#BeyondTalkingBack (2) Ghassan Hage: Is racism an environmental threat?

In the second of Olivia Rutazibwa’s four interviews appearing this week on the December 2016 Race after the Postracial conference, the speaker is Ghassan Hage. Mr Ghassan Hage is the Future Generation Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory at the University of Melbourne, Australia. In the monologue below he explores how the terminology used by the Austrialian government in her dealings with the refugee crisis links to our framing of ecological problems. Hage argues that ‘the classifications and the practices that constitute colonial racism and the practices that have generated the destruction of the natural environment are mutually self-reinforcing’.

Find Professor Hage’s full monologue here.

#BeyondTalkingBack: Anti-racism reconsidered from the Postcolony

Many observers, in different places in the industrialised West, are reporting on mounting overt political consolidations of racism and xenophobia, as well as often narrowing and hardening public debates. In such context, for anti-racist scholars and activists alike, finding and creating spaces to go beyond the re-active and the merely talking back. Inspired by the conversations during a workshop and public conference titled Race after the Postracial organised by Françoise Vergès and Theo David Goldberg in Paris in December 2016, the following blog posts collect thoughts and works from scholars that locate their anti-racist work firmly in the postcolonial. The aim is to share insights and frameworks of anti-racist thought that go beyond merely talking back. They are entry points to keep the conversation going differently.

Click here for the first in a series of four interviews this week by Olivia Rutazibwa: Françoise Vergès, political scientist, feminist, and author of the book ‘Le ventre des femmes. Capitalisme, racialisation, féminisme” (Éditions Albin Michel, 2017).