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I wonder if it is being of mixed heritage that makes me feel more connected to my Alaskan community, because the perspectives of indigenous people today are inevitably those of mixed heritages; after colonisation we were all straddling two worlds, all putting effort into learning our own cultures and languages - and often feeling guilty about it.

Anti-Black racism has only increased in Algeria with the arrival of tens of thousands of sub-Saharan Black, largely clandestine, migrants over the last two decades, who enter Algeria for educational or economic opportunities, or more often, to travel through the country en route to Europe.

20-25% of Algerians are native Amazigh speakers (Tamazight), and many more are Arabized Amazighs. The indigenous Amazighs have been struggling for equality since independence against a state determined to impose an Arab Muslim identity on the country’s entire population

Amazigh activists have challenged the state’s assertion of Arab-Muslim homogeneity. Amazigh activism, in the form of mass protests and the undertakings of Amazigh-dominated political parties and civil society organizations, has pressured the state to constitutionally accept Amazigh identity as one of the components of Algerian identity, integrate the Amazigh language in secondary education, and recognize the Amazigh language as a national and later an official language of the state, in addition to Arabic

Black people, who were present in southern Algeria even before the 13- century-long  trans-Saharan slave trade, can be considered to be as indigenous to Algeria as the Amazigh population.

following a regional trend to repress diversity issues, the Algerian government has never taken a census to ascertain the total number of Algerian black citizens in the country, most of whom remain concentrated in the Saharan south. Ninety-one percent of the Algerian population lives along the Mediterranean coast on 12% of the country's total land mass.

Because most black Algerians are scattered in the vast southern Sahara, an area of the country about which many Algerians are not familiar, white Algerians may be only dimly aware, if aware at all, that they have black compatriots.25Ouzani, op.cit. Certainly, many black Algerians have reported that they face incredulity when claiming their national identity in northern Algeria at police roadblocks, airports, and even in doing everyday ordinary things like responding to a request for the time, “When I walk in the street and someone wants to ask me the time, he does it in French, convinced that he is dealing with a Nigerien or a Chadian, a way of indicating that an Algerian cannot be black.”

When Algerians think of “racial” discrimination, it is likely that they first think of the treatment Algerian Arabs and Amazighs received at the hands of the French during the colonial period (1830-1962), and afterwards in France.27Kamel Daoud, “Black in Algeria? Then You’d Better be Muslim” The New York Times, May 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/opinion/kamel-daoud-black-in-algeria-then-youd-better-be-muslim.html . See also Seloua Luste Boulbina, “Si tu desires te Moquer du Noir: Habille-le en rouge”, Middle East Eye, 24 November 2018. https://www.middleeasteye.net/fr/opinion-fr/si-tu-desires-te-moquer-du-noir-habille-le-en-rouge-0 The debate over Algeria as a post-colonial society has been fully engaged. However, in another sign of the invisibility of Algeria’s black citizens, consideration of Algeria as a post-slave society – and what that means for black Algerians today – has not

elites were also leaders of Third Worldism, and officially believed in pan-Africanism. Ahmed Ben Bella, Algeria’s first post-independence president, declared in Accra, Ghana, in 1963: “It was the imperialists who tried to distinguish between the so-called white and black Africans.”

in Saharan areas, the slave trade continued throughout the period of French settler colonialism (1830-1962)

Arab-Berber whites constructed an economy that relied on black slave labour from their Haratins (enslaved or recently freed Islamicized and Arabized Blacks, who are still susceptible to forced labour practices).31These ambiguously freed black slaves in Saharan areas of Algeria are also called Bella or Ikelan if they were enslaved by Amazighs, including Tuaregs. Today Haratins, mostly sharecroppers, work under harsh labour conditions that some have described as a modern form of slavery, they “dig and tend wells, excavate and maintain the underground channels of foggara, irrigate gardens, tend to flocks, and cultivate dates”.32Benjamine Claude Brower, “Rethinking Abolition in Algeria,” Cahier D’etudes Africaines 49, 2009 Some argue that without the labour of enslaved Black people, the Sahara would never have been habitable at all.33Ibid. The arduous and relentless work to irrigate in a desert includes digging channels tens of feet into the sand with the risk of being drowned under it.

The French accommodated slavery in the Algerian Sahara more than anywhere else. Slave masters and merchants were given permission to trade in slaves and keep those they owned well into the twentieth century.35Ibid. In exchange, slavers and merchants provided intelligence on far-off regions to colonial authorities

there is reason to believe that enslaved black people continue to be exploited for agricultural work in the southern oases of Ouargla and Ghardaia provinces to this day (among wealthy families, owners of large palm trees, fields, and farms) and in some instances among semi-nomadic Tuareg

The Algerian state has never adopted any policies, including any affirmative action policies, to help their black community emerge from the impact of generations of servitude and brutalization.40Brower, op.cit. Instead, it has sought to legitimize the country’s white Arab-Muslim identity only

descendants of freed Black slaves (Haratins) in Saharan regions of Algeria often remain dependent upon former “masters.” Most work as sharecroppers in conditions similar to slavery

Black Algerians also face discrimination in urban areas of the country. They encounter the same racist attitudes and racial insults as any other person with dark skin within Algerian borders.

Either by their colour, k’hal, which is twisted into kahlouche (blackie), mer ouba (charcoal), guerba kahla (a black gourd to hold water made out of goatskin), nigro batata (big nose that resembles a potato), haba zeitouna (black olive), babay (nigger), akli (Black slave in some Berber areas), rougi  (redhead or Swedish to imply that the black person is culturally and socially white, as everyone must want to be), saligani (from Senegal) 46Khiat, op.cit., Calling black Algerians Saligani (from Senegal) has a different history. It refers back to the early decades of the 20th century when the French utilized black West-African soldiers in their colonial army to do the dirty work of colonialization, including brutalizing members of the population that resisted French rule, taking food from farmers, and rape. or by direct references to past servile status: hartani (dark black slave or ex-slave forced to work outside the master’s house), khadim (servant), ouacif (domestic slave), ‘abd (slave), ‘abd m’cana (stinky black slave).47Ibid. Using these terms against a black Algerian passerby establishes difference, contempt, strangeness, rejection, distance, and exclusion

In addition to racial insults, a black Algerian academic has noted, “Our community continues to symbolize bad luck. Worse: in the stories of grandmothers, we play the bad roles, kidnappers of children, looters, or vagrants. [While Arabs and Berbers can both point to a proclaimed noble history in Algeria] there is no place for a black hero in the collective memory of my people.”

In addition to rejection of interracial marriages, an Algerian intellectual has reported cases of “white” Algerians refusing to room with Blacks or study with them at university

A step forward in reducing Negrophobia, the selection of Khadija Benhamou, a black woman from the Algerian Sahara, as Miss Algeria in 2019 has been marred by the subsequent deluge of posts on social media virulently claiming that she did not represent the beauty of the country, with many direct attacks against the colour of her skin.

Partly due to pressure on Algeria to control its borders from the European Union, Black sub-Saharan African migrants have been vilified by the Algerian government and some of the press;59https://insidearabia.com/algeria-desert-deportations-eu-migration/ accused – usually falsely – of violence, selling drugs, promiscuity, spreading venereal diseases, perpetuating anarchy, and raping Algerian women.

Without irony, some graffiti and social media posts called on the migrants to “Go back to Africa.”

Three generations after independence, the Algerian state is still resisting the open public debate and civil society engagement needed to reflect the country’s pluralism and to begin to reckon with slave legacies and racial discrimination

The freer global capital becomes, the harder national borders become. Colonialism needed to move large populations of people—slaves and indentured labor—to work in mines and on plantations. Now the new dispensation needs to keep people in place and move the money—so the new formula is free capital, caged labor. How else are you going to drive down wages and increase profit margins? Profit is the only constant.

The assertion of ethnicity, race, caste, nationalism, sub-nationalism, patriarchy, and all kinds of identity, by exploiters as well as the exploited, has a lot—but of course not everything—to do with laying collective claim to resources (water, land, jobs, money) that are fast disappearing

So many kinds of entrenched and unrecognized colonialisms still exist. Aren’t we letting them off the hook? Even “Indian English fiction” is, on the face of it, a pretty obvious category. But what does it really mean? The boundaries of the country we call India were arbitrarily drawn by the British. What is “Indian English”? Is it different from Pakistani English or Bangladeshi English? Kashmiri English? There are 780 languages in India, 22 of them formally “recognized.” Most of our Englishes are informed by our familiarity with one or more of those languages. Hindi, Telugu, and Malayalam speakers, for example, speak English differently.

In the Obama years, you had to ferret out information and piece it together to figure out how many bombs were being dropped and how many people were being killed, even as the acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize was being eloquently delivered. However differently their domestic politics plays out on home turf, it is a truism that the Democrats’ foreign policy has tended to be as aggressive as that of the Republicans. But since 9/11, between Bush and Obama, how many countries have been virtually laid to waste?

I don’t think in some of the categories in which your question is posed to me. For example, I don’t understand what a “global” novel is. I think of both my novels as so very, very local. I am surprised by how easily they have traveled across cultures and languages. Both have been translated into more than forty languages—but does that make them “global” or just universal?

I wonder about the term postcolonial. I have often used it, too, but is colonialism really post-?

You once wrote that George W. Bush “achieved what writers, scholars, and activists have striven to achieve for decades. He has exposed the ducts. He has placed on full public view the working parts, the nuts and bolts of the apocalyptic apparatus of the American empire.” What did you mean by this, and ten years and two presidents later, is the American empire’s apocalyptic nature still so transparent?

I recently saw a Malayalam film in the progressive state of Kerala called Abrahaminde Santhathikal (The Sons of Abraham). The vicious, idiot-criminal villains were all black Africans. Given that there is no community of Africans in Kerala, they had to be imported into a piece of fiction in order for this racism to be played out! We can’t pin the blame for this kind of thing on the state. This is society. This is people. Artists, filmmakers, actors, writers—South Indians who are mocked by North Indians for their dark skins in turn humiliating Africans for the very same reason. Mind-bending.

In India today, storytelling is being policed not only by the state, but also by religious fanatics, caste groups, vigilantes, and mobs that enjoy political protection, who burn cinema halls, who force writers to withdraw their novels, who assassinate journalists. This violent form of censorship is becoming an accepted mode of political mobilization and constituency building. Literature, cinema, and art are being treated as though they are policy statements or bills waiting to be passed in Parliament that must live up to every self-appointed stakeholders’ idea of how they, their community, their history, or their country must be represented.

The “managed populations” don’t necessarily think from Ferguson’s managerial perspective. What the managers see as stability, the managed see as violence upon themselves. It is not stability that underpins empire. It is violence. And I don’t just mean wars in which humans fight humans. I also mean the psychotic violence against our dying planet.

The word “empire” has often been invoked as a uniquely European and U.S. problem. Do you see India and other postcolonial nations as adapting older forms of empire in new geopolitical clothing?

How can we think of empire now in the Global South, especially at a time when postcolonial nations are emulating the moral calculus of their old colonial masters?

India transformed from colony to imperial power virtually overnight. There has not been a day since the British left India in August 1947 that the Indian army and paramilitary have not been deployed within the country’s borders against its “own people”: Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland, Assam, Kashmir, Jammu, Hyderabad, Goa, Punjab, Bengal, and now Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand. The dead number in the tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands. Who are these dangerous citizens who need to be held down with military might? They are indigenous people, Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, communists. The pattern that emerges is telling. What it shows quite clearly is an “upper”-caste Hindu state that views everyone else as an enemy. There are many who see Hinduism itself as a form of colonialism—the rule of Aryans over Dravidians and other indigenous peoples whose histories have been erased and whose deposed rulers have been turned into the vanquished demons and asuras of Hindu mythology. The stories of these battles continue to live on in hundreds of folktales and local village festivals in which Hinduism’s “demons” are other peoples’ deities. That is why I am uncomfortable with the word postcolonialism.

When you think about the grandeur of the civil rights movement in the United States, the anti–Vietnam War protests, it makes you wonder whether real protest is even possible any more. It is. It surely is. I was in Gothenburg, Sweden, recently, when the largest Nazi march since World War II took place. The Nazis were outnumbered by anti-Nazi demonstrators, including the ferocious Antifa, by more than ten to one. In Kashmir, unarmed villagers face down army bullets. In Bastar, in Central India, the armed struggle by the poorest people in the world has stopped some of the richest corporations in their tracks. It is important to salute people’s victories, even if they don’t always get reported on TV. At least the ones we know about. Making people feel helpless, powerless, and hopeless is part of the propaganda.

I think we all need to become seriously mutinous

We fool ourselves into believing that the change we want will come with fresh elections and a new president or prime minister at the helm of the same old system. Of course, it is important to bounce the old bastards out of office and bounce new ones in, but that can’t be the only bucket into which we pour our passion

as long as we continue to view the planet as an endless “resource,” as long as we uphold the rights of individuals and corporations to amass infinite wealth while others go hungry, as long as we continue to believe that governments do not have the responsibility to feed, clothe, house, and educate everyone—all our talk is mere posturing.

In certain situations, preaching nonviolence can be a kind of violence. Also, it is the kind of terminology that dovetails beautifully with the “human rights” discourse in which, from an exalted position of faux neutrality, politics, morality, and justice can be airbrushed out of the picture, all parties can be declared human rights offenders, and the status quo can be maintained.

How might we challenge dominant voices, such as Niall Ferguson, who put so much faith in thinking with the grain of empire? On the flipside, how might we speak to liberals who put their faith in American empire’s militarism in a post–9/11 era? Do you see any way out of the current grip of imperial thinking?

we are buying more weapons from Europe and the United States than almost anyone else. So, India, which has the largest population of malnutritioned children in the world, where hundreds of thousands of debt-ridden farmers and farm laborers have committed suicide, where it is safer to be a cow than it is to be a woman, is still being celebrated as one of the fastest growing economies in the world.

I don’t believe that the current supporters of empire are supporters of empire in general. They support the American empire. In truth, captalism is the new empire. Capitalism run by white capitalists. Perhaps a Chinese empire or an Iranian empire or an African empire would not inspire the same warm feelings? “Imperial thinking,” as you call it, arises in the hearts of those who are happy to benefit from it. It is resisted by those who are not. And those who do not wish to be.

Empire is not just an idea. It is a kind of momentum. An impetus to dominate that contains within its circuitry the inevitability of overreach and self-destruction. When the tide changes, and a new empire rises, the managers will change, too. As will the rhetoric of the old managers. And then we will have new managers, with new rhetoric. And there will be new populations who rise up and refuse to be managed.

He’s absolutely right in saying that what draws people into teaching is that they love history or physics, and they want to communicate that love. They don’t love abstract thinking skills; they love the thrill of discovery in their own special field.

I’ve been talking to the RSC about bringing Shakespeare into primary schools

Lessons should celebrate rather than denigrate Britain’s role through the ages, including the Empire. “Guilt about Britain’s past is misplaced.”

Kremlin's broader campaign of pressure on the Crimean Tatar community that includes abductions, arrests, searches and sentences of up to 15 years in jail for alleged "terrorism" and membership in "radical" religious groups

"ethnic genocide conducted to fully colonise the peninsula."

Ukraine's Culture Ministry bristled at "Russia's totalitarian and aggressive policies aimed at destroying ethnic identity and self-identification" of Crimean Tatars and ethnic Ukrainians.

Moscow introduced history textbooks that describe how Crimean Tatars pillaged Russia, enslaved and sold tens of thousands of captives, and obediently served Ottoman sultans - the tsars' archenemies. Meanwhile, Kremlin-controlled media stoke anti-Tatar sentiments

Crimea's location - between the Mediterranean trade outposts, Eurasian steppes and Eastern Europe - attracted Byzantine emperors, Mongol khans and Ottoman sultans. The peninsula's multiethnic population included Turkic-speaking nomads, Greeks, Goths and Armenians. Many accepted Islam, but retained cultural traits such as horticulture and sophisticated, odd-metered music

A century after the 1783 annexation, Crimea became the cradle of Jadidism, a movement for political and cultural reforms among Russian Empire's Muslims. Jadidism's founder Ismail Gasprinsky published Terjiman (Interpreter), a newspaper that reached Siberia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe. His daughter, Shefika, started one of the first magazines for Muslim women, Alemi Nisvan (Women's World)

Crimean Tatars used an adapted Arabic script, but under Joseph Stalin, they had to switch to a Cyrillic script, and their next generation simply could not read their pre-Soviet literature

In 1944, the entire Crimean Tatar community was deported to Central Asia for alleged collaboration with Nazi Germans, and was allowed to return in the late 1980s. Half a century of exile amid a virtual ban on their language further eroded their religious and cultural identity.

Last November, the Kremlin forbade compulsory classes of Tatar, Russia's second-most spoken language and a linguistic sibling of Crimean Tatar, following complaints from the parents of ethnic Russian students in the Volga River province of Tatarstan.

Kremlin's tilt to anti-Western nationalism

Grant was not the first proponent of “race science.” In 1853, across the Atlantic, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, a French count, first identified the “Aryan” race as “great, noble, and fruitful in the works of man on this earth.” Half a century later, as the eugenics movement gathered force in the U.S., “experts” began dividing white people into distinct races. In 1899, William Z. Ripley, an economist, concluded that Europeans consisted of “three races”: the brave, beautiful, blond “Teutons”; the stocky “Alpines”; and the swarthy “Mediterraneans.” Another leading academic contributor to race science in turn-of-the-century America was a statistician named Francis Walker, who argued in The Atlantic that the new immigrants lacked the pioneer spirit of their predecessors; they were made up of “beaten men from beaten races,” whose offspring were crowding out the fine “native” stock of white people. In 1901 the sociologist Edward A. Ross, who similarly described the new immigrants as “masses of fecund but beaten humanity from the hovels of far Lombardy and Galicia,” coined the term race suicide.

What Grant’s work lacked in scientific rigor, it made up for in canny packaging. He blended Nordic boosterism with fearmongering, and supplied a scholarly veneer for notions many white citizens already wanted to believe. Americans’ gauzy idealism blinded them, he argued, to the reality that newcomers from the Mediterranean and eastern Europe—to say nothing of anyone from Asia or Africa—could never hope to possess the genetic potential innate in the nation’s original Nordic inhabitants, which was the source of the nation’s greatness

Reconstruction struggles; U.S. expansion in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii; high levels of immigration—each had raised the specter of white people losing political power and influence to nonwhite people, or to the wrong kind of white people. On Capitol Hill debate raged, yet Republicans and Democrats were converging on the idea that America was a white man’s country, and must stay that way. The influx of foreigners diluted the nation with inferiors unfit for self-government, many politicians in both parties energetically concurred. The Supreme Court chimed in with decisions in a series of cases, beginning in 1901, that assigned the status of “nationals” rather than “citizens” to colonial newcomers

much of the nativist energy in the U.S. came from old-money elites in the Northeast, and was also fueled by labor struggles in the Pacific Northwest, which had stirred a wave of bigotry that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882

In 1917, overriding President Woodrow Wilson’s veto, Congress passed a law that banned immigration not just from Asian but also from Middle Eastern countries and imposed a literacy test on new immigrants

historical amnesia, the excision of the memory of how the seed of racism in America blossomed into the Third Reich in Europe, has allowed Grantism to be resurrected with a new name. In the conflict between the Trump administration and its opponents, those rival American principles of exclusion and pluralism confront each other more starkly than they have since Grant’s own time. And the ideology that has gained ground under Trump may well not disappear when Trump does. Grant’s philosophical framework has found new life among extremists at home and abroad, and echoes of his rhetoric can be heard from the Republican base and the conservative media figures the base trusts, as well as—once again—in the highest reaches of government

the Supreme Court was struggling mightily to define whiteness in a consistent fashion, an endeavor complicated by the empirical flimsiness of race science

In 1923, when an Indian veteran named Bhagat Singh Thind—who had fought for the U.S. in World War I—came before the justices with the claim of being Caucasian in the scientific sense of the term, and therefore entitled to the privileges of whiteness, they threw up their hands. In a unanimous ruling against Thind (who was ultimately made a citizen in 1936), Justice George Sutherland wrote:What we now hold is that the words “free white persons” are words of common speech to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word “Caucasian” only as that word is popularly understood.

The justices had unwittingly acknowledged a consistent truth about racism, which is that race is whatever those in power say it is

Addison Smith, a Republican congressman from Idaho, proudly invoked the Scandinavian, English, Irish, and other northern-European immigrants of his district, highlighting that among them were no “ ‘slackers’ of the type to be found in the cities of the East. We have ample room, but no space for such parasites.”

Nazi lawyers carefully studied how the United States, despite its pretense of equal citizenship, had effectively denied that status to those who were not white. They looked at Supreme Court decisions that withheld full citizenship rights from nonwhite subjects in U.S. colonial territories. They examined cases that drew, as Thind’s had, arbitrary but hard lines around who could be considered “white.”

The Nazis reviewed the infamous “one-drop rule,” which defined anyone with any trace of African blood as black, and “found American law on mongrelization too harsh to be embraced by the Third Reich.”

Senator David Reed of Pennsylvania, who sponsored the 1924 bill in the Senate. A Princeton-educated lawyer, he feared that America was going the way of Rome, where the “inpouring of captives and alien slaves” had caused the empire to sink “into an impotency which made her the prey of every barbarian invader.” This was almost verbatim Grant, whose portrait of Rome’s fall culminated in the lowly immigrants “gradually occupying the country and literally breeding out their former masters.” (His plotline helped him preserve the notion that fair-haired and -skinned people are responsible for all the world’s great achievements: Rome’s original inhabitants were Nordic, but contemporary Italians were descendants of Roman slave races and therefore inferior.)

That nations make decisions about appropriate levels of immigration is not inherently evil or fascist. Nor does the return of Grantian ideas to mainstream political discourse signal an inevitable march to Holocaust-level crimes against humanity. But to recognize the homegrown historical antecedents of today’s rhetoric is to call attention to certain disturbing assumptions that have come to define the current immigration debate in America—in particular, that intrinsic human worth is rooted in national origin, and that a certain ethnic group has a legitimate claim to permanent political hegemony in the United States. The most benignly intentioned mainstream-media coverage of demographic change in the U.S. has a tendency to portray as justified the fear and anger of white Americans who believe their political power is threatened by immigration—as though the political views of today’s newcomers were determined by genetic inheritance rather than persuasion.

External forces have rarely been the gravest threat to the social order and political foundations of the United States. Rather, the source of greatest danger has been those who would choose white purity over a diverse democracy. When Americans abandon their commitment to pluralism, the world notices, and catastrophe follows.

he entered the school of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), a French philanthropic and educational association, where he spent the next seven years absorbing the fundamentals of French language and culture through lessons specially designed to bring Jewish youth of the “Orient” into the modern world

he received a full scholarship to the state-run Lycée Carnot, where for the first time he encountered the steep ladder that organized colonial society: the sons of European settlers at the top, followed by the offspring of the Muslim bourgeoisie, and at the lower rungs,  boys from the “better” Jewish classes. Here Memmi suffered a thousand cuts—from anti-Semitic barbs, to shame about his poverty and lack of social graces.

always the outsider

The stringent adoption of anti-Jewish race laws in Algeria soon followed, and Memmi, along with other Tunisian Jewish students, was dismissed from the university and sent home

When the first American edition appeared in 1965, Memmi dedicated it to “the American Negro,” underscoring Sartre’s point that the colonial oppression described in The Colonizer could easily be mapped onto other situations where one group of people brutally subjugated another.

Memmi continued his studies in sociology and psychology at the Sorbonne, with the aim of acquiring a teaching degree. Certificate in hand, he returned to Tunis, where in addition to his teaching duties, he began to write for newspapers and literary magazines and became a founding contributor to Jeune Afrique

The Pillar of Salt was a sensation because of its emotional intensity and its scenes of native life from the perspective of an oppressed minority. The book had a special éclat among Tunisian Jews, who were experiencing a period of acute existential crisis, caught between remaining in a country where they no longer felt “at home” and migrating elsewhere

Memmi was also helping to define a new genre of “Francophone” literature consisting of works written in French by authors outside of France

moving to France in the autumn of 1956 with his French wife Germaine, the other half of a “mixed marriage” that lasted more than sixty years. His union with a non-Jew was simultaneously unsettling as well as liberating

The Colonizer and the Colonized appeared during the height of the Battle of Algiers, the bloodiest episode in the eight-year-long Algerian war for independence. The book not only created a literary sensation, but it also presented a war-weary French public a framework for understanding the violence of the conflict, as well as foreshadowing its outcome

Tunisia became a battleground between German and Allied forces, and for six months, Tunisian Jews lived under Nazi rule. Young men were rounded up and sent to forced labor camps where they worked under extremely harsh conditions; others were deported to Eastern Europe and never returned. The German army was finally driven out of Tunisia in May 1943. In the intervening months, Memmi made critical transitions. At first, he sat behind a desk keeping track of supplies, but soon he was struck by a bad conscience and volunteered to go to a labor camp, where he found comradeship, purpose, and a renewed attachment to his Jewish roots. The ardently secular Memmi led prayer groups and gave lectures on Zionism, an ideology to which he himself was only vaguely attached. His wartime experiences grounded him, solidified his views on his Jewishness, and confirmed his suspicions about the infidelity of France. It also gave him greater clarity about the dynamics of oppression that he later used to construct his brilliant analysis of the colonial system.

I have lost my notes from the interview, but the substance of our conversation comes out in The Colonizer's afterward. Memmi was most concerned that in the thirty-five years since its first publication, some of the ideas in the book had become obsolete. He was especially troubled by his deprecating comments about European women, whom he had described in the book as ardent colonials, “less concerned [than a man] about humanity in the abstract sense.” Other unflattering references disturbed him as well, and he wished they could be excised, but alas, I had to give him the bad news that the publisher was reproducing the texte intégrale and no changes could be made. I reassured him that times had changed, and history would be kind to him (though I was not completely convinced of that myself). It would have been difficult in 1957 to predict the feminist revolution of the intervening years.

Memmi had made his choice: he was now more French than anything else;  though his Jewishness was indelible, and his Arabness was much less so. Unlike Iraqi Jewish writers such as Shimon Ballas, Sami Michael, and Sasson Somekh, Memmi had never mastered literary Arabic; he confessed that with his Arab and Arabic-speaking counterparts, he had “nothing in common.”

unlike other scholars of Jews of the Islamic world, he refused to romanticize a golden past of “convivencia.” Instead, Memmi moved with the literary currents of the day, enjoying increasing amounts of attention as one of the godparents of Francophonie, along with Mouloud Mammeri, Driss Chraibi, Mouloud Feraoun, Assia Djebar, and Tahar Ben Jelloun, and more recently, with a whole new cohort of Maghrebi-related writers led by Leila Slimani, Fouad Laraoui, and Kemal Daoud, among others

he was frequently called on to adopt a public position on the Palestinian-Israel conflict. He viewed it as a chronic affliction immobilizing both sides, but for the Palestinians, even more. “The Palestinians are dominated by the Israelis,” he wrote in 2004 in Decolonization and the Decolonized; “No people has the right to dominate another, and cannot succeed in doing so forever.” He urged Jewish nationalists to “give up their dream of creating a Jewish state throughout Palestine.”

his position on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict did not endear him to either side, and in this domain, he was unloved by all

“…it is true,” he said, “that you could read my books from the perspective of rupture and conflict, but you could also read them from the  perspective of an effort to resolve these ruptures and conflicts.”  

took as its model another such deal between Turkey and Romania in 1936 as well as the better-known Greek-Turkish population exchange of 1923

Forced processes of homogenization are still part of the repertoire of nation-state building, and continue to shape our understanding of world order. Muslim presence in the southeastern periphery of Europe likewise continues to be viewed as problematic and even dangerous: As Piro Rexhepi observed in the book “White Enclosures,” their integration continues to be desirable for security but impossible racially.

Focus on religious identity allowed for a formal incorporation of these rather diverse populations into the Turkish national body. The asylum policy and the settlement laws defined migrants as Turks and those “affiliated with Turkish culture” to encompass all the Slav, Albanian and Greek Muslims, making Turkey­­ a safe haven for Muslim minorities fleeing oppressive regimes.

Dispossession, expulsions and massacres of diverse Muslim populations were already a grim reality of nation-building in southeastern Europe in the 19th century, when Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria were carved out of Ottoman provinces. In fact, the conquests of Ottoman Europe after 1699 normalized expulsion and compulsory conversion of local Muslims in the lost territories

During the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) Serbia, Montenegro, Greece and Bulgaria invaded the remaining Ottoman territories in Europe. Within several months, an estimated 1 million Muslims vanished, murdered and expelled from the regions taken over by these states. The shocking magnitude of the violence, which continued into World War I, made many Muslims wary of their future in the new nation-states and incited migration to the Ottoman Empire, itself in the midst of conflict.

19th-century definitions of South Slavic brotherhood envisioned Slav Muslims as potentially assimilable, distinguishing between “the Turks” as the non-Slavic Ottomans and “our Turks,” that is, Slav Muslims

In the 1920s, Catholic missionaries working in neighboring Kosovo, a former Ottoman province inhabited by Albanian Muslim and Christian populations and similarly incorporated into Southern Serbia, sent reports of massacres, assassinations, imprisonment and forced labor in a memorandum to the League of Nations, receiving no response.

so-called reform also included the vast properties of the Islamic pious endowments. Schools, mosques and Sufi lodges lost the land and incomes that were used to operate educational, religious and community services. Some land appropriations were symbolic: The 15th-century Burmali Mosque that visually defined Skopje’s main thoroughfare was simply torn down

Ivo Andric, an admired novelist and Yugoslav Nobel laureate, was also one of the highest-ranking Yugoslav diplomats in the interwar period. Eager to finalize the population transfer agreement with Turkey, he advised the government in Belgrade that Turkey was not only interested in the small group of ethnic Turks in Yugoslavia but also populations akin to Turks in their “mentality.” Repeating a constant theme in almost all of Andric’s novels, Muslims were described in his diplomatic correspondence as alien to the Balkans. For Andric, they were “Turks leftover in the territories of our Kingdom.”

over 2,000 Bosnians were settled along with Greek Muslims in the town of Izmir.

Turkish officials, faced with the constant influx of migrants, pursued agreements with the Balkan states that would offset the costs of migrant settlement. The 1934 Balkan Pact included minority clauses that allowed Turkish citizens to sell their properties in their former homelands. Turkish administrators also considered requesting an estimated payment from the Balkan nation-states to match the value of the properties that Balkan Muslims were forced to leave behind.

The Turkish Republic saw population growth as beneficial for economic development and national defense in the long term, as it worked to populate its eastern and western borderlands. Moreover, many of Turkey’s early administrators, as migrants and children of migrants themselves, understood these new waves of migration from a personal perspective.

Laws barred those speaking languages other than Turkish from settling in groups and limited the “foreign” presence to no more than 10% of a municipality, though the realities of the period frequently made these laws impossible to execute. The locals took on much of the burden of helping newcomers, begrudgingly sharing public resources. At the same time, the immigrants provided necessary manpower and introduced new methods in agriculture and certain industries. While Balkan languages largely disappeared with the following generation, enduring legacies, such as Balkan cuisine and music evoking the most personal memories of exile, acquired a place in the Turkish national heritage.

Today, no official recognition of the violent policies of “unmixing” exists, and barely anyone has heard of Yugoslavia’s attempted population transfer of 1939.

the international community’s preferred solutions to “ethnic conflicts” in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo remain equally tied to principles of nationalist homogenization and demarcation. A century after the foundation of modern Turkey and the first Yugoslavia, the legacies of that era’s mass migration and state violence persist.

According to testimony by Olson before the House Armed Services Committee earlier this year, approximately 85% of special operations troops deployed overseas are in 20 countries in the CENTCOM area of operations in the Greater Middle East: Afghanistan, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Yemen

With control over budgeting, training, and equipping its force, powers usually reserved for departments (like the Department of the Army or the Department of the Navy), dedicated dollars in every Defense Department budget, and influential advocates in Congress, SOCOM is by now an exceptionally powerful player at the Pentagon.  With real clout, it can win bureaucratic battles, purchase cutting-edge technology, and pursue fringe research like electronically beaming messages into people’s heads or developing stealth-like cloaking technologies for ground troops. 

Tasked to coordinate all Pentagon planning against global terrorism networks and, as a result, closely connected to other government agencies, foreign militaries, and intelligence services, and armed with a vast inventory of stealthy helicopters, manned fixed-wing aircraft, heavily-armed drones, high-tech guns-a-go-go speedboats, specialized Humvees and Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, or MRAPs, as well as other state-of-the-art gear (with more on the way), SOCOM represents something new in the military.  Whereas the late scholar of militarism Chalmers Johnson used to refer to the CIA as "the president's private army," today JSOC performs that role, acting as the chief executive’s private assassination squad, and its parent, SOCOM, functions as a new Pentagon power-elite, a secret military within the military possessing domestic power and global reach.

a well-honed public relations campaign which helps them project a superhuman image at home and abroad

U.S. Special Operations forces were approximately as large as Canada’s entire active duty military.  In fact, the force is larger than the active duty militaries of many of the nations where America’s elite troops now operate each year, and it’s only set to grow larger

When missions are subject to scrutiny like the bin Laden raid, he said, the elite troops object

The fortunes made from metals, slave trading, and plantation commodities, served as direct stimuli to colonial economies, helping to bankroll the Industrial Revolution

Colonialism reconfigured the world economy. India’s share of the global economy shrank from 27 per cent to 3 per cent. China’s share shrank from 35 per cent to 7 per cent. Europe’s share exploded from 20 per cent to 60 per cent

Colonialism’s ledger of lavish of destruction – its wholesale removal of ecosystems, and the subjugation of those communities that had nourished them – unleashed major rises in emissions. Between 1835 and 1885, deforestation in the territories of the United States was the largest global contributor to emissions

Political ecologist Jason Moore argues that ‘the rise of capitalist civilization after 1450, with its audacious strategies of global conquest, endless commodification, and relentless rationalization’, marked ‘a turning point in the history of humanity’s relation with the rest of nature, greater than any watershed since the rise of agriculture and the first cities’

Its legacies endure today in colonial complexes that underlie our visions of nature, and other humans. Economically, its inheritance was the naturalization of a model of intense cost-shifting, which allowed for states to offload resource-consuming industries, and the costs of ecological damage

Once the industries had been externalized, resources could be extracted with scant attention paid to the environmental consequences.

Colonialism also firmly shaped the ways we view conservation and ecology. Colonial efforts to protect nature, particularly popular at the end of the nineteenth century, became further opportunities for colonial control. Inhabitants were removed from areas of ‘pristine nature’ that then became national parks, while lands outside these were devoted to intensive extraction

although imperial states were forced to relinquish their hold, their legacies prevailed. Centuries of enslavement, despotism, crushed sovereignty, and ecological demolition, had guaranteed a long afterlife to imperial haunting, and its logics of conquest and predation. Many of the new nation states carried on down tracks laid for them by the colonial powers and continued the process of ecological destruction. Under the banners of development, thousands of communities were evicted and displaced in development programmes

Deforestation took hold across former colonies

Today’s world is a landscape scarred by environmental violence: the monocultural soybean fields of Brazil’s Mato Grosso; the modern gold rushes of Madre de Dios and Zamfara; the vast tar-sands ponds of Canada; the forest-consuming coal mines of Kalimantan; the megadams of the Mekong Delta; the rivers dredged to yield sand; the phosphate mines of Western Sahara; the palm plantations of Tela; the bauxite mines of Guinea; the mesh of pipelines across the Niger Delta; the sugarcane fields of Uttar Pradesh.

Operation Euphrates Shield. Despite that IS was declared as the operation’s main objective, the main aim was to prevent the Kurdish geographical contiguity between the Kobani and Afrin cantons that could later expand to the west and reach the Mediterranean. Indeed, Euphrates Shield’s hidden agenda surfaced when Turkey launched the “Operation Olive Branch” against the PYD-controlled Afrin region.

Turkey began to re-settle some of its Syrian Arab refugees (their official number reached to 3.5 million in July 2018) in the occupied zone of Northern Syria. While Turkey seeks to solve its refugee problem, it also aspires to Arabize the region by settling Syrian Arab refugees to the Kurdish canton of Afrin diluting its Kurdish character.

Turkey began to re-build the infrastructure in order to encourage its Syrians refugees to re-settle. Turkey has opened the Zeytin Dalı (Afrin), Çobanbey (Al-Rai), and Karkamış (Jarabulus) crossings to connect the region to Turkey like a swing door

in order to boost Turkmens’ influence in the region who constitute only 8% of the whole Afrin province population, Turkey facilitated the formation and deployment of the Turkmen Muntasır Billah brigades to Afrin under the umbrella of Free Syrian Army.

Turkey is paving wide highways to these crossings inside Syria to facilitate transport from Al-Bab and Jarabulus to Turkey. It also plans to link Manbij (currently under PYD control) to this network in the future. This will accelerate the Arabization of the region and encourage Turkish and Syrian businessmen living in Turkey to invest in the region – most likely in textile and olive sector.

Turkish influence in the economy of the cantons is reflected also in the use of its currency. Given the fact that most of the goods are sent into the region by Turkey, the civilian population who has little access to the Syrian Lira, began using the Turkish Lira to provide themselves their daily needs such as food and oil.

The situation in northern Syria clearly reflects the traditional Ottoman colonizing model that can also be seen in Cyprus. While settling loyal population to the region the Ottomans also provided welfare and other socio-economic infrastructures to the regions that they conquered.

Signs in Turkish can be seen on hospitals, schools, fire and police stations. Turkey is paying the salaries of the doctors, teachers, fire fighters and the policemen as well as providing electricity to the region by laying a 3 km. long power cables. Ambulances, fire brigade trucks and police vehicles are all brought from Turkey.

Turkey also repaired and provided equipment to Afrin schools. While putting Arabic back into the curriculum at the expense of Kurdish language, Turkish flags, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s posters alongside with July 15, 2016 military coup attempt martyr Ömer Halisdemir’s portraits can be seen in Afrin’s schools.

Despite Turkey’s official statements favoring a united Cyprus in 2004 (in the framework of the Annan Plan), and its 2018 statement supporting the territorial integrity of Syria, its actions are not reflecting the rhetoric

starting at least around the time of Christ, the Bandas acted as a vital entrepot for trade in bird of paradise plumes and other luxuries from Papua to China and ports in between. The Bandanese were master navigators, whose knowledge of the paths to, and ties with locals in, the nodes at the ends of this network made them wealthy. By the time the Europeans arrived, they lived in autonomous villages, each run by by Orang Kaya, a Malay word meaning “rich men,” which competed with each other, often in federations, for trade power.

they quickly became the key port for the nutmeg trade, frequented by Chinese, Malay, Javanese, and (by the 15th century) Arabo-Persian merchants, whose accounts inspired European dreams of the spice islands

Bandanese-European conflict finally boiled over in 1621, after the Dutch forced the English to functionally abandoned their claims in the islands. Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the man in charge of Dutch East India Company operations in the region, decided to test out his theory that the nutmeg trade would be easier to control if the Dutch could clear out the Bandanese and replace them with Company-linked settlers. He found a pretext to attack Banda Besar, the largest island and a hotbed of resistance, with 1,600 Dutch troops, 80 Japanese mercenaries, and some regional slaves, the largest force (to our historical sources’ knowledge) ever seen in the region. Despite fierce resistance, they swarmed the island, cut deals with local defenders-turned-defectors, and took it within days. In response to subsequent guerilla strikes, Coen’s Japanese mercenaries beheaded and quartered 48 Orang Kaya who came to his stronghold to surrender, and displayed their body parts on bamboo sticks. His troops then scourged the islands, burning villages and enslaving almost 800 people, who were mostly sent to Batavia, a trade center on Java. Many Bandanese reportedly jumped off cliffs rather than surrender.

By the end of this Banda Besar campaign, Dutch records indicate that—out of a pre-conflict population of about 15,000 in the year 1500—only 1,000 to 2,000 Bandanese remained across all 11 islands.

Even after the Dutch took total control in the region, Bandanese trade networks remained vital to their local economies well into the 20th century. To this day, some people who claim Bandanese descent are still reportedly accorded a high social status in the region thanks to their historical role as high-powered, economically vital traders.

On Kei Besar, though, the biggest island in the Kei chain, just under 5,000 people in two villages, Elat and Eli, some of the best ports in the region, still speak the Bandanese Turwandan language, practice Bandanese Islam, make Bandanese pottery (a unique, valued trade good until well into the 1990s), trade along Bandanese networks, sing Bandanese songs, and sail regularly to the Bandas to affirm their heritage and perform rites. “When the Bandanese speak of colonial events” today, says Kaartinen, “they refuse to be cast as victims or refugees.”

Research by the Australian anthropologist Phillip Winn shows that most of the more than 18,000 people in the Bandas today acknowledge that they come from many different lands, but still believe that they are legitimately Bandanese. They perform rituals that they believe have roots in ancient Bandanese practices to affirm that identity, and speak of pre-colonial Bandanese history as their own.

In 1982, locals in the Bandas also took over the state-owned nutmeg growing enterprise, which still made up a major part of the local economy. They split the groves equally among local families, building collectives that buy from harvesters, then sell nutmeg on to external interests. This, speculates American anthropologist Amy Jordan, seems like a return to pre-colonial cultivation. If so, it is a compelling coda to an incredible history of ingenuity and resistance.

Thousands of Americans arrived in Athens as part of the Truman Doctrine, propping up an authoritarian regime against Greek communists and leftists and demanding that Greeks imitate the American way of life. From the late 1940s to the 1970s, American military personnel, diplomats and spies provided ample support to the Greek government as it tortured and persecuted its citizens. This history, our history, was part of them. I haven’t met any Americans for whom it was part of their identity — most never knew about it.

Holding onto an image of ourselves as freedom-loving individualists who determined our own fates and championed the same for others, Americans didn’t have any idea how far we’d strayed from this ideal in the eyes of the rest of the world. This appeared to be true everywhere I went: in Egypt, in Afghanistan and, perhaps most important, in Iran, where tens of thousands of Americans once worked in service of a brutal ruler.

the United States’ Cold War architects deliberately constructed an empire that concealed its existence through language. As critics such as Nils Gilman have chronicled, academics working for the U.S. government in the mid-century knew not to use the word “Westernization” to describe their economic or political interventions abroad, for fear they might be compared to their European imperialist predecessors.

Many Americans have long accepted this idea of our superiority and goodness as if it were a self-evident truth, not postwar propaganda created to justify imperial intervention. Without these beliefs, who would Americans be? That ours is the most successful and evolved country in the world is the basis of most Americans’ sense of reality. 

This kind of American exceptionalism is a product of 200 years of disconnection from our country’s acts around the world — a geographic, intellectual and emotional isolation

Trump may contradict everything many of us believe about ourselves, but the first question we might ask is whether what we believe is true.

it does not encourage forward-thinking, diverse and inclusive applicants, but those rooted in colonial era notions of overseas postings

In a booklet published last year, Black Skin, Whitehall, FCO historian James Southern identified a lack of diversity within the FCO and the resulting issues that this raised.

"Clearly, there are aspects of the problem of racism in recruitment that are buried too deeply for surface-level enthusiasm for ‘equal opportunities’ or ‘meritocracy’ to penetrate – admirable though such enthusiasm might be."In order fully to understand the FCO’s relationship with race, we must excavate and investigate the often subconscious forms of racism that affect the experiences of non-white diplomats."