1. The Anti-Imperial Core: We Were Never Postcolonial

This is a lightly edited transcript of the first session of Ibraaz Mission Gathering 00: Why Now? which took place on 21–22 February 2025.

• What can cultural and political institutions do in times of global collapse, repression, and precarity?
• How can we avoid reproducing models of capitalist power in the field of transnational and transcultural knowledge production and exchange?

Panellists: Pankaj Mishra, Eyal Weizman, Stephanie Bailey1
Moderator: Shumon Basar
Respondents: Radha D’Souza, Adam Broomberg, Françoise Vergès, Anjalika Sagar, Nour Yakoub, Gaurav Sinha

Stephanie Bailey: I’m glad Francesca [Albanese] brought up the question of strategy and the question of ‘now’ in her talk. Because the purpose of this discussion is not to reflect on history – though we all know in one way or another that history never ends – but rather to focus on questions of strategy, navigation, and positionality as they relate to the present moment. That is, to zoom in to the heart of the question: what does it mean to act anti-imperially in the imperial core, now?

In many ways, this was a debate that Ibraaz constantly grappled with as an English-language publication rooted in the Arab world, with many of our contributors living in the so-called Global North as members of different diasporas, as migrants, and as third-culture kids. All of which brings to mind Arif Dirlik’s observation in 2007, that ‘the geographies of development have been reconfigured, calling into question not only the earlier Three Worlds idea, but the viability of the North/South distinction. Presently, the boundaries between the two are crisscrossed by networks of various kinds, relocating some parts of the South in the North, and vice versa.’2

The imperial roots of the current neoliberal world order are captured in the opening scene of Naeem Mohaiemen’s Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017), which revolves around the 1973 Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) meeting in Algiers, where the call for a new international economic order was made, just as Pinochet took over Chile. To put it briefly, Kwame Nkrumah was right: that, within the context of historical globalisation, neocolonialism is neoimperialism is neoliberalism.

Mohaiemen’s film opens with archival footage of Singapore’s first foreign minister, the journalist and one-time George Orwell mentee Sinnathamby Rajaratnam, who cautions the NAM gathering, which included Yasser Arafat, Fidel Castro, and others. This meeting, he said, was made possible with the technology of the great powers: everything from the telegrams sent to coordinate the event to the flights taken to attend it. It was a reminder of how insidious – not to mention sinuous – imperial power can be, when we know that imperialism is not just about holding or occupying land; it’s also about occupying international institutions and financial systems. This is, of course, where the politics of development and de- or under-development comes in.

With that in mind, I wanted to open this discussion by honing in on our speakers’ practical, material experiences navigating the field of historical globalisation – thinking about what you have learned about effectively organising and acting within that global context through your various projects and initiatives, bearing in mind the inherent contradictions that are baked into it. For example, in relation to Pankaj Mishra’s work, the fascist intersection of Hindutva and Zionism as a means to understand Palestine from a more complex, global perspective; or in relation to Eyal Weizman’s work, the overlaps between the contexts of courtroom and exhibition when it comes to seeking truth, rights, and – dare I say – justice, and I use those words in reference to Forensic Architecture’s work with Tottenham Rights in the UK.

As a prompt, I wanted to refer to the introduction to Pankaj’s London Review of Books essay ‘The Shoah after Gaza’, and the story of Austrian writer Jean Améry, whose total disillusionment with Zionism after reading 1977 press reports of the systematic torture of Palestinians in Israeli prisons, is encapsulated in this arresting line: ‘Where barbarism begins, even existential commitments must end.’3 I think this is where we are now, no?

This relates to something that I spoke about with legal professor Radha D’Souza, who’s in the room, in an interview we did around the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (CICC), which Radha conceived with Jonas Staal. We talked about how Radha wouldn’t be able to put the Indian government on trial in this way in India, nor would it be possible to stage a version of the CICC in Hong Kong. These are the kind of contradictions that we have to face; that we actually have (relatively more) freedom to speak here, but it comes at a price: whether your words are heard or not. But the nature of the culture industry in many ways is that we’re all networked, right? A lot of us are independent contractors or freelancers, and so we naturally network between institutions and spaces. I’d like to think a little bit about what this means in terms of complicity and density – as it relates to being in London, for instance – given the work that we do.

This is definitely something that’s going to be brought up in the London panel, because London was one of the historical heartlands of transnational solidarity organising. In 1900, the first Pan-African Conference happened here, W. E. B. Du Bois was here. So it’s that question of bridging here and elsewhere, in the same way that, let’s say, Stuart Hall intended through the conception of political Blackness; of reckoning with what the world looks like after imperialism, after Western imperialism, because at this point in time we have intersecting imperialisms, and I think we are observing this in Asia today. The imperial core is not just here but is multi-sited, which brings us back to what Dirlik was saying, that the North is also in the South and the South in the North. 

Again, this is why I was thinking about positionality and complicity, because particularly in the culture industry, we are always networking. You’re always having to compromise in some way or you’re always working with different regions, different structures, different systems, and trying to find a way through – which reminds me of Améry’s point: ‘Where barbarism begins, even existential commitments must end.’ You have to enter this space of ethical and political dilemma because, as you say Eyal, that’s the space of the unknown. By unknown I mean this idea of the excess, or the idea of futurity that is produced by any act of rupture within a kind of all-encompassing, all-enclosing global system that blocks conceptions or imagination of other worlds, even those that already exist.

Shumon Basar: Thank you. I want to bring in Radha D’Souza for comments or questions.

Radha D’Souza: Thank you for these amazing comments and thoughts. It was very thought-provoking, I have to say. I’ll begin by responding to Pankaj [Mishra]. I come from the same kind of environment that you grew up in, and for many of us, decolonisation is not a theoretical issue. Our family members were involved. It’s stories about our parents, our grandparents, what happened to our villages. It’s not something that comes from books, if you know what I mean.

I have thoughts that I hope will be relevant for Ibraaz, and what you’re trying to do now, relating to this larger question about where we are as people who inhabit two worlds, if you like, which I relate to completely because I come from that milieu.

I’m wondering about other countries, and I’ll limit myself to India now, where there is a lot of cultural activity, but a lot of it is in vernacular languages which means those of us who are not plugged into the vernacular don’t see it. Therefore, we are left with coming and speaking in London or Washington or wherever. I recently attended some amazing cultural festivals in India. In Bombay, there is the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, which happens every year, and features an extraordinary new generation of young people. I saw a play called 1876, which is about the Dramatic Performances Act that the British introduced to ban a play about the Indigo Rebellion. What is fascinating about the play is the way it is scripted. Although it is about events in 1876, anyone could see that they were speaking to the present and the context of censorship. It’s interesting. Whenever I go back there, I think to myself: what am I doing in London?

Of course, this moment has come through a trajectory. I remember in the late 1990s, during the anti-globalisation movement, when the then finance minister of the federal government in India, P. Chidambaram – who was not a Hindutva radical but very much a liberal, a socialist, a democrat, whatever you want to call it – filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court saying that the biggest security threat to India comes from the intellectuals. Now, to say what the minister said to the Supreme Court shows there is something happening. It’s not coming out of nowhere. We need to be aware of that as people who are working in these spaces here, which brings me back to that question about those of us who inhabit two worlds.

I have often wondered, what is our role? Maybe our role is to facilitate this conversation between the two worlds, and you need that conversation because neither world can move forward without it happening. I sometimes feel I’m in a very unique position to make that happen, so that was something that I wanted to bring up.

The other thing on the theme of the imperial core: we have a very respected Indian sociologist, J. P. S. Uberoi, who says we shouldn’t get into this ‘West versus rest’ paradigm of thinking, because that congeals the dualism and doesn’t open up pathways for freedom. Instead, he says, there is always a dissident tradition in every culture, in every country, and it is our job – he calls them the European underground – to draw out that underground tradition. It has always been there. If you take slavery, there was the slave trade but the opposition to slavery was also here. Methodism comes out of opposition to slavery. So, it is our job as people and organisations like Ibraaz, I would imagine, to draw out that underground, to recognise it, because there are a lot of people out there.

I’ll just finish with this. On the question of the Genocide Convention – which is on everyone’s minds now – it’s interesting that it comes out of the Nuremberg Trials. The moment the Nuremberg Trials were declared, and the judgment was taken, the United States took it to the UN and said we should have a Genocide Convention. But at the same time, there was another tribunal that was appointed, the Tokyo Tribunal, which was very divided, unlike – but with the same terms of reference as – the Nuremberg Tribunal. As part of the Tokyo Tribunal, Justice Pal wrote a 1,000-page dissident view, highlighting one of the key questions that the Tokyo Tribunal asked: ‘You want us to punish the Axis powers, the Japanese soldiers, for the atrocities they committed, but all the atrocities they committed, the Allied powers also committed.’ These are the kinds of things that the underground must say: ‘You talk about Nuremberg, let’s talk about Tokyo.’ Because there’s a problem: the victors always write history. That is where a lot of work remains to be done, and where, I imagine, organisations like Ibraaz have a part to play.

Shumon Basar: Adam – comments or questions?

Adam Broomberg: I’m going to get really personal here. Three years ago, I was introduced to the founder of Breaking the Silence, Yehuda Shaul, who in turn introduced me to the human-rights defender based in Hebron called Issa Amro, who, alongside Eyal Weizman, won the so-called Alternative Nobel Prize this year. Issa lives in Hebron, he’s surrounded by people who every 15 minutes remind him that they want him dead. They throw stones at him. They scream at him. Together we formed an NGO that functions between Berlin and Hebron. And I was asked to use my so-called influence to bring consciousness to the art world of what was going on in Hebron.

So I spent the last 18 months devising this exhibition with Emily Jacir, which we staged at the Venice Biennale and which cost over €230,000 – just to get the Venice Biennale stamp cost €50,000. And we funded this thing with the help of many people, some of whom are in this room, by selling prints of the olive trees that I made in the occupied territories. But my point is, when I, in the last two weeks, revealed this expense to Issa, who is on the ground dealing with things on a daily basis – as opposed to us who sit within the empire and try and bring awareness to the empire, to people who sit and enjoy these plush carpets – it doesn’t make sense. And Issa and I are having a very difficult time at the moment because for him, that just didn’t make sense.

I just present you with that problem which I’m experiencing now. I’m feeling very uncomfortable with myself, because I’ve spent three years building this relationship, and obviously it’s incomparable, the risks that people take or the kind of vulnerabilities they experience. I am also ostracised because of my activism. I am unemployable in Germany. I am vulnerable. But nothing like Issa, right? This is not even a question; it’s more a dilemma. How can we make what happens in this building have a direct and positive consequence to people on the frontline whose stories we narrate?

Shumon Basar: Françoise, some comments, please?

Françoise Vergès: Well, I do think there are possibilities in the imperial core. There have always been. I mean, we have to disrupt the imperial core. We have to be there. We are here and so we have to fight here. Liberation movements have always asked: what are you doing to disrupt power in your own place? Recently, I’ve been to a lot of debates in France where I’m asked: ‘What can we do?’ I say: France is the second-biggest seller of weapons in the world, so there is something you can do in your country. You are French. This is your country selling arms. This is what you can do. If you can stop it, if you can disrupt it, it will help. Okay, we can walk in the street, protest, but we can also do this: you know, putting our bodies in front of factories.

So how do you fight imperialism? You are there at the centre. You have to do something, and you can do something. And I do think, effectively, a space like Ibraaz will be this space where we think about how to disrupt it rather than feeling guilty or asking: ‘What can we do?’ There are a lot of things to do. The murderers live here; the assassins live here. They are in power here, in Europe, so there is really something that we can do.

Shumon Basar: Thank you so much – Anjali?

Anjalika Sagar: Thank you, Pankaj. Thank you, Eyal. It’s great to hear you both together on one stage like this. I wanted to go back to what Pankaj was saying about this sense of failure, and to what Radha was saying in relation to her empathy with your position.

I just wanted to say that some of us remember London as a very different place to how it became in the 1990s. It is important to remember that struggles have been going on for a long time here. We, Otolith, are Londoners born in the 1960s and our genesis to where things are now is felt viscerally. We know a different, more progressive city, and have been making work and thinking about non-alignment as part of our personal history. We have existed para-institutionally for a long time with our intellectual friends, both living and dead. They exist in our library and have guided our platform and our organisation for 23 years now. 

I’m thinking about Equator here, which is new, and Forensic Architecture, which together with the Centre for Research Architecture emerged around the same time as we did in 2002. We as comrades, in very different ways, are always thinking about forms of transmission in the context of the horror of fake news and fascist media.

It’s important to remember that before Saatchi, much of what we appreciate as art and culture emerged from collectives, be they film collectives, bands, unions – many different formations. The important thing is that collectives improvise and create methods by which to explore the social fabric: to entangle the labour, the administrative, collaborative, managerial, programmatic, social, contextualising, and theorising activities of artists and other members, and to consider the implications of these granular actions, as the aesthetics of sociality and towards the displacement of the singular. 

Things were more critical and far more serious, and the struggles were in programming. No one assumed an audience would not understand! In the 1980s and 1990s, documentaries on the political situation in South Asia – those great films by Anand Patwardhan – were shown on Channel 4 and on the BBC quite regularly, as were experimental films by Black Audio Film Collective, Sankofa, and others. Also, after clubbing one could come home and watch Stuart Hall on television at two in the morning on the Open University. Imagine that?

From struggles in the 1970s, which was extremely racist and backward – I mean, a trendy, racist society – to the 1980s, when it became extremely unfashionable to be racist in London, you also cannot forget the power and the importance of the Greater London Council at the time, when there were all these incredible things going on in the city. We have to remember and build on these histories and also on the power of transmission.

Shumon Basar: Anjali has set things up perfectly for the next session, ‘Why London?’ We’ll take two more comments/questions.

Nour Yakoub: Thank you all. This is a question about institutionalisation and alternative means of production. When Ibraaz was first established, in its first iteration, it was very much responding to the need to create our own means of production. It was important then; it’s even more critical now, arguably. The question is more about at what point are we just talking to ourselves – insulating ourselves within our own core, within the core, and not engaging with the structures that exist to uphold the system – which you rightly identify, Pankaj, as saying ‘shun or be shunned’ essentially. We think we might be effecting change from within this cosseted establishment that we have built. But actually, we’re not really effecting material change on the outside because we can’t see what’s going on. At what point does the institution become redundant in that respect?

Gaurav Sinha: I’m new to a forum such as this, so forgive the naivety of some of my observations. I think, in many ways, listening to you all talk provokes certain observations in my mind that I’m going to table, which hopefully will fuel the rest of the sessions that you have, and, at the end of the day, try and answer some of the questions that are on the wall.

A couple of observations. They say that humanity is a great concept, it’s just held hostage by the wrong species. In this context, what we are trying to answer is: how do you create a socioeconomic cultural ecosystem that is powered by law and money, which fundamentally are the fuel that drives effective and sustainable change? That’s one thing that we have to talk about. 

There’s an old adage, which says: ‘Never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel.’ So the second aspect is: how do you create momentum around your message? And what is this new currency of culture, when we know that language is a cognitive prison – it imprisons you, the way you think, because that’s how you share your values. How can Ibraaz do that? What is this centre of gravity that we seek, which is beyond shared values that can galvanise a transnational or multiethnic movement? Because when you talk about the core, at the end of it, if there is one truth, it is that everything is dispensable today, there is nothing sacred anymore. So how do you anchor something sacred back into the context of this?

You know, about this postcolonial thing. I’m from India. My story is not very different from that narrative of the 1990s – leaving India and travelling overseas. There is this postcolonial hangover of subservience and compliance, even at the expense of your neighbour, which exists on the streets in Delhi or Bombay or wherever else. So how do you create, fundamentally, as Ibraaz, an institution? Does it craft a constitution? Does it have a charter that empowers grassroot movements in other places? These are some of the things I hope you will all talk about a little bit more in the afternoon.