Ep. 36: Reading, Thinking, and Writing about Race with Lana and Ani

Returning guests: Philosopher, writer, and PhD student Anisha
Sankar and soon to be Assistant Professor of Pacific Island
Studies at the University of Oregon and author of Bloody Woman
Lana Lopesi.


Contents: This episode gives some background to the anthology
project Towards a Grammar of Race in Aotearoa New Zealand to be
published by Bridget Williams Books in Sept/Oct 2022. We reflect
back on the beginning of a reading group that culminated into
this project, drawing from Jodi Byrd’s The Transit of Empire:
Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism,  Frank B. Wilderson
III’s Afropessimism, Lisa A. Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four
Continents, Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and
Anti-Blackness, and more. Reading and thinking with challenging
theoretical perspectives, through different points of views and
disciplines, offered productive tensions that better spoke to the
messy and complex realities of our modern world. This background
assisted us in finding language to navigate the local and global
discourse and experience of race and power, such as debates
between ethnicity vs. race in a New Zealand context. This project
sought to bring together different authors, understandings,
ideas, and experiences of race together. We confront a lack of
societal consensus or shared language to even discuss race by
putting these diverse positions together in what we call,
‘towards a grammar of race’. Grammar is both linguistic and
philosophical, as the rules that give structure to language and
to society. Ani and Lana also share a bit about their chapters in
the book and we end with a critical reflection on
‘accessibility’.


Terms: Incommensurability is a term borrowed from mathematics
that refers to having no common measure, and is used in reference
to Afropessimism, which uses the term to confront the
inadequacies to theorise Black suffering and Anti-Blackness in
other theoretical camps, positions, or traditions; Paranoid and
reparative reading are references to Eve Sedgwick’s book Touching
Feeling – Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity and particularly the
chapter ‘Paranoid reading and reparative reading, or you’re so
paranoid, you probably think this essay is about you.’; Colonial
imaginary refers to the intellectual, aesthetic, and historical
production of a modern euro-imperial consciousness and reality.