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In February 2021, French Higher Education, Research and Innovation Minister Frederique Vidal denounced what she calls Islamo-leftism and its gangrene effect on France [Sebastien Bozon/AFP]
We write to express our solidarity with the scholars, activists, and other knowledge producers who are targeted by the February 2021 statements by Frédérique Vidal, France’s minister of higher education, research, and innovation. In them, she denounced “Islamo-gauchisme” (Islamo-leftism) and its “gangrene” effect on France, and called for an inquiry into France’s national research organisation, the CNRS, and the university. The specific kinds of knowledge in question analyse and critique colonialism and racism, and support decolonial, antiracist, and anti-Islamophobia projects within the academy and on the streets. Vidal’s statements show the discomfort these challenges are causing the state, and hence the desire to repress them rather than engage them.
Preamble
In light of the fact that April has begun and there has yet to be authored a new definition of antisemitism, we offer this working definition from a caucus of “AsAJew” Jewish public intellectuals, upon consultation with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the California Ethnic Studies Initiative, and at least one school bus driver.
We have kept it concise because we expect it to be superseded by another definition of antisemitism within a week or so.
What Is Antisemitism
It is antisemitic to express disdain for the Jews more than Steven Salaita does. Claiming that a cabal of Zionists chased you out of Lebanon is not unreasonable, since Zionist control of Lebanon has been a documented reality ever since Hassan Nasrallah was forced to put his cave on the market and purchase one in Damascus at an inflated rate from the last remaining Jewish cave realtor in Syria.
BDS Australia
Eminent international researchers are calling on an Australian historian to refuse a controversial Israeli award.
In a highly unusual instance of global pressure, over 220 international and Australian academics have written an open letter to UNSW Laureate Professor of History, Alison Bashford, appealing to her to support the Palestinian call to boycott Israeli academic institutions by rejecting the US$1million 2021 Dan David prize, which she is sharing with two other researchers.
The academics’ letter says that accepting this year’s prize, which rewards Professor Bashford’s contributions to the understanding of public health, ‘serves to legitimize and normalize Israel’s colonial violence and apartheid’ against Palestinians. The letter points out the irony of an award for public health from a country actively blocking the delivery of vaccines to the five million Palestinians living under its control in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
From jazz to hip hop, Afro-South Asian music collaborations reflect imagined, more liberatory worlds
A conversation with Elliott Powell, author of ‘Sounds from the Other Side: Afro-South Asian Collaborations in Black Popular Music’. Hip hop singer Missy Elliott at the 44th Montreux Jazz Festival in Montreux. | Valentin Flauraud/Reuters
Afro-South Asian (American) musical alliances demonstrate an “other side” of Black life, history, and politics, argues Elliott Powell in his new book,
Sounds from the Other Side: Afro-South Asian Collaborations in Black Popular Music (University of Minnesota Press 2020).
Powell covers over a half-century of Black and South Asian American musical collaborations, starting from the 1960s. Included in this study are John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Rick James, OutKast, Missy Elliott, Truth Hurts, Timbaland, and also Badal Roy, Lata Mangeshkar, Rajé Shwari and others.