Tag: racism

Doodh Cha in Hamburg and Other Paradoxes

by Manish Dutta

Something has been bothering me, but before I come to the bother itself, I want to begin with something I noticed while working in a supermarket in Hamburg.

During Christmas in Germany, many sweet things appear more visibly on the shelves. Some of them are there year-round, but around Christmas, they seem to sell more, disappear faster, and become more prominent as traditional foods. One of these things is Kemm’sche Kuchen, a sweet biscuit (or cookie?) associated with Hamburg. I had seen it in the supermarket before, but during Christmas I began to notice it more carefully. Last night, while reading about it, I found that its recipe goes back to 1782 and that it is still presented as a traditional local product.

What interested me was not only its history, but its ingredients. Kemm’sche Kuchen has, among other things, cloves and cinnamon. I mention this because cloves and cinnamon are also common in Bengali doodh cha, or milk tea. For milk tea, the milk is not added at the end; the milk and a bit of water are boiled together with ginger, cardamom, cloves and sugar. It then slowly turns into a dark, thick sugary concoction. Over time, we started eating Kemm’sche Kuchen by dipping it into milk tea. In that sense, it reminded me of a Bengali habit: dipping Parle-G biscuits into tea. Dipping a biscuit into tea makes it softer and infused with the flavour of the tea. And the softened Kemm’sche Kuchen tasted good, which made sense because the flavours were not completely foreign to me. The cinnamon and cloves created a small bridge between a Hamburg biscuit and a Bengali cup of milk tea, which also contained cloves and cardamom, and it stimulated just the right places in my brain.

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Is an appreciative appropriation of culture possible?

by Bruni Sonne

(This post is also available to read in German and French)

I am white[1], German, female and by and large quite privileged[2], in Germany – and even more so globally. I wore dreadlocks for six years, and very often clothes made from African fabrics. Now you can basically stop reading and immediately label me racist. My sin: Cultural Appropriation[3].

Or you can read on and get to know me as a person first.

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Unpaid labour in the academy: the limits of neoliberal inclusion

published anonymously

After discussing the contents of this post, we agreed with the author that they would remain anonymous. Whilst we feel the issues being raised are of importance to elucidating the nature of the challenges with ‘decolonisation’ agendas, well-meaning as they may be, there is a danger that airing views so frankly puts the author in conflict with their colleagues and employers. We agreed that it was important to share these concerns, but that it was also in the interests of the author to remain anonymous.

Higher Education the world over runs on fumes and the goodwill of people committed to expanding horizons, whether their own or those of their students and contemporaries. The number of superstar academics who are cherry-picked by the Harvards or the Oxfords on salaries to match are vanishingly small. Instead we get too-high percentages of precariously employed colleagues working across teaching, research and professional services, many of whom work to prop up a customer-oriented, neoliberal higher education system that may not offer security, but still feels like the best chance to do work that may, in one way or another, be part of helping the world to save it from itself. Continue reading “Unpaid labour in the academy: the limits of neoliberal inclusion”

[COVID-19 Pandemic: Worlds Stories from the Margins] Relinking as healing: Ruminations on crises and the radical transformation of an antisocial and antirelational world

by Julia Suárez-Krabbe 

Relinking

My dear friend, mentor and guide among the spiritual authorities of the four peoples that inhabit Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia (from now on: Mamos), Saúl Martínez, once told me that he was sometimes asked if he was religious, and that his answer was yes – in the etymological sense of the word: re-ligare (Latin), re-link. And Saúl also emphasized that it is important that I relink in/to Denmark too, inasmuch my roots lie here as much as they lie in Colombia. This re-linking with the Mother as we have used it with Saul not only complements Walter Mignolo’s notion of delinking from modernity-coloniality,[i] it also involves a movement into decolonial healing. Indeed, while delinking is an important move, it appears incomplete if it is not accompanied by relinking, a continued practice of deep reconnection. As we will see, relinking is crucial to these reflections.

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[COVID-19 Pandemic: Worlds Stories from the Margins] BLACK LIVES MATTER – Solidarity Message

Some brief remarks from the editors, Rosalba Icaza and Zuleika Sheik

When we spoke of breath in our introduction to this series, on how oppression takes the breath away, we could not imagine that a few weeks later our worlds would reel from the death of George Floyd, which brought into the mainstream the deaths of countless other black bodies across the Global South at the hands of law enforcement. To us the link between the state carceral system and the lockdown and its exacting of violence on black bodies is explicit. It cannot be ignored. For this week’s feature, we offered this space to the ISS Black Community, based at the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, who wrote a Message of Solidarity to the Black Lives Matter movement and that was featured on ISS website. We are grateful to ISS Black Community as they granted us permission to reproduce it in full here. 

by the ISS Black Community

Who are we? 

Day by day I keep asking this question as reasons fly out the window when I see the monstrosity perpetrated against each other. Today it is racism, tomorrow it is gender inequality, ethnicity bias, religious conflict, everyday it’s a constant struggle over one divide or the other.

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[COVID-19] Every breath you take: COVID-19, Racism and the Climate Crisis

by Portia Roelofs

Last year, I wrote an article arguing that air travel was *the* issue that showcased the deadly intersection of race, climate change and inequality. Indeed, as COVID-19 struck, I thought I’d been proven right.

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Identity, ‘Britishness’, and Leaving the EU: What will decolonisation look like for the UK now?

by Vanessa Bradbury

I felt a deep sadness on the 31st of January 2020, as the UK left the EU. It was a sadness that seemed to run much deeper than the repetitive ‘what ifs’ of politics, policies and trade deals echoing through news channels. A sadness that seemed personal, and, as I was trying to understand and reflect on these emotions, brought me to question the ambiguity of identity, ‘Britishness’ and, ultimately, what this farewell will mean for the wider project of decolonisation.

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