 So let's make a start. OK, so welcome, everybody. Welcome back on this Friday to SOAS Festival of Ideas. My name is Dr. Alberto Fernández Carvajal. I'm senior lecturer in English literature at the University of Royal Hampton in Southwest London. And I'm very delighted to be talking to you today on the second panel on the topic of colonialism, education, and sexualities, and to introduce the three speakers that will be talking to us today, who come from a wide range of perspectives, from the world of publishing to the world of academia. So welcome to our three speakers. I like how diverse we are in terms of people's perspectives and occupations as well. And we start with Arpi Tadas, who is in charge of Yoda Press. She's the founder-publisher of the award-winning independent publishing house press, which is based in New Delhi. She runs the Yoda Press series of workshops for editors and authors, and has been visiting faculty with a creative writing program at Shocker University in New Delhi. She's going to be the first panelist talking to us today. So I'd like to give her a warm welcome and I'll give her a round of digital applause. So if the other panelists would like to join us, oh, there is no applause option. Oh, well, never mind. Peter, the floor is yours, so feel free to start your paper. I can't seem to start my video. It says the host. Excellent. Hi, everyone. I'm just going to put my video off in a couple of minutes. So thank you, Alberto. Thank you so much, Festival of Ideas. So this is my alma mater from years and years ago. So this is particularly special for me. And I'm joining you from New Delhi. It's a half past seven, and I have a G&T by my side. And I'm going to get started with a few slides. Essentially, I suppose I'm the only one who's not an academic here. And I'm talking really about a large part of my life, which has been publishing the LGBTQIA list at Yoder Press in India, in South Asia. I can say South Asia, because even today, I think, I can safely say it's the only list dedicated sexualities list in all of South Asia. So I'm just going to share my screen so that just give me a second. Can you see it now? Yes. Yeah. So it was really started as a list. The LGBTQIA list was started as a list. And it then morphed into a series, which was called the Sexuality Series at Yoder Press. And then it morphed back into a list. And I think when we started, which was back in 2005, it was a year into Yoder Press' life, as it were, as an independent publishing house based in New Delhi, India. I mean, these were the various challenges that we confronted and which were really quite sort of monumental at that point for us, because some of the stuff, we just didn't know what we could possibly do anything about. And of course, the Section 377 sort of democracy sort was hanging over everyone's head, who wanted to really talk about this issue, about this phenomenon, and the burgeoning movement. And the fact of the matter is that being in India and being in South Asia, for those of you who are familiar with South Asia, a lot of it is extremely sort of OK, kosher, when it's not being discussed. But the minute people try to talk about certain things which are not considered socially acceptable, or want to sort of bring something into the spotlight, things start getting unpleasant. And that is how I think a lot of the confrontations with Section 377, which is sort of lame dormant for a very, very long time. Because as some of you know, this was a colonial law. This was something that was seamlessly taken into our constitution from the colonial era. And it, of course, criminalized homosexuality. So the legal fight was really against that. But then the social and the cultural fight, as some of you can imagine, was even more monumental in the sense. And I think we are facing that still a lot. Because of course, this was not going to change overnight. Neither was it going to change with a change in law. It's not like throwing a switch. And what made it more difficult for us also in the movement was that at that point, at least, the LGBT community was not seen as either a vote bank or a lobbying. And I think a lot of that has changed in the past 16 years. But at that time, the invisibilization, in a sense, was complete. There are many sections of the LGBT community today which are still invisibilized. But at that point, it was fairly complete. And of course, for me as a publisher who was also doing a lot of academic publishing, whose mainstay at that point, at least, was academic publishing, what was really also important was that there were no sexuality studies at all in that time in India. I'm sorry, one second. That was too quick. And the more occupational hazard, as it were, was that nobody really saw the LGBT community at that point as a viable author pool. And frankly, when we first started, a lot of bookstores refused to keep copies of this book. Now, this book came out in 2005. It's become a bit of a cult sort of text for LGBT studies, sexuality studies from South Asia. And indeed, we had the situation that bookstores actually said they would not keep copies of this book. And I tell the story again and again, but I never tire of telling it how all of us, the publishers, which was me and my partner, really, my business partner, and the contributors and the editors got together. And we just all started visiting the bookstore asking for this book. So it was an anthology. They were like, what do contributors? So we had about 25 people visit the bookstore for two days. And after that, we got a call from the bookstore saying they wanted to order copies. And then, of course, the rest is history because this book has really taken on, as I said, sort of a cult kind of importance in LGBT studies in India. And I think one of the most important things that we did with this book was that we decided that we were not going to anonymize the authors. There had been a couple of books before this, but either they were in the realm of short stories and fiction, or they had left the names anonymous. And when we went about commissioning for this book, we were very clear that we wanted to A, not fictionalize, and a large part of this book had to be the lived experience of the LGBT community. And second, that no one got to go as anonymous. You might think at this point that it's really rigid. There's a rigid sort of a rule in that agency was hampered in some way. But trust me, at that point where we were, it was really important for us to put everybody's name out as a community, as a political part of the community, and say that the book is their book and their voice. And I think the book continues to remain in print even today, and it's a really, really important book for us. But effecting genuine sort of transformation took a fair amount of time, of course. And I think for some of you who are aware of the way the LGBT movement has moved in India, what became fairly clear very quickly was that 377 had to be read down. Article 377 had to go. And this book of ours was sort of laid out the entire discussion around why 377 had to go. And a lot of the contributors to this book were actually part of the legal team that fought the case in, first, the Delhi High Court and then the Supreme Court of India. And of course, that very interesting thing happened where the Delhi High Court read Article 377 down. It decriminalized homosexuality in 2009. And then a couple of years after that Supreme Court pretty much dismissed that judgment of the Delhi High Court. So it was fairly clear to us at that point it was such a setback. And it was fairly clear to us that more literature had to go out about the community about movement. And at this point, another thing that was becoming very, very clear to us was that there wasn't enough being written about the trans community in India. And ultimately, as many of you will be aware, in two years ago the Supreme Court did do away with Article 377 and homosexuality was decriminalized. But before that, a few years before that, there was another mammoth and very, very important judgment by the Supreme Court of India, which recognized transgender persons in India for the first time. And this was in the discussions around the LGBT movement in India, this particular judgment is not spoken about a lot. But it was equally important because of course the transgender community as part of the large spectrum of the LGBTQIA community in India often comes from marginalized and unprivileged backgrounds. And their fight, in a sense, is very different from the fight of many others who are part of this community. And this particular Supreme Court judgment was therefore extremely important. What was really particularly a victory for us, because of course you can imagine the difficulty in sort of selling these books, continuing to find markets for these books. Although I must say that a lot of our market for these books comes from international sources and comes from sexuality studies departments and various universities across the world. But what was really fantastic is that five of our titles were cited in both of these Supreme Court judgments. And that felt like playing a really, really sort of vital and genuine part in effecting change in this matter. A lot of people meet me after post the 2018 judgment and decriminalization of homosexuality to ask me, what is it like now to be publishing on sexuality and to be sort of producing knowledge on sexuality in South Asia? And I think in a lot of ways there is new impetus to recognize a lot of issues and a lot of discussions which had gone somewhat unnoticed earlier. Loving Women, Being Lesbian and Unprivileged India was this book we had published back in 2007. And at that point I felt it didn't really get the kind of sales or accolades it deserved considering the author did a marvelous job of recording and documenting stories of women living with women and women loving women in unprivileged India. And interestingly, after the lockdown began, this fantastic platform called Agents of Ishq got in touch with us and they asked us if they could turn stories, the narratives from Loving Women into comic narratives, into graphic narratives and share them. And it has given this whole new life to this wonderful book and made me very hopeful about where my backlist still stands even though things have changed so much. But at the moment, what we're looking for now is really that a lot of people will ask us, so is it still queer writing or is queer writing somewhat restricting a label? And do you want to look at it justice writing? And very often I feel that cuts both ways and the fact of the matter is that at one point it was really, really important to talk about it as queer writing. But then, of course, it is understandable that particularly writers of creative nonfiction or creative fiction want to be known as writers as well. And I think as we stand now, I think these are the things I keep in mind when I'm talking about, when I am commissioning for this list now, that it is going to be queer writing as a whole as I'll always see it. But I also want to think of it as queer characters or queer narratives as part of a book on fiction or as a part of a book on poetry or as part of a book on business or on travel perhaps. And I think both have to coexist side by side. Obviously, we need many, many more books by women in the LGBTQIA community. I think a lot of standout books have been by men, popular academic fiction. And I think this needs to change from South Asia. A particular interest for me now is to see if there is the possibilities to commission books by trans men because the few trans narratives that have been told by members of the trans community have been those trans women. And I think trans men, they still need to tell their story. The other important thing is a lot of this, I mean, what we've noticed is of course, the original English language writing and particularly when we talk about academic writing, it's mostly always English language. Of course, that's there and that exists and that's important. But the fact of the matter is that translations of stories coming in from Indian languages are not just into English, but from one Indian language to another. I think that kind of crossover, that kind of exchange needs to happen in a big way. But I think the most important thing that I would flag is to end my presentation is unless our editorial ecosystem in the publishing houses in India changes, unless it becomes more diverse, we're not going to be doing any of this genuinely. And I think that's where I'll stop. Thank you. Thanks so much, Harpita, for your presentation. We'll have so much to talk about, so interesting, all the stuff that you've done. And so many people are so beholden to the work that you do. So thank you so much. So next in line, because we don't want to lose any time so that we can discuss afterwards as much as we can. Next in line, if I can get my screen up is... Oops, sorry about this. Oh, I've lost the... Oh, here it is. So next in line is Rolda Reddock, who's an emeritus professor of gender, social change and development, and the former deputy campus principal of the University of the West Indies in the Saint Augustine campus in Trinidad and Tobago. She's an activist in the Caribbean women's movement. She has been for many years, and she's currently in the Executive Committee of the International Sociological Association. And many other, I mean, lots of accolades are very well-seasoned academic in the field. So we're going all the way from South Asia, all the way from India to the Caribbean across many, many time zones. And we really look forward to welcoming Rolda. So Rolda, the floor is yours. Rolda, are you with us? You might have to unmute yourself and turn the camera on. It seemed the camera was turned on, but turned off, so the host will have to... Okay. Back now. Over to you. Yes, good morning and thanks very much for having me. I speak as a feminist scholar activist located in the Global South, specifically Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean. And of course, it's a very small place. And in particular, my work circulates around the Anglophone Caribbean, although some of my work also has wider and broader application. Now, it is tended to be quite eclectic, ranging from the broad areas of women's labour and social movement history, feminist theory, the gender implications of global economic development, intersections of class, gender, race class, ethnicity and citizenship, radical social thought, including radical feminist thought, Caribbean feminist thought, gender environment, gender sexualities and identities and Caribbean masculinities. So you'll see that my work on gender and sexualities is often integrated into other fields, other areas, although I have done some specific work in this area, which I'll discuss this morning. Now, my positionality and experiences, therefore, would be quite different from some of my colleagues located in the North. And I hope to explore some of these. Now, before going further, I wanted to differentiate between the terms colonisation and colonialism, because colonisation usually refers to the action or the process of settling and establishing control over an area, often means control over the people who are indigenous to that area, or in areas that have not been entered into before, clearing lands and establishing a dominant presence that was not there before. Now, colonialism on the other hand, I understand as a policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over any country, occupying it with settlers, exploiting it economically, et cetera. So colonisation usually precedes colonialism and the Caribbean has been both colonised and experienced colonial rule from various European powers since 1492. And therefore, the Caribbean was that first place of significant European conquest, colonisation, colonialism, and large scale transportation and varying levels of forced and course migration and labour. Now, much of our activists work and academic work therefore at this time continues to involve challenging and removing amending colonial sexes, racist colonialist laws, practices, ideologies and religious systems introduced to the colonial process and continue today through the continued dominance of your America, including your American religious mission, your American religious missionary work in the region. Now, the Caribbean region in a way possibly like all other colonial regions has been sexualised since the 15th century. And of course, in the specific format of the systems of enslavement, it's interesting as shown in some of my early work on women and slavery in the Caribbean that for at least 200 to 400 years of enslavement, marriage and the establishment of family units was not allowed. And slave plantations, child bearing was also discouraged and unions could be destroyed through sale and therefore you have the framework for the construction of specific forms of gender relations and also relations of sexualities. I think what is also important is that the free control and access that European men had to enslave women and in fact, if one were to read the work of Thomas Disselwood who was a Jamaican overseer, we would argue that the sexual behaviours of these overseers actually became the model for sexual behaviours in the region at a later date, but that is an issue for the discussion. Now, research and sexualities in the Caribbean prior to the 1990s was mainly demographic studies, studies on population control, et cetera, but the HIV AIDS pandemic rarely opened up the possibility for funding and access to resources to begin to carry out work on sexualities possibly for the first time in that kind of in-depth way because as you may know that for many parts of our region a lot of our research funding comes through development funding so that the luxury sometimes of selecting survivors of research could be affected by the availability of funds and climate which such would take place so it was during the HIV AIDS pandemic that my work on gender and sexualities began with that team we explored the sexual cultures of the region in particular how sexualities are constructed and expressed within the unequal gender relations we were concerned about how rigid sex and gender stereotypes deepen vulnerability undermine sexual autonomy and personal security and integrity and we went deeper in exploring our work we stumbled upon an area that we really had not considered and that was the taboo area of child sexual abuse particularly intra-familiar sexual abuse referred locally as incest stakeholders and practitioners in health, gender, HIV women's movement activists, social workers etc reporting in the high prevalence in the communities that within which we work and we know also that this is a global phenomenon where we identify sexual violence against children at 7% for boys about 73 million globally 14% for girls 150 million globally below the age of 18 years had experienced forced sexual intercourse and other forms of sexual violence and that 21% of women in some countries reported being sexually abused in 2015 and it was on that background that we began to explore the gendered and structural underpinnings beneath that practice and to try to understand ethnographically what were the factors that contributed to this existence and of course we took a clear feminist and gender perspective from the public health approaches that had been used before and were able to conclude that child sexual abuse in the Caribbean is clearly located within a context of gender ideologies and expressions, sexual expectations and behaviors and social norms based on patriarchal values where women and girls continue to have the main responsibility to establish boundaries to protect themselves. At the same time we found that the attitudes and behaviors of men and older boys including family members reflected a strong sense of sexual entitlement among older boys and men and many of the same factors that gave rise to other forms of gender-based violence for example unequal power relations economic dependence were also contributing factors the research also supported other studies of how children's vulnerability makes them like women targets of abusive masculine sexual assertions and that the decision to disclose publicly came with significant burdens for children in relation to family honor, economic sustainability stigma and social judgment. We found this comfort among boys in speaking about sexual abuse because the mainstream gender ideologies constructed men as active and normally heterosexual sexual beings who should accept all available sexual opportunities so refusing sexual opportunities from women whether consensual or not could be construed as a sign of homosexuality similarly raped by men would also be similarly understood boys and men were therefore unwilling to speak about the experiences of these phenomena are more recent work by one of our colleagues among Indo-Caribbean male concluded that homophobia presents them prevents them from speaking out about their abuse shifting the discourse from the abuse to their sexuality. Now the meanings and therefore attached to masculinity and family have important implications for this phenomena and we this was an action research study which was linked to a campaign which continues we also at the same time did two other studies on youth sexual cultures and we looked at youth sexual cultures on the campus of our university but also in the streets during a street ethnography in the capital city we came up with many interesting conclusions related to notions of sexuality gender identity and suggested a greater fluidity that is normally understood and one of the important components of this study was the challenge many the binary divisions that are commonly understood so in my most recent work on gender variants I challenged many of the common assumptions about sex gender normalcy at examine the concepts of sex gender identity diverse gender expression and gender variations or diversity as well as the different ways in which these are experienced cross-culturally generally in this discourse generally in every day understanding masculinity and femininity male and female understood as binary opposites to be masculine is to be not feminine to be male is to be not male hence the discomfort we have with ambiguity and so we began by acknowledging these hegemonic gender divisions but we also noted that although these are strongly held in your American traditions and some others they do not reflect the complexity of the human sex gender experience many African Asian Pacific and indigenous and pre-Columbian American societies had developed different gender categories and understandings in this regard nevertheless there's a hegemonic construct which I think we need to integrate with our own with the other understandings to really get to the breath and complexity of this phenomena I also note the historic irony that wildly contemporary challenge to homophobia and heteronormativity has been most visible in the North Atlantic world it was European colonialism that demonized and marginalized many forms of sexual and gender variation found in other parts of the world in virtually every part of the non-western world that European colonelists and their missionaries entered they vilified, attacked, criminalized, demonized push underground and eventually closeted or made disappear existing forms of sex and their variation the reality though is much of this survived but not always in a form that allowed it to be a full expression especially with colonial laws which criminalize certain practices and which continue to be on the legal books of some of our countries and protected by savings clauses that were in the law that were established at the point of independence so our work on gender and sexualities therefore has sought to understand its complexity and to free it from some of the constructs which I feel have been imposed against and to ask that northern and southern scholars may look at each other's work in this area to really bring about a fuller understanding it's also been important it's also been important in developing new strategies for how freedom and liberation should look thank you wonderful thank you so much very exciting as well can't wait to talk to you about all these things so last but not least the person who actually originally volunteered to go first never mind we're going a bit further north we're going to Boston and we're welcoming Yoti Puri who's a Hazel Dick Leonard chair and also professor of sociology at Simo's University in Boston her interests revolve around issues of sexuality gender race nation and state as well from a transnational and post-colonial feminist lens and she's written a number of books many many books so I do ask you to have a look at her bio note to take note of them otherwise I just can't wait to hear what she's got to say so thank you so much Yoti thank you so much I can't turn on my video so I wonder if somebody it says that it stopped by the host okay I'm awesome thank you again thank you so much also to Professor Mina Yakin, Stephanie and others and a warm welcome to all of you I believe that are people from virtually all around the world who've joined in but I have to say I'm thinking nostalgically about being in London and I feel like if I squint my eyes just so I can pretend like I'm there but onto the topic in terms of I think this issue around decolonization I think it has been helpful to think about it across the terrain of sexuality which is primarily what I work on but also the discipline of sociology which is my home discipline as well as my pedagogy in terms of the courses and the approaches I take to the courses that I begin with is what is decolonization because it's a term that we use quite widely and quite broadly and it's a term that has gained renewed currency in the last 15-17 years so in one sense we know about decolonization as a process that was historical, political that required the withdrawal of colonial powers independence, sovereignty much of the ways that Professor Raddock was just talking about in terms of colonial rule so sort of the end of that, the formal end of it and since then and possibly even before then this question about what it means to decolonize thought what it means to decolonize curriculum has been a question that has been taken up by many educational centers and universities in the global south for many years now but as I said particularly in the last 15-17 years the term seems to have gained renewed currency especially via the influence of what is called decoloniality it's an area of thought led by people like Walter Mimolo and others from Latin America to think about disentangling knowledge and epistemologies of the global south from their European sources to sort of disentangle that to think about sort of legacies of thought and knowledge systems that were pre-colonial or that existed alongside colonialism without ever being fully co-opted by them and at the same time decolonization is a term that is used just very broadly a few years ago somebody pointed me to the site called decolonized yoga right so we talk about decolonizing this we talk about decolonizing that we talk about decolonizing yoga and when I look at that particular site frankly I'm not quite clear what that means you know what that sort of framework is being used so when I think about it sort of when I place it in this particular context and I think about my work the research that I've done the writing that I've done as well as the courses that I've taught over the years for me decolonization has meant contending with geopolitical conditions but also slavery, imperialism transnational migration all of these geopolitical conditions that produced the very notion of Europe or the United States which is where I'm based and its others it has also decolonization for me has also meant developing and using critical tools critical epistemologies that the United States and the United States that they are not at the they are not the reference point of our knowledge systems I wish I've sought to produce new genealogies of the global south critical genealogies of the global south particularly through the lens of sexuality and now I'm currently working on a project on death and migration so that you know that it continues and also and this is the last thing I want to make the point that I want to make about decolonization I think it also is important that we understand Europe and the United States are fresh so to decolonize means to also understand the United States and Europe from these critical perspectives and here I think the term or the phrase that Gayatri Chakravarti's feedback has used calling Europe and other right so it's it's an other and it deserves to be placed again within that position of just another and so I find that very helpful in terms of thinking of fresh about the place of the United States so with that I want to actually speak for a few minutes about my discipline of sociology and since I'm based in the United States I'd like to actually share with you briefly what this discipline means from the perspective of the American sociological association which is the premier national organization and here are I'm not sure why I'm not being able to make this full screen but just give me a second and I think I can figure that out I don't know if it has something to do with the yes anyway but I hope you can see it so this is the American sociological association on the left of the screen is the 2019 statement which defines it as the study of society social science the study of behavior the scientific study of social aggregations and overarching unification of all studies right and in 2020 they had changed the definition and now it reads the social change the structure of organizations groups it ranges from the study of the intimate family to the hostile mob it's about divisions of race gender and social class to the shared beliefs of a common culture so I can just give you another couple of seconds to just go over the two definitions I know there's a lot of text in there the point that I want to make over here is that while there is much to be said about these definitions and one can go in depth in terms of the analysis what they are not about is engagement with power in a sustained systemic concentrated way it's not about the politics of knowledge and it's not addressing neither of these statements address geopolitical formations that are set on so as a result in order to think about how does one decolonize disciplines such as sociology it seems to me that one has to turn outside of a discipline like this to turn to critical post-colonial and transnational feminist thought to black feminist scholars in order to find our sources of inspiration in order to find examples of this kind of critical thought a black sociologist Joyce Ladner published the death of white sociology back in 1973 so in terms of decolonizing our disciplines we have inspiration we have sources the ground for this has already been cleared moving on to research I want to make a couple of points in terms of my own research which has been concentrated primarily in terms of sexuality as well as gender nation state and so on and so forth sexuality has been crucial to the very projects of colonial rule and occupation and for that matter slavery, settler colonialism but also to what then emerges as the post-colonial and in my work I've looked at middle and upper class women for example in urban centers like Bombay and New Delhi and this work was done in the late 1990s and it was really at that point it became important to me to study what women from the relatively privileged classes the upper middle classes their narratives, their influences around gender and sexuality because the bulk of the literature at the time coming through the discipline of anthropology and its colonial legacies the primary focus had been on rural women on what we call quote-unquote studying down privilege because researchers have access to them and so for me it was important to shift that perspective and to study groups that in fact had not been studied precisely because of the privilege that they occupy another major project that I did also relates to what Arbita was talking about in terms of the struggle to decriminalize homosexuality and the book from sexual states which came out in 2016 one of the key projects that was motivating this book, this research and this study was not only to map the struggle around the decriminalization of homosexuality and its various complexities but also to make the point that contexts such as India or other places in the global south are not just cases but that these are sites of theory production because conventionally we look to places like the United States or Europe as the sources of theory and theory production and then everything else becomes a case but along with other scholars my project has been to overturn this and to think about India and this particular site of theory and theory production but it's also about paying attention to post-colonial context for India where I have been working primarily which is the ways in which entire communities entire marginalized communities are at risk because of the rise and the increasing ascendancy of Hindu fundamentalism that too taking on the structures and the formations of Hindu fundamentalism that too is part of this project of decolonization and it's not simply about the colonial and the colonized or the X colonial and the post-colonial but it's also about the rise of these right-wing structures and the power and the formation that has been really impacting the landscape so widely and then lastly it's about our readings, our framings, our methodologies who we are reading, how we propose our research, who we are citing you know which conferences we attend all of this it seems to me is part of this question about how do we decolonize our academic and activist practices and lastly a couple of quick points about teaching it seems to me that sociology as we know it but this is true of other disciplines as well this problem is hardly one that is pertinent only to sociology but I think these disciplines that tend to be so Euro-American centric they persist because of how we perform them in all of these criterion ways I think about it in terms of the iterative practices of teaching right, our syllabi who's in our reading list how we educate and inform students about methods the practices right through which we perform these disciplines but also that these practices have room in order to allow us to disrupt these disciplines to change them in fundamental ways to decolonize them and I've taken on some of these right from my syllabi in terms of introduction to sociology to methods to theory courses to think carefully about what that decolonizing project would look like and it's a project that is ongoing because I'm not sure we ever fully arrive at the point where we can be complacent about all of this. So with that I'm going to stop right here and I look forward to the discussion and the comments and the feedback. Thank you. Thanks so much Yoti. Another very thought-provoking and very exciting paper as well so gosh you've given all of us so much to think about. Can I invite the rest of the speakers to come back on camera and to turn the microphones back on so we can have a kind of plenary discussion amongst all of us. Hello hello. I think yeah I think the horse yeah okay you're coming out of the shadows there you are. Okay excellent I mean so many different you're working on so many on such different areas and yet I could see the topic of colonialism and education and decolonization you know running across your three presentations and I just you know I've got pages and pages but I guess I want to start by asking you all a question that you might want to you know throw to one another and debate amongst yourselves because so much of coloniality is so overrun issues of language as well particularly when we're talking about people's identities so Yoti was talking about you know using ideas that are not you're American in inception looking for different sources of thought what about the very terms that we use to describe LGBTIQ citizens from around the world I mean this is English is the is the primal colonial language it you had me thinking when you said you know we need trans men to have more visibility and I thought but who counts as a trans man in India because some of the ISRA community could perhaps be considered trans men but many not their intersex or the crossdresses as well so my question to you is about language and about concepts and how can we decolonize the study of sexuality around the globe without doing epistemic violence to the people that were trying to champion without you know labelling people very rigidly and imposing a westernised understanding of their identities very big question I'm sorry if I can just come in on the trans men bit you know there's actually very dynamic politically active trans men community in India who recognise themselves and identify as trans men and as a matter of fact that has become a particularly important point of discussion in publishing circles at least a kind of activist publishing circles which are important to me because two years ago last year early 2019 there was a book published by Penguin India on trans men which you know where a journalist engaged members of the community in conversations and even before the book came out there was large scale protests from among the trans men community against this book because some of the advance proofs leaked out to the trans men community as a matter of fact one of the most important activists from the community who was actually interviewing the book then said that you know the way he had then been portrayed and the way things were taken out of context was extremely objectionable to him and I think it got us all thinking about the fact that the community has to tell its own story first and that is an important very very vital part of the discussion for publishers like me in India right now just to put that Thank you so much for that really interesting anybody want to respond but I think it's a really important and I would say a complicated question the question about language you know in one sense sort of English or for that matter Spanish or French these are languages that have been clearly bestowed as a result of colonial rule at the same time and in a place like India or South Asia at large so it's very much a language that belongs to us alongside other languages part of the problem with English in the context of South Asia is that it is still the language of the elite it is still the language of you know the sort of the privilege right it is the language of governance which is not always open to other people and then it also English becomes the reference point by the you know for which we then have this notion of the vernacular right so that there is a hierarchy of languages that is developed so I think to me that's the more critical complicated terrain not so much about whether we can use words like LGBTQ I hijra transgender you know that to me is not as important as identity is dynamic they are constantly shifting being produced within social political context and there's nothing static about that there's nothing static about language for that reason right so to me I think I would rather you know raise the question about the primacy of English and the way it articulates with regional difference and class difference and status difference thanks so much Roder would you like to respond yes I think that this this question is really the issue that I was trying to work with in that I do think that what we that a lot of the way in which it is course as you move has been in a way almost a quantitative kind of accounting kind of approach so that so but I think that that a lot of these I think it doesn't allow for the wealth of variation that exists and also the variation in relation to identity and then the variation in relation to identity and bodies and how the two things intersect so I prefer to think of them as continue up that intersect at various points and then identities emerge based on social historical or other circumstances and also there are different ways in which societies have understood for example the U.N. CEDAW committee and and one of the this this year the Pakistan delegation turned up with a transgender woman on their as part of the delegation they were very proud of it in fact it was I they sent me after that transgender person on Pakistan and of course there were other Islamic countries around who horrified and shocked they could not believe this but my understanding is that the whole way in which that is conceptualized and understood in Pakistan has is you know there's a long deep history that's very different from other parts of the world and I think the ways in which it's understood would be quite different from certain circumstances so I do think that the putting together the actual experiences is very important or similarly in our interviews with trans women in Trinidad also suggested a lot of variation they spoke about their relationships with women and these were sex workers on the street they spoke about how even though they are trans trans women the so other women still treat them as men and insist so for example somebody is coming to attack they still expect the trans woman to be the ones to defend them and if anything happens to the trans men they are left defenseless they also spoke about the different ways in which they relate to women sexually because even though they were trans women they still had sex so what you found is that there's a complexity of experience that I think cannot always be clearly either say okay this is this and that is that I think a lot of it has to do with the circumstances and the whole understandings in that particular context so I think that yes there are categories that are important that we use but I think we also have to use this in the recognition that the situation is much more complex than a man naming thank you so much anybody else want to jump off that one as well thank you so much Roda can I read the matter okay okay it's like being one of my seminars okay so well better I can add one more thing because I think it's also the question of our current political economies and one of the things in terms of the ways in which transnational sources of funding operate and how the sources of funding have allowed for the circulation of certain terminologies like transgender right and it's not to say that there is a kind of it's because of these economies and the sources of funding that you get the adoption of the language around transgender but in fact there is a correlation there right like as groups are positioning themselves as they are claiming seeking resources as they want to be legible as they want to create solidarity with people outside of the country you know that there is this sort of again a kind of complicated nexus that is allowing for the proliferation of some terminologies and not others so in that sense you know they continue to be political but you know not in ways that I think can be reduced that's very interesting and also in terms of the politics of funding we also see shifts in the funding regimes so for example funding that is no longer available to for example women and feminist organizations may now be available to to our gender and sexuality organizations and again on the certain certain constructs so I think that that especially for those of us who end up being the kind of developmental focus in terms of aid it is even more limiting the ways in which this happens but also I think social media is very powerful and therefore also constructs and identities very widely and I think it's also up to us to see that as we understand the circulations coming from the north to the south we need to also understand circulations that can emerge in the south and almost have to also have to clarify our global understanding of these phenomena. If I could just come in with something that I would like to talk about with you know like Jyothi said I don't think I mean my experience I don't think the use of the terminology is such a problem really and I think the deeper problem really is about narratives and stories or experiences and how they are narrated coming out of the Indian language context and then travelling out only if they are translated to English I mean for instance even with fiction which is something that's you know that gets a lot of news sort of space in India I mean bestselling gay writer in Kannada in Bangalore whose book has sold 10,000 copies but he is only going to his book is only going to travel to other languages now because HarperCollins India has decided to pick up his book and translate it to English and I think you know forget about travelling out of the country I think these narratives are not even travelling from one part of the country to another there is such a such a dependence on this sort of you know the English language kind of phenomenon being part of the equation thank you so much any responses Rota you want to say something yeah I think it's not just the language it's also the power the power the global power structures because I mean we are also English there's a lot of English language in the global south but yet our work isn't read either our work doesn't travel either I think there's a hegemony of the North Atlantic and I think when we go on to the I think this is something that we could probably discuss more later on because I do have something to say about that why don't you say it now okay is that knowledge that is constructed in the north I mean I noticed that when I did when I do university or even now when I read books many of the books published in the north never identify a site you know they speak of like gender and water whatever but there's no site and the assumption is that that work is of global relevance whereas when we work let's say India South Africa we are humble we identify the source of our data but the situation results therefore that our information our theorizing is seen as provincial it is of local relevance our concepts do not have global significance and I see and I think in other words you have to actually go to the north for your work to have global significance so I think that is one of the big frustrations because associated with this that the conceptual ideas that come out of the south therefore it's very difficult for them to be engaged with even though they can add value to global understandings and I think for example Jyoti speaks of the ASA I'm in the ISA and these are we are questioning the politics of location and how what is said is even taken up or even read you know so I think that that is a very important issue because I do think that for example a lot of what's happening in Asia in terms of gender and sexualities would be really important some areas of the global north some of that work that's being done and it's really enriched understanding so that's my point I just wanted to add to that just from a publishing perspective that was really interesting because one of the things that I faced again and again after starting Yoder Press was that whenever we published academic works in sexuality in India or South Asia and then those manuscripts out to American university presses for them to buy rights they would invariably come back to me saying well this is too South Asian this is too South Asian for us and the funniest part is that once Yoder Press has gained a bit of a reputation now we are flooded with manuscripts on various academic manuscripts by people who are publishing there you know what I mean so now that's not too South Asian to send back to me right it's just ridiculous but anyway that was a great point I guess it's an extension of coloniality when you just keep centering your American interests in areas and also particular types of thinking and particular types of intellectuals what's European, what's American, is universal and what's from the rest of the world is local, is provincial which is colonial tale right tell us all this time really Jyoti do you want to chime in on that debate? No I mean you know that's the sort of the point that I was making in terms of I feel like my work one way or another has had to and I think because we're working on context in the global south that that is one of the things that you're constantly pushing back right we write a chapter you publish a chapter you publish a journal article you publish a book and the sort of the qualifier India or Caribbean or Africa or you know whatever that qualifier is always in the title so all of the you know the versions that you get from within these more hegemonic centers for some reason that title is not that qualifier is not necessary right that there is this constant production as if a title on sexuality that is based on the US it does not need to announce itself as coming from the US you know that there is a sort of implicit understanding that this is about the US that it's somehow universal and that's the problem that I was referring to about you know looking at the global south or even the you know and by global south I'm actually not even really talking about geographic geopolitical sort of or geographic understandings of it I'm talking about it in terms of marginalized groups so that the global south exists within the United States or within parts of Western Europe right and so if we think about it from that angle then it seems to me that you know we there is something important about those perspectives that are also about complicating and producing theory right that the theory we need to we need to dismantle we need to de-center a very notion of where theory and by theory I mean like where knowledge is coming from right like where do we understand how do we understand the world become so much so centered in very particular perspectives that are claiming to be universal so so interesting I mean I guess we need to go beyond citing the books that get published in the American University Presses and in the British University Presses and go elsewhere for an archive right and for ideas okay and Alberto I would say also the U.S. you know it's one is that we need to diversify and pluralize and you know have a broader understanding but also the University Presses here or in Western Europe have to do that work right because it's not a matter of simply adding things it's a matter of how do we change the very reference point how do we change that landscape thank you so much such a pressing question Rhoda did you want to respond you just agreeing you just said yes I agree but I think we also have to actually read and engage with the work you know I think that citing it is very nice but I think in actually engaging with it debating with it in our classes seeing how it speaks to other work in other words you know seeing its relevance using the concepts in analysis so I think it's an actual engagement that's really nice okay thank you so much sorry somebody else wants to say something else I felt I interrupted someone no okay thank you Yoti for sending out the reminder to all the people watching to send us in any questions I've seen that some of you have already very generously answered on the Q&A section thank you so much Yoti for the very generous discursive answers to this written up I don't know how you managed to multitask answer my questions and type everything up as well so would you like me to start engaging with some of the questions here we've got a question from Farsin Hemazbi for Rhoda and they say how does colour discrimination affect different races when it comes to sexual exploitation in the Caribbean in the 21st century yes I think that when we speak about white privilege I think colourism is one of the ways in which it is expressed and colourism of course is part of the racialized legacy of colonialism and the colonial social and economic structures to understand that there is a colourism that predated western capitalism and had a lot to do with status and class if we could use that word in feudal societies so that what we found for example in the Caribbean is that there was a racialized colour coding system that was established by the colonizers and the colonialists with the African populations who were enslaved and those that came after but then we had a large scale importation of Indian laborers who also brought colour notions of colour and status and I think those two things kind of reinforced each other so colour is definitely a legacy of privilege from various locations but I think it's important as part of the Euro-American domination it continues to be important so colourism is also something that gets taken up by global capital industry and by colourism we sometimes don't just refer to shade or colour but also to phenotype and the fact that the global hair industry for example is a trillion dollar industry which actually connects women in very unfortunate ways where so much of the human hair purchased by African descendant women in various parts of the world is here that was harvested by Indian women sometimes who have donated their hair as part of a temple ritual or by poor women in other parts of the world who sell their hair as part of an economic strategy so I think the whole question of colourism is a status thing is it but it also speaks the larger constructs of inequality which then feed into the global production cycle so it's a big one Thank you so much I don't think we have any other questions yet if anybody in the audience all across the world has any do please type them in because we still have plenty of time to discuss with you okay where can we go next I don't want to impose my schedule on any of you so is there anything that you three feel that you need to get off your chest about this about decolonising I just wanted to answer I didn't see that I saw that question about the pope talking about same sex marriage and I just wanted to respond to this person that actually it's really interesting to see that happen at this time because in India just a piece of news same sex marriage is now being debated in the High Court as a matter of fact two same sex couples who have asked for recognition of their unions and the most and it's really serendipitous in a sense because it happened just a day from across away from each other we first heard that we referred to the matter to the centre and to the Delhi government which of course had all of us saying oh my God what is going to come out of this because when a court refers something like this to the government then you know that's just like a ping pong game right they don't want to take a stance on anything because you know what the government is going to say this is the right wing government and the next day of course the pope's statement came and for some of you who know that you know for instance go up which has a very large state in India which has a very large Catholic Roman Catholic population I think there's so much sort of confusion and interest there for instance because they have always by their parish priests that this is a problem and now the pope has said this and of course everybody is discussing it which is great I guess sorry just wanted to respond to you that's great thank you very much okay let's get a bit wordy because you mentioned you examined and compared very usefully the concepts of decolonization and decoloniality and you had me thinking about you know academic passwords and how they become prevalent you know the point at which everything suddenly is intersectional and then everything is decolonial and you know I'm thinking back to my post-graduate days when everything became global and all these kinds of things but what is decolonization you mentioned that that anecdote that really amused me about decolonizing yoga I'm not quite understanding what the decolonial aspect of it was so it had me thinking about some of the and you did bring bring back the post-colonial which I love as a post-colonialist because we always seem to be in a state of solipsism or somebody wants to bury the post-colonialists but I do remember the time in the 90s when post-colonial discourse was so fixed on the concept of being unable to unlearn the legacies of colonial modernity right and that the past is irrecoverable you can never get it back there's no point in going back to pre-colonial times but I do wonder whether now it is a matter of actually trying to access pre-colonial modes of knowledge of spirit of mysticism of different cosmologies I wonder whether we need to go beyond the enlightenment and excavate other forms of knowledge what do people think about this Thank you for sharing that Alberto I think there's a lot in what you just said so I think at one level the problem is when things start to terminology starts to circulate like decolonize this, decolonize that it becomes virtually meaningless right or we really have to very carefully parse out what does it mean in this context what does it mean in this other context like how is the term being deployed and that's why you know I mentioned the decolonized yoga because I actually spent some time there on the website trying to figure out what this is and my more critical bent says you know this is really a kind of rhetorical gesture because when you name it as such saying that this is about decolonizing yoga it kind of gives you permission to go on and do what you're going to do anyway right so that it becomes a kind of protective rhetorical gesture and you do you make the gesture and you move on and practice it because if you look at that particular website there is a lot there and you know there is there's references to race and there's you know about becoming a kind of conscious, race conscious person lots of articles that have nothing to do with yoga but are about educating around questions of race so you know it's kind of doing all of this work but at the same time it seems to me the sort of the very problem the power structures in terms of which bodies are on these website who is developing the website why are they not you know like most of the teachers most of the instructors still tend to be white, lean women right like there's a particular body type there's a particular subject that is actually you know sort of making sure that this is circulating but the more generous part of me also thinks that there is a way in which that these buzzwords whether it's being used by this site or in academia that what we are constantly trying to do is to name structures of power practices, modalities or in Foucault's term political rationalities of power right we're constantly trying to get at them and they seem to be slippery or we are always somehow behind it right behind these formations how we study them so we come up with local but then it still seems inadequate because global and local to begin with inadequate local seems inadequate and then we come up with transnational and then you know transnational doesn't seem to be always doing enough work so in a sense are transnational is about our attempts at naming understanding and hopefully disrupting structures of power right that's that's what this is about and then to come to your question about the part about the pre-colonial the term to or outside of the colonial because outside of the colonial was not only pre-colonial but to some level the pre-colonial right not every aspect of life was touched in that comprehensive exhaustive way as perhaps certain other parts of life were so it seems to me that that is an important endeavor as long as we understand that there is no innocent place from which we can recover or understand right that there is a certain political project that is even motivating at this point our attempts to understand and recover to whatever extent that is recoverable so always being mindful of the fact that there isn't a place of innocence or a kind of political neutrality right or even our relationship to history there's nothing neutral about it and and that these projects are constantly being filtered and one last point that I would like to make is also about the ways in which and the subaltern studies and other you know sort of some of the thinking coming out of Latin America as well as around slavery has helped us think through the point the ways in which we turn to the subaltern right and fetishize the subaltern in order to somehow justify our own political projects our own political purposes and I think that's problematic too fascinating stuff thank you so much any responses from our Peter Roda to that yes Peter do you want to go ahead you go first Roda you go first I wanted to say that the whole decolonial turn has been very interesting but I think the most important aspect to me has to be the work that has been done in North America and in other words I think that it's not just we have to be decolonized we've been struggling with that for centuries but I think that the work that has to be done within centers of the North Atlantic are also critical so I've been really moved by some movements for example in Germany that have sought to of young people trying to identify the colonial roots within their communities I know of one group that organizes decolonial tours of Frankfurt and also of the neighboring city of Gisan in other words trying to sensitize the current population within their colonial heritage and their connections with the whole experience of coloniality I was also impressed with the ways in which Columbus you know featured in the Black Lives Matter debate so I think that the whole fact of coloniality within the colonizing and colonial history of the United States I think are very important aspects of this tune and therefore I think it establishes that connection and that recognition of that unequal relationship and it in a way shifts some of the questions away from why of blaming without taking into consideration the whole colonial and neocolonial experience so I wanted to mention that Thank you so much Roda. Yeah I was just thinking that when we're talking about I mean after a certain amount of cynicism with words like decolonizing I think now we're at a political moment in India at least where the word has become important I think Jyoti made a reference to it earlier as well and I think where we are at the moment when we're trying desperately to understand where how we got here and trying to understand the origins of this movement which has now become a government and a kind of government that makes one want to know how it all began and so I think I think these terms have become really important again and even if in some circles there is some amount of tokenism or lip service happening I'm alright with that I feel that it just has to be much more discussion I think part of the reason is that there was such a cleavage between also the academic and the lay person and for such a long time when it came to words of this sort and what did we mean by what were people in the academic circles talking about and why didn't they ever want to care about talking about it in a way which you know lay people who are going to go out there and vote can understand better and somehow because I'm positioned somewhere in the middle that is a problem and that is that's a question I have to wrestle with all the time when I'm working and some of that plays a role in where we find ourselves now it has to be said to simply say that Ram the religious figure of Ram, this God Ram was a historical so forget about him which is what the leftist liberals did right through the time when I was in college for instance that was not going to have, that was finally going to lead to this because there was just such a terrific disconnect between what our Marxist historians felt was you know in their ivory towers that they had said it they had said the final word nobody gave a damn and we are where we are now right so I'm okay with these words if academics unpack them in a way that that they waft out of the ivory towers a little bit and the other thing about your pre-colonial point that scares me a little these days because a lot of the right-wing project in India has hucked back to the pre-colonial of course they have very quickly skipped over medieval Indian history and gone right back to this imagined ancient past right and so I the minute that that sense sort of alarm bells gets alarm bells ringing for me that's really good I mean that connects with what Jyoti said about how decolonisation can be right-wing and how Zudva in India it poses as traditionalism but actually as you said it's a very selective understanding of the nation and of Indian history as well okay I want to start breaking hierarchies even here I want to bring to the general discussion Stephanie's question in the chat box because she a technical organiser who's here listening to all of us she posted a question about her research so I wanted to invite her to join the conversation so if you don't feel too exposed and mute yourself Stephanie yeah if it's okay I'll keep my camera off well my research is looking at housing transients African descended men and doing a case study in Boston and my supervisor suggested that I read Broda's work in particular because of the ways that her and her colleagues in the Caribbean look at policy and programs government sponsored programs that seek to engage with specifically pathologised African descended men in the Caribbean used the boys who cause issues or who have troubles in school and so I was really interested in thinking of the Caribbean as a Caribbean based programs as case studies for how to engage youth especially black men who are pathologised in the north specifically in the US and how these programs are structured and the lessons that can be learned and applied in the global north specifically in the US in the context of my research thank you so much Stephanie anybody want to respond or react yes I can say that the whole field of masculinity studies I think this is one area where we began working this much earlier than elsewhere and this is where and I remember attending a session of the international sociological association and there were all these scholars from northern Europe who were discovering this phenomena in 2014 when we had actually begun work on it as early as 1986 because in 1986 one of our professors Aaron Miller published his landmark study the marginalisation of the black male lessons from the teaching profession when he sought his own explanation for the phenomenon where in the English-speaking Caribbean it is stated that women girls outperform boys in the education system and I think at that time the university of Africa campus was over 80% female and there was a great deal of angst about the situation of black males and in fact he put forward his own theory where he argued that the colonial officials are afraid of the black males in the teaching profession sought to advance female teachers in the way of counteracting the power of the black males so in other words what we are already seeing there was the beginning of masculinist backlash and the contradictory thing about masculinist backlash in that it identified a very real problem, a very real issue but the way in which it is addressed was a way that actually blamed women and actually suggested that women were privileged by colonialism and given no recognition of women's agency or actions so I think that coming out of this and responding to this marked the beginning of masculinity studies in the English-speaking Caribbean and the contradictions of dealing with concerns for example what language of self-news pathologizing of the black male and the contradictions of challenging patriarchal ideas of masculinity which of course intersect with racialized constructs so I think this is an era where intersectionality becomes very important and we have many scholars in understanding how we approach this complex issue it meant that we had to be we had to understand the varying factors the colonialism, the neocolonialism the patriarchy as well as the racisms that exists in the society so I think that in our region there is a lot of work on education but also introducing courses in fact the first conference we had which I organized was in 1996 and I remember I couldn't get the because the publishers including the male publishers couldn't really understand what this book was about but nevertheless I think that the feminist is very important in that masculinity is defined oppositionally but at the same time we also need to develop the mechanisms to address the issues that emerge because of the intersection of class and race but also to provide the radical and the critical edge that critiques the toxic forms of masculinity that exist so we do have policies Stephanie and maybe later on we could discuss some of what has been tried okay thank you Rhoda we have well the Q&A section is very lively and healthy at the moment we've got Anna I mean I'll read a few of the questions so you can respond to them as you see fit Anna says as a young person in a Eurocentric education system how can we make sure that we don't fall into those perspectives I'm assuming she means colonial ones and even challenge the ways that we are talked so that's what she's asking Lee and Dong says I feel that decolonisation works need to value the Voice House Euro-American centric context so I wonder what other decolonising projects in Europe and America are doing to engage with the works by Asian scholars or community members and activists doing the groundwork and other drug methods informed other experiences in gender sexuality and power hierarchy can any of you speak to that are there any eastern Asians or Southeast Asians that are relevant to the works that are relevant to the work that we should be doing that should be enough for now I can begin with the first question which is about the Eurocentric education system and how we make sure we don't fall into those perspectives I think at one level it's really about making sure that we educate ourselves fortunately it's a lot easier to find sources to do that work just because of the availability of technology which was so much harder to do 15 or 20 years ago so I think we have just a wealth of resources at this point and so educate yourself ask yourself why are you learning what you're learning just because something is from a Eurocentric viewpoint doesn't mean that it gets dismissed what is worth what is of value there but certainly if everything that you're reading or the majority of what you're reading is from a Eurocentric viewpoint or the syllabus that you're reading is being actually promoted or has been produced from a Eurocentric viewpoint then certainly that's a problem so educate yourself but also make alliances with other people around you other students who are taking these courses make alliances and ask as a collective as a group ask your instructors and your professors why you're learning what you're learning and to say simply that you have to learn such and such theorists because that's just part of the canon that's not good enough of a response because the canon is always changing and that's part of the effort that has been going on in the last 40-50 years to really try to rethink the very canon in terms of in disciplinary areas and this canon and why so I think pushing back and actively engaging or being aware of the fact that there is a politics around education is I think the first and foremost step thank you so much Rhoda do you want to say something add something you just unmute yourself sorry yes I just think that yeah I think Jyoti did a very good job wonderful do you have anything to add Jyoti said it perfectly I can just add get more source not buy access more reading from South Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean and Southeast Asia it's all so much more accessible and available like Jyoti said when we were doing our studies 15-20 years ago just access them and push back challenge your professors I think that's important the question about South Asian and Southeast Asian I think it's possibly a bit too specific Alberto I can take a pass at it and one just sort of quick point I think for some of us academics the availability the openness of knowledge has been an important part of it's an important principle and for me it was really important that my last book sexual states is part of the open access so anybody can just sort of Google it you can just look it up and it's available so I think whatever we can do collectively in order to encourage that kind of open access even as I'm mindful that publishing companies need to be able to stay alive and you know that there is a financial consideration there so just want to make that pitch in terms of the Southeast Asia there is a lot of work going on some searches see the kind of work that you are looking for the kinds of sources that you're looking for but two names that I can mention to you right away people I think who've done really tremendous work one is Eng Bang Lim who is at Dartmouth College and the other person has written this book Geisha of a Different Kind see Winterhan so these might be two sources in terms of at least academic studies but beyond that there are other activist groups that are artists that you may want to actually look up and see the kind of work that they are doing so I hope that's helpful that's really generous thank you so much I do have, I myself have been exploring the concept of transversality in the last year and a bit and I've copied and pasted a book about transversal relationality and intercultural texts and he's trying to cut across eastern and western philosophies so my own piece of advice to someone who's trying to go to see beyond my own cosmology is think across boundaries think across boundaries of sexual orientation of racial and ethnic identity of nationality and try to look beyond a Eurocentric education and as Yoti really put really well resources right now you know most, we didn't have this kind of digital sources back only just like two decades ago so the knowledge just had your fingertips if you have an institutional affiliation so read widely and read beyond the Euro-American canon basically is what I would say okay I do realise that we are running out of time we've got ten minutes left let me see I think there was one did we respond to this? there was one, oh at the very bottom and I think Roto is possibly going to respond to it oh excellent yes does the colonisation mean going back to the origin etc what about Creole societies what does the colonisation mean for them well first of all I think it's never possible to go back in a real sense I think what we can do is try to understand phenomena anthropologically, historically, sociologically as much as we can to understand our own societies in the past but also in the present for example when we were doing that with unsexuality, the ethnography and you just talk to people, it was amazing the conceptualisation and the complexities that they brought forward things we didn't even think about that we then had to try to put in some sort of order or system but the ideas coming out from many of the people who really amazing analysis we had not really thought of so I think that also going back can be very dangerous as we mentioned because going back often assumes some sort of fundamentalist or original location which is not always very equitable or equitable or safe so that I think that what we have to do is learn the lessons of the past and the present and understand the ways in which coloniality has shaped and continues to shape our lives and to seek to develop new ways of praxis and of our understanding I think also there are ideas from the past that still have a resonance that we can use to enrich our understanding and our strategies for the future and to really critically look at for example in the Caribbean now we have accepted our request for reparations which for years was something that was debated a lot people said okay if you have reparations so what happens is that you give everybody $100 but we realise that reparations are the first of all are accountability mechanisms whereby the countries that have benefitted so much and there's so much research now about how the wealth for example in Britain the royal family the big banks how much that legacy of enslavement has enriched and how widespread slave owning was in the society of accountability and maybe an apology and some effort at reparations to me that is a very nice old fashion concept that would continue to have relevance today and could begin to heal some of the wounds that have been established in the colonial period so I think that we go back to reflect to learn and to use that information to go forward very inspiring words thank you so much do we have any final thoughts can we leave with a kind of is there any point in leaving with a message of help for anybody watching I mean where do we go from here in terms of decolonising our disciplines and the work that we do I think that would you like to go forward yeah I'm going to repeat everything I've said before why don't you go first just one quick thought about the question of Creole societies to add to Rotas excellent points you know one thing that I found useful is looking at some of the work around Creolization as a concept and or hybridity as a concept and I think when we look at it from that angle it seems like just about every social context that we know is deeply Creoleized or deeply hybridized right and I understand that you may be using the our person here might be using it in a more precise way but I'm using it I'm opening it up more conceptually and that you know so my point is simply this that the question you're asking could be asked of virtually any context because all contexts at some level are hybrid there isn't you know that's that myth of purity is really that it is a myth and societies across history have been deeply have been interacting in so many different ways for the most part right except for people who have been completely outside of it but to your excellent question Alberto in terms of steps going forward for me as I think I was saying at the very end of my talk decolonization is an ongoing project and it's something that I'm you know sort of my own work my own thinking my own teaching is deeply invested in and I I'm working on a project right now on death and migration this is about south Asian migration to North America and questions of death that were really part of this and how they dealt with all of that and the kinds of histories of racism and control that that angle opens up for us but for me what has been really important is to place South Asian histories in relationship to other marginalized communities whether it is African-Americans whether it is indigenous histories whether it is migrants from China or other parts of Asia and so and that requires I don't I don't know this work I you know this is not what I've read as a graduate student this is not the work I spent doing the last 20 years so my the reason I'm sharing this is that sort of that process of educating ourselves is ongoing that commitment to decolonizing and decentering these European Eurocentric perspectives is ongoing but it's also something that we have to do it's not about individual scholars and it's a project that we have to share across the generations and across the various fields for this to be really successful scholars, activists, publishers you know you name it it's something that I think has to be done collectively I just wanted to apologize for forgetting that section of the question and Jyoti did an excellent job but I just wanted to agree with her but also that there are certain what I call post-colonial multi-ethnic societies that raise different questions for example in relation to the concept of intersectionality and I'm sorry that we didn't really get a chance to go into this because it's something that I had planned to discuss. Well that's as much time as we've had so I can't thank you enough it's been a really stimulating discussion and we probably could have continued for another two hours but we probably would have been brain-dead by the end of them after all this concentration I find I find zoom really kind of like energy consuming but thank you so much Jyoti and Rhoda for joining us it's been a pleasure talking to you look after yourselves and everybody else please there's a link to the next event in the chat box a stage conversation ladies who punch book talk by Yasmin Ali Pali Brown so if you could make it over otherwise have a good end of the day and have a good weekend ahead thank you Alberto my pleasure thank you Jyoti bye Rhoda bye Rhoda thank you Alberto keep in touch bye now