(AIA Interviews) Dr Kerry Sinanan - Palestine, the Caribbean, and International Solidarity - Preview (2024)

Ian Anderson: So because we never got around to it, I forgot. I do want to go ahead and let everyone know where you can find more of Carrie's works. She is currently finishing a new edition of The History of Mary Prince 1831. Be on the lookout for that. There are also multiple articles that she's written and an interview that she's done with the artist King Cobra. All of this can be found in the podcast description. Thank you so much for listening. I appreciate you all. so much rich stuff from Caribbean and Windrush people contributing and there's such a rich archive there and I just wonder where those spaces have really gone now at least like my understanding it's this question of like what the digital archive is going to stay like right exactly I think people don't know and they're taking a few things for granted which is a bit worrying When I try to look things up, very often these sites that build themselves as archives, I can crash them by downloading one thing, which really speaks to how fragile the existing UI is and just the backend and system and everything. They can't handle overload, but these are things that keep all this alive. Yeah.

Kerry Sinanan: Yeah. Yeah. And also who ultimately owns it and that change, like, you know, as we're constantly seeing with platforms and I like this, this is great. I was nervous being on screen and I've done a fair amount of it with teaching on online since the pandemic.

Ian Anderson: So I did want to welcome on to the Anti-Imperialist Archive. My name is Ian Anderson. I am the main editor behind the show. I want to bring you on because I really do think that your field is important to understanding colonialism because the Caribbean is the birthplace of a lot of anti-colonial revolution right now running parallel to the current genocide situation. So it's a lot, right? Where I want to start, if you don't mind introducing yourself, what you do, your field of study.

Kerry Sinanan: Sure. I'm Kerry Synanon. I'm assistant professor here at the University of Winnipeg, but I'm also academic who's moved around a fair bit. some of the reasons for that are connected to my area of study which are to do with race and capitalism diaspora and so i have actually taught and studied in trinidad ireland the united kingdom i my last job was in the university of texas system where i had to leave recently because of the new laws that are just eliminating critical race studies african-american studies ethnic studies firing anybody who's worked in any DEI programming. So I am here at the University of Winnipeg. My primary focus, I suppose, would be understood as the Black Atlantic, which was a term that Paul Gilroy wrote the book The Black Atlantic in the late 90s. It's a sort of spatial, temporal and theoretical space all at once to invoke the culture of the between Africa, the Americas, the United Kingdom, Britain, and to try and open up that as a space of cultural production and resistance. And that's been enormously helpful to me as somebody who was really only given a choice to follow a path of disciplinary study through 18th century studies, which is possibly one of the most white supremacist areas of study you can find. And so I decided to study the Caribbean, which is my home. I'm from Trinidad and to focus on the history of slavery, but also the history of enslavement. to make white enslavery my subject of my focus as much as enslaved people.

Ian Anderson: Something I like immediately thought about not to get sidetracked, right, is that Walter Rodney, he followed this very similar path. He was Jamaica, he was teaching the Rostas. And so this put him on the map with the government. He once went to a conference in Canada prior to being able to come back he was actually banned from coming back to the country so that then forced a move to the UK which is where he did his first lecture series that was turned into a book that was on the uh USSR it's not an an uncommon thing for like fugitive academic to like emerge out of this ongoing project and and and CLR James who Rodney was close to you know Franz Fanon

Kerry Sinanan: the Sylvia Winter you know this is the thing we were technically British subject I mean I happened to have been born in Canada strangely enough because because my own father who's Trinidadian was studying as a doctor but I returned to Trinidad as a baby this is the pathway we were still you know my father was born as a British subject because under the Commonwealth 1945 Commonwealth Act All British subjects, all people in the colonies became British subjects. And we see this now still playing out with the Windrush. Sylvia Windrush has a term called colonial abduction. For many of us, we are inside the system from the very, very beginning, but always at odds with it and always, always also not outside. You know, if you're thinking of how one develops an anti-imperial perspective, for many of us, it's never been a development. It's just been an immediate state given to us. And just then that pressure that hopefully we can put on the system, which is, as James said, centre the Caribbean experience, because for Rodney, for James, for Fanon, winter, European modernity, in inverted commas, if we want to use it, there cannot be understood fully without the Caribbean. And I suppose as I'm speaking, I'm very conscious that the Caribbean is currently being ravaged by Hurricane Beryl. And that is a historical event that is entirely related to the very first plantations established by the British in Barbados in the 1600s, the deforestation of the long bearded

Ian Anderson: big trees the plantation economy that drove Europe you know we're here 500 years later 400 years later and those those effects are still happening and they are economic and historical and will have deep effects on people's lives we've seen entire like islands now completely going underwater and and that's just just in the last like few years there's this idea that Walter Rodney carries about of the guerrilla intellectual which you know that's that's something that like Fred Moten has has conversation with in in the under common we should absolutely see the school as like proper place of work right but we can also see it as a hedge fund as like this kind of rogue community displaced from the people when the goal of that displaced education is to then take that back into the community and bring it home to the people yeah the responsibility you know what is the responsibility of the intellectual so many

Kerry Sinanan: figures that we're discussing ask that question and it's to resist the incredible force to become assimilated there are sort of two choices I feel like there's a constant energy to expel you of course Walter Rodney was in the end blown up by a bomb Burnham directly responsible so these are not laughing

Ian Anderson: His brother blamed his family. They actually live here in Atlanta. And they've been trying to get, I guess, like justice for this case for years and years. They do a yearly symposium. And so when you go, one of the, I guess, like neat things about it is that there's ever-present, omnipresent knowledge, the weight of what's going on in this room with these people, right? Because like there's his wife and there's his daughter, right? And they're talking about his brother only just got free, spending decades for his death in jails.

Kerry Sinanan: You know, as you're talking, one thing that strikes me is if we think of Moten and Robin G. Kelly and others picking up on Caribbean thought via Rodney and others, it is this need for linking the Caribbean to diaspora and for these ideas, energies and resistances to cross the very, very, very recent formations of the nation state. My own background is East Indian Caribbean. My family came from Uttar Pradesh into indentured labour and very quickly emerged out of that system as well. You know, I think of also the Black British movement of the 60s and 70s, where Black was a capacious term for Sri Lankans, Bangladeshis, Pakistani, Indian, Caribbean, African people, because there was a real common cause there. And the term Black was being used in Britain in that very, very broad sense in a very different way. to how black is wielded through the legal system, North America, for example. You know, it's so sad, as you said, these are living, living histories. You know, we can also think of the victims of the move bombing Philadelphia. The state will go to these absolutely terroristic, extreme measures to eliminate dissent, resistance, streams of thought and completely get away with it. it's quite astounding and so that you know there's a real need to for us not to get siloed and to keep making connections and for me that's really what's so important about black atlantic and caribbean work is that the caribbean you know even just from a geographic point of view is a little network of islands you know from its colonization it was never not connected to global uh history and economics and and somehow as we even as we're seeing with the hurricane it's it's It's been relegated to this marginal, tiny marginal position as if it's just a place to go on holiday. And that's a tragedy. And it's a deliberate mistelling of the true story of why the Caribbean and each island, you know, I don't want to generalize either because each island has so much history. It's so important.

Ian Anderson: You have this knowledge of the West Bank of this place where it also exists in that same kind of island format, right? Because it's more settlements are there, more settlements are made. These people and places are all pushed into further camp, but they're all still connected. They're all still part of one another. Yes, the violence is to a degree lessened or lesser on purpose, right? Because like you still have a siege of Grimala, you still have these like deeply violent events that crop up, but they don't treat it the same way. It is still there.

Kerry Sinanan: Yeah, I mean, well, do you know, one thing I want to say is one of these effects of colonial abduction is that we are kind of dislocated from our own history in so many multiple ways. And this is something that every... Caribbean academic really talks about Jamaica Kincaid writes about it you know not the not being taught and in fact a lot of my English courses I open with William Wordsworth's daffodils and I talk about how Jamaica Kincaid had to recite that poem and has an allergic reaction to having had to read this poem about flowers she knows nothing daffodils has never seen them and the way that's really symbolic of that disconnection so you know if you're educated my father went to the same place that james and all went to i did my primary education in saint bernadette's i was taught by irish nuns and so in a way that history of trinidad is already marked as wrong as not real or is even not existent and we're taught British history and so that when I went to Ireland and down to Trinity College Dublin on a scholarship you know I had my Tudor history I had all my Western canon and again James talks about this in Beyond a Boundary we have the double I don't know if it's the same as double consciousness but we know both cultures or we have to come to reclaim our own it's very very difficult and actually for me it's been really painful because when you're in exile it's almost the message is this is not your history actually you don't get a claim to it and I actually think of a lot of my Palestinian friends especially students here in Canada who have never been to Palestine whose families had to leave after the Nakba the first Nakba in 48 and that pain of never having seen your home now of course I did see my home but also I haven't been able to visit for a very long time and even you know one's family one's upwardly aspiring family wants you to learn the West and its ways. And so there's, and even if we think of in the national formations of the Caribbean, the space given to indigenous peoples is tiny, you know, and again, as if they've disappeared, as if they don't exist. And so reclaim, you know, I can't say I'm an expert on Trinidad at all. And what I'm trying to do in pedagogy and in my own work is to draw on the belief that your lived experience and your memories and even your childhood memories are a legitimate site and archive of knowledge. And I learned that from teaching in Texas at the Borderlands where testimonial is a Borderlands genre that centers lived experience as knowledge as an archive and that also the testimony resists like the confessionalism of the individual it's much more on part of a community on behalf of a community but then again like Stuart Hall talks about this all the time he says I am both Jamaican and not Jamaican at the same time he says in Familiar Stranger I am of Jamaica but I you know am i really jamaican but i'm always jamaican and it's that constant movement and i really identify with that so we maybe one of the things that we can say is typically caribbean is that constant need to learn refine reclaim tell and assert that a lot of what caribbean this is is a loss

Ian Anderson: people that I know it's it's something that they carry with them constantly it's it's something that like if you know this this person that's going to be one of the first things that you know about them which I think is really just a great kind of thing you know um there's this deep lack of wanting to assimilate wanting to become part of this like American project this is something that comes up a lot when I talk about I guess like culture right the U.S.'s a blank slate in terms of what culture actually is. It's just that everyone else is the culture and it is precisely the melting pot of all these things because it has entrapped them and brought them all here or made that so that it must happen that way. And so especially with the border, especially down by Texas and the Southwest, you have a bunch of Native tribes, a bunch of Native people, Native older people. That's their land. That is where they belong. That's their place. people. It all flows in with each other. You meet a multi-generational family of three to four different people. You've got the great-grandchildren, you've got the great-grandchildren, great-grandparents, then the great-grandparents, all in the same household. It's not that they can or can't write a book about this kind of experience but they've never been given that chance to and all these people are working all these jobs just just to keep it going on on the res like a stake is ninety dollars on the res if if you're not driving two to three hours to get to flagstaff out of like the danae res you are dropping hundreds of dollars just to buy something yeah exactly you know this is and and one thing i learned about living in the borderlands also was just even my own

Kerry Sinanan: students who have indigenous family members, but other family members really encourage the umbrella identity of Latina, Latina, Latinx over indigenous identities or