I hear you on that. I think about this a lot as well–how disconnected local histories, places, landscapes can be from the larger university project. I think this disconnection often begins in earlier levels of education in primary schools, high schools, etc. Sometimes all of the focus on national and world histories obscures those local, place-based connections. And what I’ve noticed is that digging into local connections is often what can help draw students in, even helping them see how their communities/places fit within wider events, processes, and histories.

As you point out in this essay, this disconnection from the locale/proximate definitely has its effects, making some uncomfortable issues more distant than they are.

In the addendum you ask, “How do we work across the local realities in the cities and towns where we are employed in order to make sure students don’t dismiss these systemic realities as something that is reserved for ‘the deep South’ or ‘that other city…”?

This reminds me of a memory growing up in Southern California. When it came to ‘racism,’ I remember some of us kids talking about about how some white supremacist leader used to live out east of us. He was pretty well known, and didn’t live all that far away. But we talked about him being ‘out there,’ so far away, as if all the racism he was associated with didn’t touch our little coastal town. It surely didn’t have anything to do with us. I think this kind of distancing (and denial) happens a lot in our education systems as well, and I appreciate your work toward breaking some of it down in the classroom. It’s a good place to start. Sometimes I just wish it all started earlier.

Thanks for writing this very moving and evocative—for the lack of better words!—essay.

I have been reading decolonial theory/thinking and pluriversality since we looked at the ‘Refugee Crisis’ of 2015 during a seminar in my MA in Leuven, Belgium. Being situated in the heart of Europe at a moment its borders were being so violently policed, it was so heartening and inspiring to read the works of scholars like Fanon, Mbembe, Mignolo, Maldonado-Torres, et al., alongside more “classical” works like Arendt or Foucault (Note, also, the tension between the core and periphery that such two registers create; an important/potential site for subversive reading, perhaps?). At the same time, reading these texts seemed somewhat distant to the intuitiveness that anthropology and ethnography nurtures in oneself; there was the inevitable question of “applying” such knowledges, which I felt took attention away from the deep insight they evoke.

I felt your essay was a step in that direction, of finding ways in which to think and apply—again, for the lack of a better term!—ideas like pluriversality and decoloniality to not just research contexts, but to be attentive to the spatial and social contexts where we’re based as anthropologists (and indeed other forms of practitioners and actors). Your interventions, I feel, are also so important to the debate on the particular and the general, and somehow draws attention to why such binaries may not be very helpful indeed.

Again, these are just some thoughts your essay’s inspired, and I look forward to more of your writing and syllabi in the near future!

Cheers!

Intense engagement with place lies at the heart of all that you do. But given that deep immersion in place and its specificity, I wonder how you interpret Mbembe’s opening remarks, where he writes,

“Today many want to finally bring white supremacy to its knees. But the same seem to go missing when it comes to publically condemning the extra-judicial executions of fellow Africans on the streets of our cities and in our townships. As Fanon intimated, they see no contradiction between wanting to topple white supremacy and being anti-racist while succumbing to the sirens of isolationism and national-chauvinism.”