Musab Younis teaches politics at Oxford. His first book, On the Scale of the World: The Formation of Black Anticolonial Thought, was published in 2022.
On 11 October, Julien Odoul, an official from the Rassemblement National, formerly the Front National, interrupted a French regional council session to ask a woman in the audience either to remove her headscarf or leave. She was a volunteer accompanying children on a school trip. ‘Madame has ample time to wear her veil at home and on the street,’ Odoul said. ‘But not here,...
‘It is usually agreed in France,’ the poet and essayist Edouard Roditi wrote in 1962, ‘that Arabs have been gifted with greater manliness than us.’ Algeria had recently won its independence after a long war of liberation, and the loss was experienced by some French men as an emasculation, a feeling reinforced by stories of French soldiers castrated and disembowelled...
A year ago today, a boat carrying about 145 people, almost all of them Somalis with official refugee documents, was on its way to Sudan from Yemen. It was passing through the narrow Bab el-Mandeb strait when it came under fire. The shots, a confidential report to the UN Security Council confirmed four months later, were ‘almost certainly’ fired from a machine-gun mounted on a helicopter. Only ‘the Saudi Arabia-led coalition forces,’ it added, ‘have the capability to operate armed utility helicopters in the area.’ (They are Apache helicopters, made in the United States.)
Two of the great 20th-century opponents of colonialism came from a tiny island in the Caribbean that never decolonised. Martinique – the birthplace of Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon – was indifferent to the project of national sovereignty, preferring to remain a French ‘overseas department’. Fanon committed himself to the grander project of decolonisation...
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