Blunt

BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions). Twice—South Africa and Palestine. Both times those three words have been politically orienting for me: about ethical demands and political practice. In essence, about world-making. BDS is a powerful and world-shaping abbreviation that commands practice, orienting both a present and a future.

BDS is blunt in its requirement. Blunt can be meaningful. Blunt can be necessary. Blunt can be expansive.

Censure. This one word is blunt too; it seeks to fulfil a demand and commands a practice. It is a verb. (This is a measure of last resort only imposed when serious violations of academic freedom have been transgressed.)

BDS and Censure are animating words that call for a politics of the possible. Of justice, maybe.

Today, we are at a significant conjuncture on the question of Palestine, and on the role of the public university in civic life. These two things demand of us a position—an arbitrary closure, as Stuart Hall would say, so that politics might happen. Politics is blunt.

The bluntness of BDS, and of Censure, is the arbitrary closure of the political. What remains in the wake of the closure is space where one must now enter into further political acts, where new possibilities will manifest from these political acts, creating new formations, new beginnings.

As David Brion Davis has suggested in Inhuman Bondage, the still unfolding effects of the first significant abolitionist movement, that of the abolition of the slave trade and plantation slavery in the Americas, “should help inspire some confidence in other movements for social change, for not being condemned to fully accept the world into which we are born.” It is this idea of not accepting the world into which we are born as the limit of what is possible that animates and makes more expansive the blunt instruments of BDS and Censure.

Bombs are a different and deadly kind of blunt instrument, too. This past summer, bombs continually rained down on Palestine, while the University of Toronto continued to obfuscate donor influence in the cancelled/interrupted hiring of Dr. Valentina Azarova, a scholar who writes on Palestine.

The University of Toronto in its highest reaches has long been hostile to the Palestinian struggle, and the years of resistance to students and others on campus organizing Israeli Apartheid Week should not be forgotten. That Palestine and its coming freedom is a lightning rod in the university should really surprise no one who pays attention to the university as an institution. However, the knowledges that flow from the university shape our everyday lives through policy-making and the comingling of university, government, and industry elites as they assume the broader mantle of structuring the society that is in their best interests—one of white patriarchal capitalism and authorizing its junior partners to carry out the ongoing global colonial project.

The initial rescinding of Dr. Azarova’s job offer highlights the ways in which the university’s colonial liberalism functions to keep the status quo in place—all the while claiming otherwise. It also shows how the university exists well beyond its boundaries: impacting, reproducing, and reinforcing political practices and ideas that are the foundation of global coloniality. Yet it was also in the university where I learned to notice this discrepancy and, more importantly, to participate in acts with others to undo and transform those practices. The Azarova case is one example among many others that demonstrate why the university is a site of struggle among all of our struggles.

The university has to be—and is, for many of us—a site of struggle. The university’s embeddedness in and reproduction of colonial liberalism (exemplified by the mirage of democratic processes, claims of representation, claims of openness, academic freedom, and so on) is among its seductive qualities. The university gives the veneer that anything is possible. And when folks feel or experience betrayal of the university’s colonial liberalism, too many throw it away as irrelevant. Yet, as a site of knowledge production connected to all our struggles, it is foundational to the world we have now, the world we will have tomorrow, and the next and the next.

But the university also has an ambivalent relationship to what we have named activism. Many activists eschew the university as irrelevant, in favour of another shorthand term: the community. The two are never cleanly separated, though. Many activists have strong ties to the university; many have previous links and ties too; some have ongoing, complex relations with the university (or rather, with people in/side the university). Many activists come into their activism or refine their language and politics in classrooms; many are exposed to different positions in the university; many have their political ideas, suspicions, and experiences confirmed in the university. The university is never outside of activism, even though many behave like it is. We need to banish that fiction because it only serves to allow the university to do its deadly business almost—almost—unwatched. Colonial liberalism succeeds when we dismiss the potential of the university to be a part of the transformation of what we are fighting for.

The university is one site where many of us also learned to engage a politics of solidarity that has been essential to our movements and to the kinds of collective responses possible: rethinking strategy, and wrestling with the difficult histories of our encounters, betrayals, and how we continue to work together. In this regard, we must also continue extending beyond the university as only one site among others producing knowledge useful for our struggles against colonial liberalism, which has sought to use our differences to hide the very function of the work colonial liberalism does. In the Canadian context, multiculturalism, now recast as Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI), continues to hide the violence of colonial liberalism and to absolve Canada of a past of colonization and its ongoing evidence of slavery, second-tier imperialism, ecological disaster, and on and on.

Censure alerts us. It demands we look carefully, critically, and politically at the university’s role as an institution animating life within and beyond the university.

On the other hand, colonial liberalism would also have us look away from Canada’s sales of armaments to Saudi Arabia to bomb schools in Yemen; it will have us think, as normal children are rescued from their bombed homes in Palestine, it’s “just the way things are over there.” Colonial liberalism would have us not question white supremacist global arrangements of violence as long as those arrangements remain enacted elsewhere. But we know those arrangements are not just enacted over there, as the violences in Quebec in 2017 and in London, Ontario, in 2021 remind us, if we so care to remember and notice. And when those actions erupt here, colonial liberalism will have us speak the language of exceptionality and multiculturalism to cover the barbarism of the eruption, to suggest that ours is an anomaly.

BDS alerts us. It demands that nations answer to the global community for transgressions, for violences that seek to render some populations outside of collective global concern.

The blunt instruments of BDS and Censure demand and command our attention, wherein the ethical is then activated.