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Sandeep Bakshi @sandeepbak.bsky.social · 11m

We’ll have to stand our ground.

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Sandeep Bakshi @sandeepbak.bsky.social · 25m

Hopefully things change (for the better)

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Sandeep Bakshi @sandeepbak.bsky.social · 40m

Broadest audience - just say white Christian.
They should never have had to - that’s the point. Some do of their own to fit in. And that should not be the case. What would you suggest I take as a name to be successful? John Smith? Will that work?

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Sandeep Bakshi @sandeepbak.bsky.social · 44m

Had to catch up on pending work.
Partner refused to take me out to champers in my trackies.
Swift change to Gagan Paul summer onesie as it’s 18° C outside :-)

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Sandeep Bakshi @sandeepbak.bsky.social · 9h

One reason why I’m not on that rubbish platform LinkedIn. I seriously don’t see the point. It’s for professional highbranding in the hopes that you’ll be headhunted😂😂. For more dough, right!

PS: Unless of course you’re looking for employment or are on precarious contracts in academia.

Sandeep Bakshi @sandeepbak.bsky.social · 9h

I’m always circumspect in the interest of historians to insert themselves in pacification/reconciliation discourses. Here’s why: moooooo-oooolah. Pascal Blanchard, French historian of colonial history, has a company in rebranding *memory* for all big giants - Thales, L’Oréal …
Follow the moooolah 😂

Richard Monvoisin @richardmonvoisin.bsky.social · 12h

Ah oui c'est très très clair. Et j'y apprends que Pascal Blanchard (que j'utilisais fréquemment dans mon matériel) fait des ménages pour Thales, Airbus, guerlain, L'Oréal, Hennessy, Orangina....
Le petit entreprenariat historique....
(et le memory washing)

@rokhayadiallo.bsky.social

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Sandeep Bakshi @sandeepbak.bsky.social · 9h

I’m always circumspect in the interest of historians to insert themselves in pacification/reconciliation discourses. Here’s why: moooooo-oooolah. Pascal Blanchard, French historian of colonial history, has a company in rebranding *memory* for all big giants - Thales, L’Oréal …
Follow the moooolah 😂

Richard Monvoisin @richardmonvoisin.bsky.social · 12h

Ah oui c'est très très clair. Et j'y apprends que Pascal Blanchard (que j'utilisais fréquemment dans mon matériel) fait des ménages pour Thales, Airbus, guerlain, L'Oréal, Hennessy, Orangina....
Le petit entreprenariat historique....
(et le memory washing)

@rokhayadiallo.bsky.social

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Sandeep Bakshi @sandeepbak.bsky.social · 9h

Highly recommended. Whenever you hear me dropping ‘cultural whiteness’ that occupies all public spaces in the global north, you’ll know I’m referencing this ode to dismantling monumentality.

Book cover of Dan Hicks’s Every Monument will Fall.

and catalogued in his book The Mismeasure of Man back in 198L.
Gould debunked the fake 'race science' in nineteenth- and twentieth-century anthropology, exposing the misrepresentations built into the racist craniometry, phrenology, polygenism, eugenics and hereditarian theories that sought to correlate intelligence with physical features, from the legacies of Louis Agassiz at Harvard and Samuel Morton at Penn to the enduring forms of biological determinism that ran from the American Civil War through the Jim Crow era and long into the twentieth century? That's one part of it, you replied. But this isn't just about natural history and ideas of biological determinism; it's also about cultural history and ideas of cultural determinism. Ideas of Whiteness to some extent, yes - but cultural Whiteness. Ethnosuprem-acısm, legacy militarist ideologies of barbarism and 'primitiveness" as distinct from a solely fake-scientific racial supremacism. It's about patriarchal infrastructures interdigitating not just with science and laboratories but with ideas of heritage, museums, the arts, the humanities, inherited through statues, gallerie, libraries, lecture rooms - monuments of all kinds.

"The most terrible thing about war, I am convinced, is its monuments,
W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 193I.* He was talking about the warping of truth through the Contederate monuments which had been built in their hundreds in public spaces across the American South in the previous halt-century. It you were to plot the places and dates of their erection on gridded paper as a seriation graph, it would take the form of a battleship curve - an armoured grey mass that probably reaches its maximum width sometime around 1910. And that's not to mention the naming of public squares and parks. Practices of commemoration were brought from the military cemeteries into the streets and transformed in the process, in the name of the Confederacy as a living tradition. The war memorial as we know it today took form here, the historian Kurt Savage has argued - memory was inscribed into physical space in this new manner decades before such monuments were built in Europe. I want to think that argument through, and consider what it means for the modern transatlantic histories of racism, violence and memory culture, and debates about preservation, heritage and monumentality.

An astonishing tour de force... Every Monument Will Fall will inspire scholars, writers, artists and activists to challenge the monumental institutions of modernity - the university, the museum and history itself' Isaac Julien, artist and Distinguished Professor of the Arts, University of California, Santa Cruz
Tracing the origins of contemporary conflicts over art, colonialism and memory, Dan Hicks joins the dots between the building of statues, the founding of disciplines like archaeology and anthropology, and the acquisition of stolen art and ancestral human remains.
Part history, part biography, part excavation, Every Monument Will Fall pulls at a thread that runs through this history - from country houses in the Yorkshire Wolds to Caribbean plantations. The book holds the memorialisations of men like Cecil Rhodes and General Augustus Pitt-Rivers up against the writing of Sylvia Wynter, Stuart Hall and Ursula Le Guin, drawing together open secrets about dehumanisation and the redaction of public memory.
What emerges is a speculative history of inheritance, loss, collective mourning, and the possibility of a reconciliation that has not yet begun. This is a story about who gets named and who doesn't, who is remembered and who is forgotten, who has been treated as human and who has not.
Refusing to choose between pulling down every single statue, or holding onto every last vestige of a past that future generations could never change, Every Monument Will Fall makes the case for allowing monuments of all kinds to fall once in a while. The result is an urgent appeal to reassemble the fragments, listen to the silences, value life and humanity above material things - and to rebuild a new kind of memory culture.

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Sandeep Bakshi @sandeepbak.bsky.social · 22h

I had one audition as Krishna Bhanji & they said, 'Beautiful audition but we don't quite know how to place you in our forthcoming season.' I changed my name, crossed the road, and they said when can you start?

- Ben Kingsley on his change of Indian name to a white name.
Nefarious whiteness at work.

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Sandeep Bakshi @sandeepbak.bsky.social · 1d

Yes perhaps — I’ve opted for our ‘colonial present’ (not coloniality) and not used le fait colonial.

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Sandeep Bakshi @sandeepbak.bsky.social · 1d

I thought that yes. But we do have colonialité in French, right?
The colonial present perhaps and do away with le fait colonial for my purposes. Thank you!

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Sandeep Bakshi @sandeepbak.bsky.social · 1d

Not really, I think it was slightly athwart of what I was thinking with le fait colonial, almost like the colonial condition or the colonial present. Perhaps 'colonial present' is what I was trying to articulate.

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Sandeep Bakshi @sandeepbak.bsky.social · 1d

That’s how we learn from each other. Thank you. Yes he does.

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Sandeep Bakshi @sandeepbak.bsky.social · 1d

Yes. I understand. I was wishing to delve further back into who coined it. I wonder if Fanon or Césaire ever used it. Perhaps. I need to do a search in the PDFs.

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Sandeep Bakshi @sandeepbak.bsky.social · 1d

Thank you - I don’t wish to engage her white iteration. The concept is important for thinking about the conditions created by colonialism.
Luckily, there are scholars before her. I’m thinking that some French minister must’ve given a speech or some such thing — like on decolonisation.

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Sandeep Bakshi @sandeepbak.bsky.social · 1d

The earliest I found is Daniel Rivet 1960s but there’s surely someone in the 1900s…

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Sandeep Bakshi @sandeepbak.bsky.social · 1d

I don’t think the correct translation for ‘le fait colonial’ is colonialism.
It’s either the colonial condition or colonial situation. And that shakes things quite a bit.
Btw, who coined the term ‘le fait colonial’?

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Sandeep Bakshi @sandeepbak.bsky.social · 2d

Seasonal rant on women fasting for their husbands in India:
You can never cutesy-up-take-a-peek-at-our-culture on this fast for men. This huge piece of turd that arrives stealthily remains patriarchal, including when daft gayboys fast for their men.
It’s rubbish.
Rant over; enjoy the weekend.

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Reposted by Sandeep Bakshi

Agastya Gaya @agastyagaya.com · 2d

#postcolonialstudies #bookmark

Sandeep Bakshi @sandeepbak.bsky.social · 2d

I referenced this Stuart Hall essay 👇🏽to pinpoint the arbitrariness of pre/colonial. Indigenous thinking has oft considered Eurocolonialism as solely *one* episode in their existence.
Anyhow, Hall’s essay exemplifies that we can articulate substantive disagreements 1/2
readingtheperiphery.org/hall/

When was ‘the post-colonial’? Thinking at the limit by Stuart Hall

Necessarily, we must dismiss those tendencies that encourage the consoling play of recognitions. Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ When was ‘the post-colonial’? What should be…

readingtheperiphery.org

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Sandeep Bakshi @sandeepbak.bsky.social · 2d

in a field of inquiry. Open, boisterous disagreements were common in poco theory in the 90s, esp in how it theorised the period of Gulf wars.
It’s incumbent upon us to theorise our current moment of grievance. How do we proceed without falling into a culture of threats & muzzling of dissent? 2/2

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Sandeep Bakshi @sandeepbak.bsky.social · 2d

I referenced this Stuart Hall essay 👇🏽to pinpoint the arbitrariness of pre/colonial. Indigenous thinking has oft considered Eurocolonialism as solely *one* episode in their existence.
Anyhow, Hall’s essay exemplifies that we can articulate substantive disagreements 1/2
readingtheperiphery.org/hall/

When was ‘the post-colonial’? Thinking at the limit by Stuart Hall

Necessarily, we must dismiss those tendencies that encourage the consoling play of recognitions. Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ When was ‘the post-colonial’? What should be…

readingtheperiphery.org

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Sandeep Bakshi @sandeepbak.bsky.social · 2d

Overnighting in Lille.
Lila Abu-Lughod was in Paris today for a talk. Sent my MA Yr 1 student to attend the talk & she’s sent me a pic of them together, telling me she’ll attend all decolonial events I’d recommend. My student is of Maghrebian origin. She can see that this world is hers. Love it!

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Sandeep Bakshi @sandeepbak.bsky.social · 3d

The discussions were riveting today. Knackered now and looking forward to more conversations tomorrow.
#AgregAnglais2026
Cedric and Melanie did an excellent job hosting us.

AFEA @afea.bsky.social · 3d

#AgregAnglais2026
Il n'est pas trop tard pour rejoindre le colloque sur Gurnah organisé par @meljovi.bsky.social et Cédric Courtois à @univlille.bsky.social , soit sur place, soit par zoom. Et joie, il continue demain !! Avec @guillaumecingal.bsky.social @sandeepbak.bsky.social and many more!!💻📝📖