#albert memmi

[dikleyt]

Who is an Arab Jew?

By Albert Memmi, 1975 Albert Memmi, זיכרונו לברכה1920 – 2020 The term “Arab Jews” is obviously not a good one. I have adopted it for convenience. I simply wish to underline that as natives of those countries called Arab and indigenous to those lands well before the arrival of the Arabs, we shared with [...]

[schraubd]

Albert Memmi (1920 - 2020)

Albert Memmi, the great Tunisian-Jewish anti-colonial writer and theorist, has passed away at age 99. Late last year, a friend and I had the early sketches of a plan to host a conference in honor of Memmi's 100th birthday (at the time, the most common response to this idea was for people to exclaim "he's still alive?"). That was put on brakes after the coronavirus hit, but there's no question Memmi remains worthy of study and (now) memorialization. Albert Memmi was born in Tunis in 1920. In his early life he was involved in socialist youth movements, and during the Nazi occupation of Tunisia he was interned in a slave labor camp (from which he escaped). After the war, he became one of the leading intellectual lights of the movement to free Tunisia from French colonization. What Fanon was to Algeira, Memmi was to Tunisia, and for many years Memmi's book The Colonizer and the Colonized was read alongside Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth as cornerstone texts of decolonial theory. That is much less true today, possibly because Memmi's later work was more conservative, possibly because Memmi was emphatic throughout his career that he viewed Zionism as the decolonization movement of the Jews. Unfortunately, following independence Memmi found that Tunisia had little place for Jews, and he exiled himself to France where he spent the remainder of his life. He wrote a trilogy of books -- Portrait of a Jew, Liberation of the Jew, and Jews and Arabs -- which have been widely overlooked but which I think are each superb explorations of the Jewish condition that continue to resonate to this day (many excerpts from these books have been featured on this blog). He continued to write prolifically, culminating in a follow-up to The Colonizer and the Colonized titled Decolonization and the Decolonized in 2006. This book was controversial, as Memmi evinced a marked conservative turn, and there are parts of it that made me wince as a reader. But that does not mean it is not worth reading, as is the broader corpus of Memmi's amazing life's works. While Fanon famously died extremely young, Memmi's career as a writer spanned well over a half-century, witnessing tremendous revolutions in his homeland and in the disciplinary areas he wrote upon. Hence, I've sometimes described Memmi as the version of Fanon who got to watch the decolonization story actually unfold. By itself, that makes him a fascinating character. But Memmi deserved to be read and praised in his own right, not simply as a shadow of Fanon. May his memory be a blessing. via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/3ecr0a7

[mishpacha]

The situation of the Jewish population - eternal hesitant candidates refusing assimilation - can be viewed in a similar light.  Their constant and very justifiable ambition is to escape from their colonized condition, an additional burden in an already oppressive status.  To that end, they endeavor to resemble the colonizer in the frank hope that he may cease to consider them different from him.  Hence their efforts to forget the past, to change collective habits, and their enthusiastic adoption of Western language, culture, and customs.  But if the colonizer does not always openly discourage these candidates to develop that resemblance, he never permits them to obtain it either.  Thus, they live in painful and constant ambiguity.  Rejected by the colonizer, they share in part the physical condition of the colonized and have a communion of interests with him; on the other hand they reject the values of the colonized as belonging to a decaying world from which they eventually hope to escape.

The Colonizer and the Colonized by Albert Memmi; pgs. 59-60

[wellconstructedsentences]

There is a strange kind of enigma associated with the problem of racism. No one, or almost no one, wishes to see themselves as racist; still, racism persists, real and tenacious.

Racism by Albert Memmi

[depredando]

Paulo Freire e a Pedagogia do Oprimido estão mais vivos do que nunca, apesar da Idiocracia, da Cruzada dos Bolsominions e do "Escola Sem Partido"

Paulo Freire e a Pedagogia do Oprimido estão mais vivos do que nunca, apesar da Idiocracia, da Cruzada dos Bolsominions e do “Escola Sem Partido”

Um dos maiores intelectuais latino-americanos do século 20, o criador da Pedagogia do Oprimido e Patrono da Educação Brasileira, Paulo Freire (1941 – 1997) poderia dizer, na esteira de Isaac Newton: “se eu vi mais longe foi por estar sobre os ombros de gigantes“. O que poucos sabem é que o educador pernambucano subiu nos ombros de gigantes do pensamento africano e de-colonial como Franz Fanon, Am…

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[en--dear]

From inside and out, a colony mobilizes fear, insecurity and force. No one is immune. Colonies, designed as safety nets and havens, are never safe. Such settlements called “colonies” are nodes of anxious, uneasy circulations; settlements that are not settled at all. A colony is a ravaged home for some; an unsettled one for others; and both for the very same people at different times. Albert Memmi held that there is no going home from a colony. One is never again the same. But that is not really the case. The colony is rendered unhomely for those on whom it is imposed, those dispossessed by it, and those to whom it is offered as a stolen gift. There is no “being at home,” only unsettled waiting for something else, for release from that anxious labor.

Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in our Times (2016)

[scientificphilosopher]

There is a strange kind of enigma associated with the problem of racism. No one, or almost no one, wishes to see themselves as racist; still, racism persists, real and tenacious.

Albert Memmi, Racism

[urbanwronski]

Invasion Day: The Party's Over

Every January 26, Australia throws itself a birthday party. Tens of thousands of First Nations people turn up with a message: the house was never yours to begin with. Nothing new here. Back in 1938, while white Australia was toasting 150 years of “progress,” Aboriginal leaders gathered in Sydney for the first Day of Mourning. Their accounting of that progress made uncomfortable reading: stolen…

Invasion Day: The Party's Over