Ep. 36: Reading, Thinking, and Writing about Race with Lana and Ani

Returning guests: Philosopher, writer, and PhD student Anisha Sankar and soon to be Assistant Professor of Pacific Island Studies at the University of Oregon and author of Bloody Woman Lana Lopesi.

Contents: This episode gives some background to the anthology project Towards a Grammar of Race in Aotearoa New Zealand to be published by Bridget Williams Books in Sept/Oct 2022. We reflect back on the beginning of a reading group that culminated into this project, drawing from Jodi Byrd’s The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism,  Frank B. Wilderson III’s Afropessimism, Lisa A. Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents, Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness, and more. Reading and thinking with challenging theoretical perspectives, through different points of views and disciplines, offered productive tensions that better spoke to the messy and complex realities of our modern world. This background assisted us in finding language to navigate the local and global discourse and experience of race and power, such as debates between ethnicity vs. race in a New Zealand context. This project sought to bring together different authors, understandings, ideas, and experiences of race together. We confront a lack of societal consensus or shared language to even discuss race by putting these diverse positions together in what we call, ‘towards a grammar of race’. Grammar is both linguistic and philosophical, as the rules that give structure to language and to society. Ani and Lana also share a bit about their chapters in the book and we end with a critical reflection on ‘accessibility’.

Terms: Incommensurability is a term borrowed from mathematics that refers to having no common measure, and is used in reference to Afropessimism, which uses the term to confront the inadequacies to theorise Black suffering and Anti-Blackness in other theoretical camps, positions, or traditions; Paranoid and reparative reading are references to Eve Sedgwick’s book Touching Feeling – Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity and particularly the chapter ‘Paranoid reading and reparative reading, or you’re so paranoid, you probably think this essay is about you.’; Colonial imaginary refers to the intellectual, aesthetic, and historical production of a modern euro-imperial consciousness and reality.