Shaista A Z I Z Patel | University of California, San Diego (original) (raw)

Papers by Shaista A Z I Z Patel

White Benevolence Racism and Colonial Violence in the Helping Professions, 2022

Sparked by Kanaka Maoli scholar Haunani Kay-Trask’s (2000) examination of the place of Asians in... more Sparked by Kanaka Maoli scholar Haunani Kay-Trask’s (2000) examination of the place of Asians in upholding ongoing colonial violence in Hawai’i, scholars and activists have been engaging in complex, fraught, but urgently needed conversations about the relationship(s) between Indigenous, Black, and other racialized people in white supremacist settler colonial contexts. Building on the foundational discussions of Lawrence and Dua (2005), Snelgrove, Dhamoon and Corntassel (2014), and Patel, Moussa and Upadhyay (2015) among others, we come together to consider the positioning of non-black people of colour within (re)productions of white settler coloniality in universities in Canada and the U.S. What does maintaining an ethical praxis look like when teaching about white settler colonialism, when conducting our own research, and when entrenched in administrative work in neoliberal, white settler colonial spaces? Moreover, what is pedagogic about ‘settler of colour’?

Engaged Scholar Journal , 2022

Grounded in a friendship that began in the academy, we write together to problematize collaborati... more Grounded in a friendship that began in the academy, we write together to problematize collaborative writing across our distinct caste positionalities. Writing as caste-oppressed Pakistani Muslim settler (Patel) and dominant caste Indian settler (Da Costa), we write primarily across caste power lines to focus on the failure in our own efforts at collaborative writing. This article, initially meant to focus on our complicities in white settler colonialism in its present form, reflects on the detours we undertook to arrive at this place of certainty that "we cannot write about our complicity together." Specifically, we reconsider some assumptions underlining prominent methodological commitments of transnational collaborative writing across uneven locations in, for, and beyond the academy. Collaborative writing has been championed for its capacity to generate dialogue across disagreements, praxis grounded in social change, a challenge to the academy's notions of individual knowledge-production and merit, and as a means of holding people across hierarchies accountable to structures of violence that remain at work within social movements and collective struggles. Considering the contours of what Sara Ahmed (2019) calls structural "usefulness" of collaborative writing to the colonial and neoliberal academy, we use historical and life-writing approaches to make caste violence legible in order to refuse the cover that collaborative writing provides to dominant caste South Asians engaged in research with Indigenous, Black, Muslim, caste-oppressed and multiply and differentially colonized communities. Our purpose is to foreground the historical and ordinary violence of caste as it shapes North American academic relationships, intimacies, and scholarship, in order to challenge the assumption that caste-privileged South Asian scholars of postcolonial and transnational studies in western academia are best poised to collaborate with Indigenous, Black, other racialized, and Dalit scholars and actors toward a decolonial, abolitionist, and anti-casteist feminist praxis. While focusing on writing across caste lines, our analysis can also be read as offering a space to engage ethically with complexities informing collaborative projects across differential horizontal and vertical power relations informed by race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship, north/south and other differences. In the process of writing this article, we have also paid particular attention to our citational practices.

Ethnic Studies Review, 2022

It documents an increasing awareness of caste-based discriminations and calls for institution, le... more It documents an increasing awareness of caste-based discriminations and calls for institution, legal, and social interventions. The statement outlines an intention to recruit Dalit scholars. KEYWORDS caste, Dalit, discrimination The Department of Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego opposes caste-based discrimination against all students, staff, and faculty. Against the commonly circulated idea that only South Asians, specifically Hindus, should care about caste, we understand caste as a 2,500-year-old system of dehumanization that made Dalits, those outside the Brahminical caste system, into "untouchables," as non-humans who could be killed with impunity. Caste is a structure of violence that affects over 1 billion people across the world. As a department committed to the relational study of race, ethnicity, indigeneities, gender, sexuality, class, and dis/ability, we acknowledge the importance of caste studies to the field of Ethnic Studies. As the 2018 survey on "Caste in the United States" by Equality Labs, a Dalit civil rights organization, shows, 40% of Dalit students report facing discrimination in educational institutions in the diaspora. In contrast, only up to 3% of respondents who were "upper" caste reported the same. With the number of students from India in the United States exceeding 200,000 in 2018 (constituting 18% of all international students) and is expected to continue growing, it is urgent that we recognize that caste is a system of violence that is as oppressive as racism, colonialism, and other oppressions. We see our department's recognition of caste and caste-based violence as strengthening the anti-caste movement at UC San Diego and in the United States. There are no legal protections for caste-oppressed communities in most countries (United States included) because caste is not recognized as a category distinct from religion, ancestry, race, etc. Lack of legal protections allows for caste-based discrimination within South Asian diaspora, as the recent Silicon Valley company Cisco shows us. It also allows for non-South Asians to often unknowingly but structurally participate in caste-based violence by working with casteist upper-caste South Asian scholars, students, and administrators. We understand that caste-supremacy is sidelined as caste-privileged people continue to circulate simply as "people of color." Attending to the complexities of race, caste, and religion, we intend to recruit Dalit and Muslim faculty and students in the coming years. We will also work with Dalit faculty member(s) and allies across the campus to have caste included in the anti-discrimination policy of UC San Diego as part of the much-needed anti-caste organizing on campuses in North America. n 48

Unsettling Canadian Art History. Edited by Erin Morton, 2022

The Funambulist, 2022

A conversation with Dalit theorist Vijeta Kumar

Political Theology, 2022

For Muslims to become worthy of any empathy and solidarity, whether in the west or in staunchly a... more For Muslims to become worthy of any empathy and solidarity, whether in the west or in staunchly anti-Muslim India, what must first be shed is our very religiosity. Islam is to be tolerated only when reduced to culture in which the dominant-caste or white friend can joyously celebrate Muslim festivities, visit Muslim friends and restaurants for biryani in Toronto or Delhi, or post Sufi songs on their social media. Those are the parameters set around reception of a Muslim sans Islam.

Pulse Media, 2022

The so-called radicality of this Conference did nothing but further contribute to the erasure of ... more The so-called radicality of this Conference did nothing but further contribute to the erasure of Indian Muslims and Indian brand of anti-Muslimness. It carried out Hindutva’s goal. Genocide of Muslims is an aesthetic project for Hindutva. Genocide of Muslims is an aesthetic project for this seemingly anti-casteist but clearly and always anti-Muslim left.

Teaching students to think about white settlers' and racialized non-black people's complicity in ... more Teaching students to think about white settlers' and racialized non-black people's complicity in settler colonial violence can still be an instance of settler-centric pedagogy underlined by the trope of the 'dying Indian'. Through re!ecting on my teaching of a well-circulated article by a racialized scholar, I discuss how, despite my intentions, my orientation toward Indigenous peoples' resistance remained temporary whereas colonial violence became permanent in my pedagogy. Through paying particular attention to the methodology of unmapping, I argue that challenging the colonial world order does not necessarily lead to decolonization if Indigenous peoples' conceptions of land, lives, and their futurities are not centered. Because of my inability to understand the refusals staged by Indigenous people in their scholarship and all other political acts, they remained as dying and vestigial while white settlers and racialized (non-black) people were the agentic subjects in my classroom. I re!ect on my harm-producing colonial pedagogy to think about how we have to carefully teach the ethics and politics of complicity without making it into yet another damage-producing narrative about settlers' empathy. I talk about failures that were personal and also produced structurally to think about how apparently decolonial, scholarship and pedagogies can be simply settler-centric.

I began this article, and focused quite a bit, on Palestine. I began with asking a question about... more I began this article, and focused quite a bit, on Palestine. I began with asking a question about the ethics of talking about Palestine in academia. But Palestine is an important archetype, an important site for my critiques and reflections. As my discussions above clearly show, I am critical of all ‘objects’ (by which I mean spaces, events, and structures) which have or can become a site for performing unhelpful (if not harmful) radicality for academics. I am critical of Brahmin scholars who write about caste without making their positionality and intentions clear, without carefully and ethically centering Dalit-Bahujan theorists in non-fetishizing ways; I am suspicious of several kinds of works on Kashmir by savarna scholars that do not begin with their own dinner table conversations and calling Indian occupation by its name; I am invested in thinking about how I talk about white settler colonialism and anti-Blackness to perform my radical politics, without thinking about all the violences done in my name to so many of my Others in Pakistan. Whether it’s Palestine, or Kashmir, or Balochistan, or caste-talk, all of these can become sites for counter-productive work if we stop asking these important questions about complicity.

Cultural Studies, 2019

This article places Columbus’s travels to the New World within a much older history of eight cent... more This article places Columbus’s travels to the New World within a much older history of eight centuries of Muslim/Moor presence on the Iberian Peninsula. It argues that the Orientalist logics underlining the creation of the ‘New World Indian’ have a long history interpellated through figures of the Moors and other Africans whom Europeans knew for centuries before they encountered the Indigenous peoples of the ‘New World.’ This article argues for the need to bring together seemingly discrepant figures, spatialities, and temporalities in order to re/examine what we know and have yet to learn about entanglements of colonialism, capitalism, race, caste, gender, sexuality, and other social formations. Such a reading of the figure not only brings to fore unexamined relationalities but also demands that we think critically and concretely about questions of our complicity in upholding different systems of violence.

Thank you for your critical and thought-provoking journal. I would like to address Kate Milley's ... more Thank you for your critical and thought-provoking journal. I would like to address Kate Milley's article, " Where is John Wayne when you need him? Anti-native organizing and the Caledonia Crisis " (UTA 9). I learned a lot about mobilizations of white settlers against Six Nations from her article. However, what remained with me was her very important claim that " ordinary " white settlers are actively engaged in ongoing colonialism and that " the moral distance is uncomfortably narrow between those who are easily cast in the category of white supremacists and those who comprise the majority of white Canadians. " In other words, there is no race to innocence, and the are no good white settlers for Milley. Milley's article has made me once again question the binary of white settlers versus the Indigenous peoples of Canada. Where do I, a settler of colour, and other settlers of colour like myself, fit into this equation of white settlers versus Aboriginal peoples? Are we innocent just because we are people of colour and do not have a relationship of conquest to this land? Is our relationship to First Peoples colonial? I recently conducted a workshop for people of colour on how we see ourselves in relation to this land. While the enthusiasm of the people present at the workshop was wonderful, one of the questions that generated the most debate and discussion was whether or not people of colour are indeed settlers, or if whiteness is a precondition for being considered a settler. Some of the questions that came up included whether we were being too " academic " in using this vocabulary. How would we tell poor, racialized women of colour, for instance, that they were settlers here? My purpose in mentioning these questions is not to somehow claim that I am better than those who do not see themselves as complicit in routinized violence against Aboriginal peoples. Rather, I write these questions because these are important discussions that settlers of colour need to engage in. The narrow moral distance that Milley discusses in her article has made me ask myself what that distance is between people of colour here and white settlers. I have often heard people of colour with left politics claim that " our relation to this land is different. " How is this difference lived differently by bodies of colour? On one hand, people like me fight for justice in the name of being Canadians. We often stand in various anti-racist rallies to claim our rights as Canadians, and some of us – especially those born here – feel offended when we are asked where we are " really " from. On the other hand, we also claim innocence. We say that we are coming from other post-colonies, and that we too are victims of direct or indirect European colonization. Even when we recognize that we are settlers, there is no sense of urgency for most of us to organize with the Indigenous peoples and nations here. I think that we not only need to question where we are coming from but more importantly, also consider the place we have come to. What does citizenship mean for racialized people in a white settler-colony? What does it mean when we demand these citizenship rights, which are rights based in white supremacy, dispossession, and genocide of Aboriginal peoples? For instance, when Muslims today (and I include myself here) write and organize against legislation like the Anti-Terrorism Act or against acts of racial profiling, do we look at what the Indian Act is still doing to continue genocide against Indigenous peoples here? Do we look at how Indigenous activists have a long history of being labelled as terrorists? Do we ask ourselves why Aboriginality and urbanity are still framed as mutually exclusive? If we think that we people of colour have a right to be here, then where do we think people of native nations belong? There are a few clarifications I would like to make here: I am not saying that we share the same power as white settlers, or that race, class, gender, and citizenship do not define where and how bodies are organized Introductions

We also wish to thank Patrick Hunter for contributing the beautiful image for the cover of this i... more We also wish to thank Patrick Hunter for contributing the beautiful image for the cover of this issue, and Faculty of Graduate Studies (York University) for the honorarium they provided for the cover image. Thank you to the team at Feral Feminisms, and particularly Sara Rodrigues who approached us to edit the issue, to all the copy editors for their careful editing, as well as the peer reviewers who have helped us shape this collection. We are grateful for all the contributors and the care they put into their work--this collection would not be possible without their hard work, difficult questions, and brilliance. A special thank you to Zainab Amadahy and Tiffany King for sharing their time and thoughts with us during the interviews. We appreciate the help we received along the way, and hope this issue sparks conversations, resistances, and alliances. Patrcik Hunter, "Harvest Moon" (12"x16" Acrylic on canvas 2011). http://patrickhunter.ca Guest Editorial Shaista Patel, Ghaida Moussa, and Nishant Upadhyay 6 feral femin isms Compli cities, Connec tions, & Strugg les: Critical Transn ational Femini st Analys is of Settler Colonia lism issue 4 . summer 2015

This article treats An Indian from India, a photographic series by Indian-American photographer, ... more This article treats An Indian from India, a photographic series by Indian-American photographer, Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, as an example of South Asian diasporic cultural production that rearticulates white settler colonial mythology of 'dead Indians' in order to raise questions about justice and place for non-Indigenous non-Black People of Color. Drawing upon some of Matthew's photographs that are reflective of my reading of the entire series, I argue that South Asians in America must pay attention to how our questions and critiques of racial injustice are often steeped in white-settler colonial, anti-Black and casteist logics.

On questions about complicity and the place of people of color in white settler colonialism

Patel, Shaista. "The Anti-Terrorism Act and National Security: Safeguarding the Nation Against Un... more Patel, Shaista. "The Anti-Terrorism Act and National Security: Safeguarding the Nation Against Uncivilized Muslims." Islam in the Hinterlands: Muslim Cultural Politics in Canada (2012): 272-298.

Disability Incarcerated, 2014

Talks by Shaista A Z I Z Patel

Pe'nd Online, 2022

This is an hour-long video lecture on the centrality of theoretical framework in a PhD proposal a... more This is an hour-long video lecture on the centrality of theoretical framework in a PhD proposal and/or dissertation. https://fb.watch/hsOWnT1-L4/