that I like a lot,
which basically says, and he's talking about
borders in this case, and he basically makes
the argument is that every country in the world,
as we know it, was either colonized or was colonizing.
and sometimes both at the same time, right? So
that's what the modern world is. That's the sort
of cauldron in which it was forged to get beyond
it, to decolonize it. Again, I still think we
need to have a fuller reckoning with what we
were given before we can decide what we want
to do when we want to move on. So we still have
a lot to unpack about colonialism. I think we
really need to sit down and look at... The extent
to which it influences our lives today, even
though people, oh yeah, the British are gone
or the French are gone. They may not be there
physically, but their ideals are still very much
influencing society and laws being made today,
especially in India, looking at the legalization
of the LGBTQ community. It took 75 years and
it's still not legal to get married. Same -sex
couples are not acknowledged. The West has moved
on. Why are we still sticking to the Victorian
norms of it. Right. Right, right, right. And
so there's different things to think about. There
might be some elements that are contributions
from, let's say, French and British cultures
that you want, right? There might well be things
that you want to retain. And that's why this
sort of either -orism, and it's sort of, I think
it's predicated on this idea that these cultures
are hermetically sealed and then they clash and
one was just sort of juxtaposed on the other,
or superimposed, I should say. Not really the
case, right? That's not how culture works. You
know, anthropologists have been demonstrating
this for decades now, that culture is something
that's alive, is not static. And that's precisely
what makes it so valuable. And it's also precisely
what makes it so political. You can see that
every movement, these nationalist movements,
they all start as cultural movements. And they
identify an element in their given culture that
they think is objectionable. And then they organize
politics around it. So, you know, which is a
long way of saying politics is downstream from
culture. Yep. There's this one joke which a comedian
made, which basically said, in India, you have
to plan a political campaign around suppressing
a minority to get elected. Yeah. It's like, which
one are you going to pick? Right, right, right.
And which, again, is an old tactic, right? That's
as old. legislative or electoral politics tactic
that I think in modern politics was really perfected
around the turn of the century, around 1900,
the last century, I should say, in Vienna, right,
around antisemitism, right? So that it's Viennese
mayoral politics were utterly transformed by
the political innovation of mobilizing antisemitism
to whip up votes. And now you can just sort of...
identify a minority identify a vulnerable community
that cannot have much pushback had used them
politically and it's been unfortunately very
effective so let's move on to the next aspect
of it uh mental colonization you mentioned a
couple of thinkers or historians who've worked
on this and they explored how empire lived and
lives in the mind shaping desires self -image
and what is seen to be civilized or polished
like even today in india there are certain activities
or certain things that you do that classify you
as a sophisticated upper class rich person but
they're inherently very british drinking chai
in india very common people drink chai on the
side of the road But when you have high tea,
it's suddenly when it gets really fancy. Still
the same thing, but it's all in the mind. So
how would we look at those activities today and
look at what these thinkers have to say about
it and then maybe be aware of or adapt? Yeah,
so Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, we talked about already a
little bit. would make the argument of trying
to actually rid the society of that practice
and use, and by practice, I mean using consumption
of a given good as a metric to status. So that's
part of the colonial, that's the relationship,
right? So the chai is the chai, but if you change
the context in which it's being drunk, then suddenly
you can start making class and status assumptions
and associations, right? And so I think that's,
you know, that would be the target is that try
to get rid of that relationship, which would
be difficult, right? Which would be difficult
and would take probably decades, if not centuries,
right? But that would be the sort of the long
game. Fanon would make an argument really about
going, what he says, going to the people. right,
going to the masses and not thinking about what
he calls colonized intellectuals, of which he
is one, but that he believes that the colonized
intellectual is a little bit too indebted and
therefore sympathetic to the presuppositions
of the colonial ruler, that they don't even sort
of challenge them, that this wouldn't even, a
question like that wouldn't even come up for
them, right? It wouldn't even be on their radar.
But if you go to the chaiwala, right, and speak
with them and about their everyday life and the
sort of consumptive activities of the laborers
that come and so on, you could then say, well,
this is actually something that's popular in
the French sense. It's coming from the masses
or it's coming from the people, right? And if
that's then the case, sure, the British might
have made tea and opium plantations and done
all these terrible things and so on, but it's
been integrated into the everyday life. And it's
a pause from labor. It's a way to talk to your
friends. It's a way to be with family. All of
those things, it makes certain types of social
life possible, right? And if that's then the
case, you know, there's not a problem with it.
Yes. But they would both agree that making distinctions
based on consumptive habits to then put human
beings in a hierarchy, that's fundamentally what's
colonial about it. Interesting. Yeah, they've
always had a policy of, well, divide and rule.
And that's how you do that. Yeah, yeah. And look,
we can just talk about the Indian case. They
found it a little bit easier precisely because
of the caste system. Yes. Right? So that they
further weaponized the caste system, let me put
it that way. It's a myth that the British, like,
they didn't invent it, but that they fully mobilized
it where it hadn't been, you know. It was there,
they just made it worse. Yeah, it's been there.
Sometimes it's been. fairly neutral, and sometimes
it's been really malevolent. In the British case,
you know, again, it's a sort of fundamental mystery.
They saw the caste system and they saw, aha,
we have a class system. You know, we understand
that, right? And therefore we can make these
distinctions. And what about the Africans in
France? Yeah, so there, you know, there's the
interesting thing there is that many of the North
Africans who end up in France, especially the
first generation, even though, you know, they
eventually learn French and so on, but they make
efforts to try to assimilate to a certain degree.
Okay. And, you know, they wear French clothing
and they speak French in the home. They want
their children to speak French, et cetera, et
cetera. And they're still rejected. by the official
policies of the French state, right? So it's
not even just a sort of de facto rejection by
the society, but there's explicit policy by the
French state that hopes to further segregate
them. And so the response has been interesting
because generations later, you've got a sort
of turn to Islam and a turn to learning Arabic
and things like that, things that hadn't been
taught in the home. precisely because of the
produced social isolation of these communities,
right? So whereas there was a kind of a window
where, let's call it, a more benevolent or benign
kind of integration was possible, this happened
during colonialism. So these groups were still
thought of as fundamentally other and need to
be reminded as such in the metropole. So hence,
they had a separate police for them. There was
obvious neighborhoods where they weren't welcome
and where they should be. There were buildings
that were built for them that were then concierged
by former French paratroopers who had done their
work in Indochina and Algeria during the wars
and so on, and who were thought to know the natives
the best and so on. So there was a sort of very
concerted effort to mark the line of difference.
between these peoples while keeping the line
of French Republican universalism, which doesn't
quite work. Yeah, I was just thinking, I mean,
for all we've studied about Germany and Nazis,
the French fought it, but it sounds very similar
to the Gestapos and exactly what they fought
against. That's a good point. So Fanon's teacher,
Aimé Césaire, also from Martinique. great poet
of the 20th century and then becomes a politician
in Martinique itself. He made this argument in
a short pamphlet called The Discourse on Colonialism.
And he basically said that Nazism, Hitlerism
was so objectionable and people were so repulsed
by it is because they were doing colonialism
in Europe against white people rather. than in
Asia, South America, and Africa, where it was
seen as perfectly permissible to do such things.
Because when you look at most forms of colonialism,
it's basically racist authoritarianism. Pretty
much. That there's different sets of rules. There's
a definition of difference in order to rule people
differently, right? So, yeah, the French did
it a lot, and they did it for a long time. And
then, of course, we do have to remember that
there were a number of French that were all too
willing to collaborate with the Nazis, as there
were with a number of other countries in Europe,
which tells us something. Including one of the
former British monarchs. Yeah. Oh, yeah, of course.
Of course. And, you know, significant portions
of the British aristocracy in general, various
lords and so on. But if you can go all around
Europe, this is one thing to remember about empire
is that. all empires require local collaborators
for them to actually operate. Unfortunately,
the Nazis found many willing collaborators. And
the argument, Césaire's argument, is that they
were prepped for that precisely because of the
history of European imperialism. That's one to
think about. So the French, they famously say
that The race stuff is all Anglo -American. We
don't do race, right? We maybe have a history
of religion and religious persecution and stuff
like that, but that's precisely why we have laicite
and secularism in our laws. We've sort of mastered
the church and all that. But when you actually
look at the colonial record, there's race laws
all over that colonial record. In some cases,
it's very explicit. The Black Code is very explicit.
In other cases, it's more muted where they're
talking about French Muslims of Algeria, which
is a category of citizenship. But it's not just
French. There's all these other add -ons, right?
So they're French, but not quite. They're French
with an asterisk. And what that ends up meaning
is that they're treated differently by society
and the state. That's unfortunate. A while back,
you mentioned how acts of what could be perceived
as colonial influence are now becoming popular.
So looking at, let's say, Senegal and hip hop
or Bollywood in India or a specific type of literature
in the Caribbean, I can't remember the name of
it. Do these still carry the colonial ghosts
with them? Or is this a sort of individual step
out saying this is inherently Indian or this
is inherently Caribbean or this is we're breaking
out of colonialism? Well, it depends on what
we're talking about. What, you know, what type
of Bollywood film. Yeah. Right. You know, so
in one, you know, Lagan, there's like there's
these anti -colonial, you know, messages built
into some of these films. Right. So but in the
end, this is for a commercial enterprise and
it's really about making money. You mentioned
that because I'm in an Indian cinema class this
semester and one of the perspectives we looked
at was. This isn't anti -colonial. It's pro -Indian.
What? And it's basically about looking at the
unity of everybody. And it's not talking about
the British, but inherently they are doing that.
Yeah. So, look, one thing to think about is that
the British Empire produced modern India. Oh,
yeah. Right. So that in much the same way that
the world was brought together in a very... unfair
and unfortunate way but it was brought together
by colonialism in the same way india was brought
together by british colonialism uh through newspapers
railroads and things like that these sort of
far reaches of india where the lingua franca
ended up being english because the tamilians
don't speak hindi and vice versa and so on right
so that the idea of india as one thing is actually
almost as far as we know, has to go through colonialism
for that to even be an idea, right? So even the
call for Indian unity will forever rely upon
that history. Colonialism, yeah. We had so many
Maharajas and districts. Yeah, yeah. It was never
united. Yeah, and even during British rule, there
were still a lot of technicalities of sort of
principalities and stuff like that that were
notionally independent. even before, even post
-1757 to 1857, that period there was a period
of, you know, consolidation of power that was
still highly fragmented. So, you know, any call
for the total unity of India is fundamentally
a colonial idea because it's talking about anti,
it's responding, it's a dialectical response
to colonialism. Anti -colonial nationalism is
a response to that. Had there not been British
colonialism or colonialism at all, we might be
talking about many different countries in this
vast land. Yeah, that is something we have to
give to them. They did whip it together well
at whatever horrible cost. At far too high a
cost, right? And it's not even like this is a
net positive or whatever. It's a brute fact,
right? It's an inescapable fact that you have
to recognize. You know, one way is about thinking
about, I don't know, decolonization for me is,
it's a tough word. I like to think more of like
going beyond colonialism, right? Because full
decolonization, well, where do we end there,
right? Because the Mughals came and colonized
as well. I mean, we can just layer upon layer.
There's sort of a vast amount of, especially
in a place like India. A vast amount of political
sedimentation. Different people who, are we going
back to Alexander? You know, I mean, like, how
far are we going here, right? And there were
Indian empires that had as well. You had the
Mauryan Empire. You had Ashoka. You had the Gupta
Empire. I mean, it just goes on. Sure, sure.
And you're right about the sedimentation. It's
suddenly the Mughals have become a part of Indian
history. Yes, there are certain political parties
that would like to rid that and have more. Again,
nationalist context in history. So that's another
way of supposedly decolonizing it. But it's more
accepted that the Mughal Empire is now Indian
history. And then you have colonial history,
which is the British, which, funnily enough,
is not taught in any of the British curricula.
I did the IGCSE myself. They don't mention it.
So interesting that they have left out a huge
part of British history. They don't teach in
A -levels, they don't teach in the O -levels,
nor in the IG. Wow. That's interesting. Yeah.
So this is what I'm talking about, is that the
colonial fact has yet to be fully confronted.
Yeah. Right? So if you haven't confronted that,
and if there hasn't been a wide -ranging conversation
with many participants and many perspectives,
what exactly are we decolonizing? Yeah. Right?
I think that's... you know it it becomes well
whatever the person who's shouting the word says
it is whoever has the loudest voice and on a
very superficial level we're decolonizing but
it's it's more about tokenism and the danger
of that right like okay we replaced a statue
we put up an indian leader over there or we changed
the name of a road from uh Better Road did some
long name, which I have no idea what it is. Or
we changed the name of the train stations. Okay,
great, you're doing that, but it's still at a
very superficial level. And like we spoke about
earlier, it's more about the symbolic, less about
the structural efforts on a... I wouldn't even
say a global decolonization movement, right?
Because you can... There are so many countries
of the Commonwealth that you can't get rid of.
You can't get rid of the fact that... It happened,
but you can, like we spoke about, revamp it,
integrate it into your own society or make it
your own and move on. But it's still at a very
superficial level. We haven't begun to fully
understand the depths of colonization and what
a decolonized future would look like. Yeah, I
mean, in terms of the question of tokenism, again,
to a certain extent, there has to be some of
that because you need... the pioneering people
who are in these positions and so on, who have
been systematically shut out, right? So those
are achievements. I don't want to say that those
mean nothing, right? But if it remains at that,
they remain just symbolic achievements. And as
time passes, they can then be mobilized to perpetuate
the status quo. And if you think the status quo
needs amending, that's a dangerous thing to alight
upon because then you just have this sort of
plausible deniability, but look, we've had, we
had a black president, so racism's over, you
know, that sort of thing, right? So you can make
such pronouncements and people do, I mean, and
it ends up being quite effective. So my kind
of mantra here is that the reckoning with the
past, there's, I'm going to mess up the line,
but there's a line from James Baldwin. It goes
something like this. Not all things that are
faced can be kind of transcended, but you can't
transcend anything until you face it, right?
So that hasn't happened, right? That has not
happened. And if anything, there's been the reverse,
which has been the purification of the colonial
adventure, if you like, as something that is
positive, that... the British and the French
and the Dutch and so on should be proud of, and
they've been made to feel bad about it. But actually,
there were these sort of humanitarian aspects
to it, right? I think that's the wrong direction
to go. Unfortunately, that seems to be the direction
most societies are going in. Even if you're talking
about like reparations and stuff, I saw this
really ridiculous thing that there's this British
reporter who's saying, if a country can afford
to put their flag on the moon, we shouldn't be
giving them and helping them out with finances
and stuff. The trillions of dollars worth of
stuff that has been taken away, one, I don't
think they can afford to give the money back
as such. Like they can't afford to just pick
up a bunch of trillion dollars and just give
it back to India. Two, I think maybe just too
corrupt in India now to do that. What will they
do with the money? Yeah, well, I mean, I think
there's in the question of reparations is, It's
a very dangerous one for the former colonial
masters, right? Because if, especially at the
national level, right? So different sort of regions
and municipalities have done this across the
former metropolitan world, let's call it that.
But it's never been adopted by the national state
because that is a precedent. Once that precedent
comes, there's going to be a lot of people knocking
on the doors, right? To a certain extent, I understand
why they would be reticent to do this for their
own finances, for the political blowback that
would come. National pride. Yeah, yeah. And the
amount of people balking at this in domestic
politics would be huge. The flip side is, of
course, that if you go to law school, one of
the first classes you take. is something called
torts, right? Which is just the French for wrongs,
right? And, you know, so when you've been wronged,
you take somebody to court and usually, you know,
it's civil compensation, right? You get the civil
compensation. Well, we have records for a lot
of this stuff, right? I mean, there's a lot of
torts that happened and it's pretty easy. So
when people say, well, how much, how would we
distribute it? It was like, well, we have. a
process for that actually pre -existing in our
court system to adjudicate that. And this would
just be a matter of scaling and mobilizing researchers
who are specialists in certain regions, stuff
like that, to do the tabulations of, you know,
measuring labor extracted or resource extraction,
whatever it may be. It could all be done. It's
just a matter of political will, right? So I
think I always just say that reparations have
happened already. it's just that the slave owners
got the reparations for their loss of property
right so that the british crown made the slave
owners whole after in the 1830s they banned slavery
and it was half the crown's wealth for one year
that they handed over to former slave owners
Haiti, who famously had not only a democratic
revolution an anti -colonial revolution an anti
-slavery revolution but also an anti -racist
revolution, they were rewarded for that with
basically an indemnity to pay until 1944 to the
French for effectively loss of property by their
slave colony, right? So whenever you're wondering
why Haiti is the poorest country in the Western
hemisphere, it was meant to be by such policies.
There's a clear logic there, right? So those
reparations have happened, right? Reparations
from colonialism and slavery have happened. just
not in the direction you think they might have
gone. Yeah. And of late, there's been talk of
the British museums and them lending out or having
like a timeshare sort of thing where they'd be
like, okay, the Kohinoor spent six months in
India, six months here, or even with the Greek
statues, they tried that for a while. So there
are some efforts being taken to kind of give
back, but not really give back in... in the form
that they can give back things that were taken
or acknowledged, at least on the side of the
government. Fun fact, the British government
has never apologized for Jallianwala Bagh. They've
just expressed their sympathies or their empathy
towards the situation. So I think you can start
with an apology. I think that would be a great
way to look at that. But let's shift direction
a little bit here. So something, and I hope I'm
not outing you on this, your students may not
know is that you are also a DJ. Oh, yeah. Okay.
Yeah, sure. And that you, you're into various
kinds of music, especially vinyl. And looking
at your experience as a historian and now along
with music, let's look at music and the arts
as a sort of voice either for or against colonialism.
and how the arts can play a role in a potentially
decolonized future. Now, I've heard of instances
of freedom songs in Algeria being sung, or underground
techno at protest movements. From your knowledge
of both these fields, where would you say the
arts have, what role do the arts have to play
in decolonizing? Yeah, I mean, they have a massive
role, right? Because this is precisely why colonists,
modern colonialism, focused on the indigenous
cultures to try to either suppress them, segregate
them, certainly make them appear a second tier
because they understood that cultural identification,
cultural pride does not make a docile subject.
Right. So, so, um, you know, I think culture
is, is supremely important. Um, and it can. have
an effect, I think, in movements for anti -colonialism.
In movements of decolonization, such as we're
talking about it, right? So, you know, we're
after colonialism, but the colonial mentalities
and practices are still there. So how do we rid
ourselves of those? I think that's a different
thing. So with anti -colonialism, there's a very
sort of clear distinction between friends and
enemies right so that we know that this is the
enemy um and it's reflected in the lyrics and
stuff like that of the songs that come out with
decolonization what that would look like would
that then mean um the french rapper does not
rap in french but they rap and say arabic but
they are living in france but they're rapping
in Arabic and they've just shrunk their audience.
And so who's listening, right? So this is fundamentally
the question that anti -colonial writers were
dealing with in the 40s and 50s, which is that,
do I want to have the largest platform possible
in order to get my ideas out? And that usually
means acknowledging the fact that the native
languages of my region have been crushed. And
what's left is English or French or something
like that. Some people opted for that, right?
So Chinua Achebe, things fall apart. He had a
big debate with Thiong'o about this because Thiong'o
was basically saying, no, no, no, we have to
step away. Achebe is saying, no, there's not,
you know, the other aspect of colonialism is
the miseducation of our people and therefore
our native languages weren't taught. And the
schooling was, you know, was not a focus. And
therefore, I want to be able to speak not only
to those who are in power in my country, but
then sort of the global stage. And therefore,
you know, global English is the language that
has to be embraced. It's a strategic decision.
I don't think there's a right or wrong take.
I mean, there's good moral and political arguments
on both sides of that, which I find attractive.
But I think, you know, let's say music. Music
is tricky because if it's not an obvious colonial
master, right, you're basically trying to tell
your listener, first of all, you have to believe
me that there is this colonial shadow being cast
on our society. and that my song has lyrics attacking
it. And by the way, my song's really catchy,
right? And you like it, right? And so often with
especially music these days, the last part comes
first because musicians are just struggling.
And so the commodification part becomes quite
important. And if it doesn't, the audience is
very small. So this is, you know, one of those
sort of tensions of art and commerce that I think
could end up defanging, let's call it, decolonizing
music, right? Or one that self -styles itself
that way. It's possible, but I don't know. From
history, I think, you know, there's also a lot
of projection from the present that, oh, well,
we look back at, say, like the 60s. And, you
know, what is the music that they were listening
to then? It's like The Doors and Creedence Clearwater
Revival with some anti -war songs and stuff like
that. Right. OK, sure. Fine. But that was just
a tiny element of what people were listening
to then. Yeah. And so the idea that this was
the soundtrack of the revolution, I think, might
be a little bit misguided and might be. us wishing
it was that way where it was not necessarily
that way there's a whole literature from really
the 10s onward 1910s through the 1970s which
i would just describe as sort of anti -colonial
literature which you know you know it's become
canonical in various ways but it in also in the
worst ways that people refer to it but they don't
read it um you know so i think Everybody from
Gandhi to Césaire to Fanon to Amílcar Cabral
There's a number of people who should be read
deeply, slowly, and carefully because they actually
have a lot to say about right now, even though
they've been writing about a century ago at this
point. What would it be? So I guess one big thing
is that before you can have something like decolonization,
we have to look at colonialism in the face and
fully understand it in order to properly decolonize,
should that ever happen. And it's definitely
more than just barbaric acts of breaking statues
and defacing monuments. burning books and tearing
up pieces of art, it goes on to a much deeper
level, I would say. It's something that we can't
necessarily break away from. We just sometimes
have to adapt. Some things we can get rid of,
but some things I think you just have to adapt
and move on because it happened. Yeah. I mean,
I think the major point here is that the purpose
to study this stuff is to think about the social
relationships and norms that it produced. that
we often unconsciously reproduce. And then to
think about that is like, do we want to reproduce
it? Maybe we do, maybe we don't, but we can only
have a thoughtful understanding of it once we've
done the proper analysis of what thing colonialism
actually was. Yeah. And just to be aware that
activities in our day -to -day life that may
not seem to be influenced by colonialism is just
something that we're doing. might have colonial
roots. So think about that. Be aware about that.
And that's some homework for you guys and all
our listeners to do. Thank you so much for joining
us. Thanks. That was fun. This was a very interesting
conversation. And that brings us to the end of
our episode. Thank you so much for monkeying
around with us. Stay tuned for the next episode
of the Monkey Mind Lab.