Shiera Malik | DePaul University (original) (raw)

Papers by Shiera Malik

Globalizations

This article asks questions of ambient violence, its analytic value, and how to affectively illus... more This article asks questions of ambient violence, its analytic value, and how to affectively illustrate that value. Comprised of six thematically-interwoven essays, it examines Fanon's oeuvre to show how his analysis of, and claims about, (colonial) violence might be connected to eugenicist modes-ofthinking, or how a project of eugenics conditioned Fanon's work on sociogenics. If I were to title the six sections, they would be: I. A poetics of relation makes visible the social fabric of the figure of the person. II. With and on whose body colonial violence has written, despite angst over the use of violence. III. Hierarchies of social meaning. IV. 'We' seek the conditions of possibility for other relations in the face of dehumanizing ambient violence. V. 'We' read in the weave of the violence that hangs in the air. VI. A culture of eugenics, against which we accept the offer of 'sociogenics'.

African political writing of the mid-20th century seeks to critically engage with questions of id... more African political writing of the mid-20th century seeks to critically engage with questions of identity, history, and the state for the purpose of national and human liberation. This volume collects an array of essays that reflect on anticolonialism in Africa, broadly defined. Each contribution connects the historical period with the anticolonial present through a critical examination of what constitutes the anticolonial archive. The volume considers archive in a Derridean sense, as always in the process of being constructed such that the assessment of the African anticolonial archive is one that involves a contemporary process of curating. The essays in this volume, as well as the volume itself, enact different ways of curating material from this period.The project reflects an approach to documents, arguments, and materials that can be considered “international relations” and “world politics,” but in ways that that intentionally leaves them unhinged from these disciplinary meanings. While we examine many of the same questions that have been asked within area studies, African studies, and International Relations, we do so through an alternative archive. In doing so, we challenge the assumption that Africa is solely the domain of policy makers and area studies, and African peoples as the objects of dataPreface, Pal Aluwalia / 1. Introduction: Politics of African Anticolonial Archive, Isaac A. Kamola and Shiera S. el-Malik / 2. Archiving the Universal: Commonwealth, Truth and Pluralism in International Law, Siba Grovogui / 3. Curating and Politics: Searching for Coherency in Archives, Shiera S. el-Malik / 4. Comradeship, Committed and Conscious: The Anticolonial Archive Speaks to Our Times, Branwen Gruffydd Jones / 5. Realism Without Abstraction: Amílcar Cabral and a Politics of the World, Isaac Kamola / 6. Inviting Marianne to Dance: Congolese Rumba Lingala as an Archive Against Monument, Míde Ní Shúilleabháin / 7. Recollections of Past Events of British Colonial Rule in Northern Ghana, 1900-1956, Christopher Azaare Anabila / 8. The Skin and the Stool: Re-Crafting Histories of Belonging in Northern Ghana, Anatoli Ignatov / 9. “… But for God\u27s Sake, Let’s Decolonize!”: Self-Determination and Sovereignty and/as the Limits of Anticolonial Archive, Timothy Vasko /10. The Hip-Hop DJ as Black Archaeologist: Madlib’s Beat Konducta in Africa and the Politics of Memory, Seth M. Markle / 11. Archiving Thomas Sankara’s Presence: Metamorphoses of Memory and Revolution in Burkina Faso, Allen Stack / Afterword: Archives, Life, and Counter- Archives, Sam Opondo

Journal of Narrative Politics, 2020

Critical Imaginations in International Relations, 2016

International Politics Reviews

Contexto Internacional, 2016

Léopold Sédar Senghor's 1961 Speech at Oxford University is a provocative and critical interventi... more Léopold Sédar Senghor's 1961 Speech at Oxford University is a provocative and critical intervention during what is generally considered to be a decolonisation period. It is a speech that engages across eras, and one from which we can glean insights on how to nourish ideas and modes of thinking that may be needed in this historical moment. With it, Senghor illustrates the importance of humanism for interlocutory dialogue, which is necessary to transcend delimiting and violent kinds of relations. This article deploys the idea of surreptitious speech to examine how Senghor makes these arguments in a crevice moment. I present a homologous reading of Senghor's speech using the lecture itself as a base with its three sections: 'Negritude as a Form of Humanism' , 'The African Mode of Socialism' , and 'Conclusion'. Atop the speech, this essay develops in five sections that mirror the re-imagining and the future imagining that Senghor accomplishes with his words. I suggest that this speech represents a vision of a humanistic, decolonial future that keeps alive the idea and the hope of a more universal universalism.

Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2015

Politics, Groups, and Identities, 2013

Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 2014

Review of International Studies, 2014

In 2007, the British Journal of Politics and International Relations (BJPIR) devoted an issue to ... more In 2007, the British Journal of Politics and International Relations (BJPIR) devoted an issue to gendering International Relations. It opens with Cynthia Enloe addressing the ‘politics of casual forgetting’. I investigate this notion of casual forgetting using a framework informed by postcolonial and feminist scholarship. Working with ideas drawn from critiques of Orientalism and neoliberalism, I examine knowledge practices that centre binaries as forms of objectivity that disembed phenomena from context, and as forms of over-simplification that flatten the appearance of complexity. Together, these practices have a depoliticising effect; they obscure contestation, situate hierarchy as natural, and separate analysis from its embeddedness in historical and political conditions, even in work guided by critical agendas. I trace these depoliticising practices in a conversation in the 2007 Special Issue of BJPIR and show that Enloe's comments present a push for critical analysis that ...

Critical Studies on Security, 2013

African Identities, 2014

This paper suggests that Senghor's political and poetic work can be understood as connected to hi... more This paper suggests that Senghor's political and poetic work can be understood as connected to his position as a sophisticated critical thinker. In order to move past a hasty rejection of his work, one might analyse Senghor's work as part of the more serious anticolonial, epistemological activism that emerges in the mid-twentieth century. I argue that, for Senghor, politics is an art of interrupting discursive closures. I characterize Senghor's thinking as focused on epistemological questions, a recognition of the embeddedness of these questions in everyday political decision-making, and an awareness of the way his own thinking develops over time. I examine Senghor's On African Socialism in order to unpack the nuances in his approach. In thinking about international politics and the legacy of colonialism, I suggest that Senghor was successful in keeping open discursive closures and that from him we can learn how to prioritize the critical analysis that the development of critical questions entails.

Black Diaspora with inadequately addressing ethical questions of racial hierarchy.

Books by Shiera Malik

Table of Contents, Index, Contributors + Link to Forward and Introduction