Saadia Toor - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Conference Presentations by Saadia Toor
Conference: LAEMOS, 2018
In an age of neoliberal plunder, debt has become a central organizing principle of the times and ... more In an age of neoliberal plunder, debt has become a central organizing principle of the times and a mode of discipline/governance. A variety of scholars persuasively argue that the growth of indebtedness is but an inevitable (and intentional) outcome of an advancing neoliberal order (Soederberg, 2015; Strike Debt, 2014). As wages stagnate or fall, marginalized citizens are pushed further into indebtedness through the hands of a rapacious poverty industry that includes pay-day loan centers, pawnshops, sub-prime housing mortgages, and credit cards.
The most pernicious form that this debt takes in the US today is student debt, which at $1.4 trillion has surpassed all other forms of consumer debt, while being systematically stripped of any consumer protection like bankruptcy (Frederickson, 2016; Taibbi, 2013). Millions of young Americans graduate each year only to find themselves saddled with enormous and unpayable debt as part of an “ideal initiation to the rites of capital” (Lazzarato, 2013: 66). However, the burden of this debt is unevenly distributed; African-American students are disproportionately impacted, resulting in conditions that recall an earlier period of Black indenture (Huelsman, 2015; Goldrick-Rab, Kelchen, and Houle, 2014).
While we theorize debt in the context of global capital, our focus in this paper is on its differential impact along the axis of race in the US, particularly against the backdrop of a new phase of Black radical resistance exemplified by the Black Lives Matter movement. We are in agreement with Cedric Robinson’s (2000: 2) who contends in his important book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition that race is built into the very DNA of the capitalist system such that “the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions”, and that the domestic nation-state project and imperial adventures of the US have both been animated by this racial capitalism.
As radical Black public intellectuals of the early twentieth century like W.E. B. DuBois and Ida B. Wells recognized, African Americans within this project remained positioned as raced colonized subjects long after Emancipation. In his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois famously declared that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line" where the color-line refers both to systems of deeply embedded racism in general and to racial segregation more specifically. This color-line ensured not only a lack of access to economic opportunities, but a racial wage gap and, even more importantly, a racial wealth gap: today, Black college graduates earn far less than Whites with just a high school diploma, while the median wealth of a Black family today is a tiny fraction of a White one.
It is in this context that Black student debt today should be understood as a new form of indenture and demands our moral outrage, especially given its deeply troubling resonance with the specifically racialized form of debt servitude experienced by African Americans in the wake of Emancipation. This parallel is not lost on a new generation of African American radicals. It is not an accident that reparations for centuries of exploitation and discrimination feature prominently in the manifesto issued by Black Lives Matter, nor that access to free higher education is defined within the manifesto as a crucial form which reparations should take.
From the beginning, the BLM movement has insisted on connecting police violence against black bodies (and racialized bodies more generally) to a broader and deeply-entrenched system of white supremacy within the US and racialized imperialism globally. By highlighting the continuing differential impoverishment of Black America by the project of racial capitalism in the US, it draws our attention to the fact that African Americans continue to be colonized subjects and that Black emancipation remains an unfinished anticolonial project. This new generation of Black radicals thus speaks powerfully to the historic and ongoing resilience of the African American community in the face of immense adversity. Through their words and deeds they align themselves very consciously with their community’s long history of anti-colonial resistance.
Papers by Saadia Toor
Race & Class, 2012
unable to retaliate and yet there is an inability, or unwillingness, on the part of the police to... more unable to retaliate and yet there is an inability, or unwillingness, on the part of the police to do anything. Discrimination and harassment in the workplace, on the streets and on public transport have created a ‘pervasive landscape of fear and incivility’, while the dominant Anglo-Australian figures of authority – politicians, law enforcement agencies and media personalities – assert their own paranoid images of a white Anglo-Australian national landscape. Altogether, this is a must-read for anyone interested in migration, ethnicity, racism, gender, ethnic politics, identity and community relations, and how global events can affect local attitudes, particularly in relation to the Middle East. My only criticism is that, since the empirical setting of this work is Sydney, rather than Australia as a whole, the title is rather misleading.
SAE Technical Paper Series, 1987
Introducing the New Sexuality Studies, 2016
The History behind Badano Grand Mosque: Radio Feature" is the history of an old mosque in Pariama... more The History behind Badano Grand Mosque: Radio Feature" is the history of an old mosque in Pariaman-West Sumatera. It is one of important information that needs to be shared to listeners as source of sharing information. There are a lot of old mosques still exist nowadays in West Sumatera but Badano Grand Mosque still has some interesting and uniques stories that make people in Pariaman are very proud of it. The radio feature of History behind Badano Grand Mosque will be able to attract a lot of tourists to visit this place. There are three procedures in making this project are conducted: Pre-production, Production, and Postproduction. The main point of this project is production process. In production stage, there are some steps that were done such as doing interview with informants, choosing the insert, writing the script and recording the voice. The result of this project is an English script with 750 words.
Organization, 2021
This paper focuses on the current phase of Black resistance exemplified by the Black Lives Matter... more This paper focuses on the current phase of Black resistance exemplified by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which urges us to recognize and reckon with the differential racial impact of student debt in the U.S. and calls for the cancelation of student debt as an explicit part of its demand for reparations. Using the concept of racial capitalism, the paper examines the structure of student debt and its consequences for Black borrowers, analyzes the structural reasons behind the disproportionate debt burden borne by Black students, and highlights movements such as the Debt Collective and BLM, which not only offer a critique of the debt regime but also suggest ways of organizing against it.
Cultural Dynamics, 2009
Recent scholarship on the state has moved towards a focus on state formation as a contingent and ... more Recent scholarship on the state has moved towards a focus on state formation as a contingent and contradictory process, and the role of culture therein. Since all states today are understood to be `nation-states', `national culture' becomes a key arena for struggles over hegemony and consequently for understanding nation-state formation. This article uses the `national language controversy' in Pakistan between 1947 and 1952 as a lens through which to explore the relationship between discourses of national culture and the consolidation and contestation of power within the modern (postcolonial) nation-state.
SOAS Literary Review, 2000
Social Research: An International Quarterly, 2016
Abstract:The debate over the tragic attack on Charlie Hebdo quickly settled into a familiar scrip... more Abstract:The debate over the tragic attack on Charlie Hebdo quickly settled into a familiar script that posits Islam as being antithetical to art, and Muslims therefore as enemies of liberal values such as free speech. The title of conference for which this short paper was written—“Fear of Art”—risks affirming this script. Positing a “fear of art” as the reason behind this attack consigns it to the realm of the irrational, devoid of politics and history. Instead, I argue that we look at art as something that emerges from within society, and thereby as necessarily embodying/reflecting the extant relations of power in society. The paper also underlines the importance of differentiating between art which (explicitly or implicitly) affirms the existing power relations within a society, and art which contests them. Only then can we hope to move our understanding of this incident beyond a simplistic and dangerous civilizational narrative.
'Canned Culture!', screams a cover headline from one of India's leading weeklies. 'After burgers,... more 'Canned Culture!', screams a cover headline from one of India's leading weeklies. 'After burgers, Cielos and cellulars, it's time for cultural consumerism' (Outlook, April 9, 1997). If one needed any more testimony to India's coming-of-age as a late capitalist society, the emergence of a nascent culture industry as reflected by this headline and others like it-the cover story is entitled 'The Merchandising of Culture'-is an important indicator that India has 'arrived' on the international economic-political scene; and none the worse for wear after its almost half a century of Nehruvian 'socialism', either. Under the watchful eye of the IMF/World Bank, India began to liberalize and 'reintegrate' into the world economy in 1991-92, but it is only recently that the ideology of global-local capitalism has managed to construct the level of hegemony 1 that allows a globally-oriented capitalist consumer culture to truly manifest itself in Indian society. This cultural consumerism has resulted in a curious phenomenon: whereas formerly India was integrated into the global culture 2 industry as a 'producer/exporter' of cultural commodities-or the raw material for what became cultural commodities in the West 3-in the form of exotica, it is also increasingly their consumer-or at least a certain class of emerging capitalist elites is: 'yuppies' with disposable incomes unlike any experienced by previous generations of largely austere socialist India. This is heralded by a change in how India and its inhabitants are now 'imagined' or represented on the world stage, but one which includes vestiges of past
The Oxford Handbook of Diversity in Organizations, 2015
Prejudice and discrimination in the US against those perceived to be Muslim has reached an all-ti... more Prejudice and discrimination in the US against those perceived to be Muslim has reached an all-time high, yet not enough attention has been paid to this phenomenon within the field of management studies. In this chapter, we make the case for why management scholars must address this issue, and do so from within a framework of race and racialization. We show that racism today primarily exists in a cultural form, which is harder to identify and therefore address. Drawing on important insights offered by scholars from various disciplines, we outline the important relationship between religious, and specifically anti-Muslim, prejudice in the West and the origins and evolution of the idea of race. The racialization of Muslims today draws on this history and the various discourses of race so as to construct ‘the Muslim’ as the radical Other of a liberal and progressive West.
Routledge Handbook of Gender in South Asia, 2013
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 2005
Dialectical Anthropology, 2012
Conference: LAEMOS, 2018
In an age of neoliberal plunder, debt has become a central organizing principle of the times and ... more In an age of neoliberal plunder, debt has become a central organizing principle of the times and a mode of discipline/governance. A variety of scholars persuasively argue that the growth of indebtedness is but an inevitable (and intentional) outcome of an advancing neoliberal order (Soederberg, 2015; Strike Debt, 2014). As wages stagnate or fall, marginalized citizens are pushed further into indebtedness through the hands of a rapacious poverty industry that includes pay-day loan centers, pawnshops, sub-prime housing mortgages, and credit cards.
The most pernicious form that this debt takes in the US today is student debt, which at $1.4 trillion has surpassed all other forms of consumer debt, while being systematically stripped of any consumer protection like bankruptcy (Frederickson, 2016; Taibbi, 2013). Millions of young Americans graduate each year only to find themselves saddled with enormous and unpayable debt as part of an “ideal initiation to the rites of capital” (Lazzarato, 2013: 66). However, the burden of this debt is unevenly distributed; African-American students are disproportionately impacted, resulting in conditions that recall an earlier period of Black indenture (Huelsman, 2015; Goldrick-Rab, Kelchen, and Houle, 2014).
While we theorize debt in the context of global capital, our focus in this paper is on its differential impact along the axis of race in the US, particularly against the backdrop of a new phase of Black radical resistance exemplified by the Black Lives Matter movement. We are in agreement with Cedric Robinson’s (2000: 2) who contends in his important book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition that race is built into the very DNA of the capitalist system such that “the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions”, and that the domestic nation-state project and imperial adventures of the US have both been animated by this racial capitalism.
As radical Black public intellectuals of the early twentieth century like W.E. B. DuBois and Ida B. Wells recognized, African Americans within this project remained positioned as raced colonized subjects long after Emancipation. In his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois famously declared that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line" where the color-line refers both to systems of deeply embedded racism in general and to racial segregation more specifically. This color-line ensured not only a lack of access to economic opportunities, but a racial wage gap and, even more importantly, a racial wealth gap: today, Black college graduates earn far less than Whites with just a high school diploma, while the median wealth of a Black family today is a tiny fraction of a White one.
It is in this context that Black student debt today should be understood as a new form of indenture and demands our moral outrage, especially given its deeply troubling resonance with the specifically racialized form of debt servitude experienced by African Americans in the wake of Emancipation. This parallel is not lost on a new generation of African American radicals. It is not an accident that reparations for centuries of exploitation and discrimination feature prominently in the manifesto issued by Black Lives Matter, nor that access to free higher education is defined within the manifesto as a crucial form which reparations should take.
From the beginning, the BLM movement has insisted on connecting police violence against black bodies (and racialized bodies more generally) to a broader and deeply-entrenched system of white supremacy within the US and racialized imperialism globally. By highlighting the continuing differential impoverishment of Black America by the project of racial capitalism in the US, it draws our attention to the fact that African Americans continue to be colonized subjects and that Black emancipation remains an unfinished anticolonial project. This new generation of Black radicals thus speaks powerfully to the historic and ongoing resilience of the African American community in the face of immense adversity. Through their words and deeds they align themselves very consciously with their community’s long history of anti-colonial resistance.
Race & Class, 2012
unable to retaliate and yet there is an inability, or unwillingness, on the part of the police to... more unable to retaliate and yet there is an inability, or unwillingness, on the part of the police to do anything. Discrimination and harassment in the workplace, on the streets and on public transport have created a ‘pervasive landscape of fear and incivility’, while the dominant Anglo-Australian figures of authority – politicians, law enforcement agencies and media personalities – assert their own paranoid images of a white Anglo-Australian national landscape. Altogether, this is a must-read for anyone interested in migration, ethnicity, racism, gender, ethnic politics, identity and community relations, and how global events can affect local attitudes, particularly in relation to the Middle East. My only criticism is that, since the empirical setting of this work is Sydney, rather than Australia as a whole, the title is rather misleading.
SAE Technical Paper Series, 1987
Introducing the New Sexuality Studies, 2016
The History behind Badano Grand Mosque: Radio Feature" is the history of an old mosque in Pariama... more The History behind Badano Grand Mosque: Radio Feature" is the history of an old mosque in Pariaman-West Sumatera. It is one of important information that needs to be shared to listeners as source of sharing information. There are a lot of old mosques still exist nowadays in West Sumatera but Badano Grand Mosque still has some interesting and uniques stories that make people in Pariaman are very proud of it. The radio feature of History behind Badano Grand Mosque will be able to attract a lot of tourists to visit this place. There are three procedures in making this project are conducted: Pre-production, Production, and Postproduction. The main point of this project is production process. In production stage, there are some steps that were done such as doing interview with informants, choosing the insert, writing the script and recording the voice. The result of this project is an English script with 750 words.
Organization, 2021
This paper focuses on the current phase of Black resistance exemplified by the Black Lives Matter... more This paper focuses on the current phase of Black resistance exemplified by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which urges us to recognize and reckon with the differential racial impact of student debt in the U.S. and calls for the cancelation of student debt as an explicit part of its demand for reparations. Using the concept of racial capitalism, the paper examines the structure of student debt and its consequences for Black borrowers, analyzes the structural reasons behind the disproportionate debt burden borne by Black students, and highlights movements such as the Debt Collective and BLM, which not only offer a critique of the debt regime but also suggest ways of organizing against it.
Cultural Dynamics, 2009
Recent scholarship on the state has moved towards a focus on state formation as a contingent and ... more Recent scholarship on the state has moved towards a focus on state formation as a contingent and contradictory process, and the role of culture therein. Since all states today are understood to be `nation-states', `national culture' becomes a key arena for struggles over hegemony and consequently for understanding nation-state formation. This article uses the `national language controversy' in Pakistan between 1947 and 1952 as a lens through which to explore the relationship between discourses of national culture and the consolidation and contestation of power within the modern (postcolonial) nation-state.
SOAS Literary Review, 2000
Social Research: An International Quarterly, 2016
Abstract:The debate over the tragic attack on Charlie Hebdo quickly settled into a familiar scrip... more Abstract:The debate over the tragic attack on Charlie Hebdo quickly settled into a familiar script that posits Islam as being antithetical to art, and Muslims therefore as enemies of liberal values such as free speech. The title of conference for which this short paper was written—“Fear of Art”—risks affirming this script. Positing a “fear of art” as the reason behind this attack consigns it to the realm of the irrational, devoid of politics and history. Instead, I argue that we look at art as something that emerges from within society, and thereby as necessarily embodying/reflecting the extant relations of power in society. The paper also underlines the importance of differentiating between art which (explicitly or implicitly) affirms the existing power relations within a society, and art which contests them. Only then can we hope to move our understanding of this incident beyond a simplistic and dangerous civilizational narrative.
'Canned Culture!', screams a cover headline from one of India's leading weeklies. 'After burgers,... more 'Canned Culture!', screams a cover headline from one of India's leading weeklies. 'After burgers, Cielos and cellulars, it's time for cultural consumerism' (Outlook, April 9, 1997). If one needed any more testimony to India's coming-of-age as a late capitalist society, the emergence of a nascent culture industry as reflected by this headline and others like it-the cover story is entitled 'The Merchandising of Culture'-is an important indicator that India has 'arrived' on the international economic-political scene; and none the worse for wear after its almost half a century of Nehruvian 'socialism', either. Under the watchful eye of the IMF/World Bank, India began to liberalize and 'reintegrate' into the world economy in 1991-92, but it is only recently that the ideology of global-local capitalism has managed to construct the level of hegemony 1 that allows a globally-oriented capitalist consumer culture to truly manifest itself in Indian society. This cultural consumerism has resulted in a curious phenomenon: whereas formerly India was integrated into the global culture 2 industry as a 'producer/exporter' of cultural commodities-or the raw material for what became cultural commodities in the West 3-in the form of exotica, it is also increasingly their consumer-or at least a certain class of emerging capitalist elites is: 'yuppies' with disposable incomes unlike any experienced by previous generations of largely austere socialist India. This is heralded by a change in how India and its inhabitants are now 'imagined' or represented on the world stage, but one which includes vestiges of past
The Oxford Handbook of Diversity in Organizations, 2015
Prejudice and discrimination in the US against those perceived to be Muslim has reached an all-ti... more Prejudice and discrimination in the US against those perceived to be Muslim has reached an all-time high, yet not enough attention has been paid to this phenomenon within the field of management studies. In this chapter, we make the case for why management scholars must address this issue, and do so from within a framework of race and racialization. We show that racism today primarily exists in a cultural form, which is harder to identify and therefore address. Drawing on important insights offered by scholars from various disciplines, we outline the important relationship between religious, and specifically anti-Muslim, prejudice in the West and the origins and evolution of the idea of race. The racialization of Muslims today draws on this history and the various discourses of race so as to construct ‘the Muslim’ as the radical Other of a liberal and progressive West.
Routledge Handbook of Gender in South Asia, 2013
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 2005
Dialectical Anthropology, 2012
The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2001
Dialectical Anthropology, 2012