Month: March 2022

Karachi, March 31, 2022 (PPI-OT):The final session of the 5th Post-Colonial Higher Education Conference, Habib University’s flagship conference was held online on March 25. Titled South Asia and The Colour Line, it featured sociologist Mishal Khan, and Associate Professor of History at Swarthmore College, USA. The panel was moderated by Dr. Shama Dossa, Associate Professor in the Social Development and Policy program at Habib University, along with Conference Chair, Dr. Nauman Naqvi, Associate Professor in the Comparative Humanities program at Habib University.

Khan began her lecture by sharing her reflections on what she believes South Asia has to offer to urgent debates about racial capitalism and its history. She brought into focus W. E. B Du Bois’s famous formulation in his essay, The Dawn of Freedom, where he says, “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the Colour Line.”

She stated that Du Bois was clear in admitting that the colour line was not just the division between black and white but a global racial ordering, which is the topic of this conference. “In his formulation, the European empire and capitalism were both inextricably tied together creating a world that locked colonized people into subordinate positions that enabled capitalists and colonizers to draw on their resources and of course, their labour.”

She spoke about the interventions she made her in her research, “Abolition as a Racial Project” that explores what racialization means in the South Asian context. Khan argued that in South Asia and the colonial world in general, we need to focus attention away from the legacies of slavery and more towards the focus on British abolition – this was itself an essential tool used to reorder the world for the purpose of global labour control. She went on to state that this came from the same appreciation that racialization as a global process of modernity began in the Atlantic world and had different contingent consequences in the rest of the world.

Through a graph, she showed how the sorting of racial categories was crucial to processes of global racial capitalism, particularly to establishing India as a site of free labour. She established that slavery cases always involved Africans or Shidis. The Shidi community was the “residue behind questions of slavery.”

Race, caste, kinship, she pointed out, are all terms that we impose on a complicated social reality that involves many distinct kinds of legacy, including slave legacy. Khan concluded by stating, “Whiteness and whether or not we think about different formulations of social hierarchy in South Asia look like whiteness but are not quite that.”

Farid Azfar’s presentation was titled, ‘Turtle Hunters: Capitalist War in Colonial Karachi’ that displayed a print without a context called Graphic in 1880. This was a series of four panels as a kind of satirical parable to turtle hunting that served as a kind of colonial governance.

Azfar suggested through this print that along with being a satirical parable, it also displayed colonial abjection of whiteness and a state of rapturing: “it was a story of a group of people possessed by a power produced for them by highly fortuitous historical conditionings, reflecting a subliminal subconsciousness of the fact that they were once luckier and more capable than their own colonial forebearers.”

He stated that the point of restructuring this history was not just to blame the West for everything but it was to retrace the role of human agency in constructing the problem so that the steps to reverse the problem can at least be imagined, if not affected.

“The capitalist war,” Azfar went on to say, “that is staged on and waged upon the archipelagic, shapeshifting, politically recalcitrant trading zone that was Karachi depends on the pre-existing energies of a city that has long combined the elements of smuggling den and pirate’s nest.” He concluded by leaving us to ponder on the reparation of the future in terms of race, “even today, as beset as Karachi is with crisis, the utterly exceptional place that kind of springs from these works can also be a battleground for reimagining the future of racial capitalist regime.”

As the seminal intellectual conference ended, opening dialogue and contemplation on whiteness in South Asia, each panel left us with much to ponder over given our postcolonial racial realities. The Conference Chair, Dr. Nauman Naqvi, thanked the speakers for their participation and efforts while reminding us why this topic was important to talk about, “it is especially important to the entire modern period. The way that South Asians have repressed the whole racial aspect and created racial attitudes has to do with our own oppression.”

The racialized order served to simultaneously reduce human beings to a biological reality that does not correspond to either their nature or to the nature of reality itself. Acknowledging Habib University’s pedagogical vision and mission to further the reparative project of reimagining and reconstructing a hopeful future, Dr. Naqvi stated, “Habib’s mission is central to the work of this project. This de-racialization is linked to the process of hooking up with our inheritances and legacies.”

For more information, contact:
Habib University
Karachi, Pakistan
Tel: +92-21-34301051-55
Email: marketing@habib.edu.pk
Website: www.habib.edu.pk

Karachi, March 31, 2022 (PPI-OT):The third session of the Fifth Post-Colonial Higher Education Conference was titled, ‘Aesthetic Whiteness’ which featured Associate Professor at Institute of Urdu Language and Literature at Punjab University, Nasir Abbas Nayyar, and Lecturer, Comparative Humanities at Habib University, Daniyal Ahmed as panellists. Dr. Nauman Naqvi, Conference Chair, was moderator of the session.

The speakers stated that the roots of white nationalism are much deeper than we think, and this prevails not only in the West but also in Third World countries as well. The future of the entire planet is threatened by this dilemma. Professor Nayyar said that unfortunately, less has been said and written on this subject. It has not been studied enough how racist attitudes have permeated literature and become a part of our identity.

“Whiteness pervades every area of our lives. A small example of this is that white skin is considered to be a symbol of beauty in our country. Capitalist institutions take advantage of this,” he stated. He said that there are also influences of white supremacy on Urdu literature. Indians were called natives (local) and a separate identity category was created for them. The whiteness was different from European identity in every way. In the colonial context, a native is a stranger on its own soil, cut off from their true identity and alienated from their origin. He is deprived of the right to live with dignity.

In the white man’s world, he needs validation to work. White racism is not just about arrogance, prejudice, nor political strategy anymore; it has extended to our real, physical, mental, scientific and imaginative worlds.

According to Professor Nayyar Abbas, the first of the basic principles of whiteness theory is that it considers power as its right. Second, they possess all ‘superior’ human qualities because they have power. They are high-minded, true, civilized and true benefactors of the common people and they possess the divine right to rule over the lower nations.

He went on to say that the colonial power, under the guise of racism and establishment of economic monarchy, also offered various interpretations to find its moral justification. According to Daniyal Ahmed, “today’s youth tends to learn guitar and other instruments of Western music rather than instruments of classical music.” He stated that, for a long time in the Western world, Eastern music was considered merely a noise and it was believed that there was no science or thought behind it. However, over time, that is now changing and white people are becoming more interested in our music.

On the other hand, Pakistani music competitions have very few people who sing and listen to classical music and it has more of a Western aesthetic. Despite the effective power and strength of traditional music, many musical instruments invented in Europe, such as the harmonium, have been adopted. Through an example, he pointed out that the heritage that protects our heritage is now considered abusive in our country – all this has occurred after the colonial era.

Ahmed argued that we have given place to Western composers in our music which has prompted us to view our own musical instruments and composers with our own lens. Furthermore, the link between capitalism, colonialism and globalization has also influenced music.

The speakers of the session said that the ethnic classification established by the government in the colonial era is still embedded in the global system. Addressing the speakers and audience, Dr. Nauman Naqvi said that black thinkers, in particular, as well as others say that modern times and systems are in fact ethnic. Racism and capitalism are intertwined and inseparable. Its effects are also present in the culture. This fact has caused irreparable damage to European and Western culture itself.

For more information, contact:
Habib University
Karachi, Pakistan
Tel: +92-21-34301051-55
Email: marketing@habib.edu.pk
Website: www.habib.edu.pk