The Argonaut mini-printed edition Autumn Term 2023

December 2023

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THE ARGONAUT Radical Thought at the LSE.

By engaging with comment, culture and fieldwork, The Argonaut is committed to challenging hegemonic narratives and broadening radical discourse.

‘Shuhada’ Sadaqat by Ellius Grace for the New York Times (more on page 3)

‘Untitled’, Rahul Basu, 2023 (more on page 4)

Rojava Information Center (2022) celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Rojavan Revolution [instagram] (more on page 13)

Welcome to The Argonaut's Autumn term 'mini' print edition! This past term has welcomed exciting new pieces from our students, ranging from scholarly interviews to musical and theatrical reviews. This has come amidst a moment of outrage, mourning and violence, highlighting the importance of spaces for critical engagement and radical thinking at the LSE. This edition showcases some of what we've been working on in the past weeks. We hope you enjoy; and if you do, please don't hesitate to contact us and contribute - we welcome pieces in the categories of Comment, Culture and Fieldwork, in written, visual and other form. Funded by LSE's Social Anthropology department but led by students for students, we welcome submissions from everyone. This is a space for the anthropologically-minded community of LSE to express themselves and cultivate a much needed community.

Much love, Iacopo, Ishani, Pia, Carli, Lucy

THE MEDEA

The Little Argonaut has eclosed as The Medea, to illuminate the margins of patriarchal narrative.

Each month we curate a sensorium of music, events, community action, and recipes all foraged for to The Argonaut reader.

Join us as we navigate London together via the QR code below:

Images: Majazz Project Palestinian Sound Archive

www.the-argonaut.com Anthro.Theargonaut@lse.ac.uk Instagram: theargonautlse Twitter: @LSEArgonaut

In solidarity

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In the past month an half many of us have taken the streets in massive marches around Central London showing solidarity with the Palestinian people. Along with marches organised by Palestine solidarity campaign, LSE members have organised rallies, sit-ins and dieins on our campus. Many of us have felt less alone by coming together. These have been important spaces for people to share in grief, anger, solidarity and to hold our university accountable. We send our heartfelt gratitude to all those who have been persistently involved week after week. We are safer and stronger when we are together.

Picture by Nazli Adıgüzel

Picture by Carli Jacobsen

Picture by Nazli Adıgüzel

Picture obtained from LSESU PalSoc

Picture obtained from LSESU PalSoc

This is a rebel song: an obituary of Sinead O’Connor

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by Carli Jacobsen Sinead O’Connor uses her music to encapsulate Irish, personal, and international struggle. Nothing can get past the lyrics of her music: she is always unafraid to express an often-taboo truth of controversies, but nonetheless is still held as the moral compass of Ireland, even after her death in late July. Her ruthlessness is best known from the moment she tore up a photograph of Pope Jean Paul II on a Saturday night live in 1992 to address child abuse in the catholic church. The outcries from the public for her provocative stances never hindered her from using her position as an artist to create and remind the world of resistance in Ireland. She boycotted the Grammys, refused to participate in the US national anthem, and whole heartedly used her screen-time to express her devotion for the refugees of Ireland.

She embodied Irish struggle and resistance, encouraging other Irish to discern the injustices under Irish leadership, particularly in relation to the Catholic church, on which she was known as a resistance icon. She became a priest in Belfast despite the Vatican’s rejection of women in such positions, but continued to bless and perform her duties to God and the people of Ireland as a religious activist that advocated for transparency and inclusivity in the Irish Catholic church, sharing her own experiences of queerness, bi-polar disorder, and abuse from her mother. Her experiences were a reminder of the genocide against Ireland, and its lasting effects on mental health that she addresses in her songs.

From her album Universal Mother, ‘Famine’ exposes the harsh treatment of the Irish people, addressing propaganda and the false narrative of the death of 1 million Irish people. Listening to her albums in order of their creation, you embark on a journey of Sinead’s spiritual growth and become embraced in the inconsistencies of her identity through her music in parallel with her struggles of healing and of emotional peace. These inconsistencies are the utmost human cultivations of the self as written through song, but these inconsistencies are constantly made sense of through her ongoing radical critique of colonial and capitalist establishments. Her music tells a story of personal growth from a young and remaking Sinead, to a vengeful and willful Shuhada’ Sadaqat; her name after converting to Islam in 2018; when she reclaims craziness and revitalises her musical talents that have only ever exacerbated love for the marginalised and shame for those in power that attempt to crumble resistance and revolution.

We think of both Shuhada’ and Sinead as entangled identities that show unity in resistance, particularly between Ireland and Palestine. Ireland, as one of the few member states supporting a ceasefire regarding the Palestinian genocide, and as one of the only long-standing advocates for the liberation of Palestine since the Nakba in 1948.

Both Ireland and Palestine have experienced genocide, oppression, censorship, and the stripping of human rights, and

Sinead O’Connor at the Grotto in Lourdes, France, a Christian pilgrimage site (Michael Crabtree/PA): https://perspectivemag.co.uk/sinead-oconnor-filmmaker-reflects-on-enduringpower-of-nothing-compares-2-u/

these struggles bring unity between both groups. Their flags are used interchangeably as symbols of resistance.

Shahuda, even before her conversion to Islam, stood up for Palestinian liberation. In 1997, she wrote a letter to Israeli defence minister Ben Gvir to condemn the Palestinian occupation and condemn his actions as a leader, after he sent death threats to her and her band. Also profoundly, her songs rewrite the Irish occupation. Through music, she has curated a new Irish history that expresses emotions of mourning, anger and hope, like the power of Palestinian music by musicians like Khamal Khalil, who plays with dawla to express the violence of occupation and complicity of Israel and nearby Arab states; and who was arrested after his songs were played in the streets amongst activists and shabab, and curators such as Mo’min Swaitat’s Majazz Project, who has compiled tapes and vinyl's of revolutionary resistance music and cinema, mostly from Jenin in the West Bank.

Through Mo’min’s project, we can learn together about the importance of music to navigate violence and exile across political context, from Palestine to Sudan to Kashmir to the Congo. While Sinead’s music was not around to actively resist the Irish occupation, it tells a story today of a reclaiming of narrative that has previously written a famine ridden, barren, terrorist Ireland.

Listening to resistance music today reminds us of ongoing political violence where revolution is simmering, using the poetics of national and cultural pride to challenge the dominant narratives that mislead us away from the streets on which we protest.

Extracted from my favourite song of hers, Famine, I share these lyrics, but recommend listening to her music remembering her influence both in Ireland, and in Palestine in the context of the horrors that we all should be attentive to learn and understand: And if there is ever gonna be healing There has to be remembering And then grieving So that there can be forgiving There has to be knowledge and understanding.

In Conversation With Purnima Mankekar and Akhil Gupta

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This interview was joyfully conducted by Ishani Milward-Bose, Lucy Bernard and Nazlı Adıgüzel, transcribed by Iacopo Nassingh and Lucy Bernard.

In your seminar you touched on the corporeal cycles of life in the BPO Centre, and in ‘The Missed Period’ chapter you discuss the direct effect of this on the body. How did it feel Following their Friday Seminar, we had the pleasure of going nocturnal with your interlocutors? interviewing Professors Akhil Gupta and Purnima Mankekar from the University of California, Los Angeles on their new book titled Prof Gupta: When we began this project our daughter was six ‘Future Tense: Affective Capitalism and Potentiality in a years old, so there was a balance to be struck between the Transnational Service Industry’. The book explores the lives and personal and professional. We couldn’t both go off in the work-lives of intimate strangers that make up Business Process middle of the night, so we largely took turns. The companies Outsourcing (BPO) agents in South India. Since 2000, the BPO also couldn't afford for us to be talking to their agents on the industry has grown to employ 700,000 young people in India. shop floor: interviews infringed on labour time. Instead we These workers spend their nights interacting by phone and online held interviews off-site, on BPO agents’ days off. Management with customers in the United States, the United Kingdom, were actually happy to have us there - for them we might have Australia, and elsewhere. provided solutions to increase efficiency and reduce worker turnover, and we were happy to share this information as we The calls are not only signifiers of transnational flows of capital, thought it might improve working conditions, though of but are also windows between intimate worlds: they are among course we never shared any personal or identifying the tangents of racial affective capitalism. Professors Gupta and information. Before ours, there were a dozen books written on Mankekar’s research spanned almost a decade in Bengaluru, call centres, but almost none of them were done from inside a where transnational capitalism shapes and is shaped by a company. We had to sign NDAs…but quite frankly the kinds of historically diverse workforce. The tech parks of the BPOs human protocols that we have in anthropology are much construct futurities and aspirations that provide critical insights stricter than any NDA. into the imaginaries interwoven with transnational capitalism.

This invisible labour is carried out at night, whilst colonial relations Did you openly approach the companies as researchers, and are both re-inscribed and altogether forgotten. What image of were they receptive to this?

The West is painted from the end of that telephone line?

Prof Mankekar: Most companies were pretty open to it!

Interestingly, even some of the managers were themselves curious about our work - they too were asking similar questions about the lives of their workers.

Prof Gupta: They were very interested in how working in call centres changed agents’ lives.

In our courses we have studied neoliberal development extensively, and how in South Asia especially, an entrepreneurial mindset is present in all modern companies.

Did you encounter that?

“Untitled’, Rahul Basu, 2023.

Seated comfortably in Professor Banerjee’s office, we sink into the sizable armchairs. Professors Gupta and Mankekar immediately invoke an atmosphere of serenity with their absorbing comments and witty exchanges. This is an opportunity for us to delve into the nitty-gritties of their research and anthropological method, so we begin with their embodied experience of fieldwork.

Prof Mankekar: Most companies were pretty open to it!

Interestingly, even some of the managers were themselves curious about our work - they too were asking similar questions about the lives of their workers. Prof Gupta: They were very interested in how working in call centres changed agents’ lives.

BPO centres can be understood as new frontiers of capitalist accumulation, which we have come across in the work of David Harvey, and in a school of relatively modern Marxist anthropology. Where do you position yourselves along the scale of Marxist anthropology?

5 Prof Mankekar: I think we’re positioned in different places… why don’t you talk about where you sit [to Prof. Gupta], and then I’ll talk about where I sit.

Prof Gupta: What’s distinctive about this project is it brings together discussions of racial capitalism and affective capitalism. For us this was essential following Harvey and others’ particular lack of attention to the logics of race in theories of capitalism.

Prof Mankekar I was informed by Marxist theorisations of culture - Raymond Williams, Gramsci, Althusser, Stuart Hall and simultaneously by Women of Colour Feminism in the United States. As somebody who moved to the US from India where our conception of race was very different, it was a real eye opener. Especially in relation to how I, as a woman of colour, was perceived in the classroom, and later when I joined the profession. It was very personal and transformative. This allowed me to truly grasp racial capitalism from a feminist perspective. Working in a centre for Asian-American studies has really allowed me to push back against any Eurocentric, America-centric, or even an Atlanticist notion of race. It allowed me to examine: what does race look like in the Pacific?

What does race look like in the context of settler colonialism?

It's those two streams that have shaped me as a Marxist.

eligious conflict. So I think it would have been really naive for management to even think about a unified working body. That was just not on the horizon, and nor was there on the part of the managers a Hindu nationalist agenda. It was not manifest in the training, though it may have been manifest in their particular attitudes toward individuals. It was definitely not on the agenda to construct a kind of universal, ‘Pan Indian Body’.

That was happening in other domains, but not necessarily in the BPOs. Prof Gupta: In Bangalore, people exist in a multilingual and multicultural context. For example, Kannada is the regional language, but it’s only spoken by a third or so of Bangalorians.

People are there from all over the country.

Prof Mankekar: It has a history of a polyglot civic life; it’s not a new thing. The city is an actant: it is not outside, it permeates working life.

In the seminar, you talk about the idea of class/caste dynamics in an outsourcing system that seemingly transcends national borders. How do you situate the concept of ‘India Rising’ and nationalism in this situation?

Prof Mankekar: They are very closely linked. This idea of futurity and the future as articulated by call centre agents was very closely linked to India as a rising power. What was powerful for us to see was the suturing of individual aspiration with national aspiration.

Prof Gupta: What was also interesting was how this nationalism existed in an explicitly transnational setting which produced intimate connections between different nations through the agent and the customer. For both the customer and the agent, more strident visions of nationalism don’t necessarily conflict with working for or helping those in another country. They don’t see it as contradictory that you could become a majoritarian Hindu on the one hand, and on the other you’re doing this service work for people who may be re-transcribing colonial relations. It’s a job! They don’t see it as opposing ideologies. I don’t think we found any friction there at all. Only that perhaps agents might be more inclined to be critical of the West.

Was there a desire on the part of managers and CEO’s to have a homogenised workforce, in trying to think about this concept of ‘One Nation’, beyond religious boundaries?

Prof Mankekar: That’s a really good question! I don’t think that was on the radar of the managers at all. They were living at a cultural moment in which there was linguistic, class and

‘Shantiniketan Express’, Rahul Basu, 2023.

We were thinking about changing and mutating capitalism: that it doesn’t wipe out existing differences, but instead tends to transform them and be transformed by them. Do you think that the economic boom in India, especially in the tech industry, has been aided by the diversity of India? Is conjugated oppression in some way useful for this kind of capitalism?

Prof Mankekar: That is such a good question… in fact I wish I had pondered this before we wrote the book… I’d have to really think about that. I’ll say that the reason that we ended up in Bangalore is the chief minister had a vision of the area becoming a hub for IT, it was very much part of that regional policy. The history of scientific education and aeronautical engineering made Bangalore hospitable to the IT industry.

Prof Gupta: These industries each had their own call centre, and would start BPO’s in buildings adjacent to their IT centres.

The places where there are no BPO’s are Chennai and Kerala.

Possibly because they had communist governments who were not receptive to trans-national capitalism…..now of course, they are. With China leading the way, everyone is receptive to multi-national capital. When call centres first opened, there was definitely awareness about which kind of accents are

6 desirable, or at least which accents were malleable to be changed.

They would call this ‘MTI’ or Mother Tongue Influence.

We want to talk about another kind of mutation or possibility of mutation. We loved that your research was conducted in the span of 10 years, as a lot can change in a decade! So how did developments in technology and involvement of artificiality impact a space where you focus on contrasting tactile and tangible elements through embodiment?

Prof Mankekar: So there came a point in our research when many of these companies were shifting to more automated processes. And that’s when we decided we wanted to stop the research, because we felt there was going to be a change in the way in which this work was occuring, and we didn’t want to spread ourselves too thin. So huge change has occurred, and that’s going to be our next project which is going to be on AI, not AI in BPOs, not AI and labour, but on AI and the algorithmic cultures that are being constructed.

Prof Gupta: Even by the time we stopped our research, there was a lot of machine learning and predictive analytic already happening. Chat boxes etc hadn’t been developed but other stuff was already happening. The CEO of one company told us that when somebody calls his company he can predict the three most likely questions people are going to ask just from the phone number.

It feels like this topic is really related to David Graeber’s ’bullshit jobs’, and how technology supposedly would ease our labour but instead ends up creating new efforts, frustrations and exhaustions. What are your thoughts on this new evolving technology and the possibilities and hopes it creates, and on the changing nature of labour itself for the BPO agents?

Prof Gupta: So one of the ways in which labour had changed for BPO agents already by 2016-17, was that they were being heavily assisted by machine learning and predictive analytics. On their screens they were already getting advice about what they should say next to the caller or what, based on the caller’s profile, they should have said to the caller. 5 years ago this wasn’t the case.

The other thing about these technologies is that they have merged web surfing, chat and calling. So when you are surfing the internet and you are looking at Sainsbury’s site or some shop and you spend more than a few minutes looking at it, depending on whether you had been a high-value customer in the past, the machines track how long you are taking, what you spent in the past and then they drop a balloon saying ‘can I help you?’ on the chat and they move you from one platform to another because they don’t want people to get frustrated by inefficient searching. So they try to help you find it sooner rather than let you get upset by wasting your time. That’s how technology changes the way customers interact with the company.

Prof Mankekar: In fact when I was sitting next to one of the agents, he had two screens. One with the complete profile of the person he was speaking to so he knew what they were like, whether they lived alone so he knew what he was dealing with.

Moving on a bit, we really liked your use of the word futurity in your lecture. It seems that anthropology thinking about conceptualisations of the future is quite a new thing to do, but why do you think it is such an important framework? And also what are your thoughts on the term ‘solastalgia’? It’s a term coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht, but it’s been used by anthropologists to talk about ontological trauma caused by the lack of agency some people feel when their lived environments are changing very rapidly. It’s used by environmental anthropologists, but we think it can be applied to a lot more as it takes seriously the disruption of having unstable futures and considers that as traumatic.

Prof Manekekar: That’s so interesting, like the opposite of what we argue.

We did summer ethnography projects this year with grants from LSE. Ishani did hers in rural West Bengal [India], Lucy did hers in London, and Nazli in Istanbul. For Ishani, solastalgia was very helpful to understand that for some people, in the context of Adivasi youth, a connection to the past and a more historicised sense of the self was helpful for them to also project themselves into the future. So for the BPO agents, did the fact that many of them migrated and had a disrupted sense of place affect the way they envisioned the future?

Prof Mankekar: I wish we talked to you before we wrote the book! Of course it did, in many ways. That’s why we use the metaphor of mapping. In many ways there was a sense that this kind of dislocation was something that required some kind of ethical map for them to navigate this new unfamiliar space; very daunting spaces that the workers now had to inhabit. So what were the different kinds of ethical mapping that were available to them?

The one we talk about the most is that of relationality, meaning the relations between them, between themselves and their families. This isn’t a romanticised notion of family, but whatever it was, oppressive or not, it provided them with a grid or a map to navigate this extremely new unfamiliar terrain.

I guess the difference between how we envisioned this idea and the way you talk about it is that I wouldn’t use the word trauma because I don’t think it was traumatic, but it was for sure dislocating and disorienting. Even if they didn’t migrate physically from another state or another part of India, just the migration from their almost slum-like homes to these hightech glassy tech parks, that in itself was a dislocating journey.

That’s a very dislocating journey that a lot of them make regularly when they come to work. So, what kind of ethical map was available to them to navigate this? Relationality was the main thing, super important.

Our last question is related to Nazli’s fieldwork. Nazli focused on HIV related stigma and testing in everyday spaces, and conceptualised the body something that doesn’t finish with the skin, whose boundaries are blurred, and how health is impacted by fear. So what are the possibilities that thinking about the body in relation to space, or being one with space, provide for anthropological thinking?

7 Prof Gupta: So Harris Solomon’s book on ‘metabolic living’ explores exactly this question, of how the relationship between the body and the city is a permeable relation, how the city comes into the body and the body inhabits the city in a particular way. He uses the metaphor of metabolic living (metabolism) to think about that. So our way of thinking about it is that the body, the agent and relations are fundamentally spatially and socially expansive. The self is shaped by relations the agent is in, the kind of working conditions they are in, how they care for kin and so forth. We emphasise in the book that this is not about individuals. We don’t stress individualism (and this is how neoliberalism differs), people are entrepreneurial but they are not individuals in the same way.

Prof Mankekar: That’s why the notion of affect is so useful.

Because the skin doesn’t enclose the body. For example my body and this chair are constantly interacting with one another: my muscles are being shaped by this chair, it’s not separate from this chair.

So we want to end with a fun question. In the event of an apocalypse, or if you found yourself in an eternal tech park, which three anthropologists - or cobras - would you keep by your side while you try to survive and why?

Prof Mankekar: Hahaha. I’m not sure that’s such a difficult question.

Perhaps each other?

Prof Mankekar: Definitely. I also think Silvia Yanagisako, she has been a mentor to us and very formative in my thinking of family and kinship, so definitively Silvia. Actually maybe Eric Wolf, from what Akhil has been telling me lately he sounds like an amazing, ethical good human being which I think would be very important to me.

Prof Gupta: I would say Amitav Gosh - an anthropologist but novelist mostly. Maybe Catherine Stewart, actually maybe Anne Alison more than Catherine Stewart who doesn’t work on affect per se but whose work has been really wonderful.

Thank you so much for talking to us! It’s been an honour.

Mankekar and Gupta’s book will be published by Duke University Press, Forthcoming 2025.

All images are original works by Rahul Basu, find his works @rahul.basu on instagram.

Thank you to Professor Mukulika Banerjee for your encouragement.

From the November Edition of The Medea...

LISTEN UP Palestine’s Lost Tapes: The Majazz Project Mo’min Swaitat trained at the Jenin Freedom Theatre in the West Bank, occupied Palestine, and is now based here in London. It was on a trip home during the pandemic that he re-discovered a longabandoned dusty tape shop- a faint memory from his childhood. A sensorium of thousands of Palestinian tapes, many of the tracks he found were produced during the first Palestinian uprising of the 1980s.

The treasure trove of revolutionary tracks have since been re-released under his archival label of Majazz Project, and are powerful, defiant and deeply moving sounds of resistance, of loss and of hope. May your listening be part of strident collective efforts to protest, to mourn and to learn.

www.majazzproject.com/listen

Words by Lucy Bernard

‘Join us around the table’, watercolour by Delphi Brown

Navigating Black Masculinity at the LSE

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by Oliver Geddes BEING BLACK AT LSE As a Black man born in Europe, race has always been a key feature of my existence, whether I wanted it to be or not. Consequently, finding a sense of belonging among a society that historically did not want me to belong has been a challenging and often confusing experience. Amidst this struggle for my identity I found sanctuary in team sports, particularly basketball. The idea that I was part of a larger group, moving towards one common goal, was an escape from the daily pressure of being Black in a Eurocentric society.

basketball to Black men, and how it helps us to form a ‘collective identity’, particularly against the backdrop of an institution where navigating our identity feels like a constant struggle. Interactions with my peers allowed me to understand the diversity of Black men’s experiences in white spaces. Our experiences are individual, and the institutional denial of their uniqueness only perpetuates harm to our community.

Yet while finding community and commonality among other young Black men has been liberating, it has also created ‘conditions of ambivalence’. These are a series of contradictory feelings and experiences – optimism undermined by pessimism; freedom refuted by restraint. I found these conditions to be present in how we reconcile oppression with our masculinity; in the way we are impeded by our oppression even in spaces where we are supposed to feel safe; in the way we escape our oppression through community and yet seek to reject monolithic identity. Generally, the racialised experiences of Black men in predominantly nonBlack spaces seem plagued by contradictions.

When I started university at LSE, an institution where Black students are a visible minority, I felt a replication of the experiences I had endured in the past. I was again in a space unsure of my identity, and with little representation. I found sanctuary through team sports – basketball. It allowed me to access a community where I didn’t always feel the intensity of something as insignificant LSESU men’s basketball instagram page (@lsembb) as my skin colour. I was a part of a larger whole, a common Overarchingly, I sought to explore the conditions of objective. I became close to my Black teammates, largely due to ambivalence that underpin these findings. our shared experience of being visible minorities in predominantly UNDERSTANDING THE BLACK MALE EXPERIENCE: white spaces. My fieldwork focuses on Black men’s navigation of “BEING ON THE COURT IS LIKE AN ESCAPE… IN THE these spaces, using basketball as a vessel to facilitate this CLASSROOM I FEEL ISOLATED” understanding.

Every Friday the first person I see at practice is Sam. He is a Initially, I wanted to research a wider question on the ‘Black’ fellow Black teammate and my closest friend on the team. This experience at LSE, but this approach had limitations. Most Friday was no different; he came and sat next to me on the importantly, Black experiences are not monolithic, so I felt it wasn’t bench as we got ready to play. After exchanging pleasantries, I justified for me to speak on experiences that were not reconcilable introduced my research topic to him. He seemed intrigued and with my own. Finding sanctuary through team sports is one Black enthusiastic to be assisting me. He looked over at me, smiling experience but it is by no means a universal one. I also realised that invitingly, and said “alright cool, what do you wanna ask me?”. there was a gendered element to my curiosity – I couldn’t ignore that there was something innately masculine about how I found an My first point of inquiry was why young Black male athletes at escape from my racialised experience through a physical activity, so my university gravitated towards basketball, as proportionally this formed something I wanted to explore further. the men’s basketball society had more Black student athletes than any other sports team.

The basketball court is a place I’ve known my whole life. I’m always struck with the same sensation when I walk into a basketball gym; I asked Sam, “why do you think us Black guys love basketball so the stuffy air and the faint smell of sweat always produce a sense of much?”. He pondered and responded, “Well, I think basketball dizziness as I acclimatize to the court. Similarly, the holds a special place in our hearts. It’s a sport we can watch at competitiveness of game day always produces a palpable intensity, the highest level and see guys that look like us. When we’re in a and thus feelings of unease, even angst. place like this I think that’s something that we need”. As Sam said, culturally basketball is significant to Black men. The My research allowed me to explore the diasporic importance of National Basketball Association (NBA) is constituted by 71.8%

Black players (Statista 2022), while Black Americans constitute just 14% of the U.S population (Pew Research Centre 2023).

While my research is focused on young Black British (and not American) men, the diasporic significance of this phenomenon is far from lost on us. We too live in a society where we are very visible minorities and where systemic racism plays a dominant role in our lives. Seeing Black men succeed is a diasporic victory, regardless of where within the diaspora this success takes place.

What I wanted to explore further though, was the last bit of what Sam said - “in a place like this”, the idea that being in a space where we are minorities generates a desire to find a sense of belonging. What was driving this desire? Why did we need to come together as Black men and play basketball? Why was merely being a fan of the sport, an individual spectator, not enough? I got a very insightful answer during an interview with another one of my fellow Black teammates, Daniel. I asked him, “how do you compare your experience playing basketball with your wider experience as a Black man at LSE?”.

9 This experience confirmed what Daniel had told me, playing basketball alongside my teammates was an escape from the microaggressions we experience daily.

What I now realise about the experience as Black men at LSE is that it is a rite of passage. I emphasis the ‘liminal’ phase of rites of passage as Van Gennep (1909) puts it. Experiencing racism places us in a strange middle place where we are unsure of where we belong, and how we are supposed to belong. In essence, we have surpassed the first stage of the tripartite structure of rites of passage as we have been separated from schooling as we knew it in the first 18 years of our lives, and placed in a higher learning institution, yet we are stuck in a liminal space, incapable of progressing to the incorporation phase of rite of passage. We are stuck because as minorities in a space that has historically excluded us, we are unable to fully feel like an intrinsic part of the student community. Our experiences with racism produce a sub-conscious feeling that we’re not supposed to be here and thus we are in a perpetual state of transition, unable to integrate.

Daniel recounting his experiences of racism at our university reminded me of similar experiences I’ve had. Microaggressions ranging from getting my name confused with another Black student, to a throwaway comment about my hair, to even one I experienced during a basketball training session. This was a while into my research, when my project was widely known about in the team.

I align this with Victor Turner’s (1969) discussions about liminality: we are “betwixt and between” as well as “structurally invisible” because the institutions where we study aren’t designed to include us. The primary difference between our experience and Van Gennep’s and Turner’s theories is that we are unable to advance to the final stage of this perverted rite of passage, unable to be liberated from the liminal position that racism places us in.

However, as my experience interacting with my interlocutors has demonstrated to me, we cope with this position through escapism. Playing basketball, attempting to recreate the feelings of triumph that we feel when we witness the seemingly disproportionate success of Black athletes, gives us a sense of belonging – Appiah (2009) refers to this phenomenon as creating “collective identity” – specifically in the context of being minorities at our university, where our identity is systematically confused.

A non-Black player from the second team who I wasn’t particularly familiar with came up to me and asked, “do you think non-Black people should be able to say the ‘n’ word? I only ask because when I was growing up everyone used to say it, what do you think?”. It was an obvious attempt to get a reaction out of me. I looked at him in disbelief, got up, and went about the rest of the training session as normal. What fascinated me though, was that as the training session progressed, being surrounded by my Black teammates created an element of comfort and by the end, I had forgotten that the micro aggression had even occurred.

Another question that I couldn’t ignore was the relationship between the escapism we sought through basketball and our masculinity Later on, I had a revealing conversation with some of my Black Team mates on this topic. am started the conversation, saying: “it’s weird how we’ve never really talked about our experiences with racism like this. I mean we joke about it but before this we’ve never really spoken about it seriously.” Daniel laughed and responded, “well yeah, we just have to get on with it, what’s complaining gonna do, you know no one would listen to us.” Sam laughed and nodded in agreement.

He thought for a while. Finally, he responded, “Being on the court is like an escape from all the bullshit. In the classroom I feel isolated, on the court I can just forget about all of it”. He paused briefly before continuing, “I remember one time, I was doing a module for my course, and not once did my class teacher, who was white, get my name right. She confused me for the one other Black guy in the class every single time.”

Photo provided by the author

I found this to be a typically masculine, reductionist approach to the issues we face as Black men. Talking about our problems goes against our traditional conceptions of masculinity, so if we just “get on with it” as Daniel said, it’s almost as if the problem doesn’t exist. This is why seeking escapism through basketball makes sense; it’s easy to reconcile with patriarchal ideas of masculinity, ideas that purport that we shouldn’t talk about our experiences with racism. In part I blame the fact that we are victims of systemic racism, but I also blame the fact that as men we reproduce toxic ideas of masculinity. I don’t find it to be a coincidence that historically, participation in sport was seen as a process of “masculinising” and a “toughener” for young men (Kidd 2013). I’ve thus acknowledge that there is a problematic element to the way in which my fellow Black teammates and I deal with racism at university. While basketball has provided us with a community and a cathartic way to relieve the daily pressures of our racialised experience, it also reduces our racialised experience and reproduces ideas about masculinity that we should begin to forget.

The violence of the patriarchy is different to that of racism, yet it is undoubtedly connected and comparably oppressive. The notion that as Black men, we fight our oppression by reaffirming a different type of oppression, speaks to the sentiment that underpins the entirety of my project – our experience as Black men in non-Black spaces is confused by an exhausting paradox.

UNDERSTANDING INTERNAL DISTINCTIONS - ‘WE ARE NOT A MONOLITH’ Something my research demonstrated was the diversity of my Black teammates’ experiences. Our experiences were not only racialised and gendered but also defined by class division and ethnicity. This became apparent to me from the beginning of my project. Two training sessions into my research, my Black teammates and I were having a general conversation about our backgrounds.

Michael made an interesting contribution – “I went to private school, so coming to LSE wasn’t that different. I feel like I was already quite accustomed to code-switching and knowing my position in a place like this.”

Sam contrasted this account with his own experience – “I think my time here’s been different. I went to a school that was majority Black and Brown, when I started uni it was a whole new world for me”.

Sam and Michael continued to contrast their experiences based on their ethnic origins. While both Nigerian, they come from different tribes. Sam is Igbo while Michael is Yoruba. Michael jokingly said to Sam, “you Igbos are all money hungry, I bet you felt right at home here, I had to adjust to that”. Sam laughed and replied, “you make a fair point”. This interaction got me thinking about my own experience and how it was distinct, because I’m Zimbabwean and similar to Michael, I have been privately educated in predominantly white schools. Thus, my perspective of the world has been uniquely shaped by not solely my race but also my socio-economic background as well as the cultural knowledge dispersed to me by my parents.

10 I added to the conversation with this suggestion: “I think it’s important to understand that while we’re all very visible minorities at this university, meaning we share that common struggle, our experiences are still going to be unique based on factors other than our race”. Michael agreed, responding, “yeah… we’re not a monolith. It’s annoying that we’re viewed as though we are”.

A key takeaway from this observation was that even though my research focused on a specific part of the Black student population at LSE, our experiences were still so different. While as Black men, we had found a community in our basketball team, we are not monolithic. Michael alluded to the idea that we’re viewed as though we are, and he’s completely right. LSE’s recently published statistics on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion show Black Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) students constitute over 60% of the student population (LSE 2020).

However, there are no individual statistics for Black students.

This is an institutional representation of exactly what Michael is referring to, and he calls it annoying because if institutionally, we are viewed as one singular group, how can we expect to be treated as individuals. I believe that certain microaggressions are a species of this institutional hazard – being confused for another Black student in my class is reflective of the fact that on an institutional level, my very existence within the institution is not individualised, rather it is grouped into one overarching monolithic demographic. As Michael and Sam described, they have very individual experiences as Black men at LSE, as do I, and the institutional denial of those experiences perpetuates negative trickle-down effects. I believe Michael and Sam’s depiction of their experiences are calls for institutional recognition of them.

CONTRADICTIONS: INVIDIVIDUALITY AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITY I want my inquiry into the experiences of Black men at an institution where we are minorities to reveal what exactly those experiences are, and how such experiences trap us in a liminal space we find difficult to navigate. I hope that my research paints a clearer picture of what we go through in a space where we don’t always feel like we belong and how we have tried to deal with this by finding a community in our basketball team. I also want to reveal the complexities that lie beneath how we’ve found this community, specifically the way in which we reconcile the desire for community with problematic notions of masculinity that we still hold, and how this demonstrates an apparent contradiction in how we as Black men fight oppression.

I want my research to demonstrate that the community myself and my interlocutors have found in our basketball team should not overshadow the fact that we still have individual and personal experiences and that we want these individual experiences to be recognised on an institutional level, perhaps this would be the beginning of ameliorating our negative experiences with racism. I once again want to note that these calls are an indicator of our conditions of ambivalence – we seek to find individuality in a space constructed for collective identity, an exhausting effort in the wider struggle that is battling the contradictions that afflict our experience as Black men

A Walking Ethno-Poem of Soho’s Streets

by Finola Stowe

Picture by author

Forgot my headphones so street music is more appealing The unrecognisable instrument that somehow gets you from A to B I walk with aim There’s purpose on these roads.

My route governed by “when I went here”s and “last time”s Past times guide me and I never thought i’d be familiar with a Soho street Person brushes or crashes past me and I say something kind of mean in my head but remember that self development girl on YouTube who told me not to think ill of other people Peaceful is literally nothing in this city.

Trippy lights and displays make up the scenery and I’m overwhelmed but they’re explaining why I should buy this and that and yes, I agree, I should buy it Halt my walk to find it Consume it.

There’s girls on the street and gum on the floor Worlds upon worlds of un-ironed business attire, books carried in arms to feign intellect and calculated hairstyles whilst I take extra steps to consciously avoid these complex people of Soho’s streets Things you do on a walk alone are fluid and unforgettable/ A time of its own Tracing how I’ve grown I’ve been walking here for two years but I still look for the same clues on the same routes I traversed back then and thank the racket of soho streets for guiding me.

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The Book of Mormon - on the boundaries of political incorrectness

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by Pia Tasso

Blasphemous, racist, undeniably offensive. In a society that seems to be tending towards a hyper-vigilance to political correctness, how is it that a show that essentially gives the middle finger to the Mormon Church continues to be so widely acclaimed?

Winner of 9 Tony Awards including Best Musical, The Book of Mormon, written by Trey Parker, Robert Lopez, and Matt Stone has grossed over 1 billion dollars internationally and continues to be one of the most enduring Broadway plays. From John Stewart to Oprah Winfrey, the show has been overwhelmingly well received, so much so it would nearly seem out of place to put in question the legitimacy of its jokes and overall message.

Loosely, the show follows two missionary Mormons, Elder Price and Elder Cunningham. Sent to Uganda on a missionary operation, they endeavour to convert the local population to the Church of Latter Day Saints. Living in precarious, dirty houses that are depicted to be Ugandan ones, they initially fail to convert the locals. Discouraged by this outcome, they eventually start lying – making up stories to convince the people that Mormonism is relevant to them all. This eventually leads to their realisation of the metaphorical nature of religious accounts and encourages them in the spread of their new religion across Africa.

On paper, one would think that a show simultaneously mocking a religious minority and the colonised populations it has converted would spark some controversy. Perhaps the key to understanding the reason for the show’s surprisingly socially acceptable nature lies in the choice of actors to embody this synopsis – namely the Mormons and Ugandans.

One of the catchiest lines of the show might just be ‘I am a Mormon, and Mormon just believes’, evidently mocking the Mormons’ naïve credulity and lack of pragmatism. But could the same joke not be made just about any other religion? ‘Religion’, and by extension faith, arguably necessitate a degree of ‘irrational’ belief, in the contemporary Western understandings of science and factualness. In other words, isn’t it the very premise of a religion to ‘just believe’? It could be argued that the same statement could be applied to nearly any other religion – or in fact to supposedly ‘nonreligious’ entities too. This might suggest that Mormons are the scapegoats through which to mock ‘faith’. But because 'faith' is so intrinsically human, perhaps we should consider the idea that our laughs also vent our own insecurities regarding ‘God’ and ‘religion’.

This recognition of the show’s broader underlying themes begs for a parallel with other religious groups. Would the show have been equally acclaimed if it treated Islam, and depicted Muslims as naïve worshipers who ‘just believe’? Or would it for the same matter be guiltlessly enjoyed if it poked fun at the Jewish community’s blind faith, considering their complicated history? Though this line in itself bears little importance, such analogies open the door to the reconsideration of the jokes that flow through the play, starting from its very title. Just consider if the show was called ‘The Koran’.

Though these are only abstract speculations, my point is to

Photo credits: Julieta Cervantes

denounce the bias that is intrinsic to our tolerance of political incorrectness, revealed through the boundaries of socially acceptable humour. The metrics by which we abide humorously are defined by an unspoken script, and the show is a contemporary example of those implicit preconceptions. This is not to question the legitimacy of the authors to mock the Mormons – their humour is somewhat beyond their control, predetermined by social norms and values. But precisely because of this fact, irony powerfully informs our understanding of the underlying socio-political dynamics that permeate our world.

Though the show may in part be ‘funny’ because it took an easy scapegoat to mock religion, we must not forget the other party in the show – the Ugandans. The script is flooded with racist jokes, yet it seems no one gets offended. For example, one of the running gags is a man explaining how he now has sex with frogs instead of babies to deliver him from his aids. Another character also complains that he has maggots in the scrotum, but they cannot get a doctor, because he is the doctor…LOL! In theory, those jokes mock the missionary’s conception of Uganda and Africa and thus serve more as a criticism of Western prejudices. But is that really so? The ironic nature and setting in which those statements are embedded make them acceptable. Irony is by definition ‘not true’, and getting offended would theoretically be a lack of humorous awareness.

In this context, however, doesn’t irony serve as a façade to enjoy a good old racist joke?

This opens the door to an important debate surrounding the role and boundaries of irony. Humour and satire are irrefutable pillars of freedom of speech. This being said, though everything can be poked fun at theoretically, we must recognise the blatant bias in the choice of groups that embody those jokes, as well as the underlying ideas that incite us to laugh at certain jokes. The playwrights disappointingly use irony to reinforce pre-existent dominant and racist narratives when they could and should, have challenged this very status quo. Irony is therefore powerful but also dangerous and I merely want to debunk the idea that one cannot take offense because it is ‘not true!’. Perhaps the key is that we should be more introspective of the boundaries of irony as a marker of the limits of our freedom of speech and the collective moral code we tacitly abide by. The Mormons and Ugandans are just defenceless props of our ritual of moral and intellectual ablution, and our laughs a vain form of penitence.

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Lessons from Rojava

by Iacopo Nassigh Global North Commies’ extinction One thing us global-north left-wingers always tend to forget is that while in the last 50 years we have been sitting around and growing beards thinking that a revolution is impossible, it doesn’t mean that it has been the same in the rest of the world. Popular uprisings have been changing things up all around the world, showing that left-wing revolutions are not just a 20th century phenomenon. If one just looks at the last 15 years, several uprisings have dramatically challenged the status quo of world elites, from the Arab Spring all around the Middle East in the 2010s to the estadillo social in Chile (2019-2022).

Then, why, despite all of this, does revolutionary politics seem so far from the programs of the European Left, which is instead every day more prone to come down to compromises with the neoliberal establishment in the fear, often more supposed than real, to lose popular legitimacy? The question is extremely difficult, but my approximate answer would be that it comes down to a matter of what we have in mind when we think about democracy. I have the nerve to say that an anthropological viewpoint may suggest a way out of this situation. Indeed, as Graeber (2001) reminds us, what anthropology should be about is revealing that reality can be different from ours by looking at places in which it is. Anthropology should then give ‘power to the imagination’, as Graeber (ibid.) says, quoting a slogan from May 1968, roughly 50 years ago, roughly when in the Global North we stopped thinking left wing revolutions were possible.

Regarding our conceptions of democracy in the Global North, there is an elephant in the room. And the reason might be simpler than expected. As David Wengrow (2022) puts it, it may well be just a matter of racism. An embedded racism that, for example, blinds us when we celebrate Athenian democracy as the epitome of participatory democracy while it was probably no more than an imperialist state based on chattel slavery (ibid.). This same blindness prevents us from seeing how radical democracy is and has been successful in other places. I will try and show that not only radical democracy is taking place, and probably originated as well, outside of the Global North, but that by looking at its manifestations there, many lessons can be understood about the State, the origin of inequality and ways to create a truly free society. In this sense, the ongoing revolution in Rojava, officialy known as AANES (Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria), developing amidst the Syrian Civil War since 2012 offers a fertile ground for thought.

A first lesson: give to women what belongs to them The first lesson we should learn from the Rojava revolution is that class doesn’t have to be the only discriminated identity that makes a revolution start. It can be gender as well. Even more, the Rojava revolution holds that the origin of inequality should be found in the latter and not in the former. This line of thought needs to be traced back to the thought of Abdullah Öcalan, the theoretical mind behind the revolution and co-founder of the PKK (Kurdistan workers’ party), who was put in jail by the Turkish regime in 1999 and has been incarcerated ever since. In his thought, the main reason for the unequal

and unfair state of the current capitalist society, embodied in Syria by the Assad regime, is to be located in the oppression of women as, in his own historical metanarrative, ‘the decline of society (…) began with the fall of women’ (Knapp et al., 2016: 40).

Rojava Information Center (2022) celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Rojavan Revolution [instagram]

However, this is no new argument at all. To say it better, it looks very similar to Engels’ (1884) famous argument. Indeed, in what is probably Engels’ most well-known book he argues that in origins human society was regulated by a matriarchal and matrilineal principle that put women at the centre of society’s life and then all went wrong with the shift from nomadic to sedentary lifestyle which gave rise, in order, to private property, patriarchy and ultimately the State. One might say, and many actually do, that this argument is a bit simplistic and evolutionary; an example of 19th century anthropology that should be bypassed in order to pay attention to the uniqueness of every specific social arrangement.

Nonetheless, students of Engels who have refined the argument are still around us. One of them is Chris Knight, co-founder of the RAG (Radical Anthropology Group), still operating in London at the moment. For him, primitive communism’s origins lie in the evolutionary step that brought humans to distinguish themselves from primates as a species. In particular, the first act of the revolution that led to an egalitarian society is for him the uprising of female primates against dominant and immobile males in order to ‘force the leisured sex to help in childcare for the first time’ (1991: 25), allying with outcast male primates.

The core of this alliance was a sex-for-meat agreement by which the game hunted by males was exchanged with females for sex, thus taking away potential sexual partners from the alpha male primates.

Nonetheless, Knight does not only follow Engels, but add something to it. What Knight adds is the centrality of the menstrual cycle in this shift away from the domination of the alpha male in social arrangements. Indeed, the menstrual cycle was, according to Knight, the biological clock around which couples would alternatively disjoin and conjoin, since men would leave in order to hunt when their partners were menstruating and the end of the hunt would coincide with the end of the females’ cycles.

Considering the biological proven fact of menstrual cycle synchronisation among females living in proximity, the final effect of all this arrangement was the coordinated splitting and reuniting of the males and females, leading thus to a society with two centres of power, male and female, balancing one another through the overarching time-scheduling principle of the female menstrual cycle. As the theory goes, this revolution brought into existence egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies which turned into patriarchal and sedentary societies, scared of the power of women and thus terrified by their menstrual blood.

What is peculiar about these arguments which resonate with Öcalan’s ones is that they are often discarded by classic Marxist theory for which “the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle” (Marx et al., 2008). Instead, what the Rojava revolution has done is taking this seriously, stating in facts that there was a struggle before class struggle to solve: the one between genders. A ‘science of women’, Jineolojî was thus created by the revolutionary forces in Rojava to address this core inequality. The main idea of Jineolojî is that ‘knowledge and science are disconnected from society (and from women especially) - they are a monopoly controlled by dominant groups, used as a foundation for their power’ (Knapp et al., 2016: 71).

What it aims to do is thus giving ‘women and society access to science and knowledge and to strengthen the connections of science and knowledge to society’ (ibid.), to re-embed them to where they originally belonged as an anthropologist would put it.

14 Thus, the Rojava revolution is showing the world a radical and successful feminism in which the key to women’s liberation is giving back to women the knowledge that has been taken away from them, creating female-only organs that can do this following the guideline concept of woman-to-woman solidarity as the basis of women’s (and thus everyone’s) liberation.

However, as the shared metanarrative goes, women’s freedom and power are put in danger by the State, the ultimate masculinist construct. Thus, in order to protect women’s freedom, the revolution had to replace the State with something else.

A second lesson: ‘The origins of the commune, cooperative and democratic confederalism’: Engels today It is in its refusal of the State as we know it that the Rojavan revolution gives us a second lesson. Indeed, what Öcalan’s political theory, called democratic confederalism, the political ideology governing Rojava political life, wants to do is addressing the inherent oppressive nature of the Nation-State.

The core idea behind democratic confederalism is one of total integration between political society and civil society in a bottom-up fashion. To put it in Öcalan’s words ‘confederalism proposes political self-administration in which all groups of the society and all cultural identities express themselves in local meetings, general conventions, and councils. Such a democracy opens political space for all social strata and allows diverse political groups to express themselves. In this way it advances the political integration of society as a whole. Politics becomes part of everyday life’ (Öcalan quoted in Knapp et al., 2016: 43).

What Jineolojî has meant on the From the level of the ground, even for the most commune to the one of the sceptical observers of the country thus the assembly revolution, is a dramatic has become in Rojava the repositioning of women in main form of collective society through their direct decision-making, trying to political participation. In Rojava dismantle collective life as the principle of dual leadership, we know it in the Nationby which there should be two State.

But what is leaders (one of whom must be a ultimately wrong about the woman) in any political State? assembly, applies at every level For simplicity, let’s just of political organisation. take the definition of State Moreover, every assembly must by Encyclopaedia consist of at least 40% (in Britannica “a territorially Rojava Information Center (2022) meeting of a commune in the city of Qamishlo multiple instances they are bounded sovereign polity actually more) women. a state Moreover, at an extremely localised level, often the that is ruled in the name of a community of citizens who identify neighbourhood one, there is a ‘Women’s House (Mala Jinan), ‘an themselves as a nation”. Thus, the nation-state is a ‘territorial all-female house where women’s autonomy is discussed’ (Nordhag, bounded’ unity. What does this imply? It implies the drawing of 2021: 16), women’s peace committees that investigate cases of neat borders that mark off a specific area, making it ‘bounded’. gender-based domestic violence, women’s education and research However, who are these neat borders for? Nobody needs a neat centres where ‘women bring their family and social dilemmas (…) delineation of a geographical space if the relationship they have and find solutions by talking with other women’ (Knapp et al., with that territory is not one of possession, or to say it better, of 2016: 70) while at the same time being taught about ‘computer capitalist exploitation. The people who want boundaries are use, language, sewing, first aid, and children’s health, and culture colonisers, rulers or landlords, not subsistence peasants. Borders and art’ (ibid.). On top of all this, there is the YPJ (Yekîneyên have historically emerged as a way to assert domination over land Parastina Jin), the all-female women’s protection units, an armed within the typically western and moreover, historically typically body led by women that protect their lands and families, and now masculine, binary between nature and culture. State’s borders are world famous for their fight against the IS. just taken-for-granted manifestations of this logic.

15 In this vein, Nation-States have been successfully represented in propaganda in the form of a wedding (a non-consensual one I’d say), between ‘Father State and Motherland’ (Delaney, 1995: 187), the male ‘cultural’ dominator and the female ‘natural’ territorial victim of this domination.

The Rojava revolution dramatically challenges this ‘territorial boundedness’. What instead leads the way is Bookchin’s theory of social ecology (2006), the idea that links ‘the fate of ecological society to that of a revolutionary political project of local direct democracy’ (Hammy and Miley, 2022), stemming from Bookchin’s conviction that ‘our present-day ecological dislocations have their basic sources in social dislocations’ (Bookchin quoted in ibid.). Thus, human-nature co-dependence has informed the practice of the revolution.

Cooperatives established in Rojava have ever since the beginning of the revolution tried to paradigmatically change the ‘territorial bounded’ nature of North-eastern Syrian landscape, transforming wheat and olives monocultures in fields hosting a wide range of vegetables (Rojava information Center, 2020) By crushing the boundaries of monocultures and those of strict individual possession and boundedness, the very basic principle of ‘boundedness’ that underpins capitalist exploitation and the Nation-State is at danger.

Going back to our definition, a nation-state is also a ‘sovereign polity (…) ruled in the name of a community of citizens’, but here as well the question of boundaries is a central one. Who is included in the ‘sovereign polity’? From Agamben (1998) we know that the ultimate characteristic of sovereignty is to distinguish between ‘bare life’ and ‘political life’, and isn’t this distinction historically and ideologically in the western polity, a distinction between men and women, ethnic majority and minorities? Indeed, historically, women didn’t get only citizenship rights later, but their exclusion was part of the process by which men acquired citizenship as representatives of the entire family (Vogel in Yuval-Davis, 1998: 24). At the same time, are not the members of the nation’s ethnic majority often distinguished ethnically from the rest of the population, as bearers of some sort of ‘ethnic genius’ (Appadurai, 2006: 3)?

Rojava challenges these, one might say, ‘original exclusions’ underpinning the State project. I have talked about the centrality of women in the revolution, empowered in being protagonists of the holistic revolutionary project. However, in the many camps that occupy the Rojavan territory, ethnic boundaries (often neatly stressed across the region) are blurred. Arabs, Turks and Kurds have learnt to live side by side, revealing how the camp, instead of what predicted by Agamben (1998), can be a space for political participatory and inclusive activity (Bishara 2017), where people have to collaborate to create a liveable future through economic cooperatives, such as the one south of Tel Abyad (Broomfield 2023).

Thus, what Rojava is attempting to do is dismantling the State and its inherent oppression stemming from its intrinsic boundedness and exclusion. This is not just revolutionary, this is even beyond Marx’s whole economic determinism. Indeed, the Rojavan revolution does not just say that gender comes before class but that the political comes before the economic. Turning their back to the dictatorship of the proletariat, Rojavans take seriously Clastres’ (1974) genius intuition that the original source of oppression does not come from economic division but from the existence of the State, without whom even class society would not be possible. As the argument goes, it is the centralisation of both power and wealth brought by the State that prevents people Rojava Information Center (2020) workers of the Umceren cooperative (Heseke countryside) are drying up bricks to construct a school for the local community from just producing for subsistence and thus from being in egalitarian relationships to one another. Thus, abolishing the State as overarching structure means abolishing, or considerably reducing, the risk of patriarchal authoritarianism within the revolutionary government. There is no Lenin or Mao in the Rojava revolution that can take over and transform a popular revolution in an oppressive, party-led, chauvinist regime. Instead, at the moment, there are two co-presidents leading the revolution, Îlham Ehmed, female and Kurd, and Mansur Selum, male and Arab.

However, this statelessness nature of the revolution should not be confused with a return to a sort of Engels’ ‘primitive communism’.

Instead, the Rojava revolution creates a stateless contemporaneity, embedded in the long history of entanglements of the Kurdsish people, and the Middle-East at large with the capitalist and imperialist world order. Indeed, the Rojava revolution is a late capitalist one, a revolution at the margins of the capitalist Empire, in an area torn by conflicts caused by political interests of European superpowers, dating back to post-WWI mandates’ system, and of the Syrian and Turkish dictatorships now. From the destruction of war, revolutionary life has emerged trying to pursue ‘collaborative survival’ (Tsing, 2015: 2) at the margins of the State and capitalist modernity.

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Camps people are forced to live in, not academics theorise about: Agamben in the real world Thus far what I have depicted may look like a socialist utopia but the reality is of course much more complex. As I have already mentioned, a lot of people in Rojava live in camps due to the displacement caused by the numerous military invasions, by the IS and the Turkish State. On the economic side, the general material conditions are often extreme. Indeed, as it has been the case of Cuba for more than 60 years, Rojava has been subjected to a heavy blockade by Turkey which renders many essential goods scarce and often, non-existent. Thus, often smugglers that follow an entrepreneurial logic are tolerated to keep the population using some essential goods, inaccessible in any other way (Broomfield, 2023). As many observers suggest, fossil fuel revenues are still the ones which provide the basic income of most of the population, as cooperatives are not as widespread as the revolutionaries would like them to be (Broomfield, 2023; Hammy and Miley, 2022).

On the political side, the shortcomings are multiple. People document how the discussion in the communes are often not as participatory and radical as auspicated as people sometimes go there to collect their rations rather than to engage in political debates (Broomfield, 2023). Or even more worryingly, people sometimes are scared to express their opinion or feel that they do not count if they are not close to YPD members, the branch of the PKK with a leading role in the revolution (Hammy and Miley 2022). On the other hand, the revolution, being under a constant military siege on multiple sides, deeply depends on top-down military units, hindering the autonomy of the communes.

On another more theoretical level the Rojava revolution has worried left-wingers for one specific reason that I have already mentioned: it is not mainly about class. As Graeber puts it ‘economic capital had been partly expropriated, social capital had been somewhat rearranged, but cultural capital – and particularly class habitus – had barely been affected’, concluding that ‘unless these structures are directly addressed, they will always tend to reassert themselves’ (2016: xix). However, one could say, what is cross-class solidarity there for if we do not accept that ingrained cultural capital is not strictly co-related with social antagonism to someone with a different class habitus? Could social and political class-solidarity be stronger than cultural differences between classes? Isn’t the idea of class homogenisation on a cultural level one that has had a controversial history in past, self-proclaimed ‘communist’, revolutions? The matter is complex, and I do not have an answer to these questions, but dismissing the revolution as doomed to fail because of this seems too simplistic to me.

At the end of the day, as everything human-made, the Rojavan revolution is highly imperfect. However, what seems saving it from its own self-destruction is one amazing detail: the awareness of this imperfection. Indeed, Öcalan himself sees self-critique as an essential part of the revolutionary process and this is widespread among the revolutionaries’ discussions at every level, to the point in which the revolution has been called a ‘self-critical’ one (Aslan, 2021: 333). As long as the revolution stays this way, it has the potential to improve. As dogmas and States go hand in hand, Rojava remains one of the best examples of an Anti-State holistic revolution, which makes of the intersectionality of its battles its point of strength. It may well be the best model we currently have to give ‘power to the imagination’, to start the ‘war of imagination’ as Graeber also used to say, changing our imagination about possible futures and changing what we think about when we think of democracy. Maybe the first step in this way could be, when we hear the word democracy, to think before anything else about the words said by a revolutionary woman to David Graeber when leaving Rojava. While he was apologising about not having brought more goods with him, she said “Don’t worry about that too much (…) I have something that no one can give me. I have my freedom. In a day or two you have to go back to a place where you don’t have that. I only wish there was some way I could give what I have to you’ (Graeber, 2016: xxii).