On July 6 our Democracy & Belonging Forum hosted its latest installment of The Edges in the Middle series where OBI Global Senior Fellow Bayo Akomolafe spoke with Minna Salami and Professor Madhulika Banerjee about the changing body of democracy, the presumption of universality often entangled with conversations about democracy, the moral and architectural limitations of the concept, the historical practices of commoning that have existed alongside the emergence of democracy as a technology of power, and what we might do together to instigate new forms of being-together that are responsive to the times and the intelligence lost when politics are animated exclusively by people.
Transcript
Sara Grossman:
Hi everyone. Welcome to our conversation today. My name is Sara Grossman, joining you all from my office in Berlin, Germany. I am the Director of the Democracy and Belonging Forum, which is hosting this conversation today. The Forum is a transatlantic community hosted by UC Berkeley's Othering and Belonging Institute, which aims to connect and resource civic actors in Europe and North America, who are committed to bridging across lines of difference to strengthen democracy and counter populist authoritarianism, while centering the needs and concerns of marginalized communities. In this conversation, we'll be exploring democracy and power-sharing in the context of low trust in institutions, rising authoritarian populism, extreme nationalism and worsening global crises, which democracy can seem increasingly unequipped to address. The thinkers who will be grappling with this topic today are each luminaries in their own right.
Minna Salami is a Nigerian, Finnish and Swedish feminist author and social critic. Her research focuses on black feminist theory, contemporary African thought, and the politics of knowledge production. Madhulika Banerjee is a professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Delhi. Her research interests center on the politics of knowledge and its role in shaping the discourse and practice of development, with a particular focus on the global south. And lastly, we have Bayo Akomalafe, who is our global senior fellow at OBI and the host for this conversation. In his role as senior fellow, Bayo is hosting a series of conversations entitled The Edges in the Middle, in which he explores difficult topics related to our collective work towards justice, with leading thinkers and culture makers from Europe, the US, and around the world.Before I hand things off to Bayo, I want to quickly thank our wonderful ASL interpreters, Jolanta Galloway and Laura Crespo Montoya from Interpret, Educate and Serve, as well as thank our captioners from Live Cap. I also want to give a shout-out to our wonderful comms lead, Evan Yoshimoto, who is running the tech backstage. A quick reminder to members of the Democracy and Belonging Forum, that you can reflect on this conversation with Bayo after the live stream has ended, in a private Zoom room. You should have received the link via email directly, and if you didn't, please write me. If you're not a member, I encourage you to sign up for our E-news, which you can find at our website, democracyandbelongingforum.org, and follow us on Twitter and Instagram at DNB Forum to stay up to date on future conversations. And with that, I pass things on to you Bayo.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Good evening. Hello, Jolanta, I see you. Hi, and good evening to everyone on this fugitive channel. We were beaming from the underground and through the cracks, and inviting difficult conversations, the edges in the middle. My name remains Bayo Akomolafe. And I'm here with two very dear sisters of mine, and their preciousness to me and their work is of these times, their thought and their explorations, and their inquiry. There was no way they were not going to be guests and co-participants in this co-creation of possibility. And so I'm really excited and touched that they said yes to being part of this. And I will introduce you to them and bring them up shortly. But just before we do that, as is traditional, I want to say that this conversation is the last in a series of conversations we've been having for some time now since last year. And if there's time, I might say a bit about how we are relaunching this and it might take some new form, but this is a threshold. We've come to a threshold in this experiment with conversation and exploration that we called the Umbari series.And it has never been a conversation or an exploration that is around reaching consensus or arriving at a stabilized notion of truth. It has always been a dance with possibility, a gesturing towards the possible, noticing that our bodies are yearning beyond language, beyond text, beyond theory, beyond concept, to do things with the world that our academic work and our activisms may not have space for. So this is a space for radical and exquisite becomings. And speaking of radical and exquisite becomings, this conversation in particular, around democracy and its exquisite other, wants to do something and hold space for questions that I think are increasingly vital now, and urgent.
Something happened a couple of days ago in France, as most of us or everyone here knows, there is fire on the mountain. And this is not limited to France, this is spreading. But that has to be held in context with larger trends and observations about democracy. Democracy as a system of governance, democracy as a power-sharing format, democracy as the presupposition of the primacy of the citizen. There is a sense in which one might say that democracy is shrinking, if you will, and studies showing the diminishing trust in democratic institutions. Those studies are just symptomatic of what is happening at large.
And so what we're here to do together is to probe, is to co-examinee this thing that is happening and to see what might want to emerge then, not to displace, or to replace, or to go beyond democracy. I'm not ready to do that yet. I don't even know what a beyond democracy looks like at the moment, but at least to touch the demise as it seems, the demise of this paradigm. And to have questions about how people in the global south have experienced democracy. And to wonder, especially to wonder, if there aren't other ways of being powered together with each other and together with the world that is creeping up through the cracks of these times. So with that, I would like to bring Professor Madhulika Banerjee and my dear sister Minna Salami to the table. We promised we would eat chicken together digitally, but in the absence of that, please unmute yourself, my sisters.
How are you? It's a very banal question, but how are you doing?
Madhulika Banerjee:
Well, Minna?Minna Salami:
However I'm doing, I'm doing all the better for being here with you both. It's really wonderful to be joining this Umbari. And as you say, Bayo, the questions that we're going to be exploring are really emergent, really important, really symptomatic, I think, of so many of the questions that people are harboring in their minds and their bodies, and their spirits at the moment. And so I'm very much looking forward to just unpacking and exploring this idea of democracy together with you both very dear minds and dear spirits to me. Thank you.Bayo Akomolafe:
Thank you, Minna.Madhulika Banerjee:
Very happy to be here, Bayo and Minna, kindred spirits I have just discovered in the past few months and what a pleasure. And I really welcome this forum, this opportunity for us to talk and share our ideas with others, who are listening and watching. Because I think we represent very self-consciously voices that are not often heard and need to be heard, because they have wisdom, experience, forbearance and a lot to offer to the world as it is now. And to ideas like democracy and freedom, and progress, there's a lot that these voices can contribute too. So yes, I thank you for creating this opportunity where we can chat together, what you call an Umbari chat. I have tried to understand through my own grammar, as we do, my own grammar of Bangla, in which I shared with you earlier, we call it an [foreign language 00:11:14] where friends sit together and it could be chicken, it could be tea, and you talk about things that you share in the hope for doing things better and together.Bayo Akomolafe:
Yes. Thank you my dear sisters. And this is the first time we are on this platform having three-way conversation. And of course, this has informed the time. So we usually have this within an hour, we're stretching to 90 minutes to hold the juiciness and the robustness of what we want to explore today. And I'm really glad we're doing this together. Let me start things out by offering proposition. I was just on a call just prior to this, and I shared with them that I woke up yesterday and was alerted to a paper, the scientific report by Jeff Morgan from the National Museum in California, with an intriguing premise.And so this dude has studied, over 50,000 years, the correlation between the rise and fall of temperature, and the shrinkage of brains. So what this research team is finding is that in warmer temperatures, when the earth gets warmer, our brains shrink. And I just want to leave that there for a moment. That when climate warming and global warming happens, the brain capacity reduces, if you will. There's so much there. That's so layered on many levels. There's so much we can do with that. But it ignited a different question for me. And we'll enter into the definitional aspects of democracy, but let's get into a conversation and see what ignites from here. And maybe I'll start with you Madhulika. Could it be that our practices of democracy, how we see democracy, how we think about democracy, could it be that democracy is just as much an organic responsivity to these times, and is shriveling up as the earth gets hotter, so to speak? Could it be that in some senses, we are this decline in trust in democratic institutions, this rise in the big man in the populist movements, fascist undertakings? Could it be that we're seeing these events and it's correlated with rising global temperatures? Could it be that democracy is at risk and it's facing extinction? What does that ignite for you, listening to that?
Madhulika Banerjee:
I think that for so long, we have been talking about democracy. And if we even go back to the most banal, but very significant definition of the people, for the people, by the people kind of thing, I think we need to understand that we have forgotten the part of by the people and of the people. We have focused on democracy for the people, which is okay, which is good, because all people need democracy, and all democratic institutions should try to provide it and protect it as much as possible for the people. But I think that democracy is something that people can construct for themselves, and that they can continue to construct and continue to contribute towards a democratic undertaking, is underestimated. Let me explain and let me see how that links to the issue of warming.I think that why many new concepts of democracy have no doubt come in the last 300 years or so, and actively in the last 250 to 100 years or so, one of the most deeply democratic things we had built across cultures is a democratic relationship with nature. We always felt that we were a part of nature. Nature was a part of us. There is a way in which the human being is at even key with nature. And so even though human beings have utilized nature, have been dependent on nature, have worshiped nature for that reason, but have always known that they have power over nature. But because human cultures, in so many parts of the globe, were extremely respectful of the same nature, which they could have power over, and that respect meant that they kept themselves at least at even key with nature, never trying to plunder, use but not abuse.
So this of course enabled them to produce so much, to create such beauty, to create so much abundance, to create wealth, but nature was never destroyed in that process. I think that in building all the other dimensions of modernity, of development, and so on, we have somewhere lost this particular aspect of a democratic relationship with nature. Reams and reams have been written on this, so one doesn't need to go into that detail. But to link with your question about what is happening today about democracy being in danger and how that links with what I'm seeing, is that the kind of democracy that we think ought to be built today always rides on the back of a modernist notion of prosperity.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Okay, there you go.Madhulika Banerjee:
So the big man becomes big, because he promises that prosperity on the basis of which you can anticipate a democracy. And that is accompanied by the claim that nobody could do this for you, I'm going to do this for you and we are going to discover a greatness. And whenever somebody is trying to deliver democracy to you for the people, no, today it takes a form of populism and the big man, it's a problem. But look at the history of democracy, especially in the global south, all the people who have tried to deliver it to us, for us, there is somewhere an assumption that the people are not clever enough or smart enough to be participant. We talk about participatory democracy, but the way in which we have thought of prosperity in the modern time, we don't think that what people know, how they have cultivated crops, how they have woven cloth, how they have produced beautiful materials, how they have built beautiful buildings, how they have had trade and commerce, they have built big ships, they've crossed the oceans, they know the stars, they know the currents. These knowledges are not seen as germane to the project of prosperity in modernity. So if those very people, who are supposed to be constituent of the democracy, are not respected as human beings with a mind, you have been shrinking their minds for a long time.The entire process of prosperity building has been contributing to global warming, that we know, independently anyway. So global warming is happening on the one end. Why actually you have been shrinking the self-worth of people who you expect to be participant in a democracy? And that can only result in this kind of a skewed notion of populism and the contortion of the idea of democracy. We have been contorting it for a long time now, this is really a sort of end result in that sense. That's how it seems to me.
Bayo Akomolafe:
I want to take this idea of contortion there, because how you describe it is that the way democracy has unfolded, and there isn't a monolithic perception or practice of democracy, but the way it seems to have unfolded, especially received by the global south, is that it's front loaded with epistemologies, ways of knowing, that are decidedly European, that are decidedly industrial. I mean, I wonder if you could just jump in on this and what you feel about that, because there is a prevailing presumption that democracy is contentless, that it's neutral and it's universal. So it basically applies everywhere and anywhere. But is that how you understand it? Is that how you understand this political arrangement? It's notion of power, it's understanding of the citizen as the unit of analysis. Is this what is at stake when you think about democracy?Minna Salami:
Thank you Bayo, and thank you for kicking us off with the image by Jeff Morgan. And I want to just return to that briefly in order to respond to the question that you're asking now, because what came up for me, similarly to Madhulika, as you shared that, was a kind of an... And I know it was metaphorical, so let me also stick with image and metaphor. Because what came up for me is a house and an image of let's say all of us, all of humanity, all of all living species, if we were one organism and we're in this house, and it's a rectangular shaped house with a window on both ends, so two windows, and if you look at the window on the right, let's say, you would see a raging fire, war destruction, the erosion of our forests, our rivers, our mountains and so on. So everything catastrophic, all the poly crisis, all of that, one window. And if you walked over to the other end, as this collective organism, and looked out of that window, imagine you see this immense beauty, our planet thriving, humanity elevated and elated, knowledge of the mind, body and the soul being championed, democracy, in its best form, being practiced.And as Madhulika was speaking, the image started to shape-shift for me, following from what you had said, Bayo. And I thought about how at the moment we have, I believe it is about 30% of the world is under authoritarian rule, which is a massive increase if you compare it to a decade ago. And it seems as though you could sort of say that this organism is shifting towards the window that faces the fire, that faces destruction, that faces the declining of democracy. But a huge part of that, and this is in response to your question to me, because there are various reasons, yes, climate change and it's a sort of shrinking of the organism, shrinking of the brain, shrinking of the world, shrinking of the house that we're all in-
Bayo Akomolafe:
And agency. Even agency, shrinking of agency.Minna Salami:
Shrinking of the agency, precisely. But one very massive part of this shrinking is Eurocentrism and the way that it has been decades, centuries, soon probably millennia, of our trying to end the imperialist forces of Eurocentrism and the way that Eurocentrism shape-shifts, and convolutes, and contorts, and distorts notions such as democracy. Because I do very much think that with democracy, the Eurocentric impulse is very easily transmitted into this form of governance with its impulse to sort of assert itself as an empire. And so the way that we could associate democracy today is we can associate it with neoliberal capitalism for example. And that of course is connected to and stems from the enlightenment and a lot of the thinking of the enlightenment that conceived of the human in a particular way, and freedom of speech in a particular way, and knowledge in a particular way, and all of these things that have been immensely problematical and destructive for the collective organism.That said, I find that it is important for me anyway, as I think about democracy, to make the distinction between, let's call it eurocracy, maybe we can call it.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Let's go with that.Minna Salami:
Let's go with that. So there's eurocracy and then there's the democracy for the people, of the people, which as an African, as a Nigerian specifically, when I've gone to vote in Nigeria for instance, it's almost as though people vote with their entire bodies. There's this exuberance about being able to participate in shaping the politics of your society. And that for me says that there's something almost instinctive about democracy to the pursuit of... Because again, then with going back to the enlightenment and all of that, but yeah, there's something very embodied, joyous, and of course it is then often completely met with corruption, with violence and so on. But just that impulse toward democracy that I've witnessed in Nigeria, and that I seem to see in all of the so-called global south when the opportunity arises, is something that I find juxtaposes eurocracy so massively and it really troubles me. I guess it also corresponds well with this house of the very different worlds that we are faced with.Bayo Akomolafe:
I like that helpful distinction between eurocracy, which you should obviously write a book about, Minna.Minna Salami:
Can I just quickly say this. I've been really struggling with the term global south, as Madhulika knows, I spoke about this-Bayo Akomolafe:
I know.Minna Salami:
I'm trying to find a better way. And so maybe thanks to you and this conversation, maybe eurocracy is the-Bayo Akomolafe:
Maybe eurocracy, but it's increasingly problematic, but it's a galvanizing point for the moment, to plant a flag and see what we do with space there, and how we move there. But there's something you say in distinguishing between eurocracy and democracy. eurocracy as an enlightenment product and then something that feels more instinctual, something that feels animated. Though one has to also contrast this and hold this in light of the diminishing returns of democracy in Nigeria, going by our recent elections, less and less people are dancing to the polls. It seems there is even a fear to participate. And the very notion of the citizen is called into question in our political arrangement. In fact, I might just venture to say that we don't have a government per se, we have a bully system that runs parallel to citizen aspirations. Every time something wants to reach out for something new, this bully system reinforces the parallelism and says, stay in your track. We will drive the best cars, we'll fly in private jets, and you will stay in this space of servitude and exclusion, and oppression. So there is a sense in which I might hold this space of tension and notice that along with [inaudible 00:31:26] that democracy hasn't worked for us. And I wonder how that sits in your body, Madhulika, with regards to India as well.Madhulika Banerjee:
In India, an anthropologist, who also happens to be my sister, who studies elections in India in democracy, and she has a book called Cultivating Democracy. She's been studying rural India and its involvement in the democratic process for 20 years.Bayo Akomolafe:
Let's go there.Madhulika Banerjee:
And one of the things that she argues is that, like Minna said, in India, election time is like a festival. Anyway, in our cultures, every festival is very joyous, very colorful, noisy, and participatory. We've turned elections into one of our many festivals. And so when people come to vote, there is that joy of participation. I think it cuts both ways in India. The national election survey that has been doing extensive surveys in India since 1995, has shown a very high rate of participation in the elections. So in simply the procedural terms of democracy, where elections are one of the important institutions and procedures, there is a participation. And the highest participation comes from so-called illiterate people, the lowest of the society. They are the ones who vote the most. And to link with what I was saying earlier, these are the people who have been enfranchised by their ability to participate in the elections. You see them as human beings who are, for me, carriers of very deep knowledges. They have been disenfranchised by the process of development.And the entire history of 75 years of post-colonial India has been this struggle between one kind of enfranchisement on the one hand and another kind of disenfranchisement on the other. And I think that the fact that people continue to participate in what makes them enfranchised, even as they are continually marginalized, invisibilized by the system, is a remarkable testament to their spirit and to their desire to be part of a modern democratic process. And I think that there's so much else in the democratic process that they have participated in. So their invisibilization in terms of their knowledges and their kind of persona, economic persona, what are they going to do? How are they going to contribute to the economy and to the society? There's been so much mobilization against injustice of all kinds, injustice against caste divisions, injustice against gender inequality, injustice against regional imbalances. And people have mobilized, fought, petitioned, every single kind of political mobilization that is possible, people have done. And there's never a dull moment in terms of political life in India. And there's a continuous desire to grasp with both hands, every single possibility that the democratic sphere holds out to them. And I think that that's possibly why democracy in India continues to be by the people, of the people.
And this is irrespective of whichever regime may think that they are the ones who are going to provide for the people. There will be more malevolent or benevolent regimes, but regimes always think that they have to provide for. We haven't yet reached that point in democracy where the regime says yes, the people will constitute, I will just be a handmade, the institutions will just be a process by which the contributions of ordinary people will be consolidated into the democratic process. That process yet to come, but the pressure from below, the pressure from different kinds of people, different kinds of movements, that has been continuous, and that has been energetic, and it has been one with great belief, carried with great dignity. I think that's the real testimony. And no surveys or barometers of democracy across the world have yet been able to really identify this aspect of how across the global south people retain their belief in this process, despite everything to the contrary, everything at the wrong end of the stick of different kinds of sticks that they have to deal with over the last century. They continue, they rise. Still I rise. Yeah.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Still I rise. But Didi and Minna, maybe a lingering haunting question here is, is civic participation commensurate to a materiality of democracy? I think it's quite evident in the regions, the worlds that we come from, that there is a resilience. There's a story of this Nigerian woman who came out to vote. I mean, I don't know if you saw this, the February elections in Nigeria, February 25th, and she came out to vote, and she was beaten by people who work for the ruling party and almost lost her eye. She went home, dressed herself up and came out again to vote. She insisted and she was carried on. She became a media project and almost a meme with that bandage on her eye saying, I will vote.And this happens again and again. This resilience is exploited and almost used as a resource base to fund and nurture bully systems, again, regimes that do not care for people. And I'm wondering about this one-sided notion of democracy that celebrates resilience, but doesn't actually translate into, I dare use the word power or the phrase power equity. It doesn't translate to agency, the spaciousness and the wonder. So I'm critical. I'm wondering about this materiality of democracy as a spatial temporal arrangement. It cannot simply be civic participation, can it? We have to take into considerations democratic institutions. We have to take into considerations the post humanist infiltrations around us. I'm wondering, where does democracy lie if we notice that it cannot simply be one aspect of a spectrum of things?
Minna Salami:
Yeah. I think that's why what really came to me was this image of people, as Madhulika also so beautifully explored, the image of people in our parts of the world in movement, in festival. And festival, not the tradition of festival, and masquerades, and ritual, is not always one that is peaceful or joyous. It can also really be eruptive and bring out all of those shadow sides of society that we're trying to hide, and that are indeed very oppressive and violent. And it sort of all really comes to the fore. And I guess, you said Bayo that maybe democracy isn't for us. And I think that that's a statement that we really need to take seriously in our societies, in our social criticisms, in our dialogues, in our embodied explorations. Because there is something to that that is true.But then on the other hand, I still want to go back in thinking about the materiality of democracy and expanding not beyond democracy, but beyond the materiality of it, because maybe there is where we can find a way to not get stuck in the idea that democracy is not for us. And in a second, I want to say why that idea always troubles me a little bit as a feminist. But this project of the enlightenment of eurocracy has of course always been very much about the materiality of democracy and very specifically even about the measuring of the materiality. So it's very much about the votes, the statistics, of demographics and of course all kinds of other indices, such as GDP or let's measure happiness as a way to assess which countries are democratically happy.
I read a couple of days ago, a completely absurd survey. I mean it's just like Euro patriarchy and it's measurement obsession on steroids, which was a survey conducted I think in Norway, one of the Scandinavian countries, about which countries have the most cyclists in the world, and of course, and where it is the safest for cyclists. And of course the Scandinavian countries, who were creating this survey, ranked the highest and other western European countries, and Nigeria was I think third or fourth lowest. And I just-
Bayo Akomolafe:
Really?Minna Salami:
We could have told you this without you investing lots of funds into this kind of research, which ignores the global order. But it's basically this sort of fixation and fetishization of indices that are somehow telling us about progress and about democracy. That is not what democracy is. And maybe what we are called to do at this point in time in between worlds, is to really start to think about different ways of understanding democracy. And I think this thing about movement, even when it is so painful, as in this terrible story of the woman who was beaten in Nigeria, it's telling us another story. It's not about the measurement, it's about the raw human emotions and all the foul play that can come along with that. And I just also want to say that this sort of bullying democracy, which is what we have in Nigeria, is I think an outgrowth of eurocracy. It's just a continuation of that.But yeah, the point I wanted to make earlier, which is another outgrowth of eurocracy, would be Euro patriarchy and patriarchy as we find it in our parts of the world. And I struggle and have always struggled as an African feminist with how opposition to call it eurocracy so easily becomes used and manipulated as support of patriarchal and androcentric systems in our countries. And this is why I feel very hesitant or mindful to say things like democracy, maybe is not for us, because that's the exact kind of words that I also, when people say feminism is not for us, something western [inaudible 00:46:19] And I know that's of course not how you meant it, but it's so easy to manipulate that type of thinking. And so maybe it's a question, how do we hold these tensions?
Bayo Akomolafe:
It feels like a question, sister. And these are the themes, the motif emerging here is, as Madhulika says, democracy has for long been coupled with development and progress, which comes with the furniture of enlightenment and its machinations, and its ideas of time, as this forward leaning linearity, which is already a violent exclusion of other temporalities. But no, it's this concrete gutter that is time, and time flows from the past to the present to the future. And you mentioned that democracy is usually seen and altered within the same breath as neoliberal capitalism, which is an enshrining of the human and the citizen. And of course, it is a flattening of the agency of the world around. But then the question lies here. If we uncouple democracy from eurocracy, what does it look like? Is it something to imagine? Can we imagine that? What are glimpses of this?And I hesitate to reintroduce the Abraham Lincolnian notion of government for the people, by the people and of the people. There's still a centralization of people in there, but there are other systems that notice that humans are not at the forefront of power. We're not the center of power. Anthropocentrism is already an enlightenment project in itself too. What would democracy look like as a multi-species arrangement, which seems to be the case here with global warming and climate change. It seems to be the case that we're at a place where we have to confront the myth of our centrality, and that also means confronting democracy as a project of enlightenment. So again, the question, if we uncouple democracy from eurocracy, Minna's definition of eurocracy that we're adopting here to play, what's left?
Minna Salami:
Yeah, that's the million-dollar question. I hate to use this very kind of neoliberal language actually. But no, I think it is something to do with expressing democracy through the body in a somatic way, and not just the human body, but this kind of image of the collective organism that is all living animated things. And I of course don't have a concrete answer to the question, but I think it is something about... I'm wondering if we were to describe democracy without words, so if I were to try and dance democracy, or draw democracy, or eat democracy, it's moving into that kind of domain for me, if we extract eurocracy from democracy.Bayo Akomolafe:
The government of gut microbes, for gut microbes and by gut microbes. Madhulika, do you want to dance with this?Madhulika Banerjee:
Well, actually the thing is, I think the, unlike Minna, who's I think at heart, a writer and a thinker of a very different kind, I'm sort of more circumscribed by my social science orientation. And I too am struggling. This is a very important question, and I'm struggling to address this in my own way. And I think part of the reason why we are struggling with this question is because we are going with eurocracy as Minna phrased it, terms it.Bayo Akomolafe:
It's a thing now.Madhulika Banerjee:
Sorry?Bayo Akomolafe:
I said it's a thing now. It's a thing. There's a textbook being printed right now on eurocracy.Madhulika Banerjee:
I think that it's because it has acquired the privilege to define democracy, because enlightenment thought is what has defined democracy that we feel that it did not exist before in any other way, and that in the future or outside of eurocracy, we would have to invent something so new, so different, which is why we are struggling with this question. But if you were to just step out a little bit for a minute and to think that, to go back to what I began speaking with, that if you are going to conceive of democracy, which is not androcentric. I like it better than anthropocentric, I must say. So if it is not going to be androcentric, if it is going to privilege the democracy between all living beings, then we are actually looking towards streams of thought, streams of consciousness, that have actually been with us for a long time.But we cannot deny that even while... It's very interesting. See, modern democracy comes with a democracy, which is anthropocentric or androcentric, but undemocratic vis-a-vis other living beings. But we have inherited traditions in which there have been a democracy between different living beings, but a lack of democracy within human cultures. Therefore, the patriarchy that we have in inherited, the deep caste divisions that we've inherited in India, and the race divisions we created through colonialism and so on. These are all divisions, which of course, racism in that sense comes later, it's really a product of modernity. But maybe not, who knows? I mean, I know that Indians are deeply racist people. I don't think that it came just from colonialism. I don't know how we interacted with... Because we traded worldwide. What our relationship was as human beings, in terms of how... I don't know, maybe we were democratic in orientation, I don't know. And I would like to pose the question to ourselves first before I question others.
But with that, as it may, we have inherited deeply undemocratic structures in society. So it's very interesting, isn't it? There is a frame of knowledge and epistemological frame in which there is a parity, a democratic relationship between all living things in the universe. As a practicing Hindu, for instance, for me, the essential meaning of being a Hindu is that I see myself, I look within, what do I see? I'm something that is made of the five elements in the universe, earth, water, space, fire and air. And around me, the universe is made up of these five elements as well. So in that sense, my everyday prayer, which is that I understand that I am the five elements and that may I have the strength to recognize myself as part of this universe and that this universe recites in me. And derivative of that, is that every human being and every living thing is a manifestation of the five elements. So my practice teaches me that I need to be deeply democratic with all other living things in this universe. And yet my practice allegedly has also led to deeply divisive societies on the basis of patriarchy, on the basis of caste, at least these two things I know.
So I think we have a much larger and more interesting project on hand about understanding the nature of democracies that we can create in the future, than simply seeing this received wisdom of the enlightenment and how we in the global south are going to become better suited for this project that we received through colonialism. I think it's much more complex and interesting than that. The sooner we recognize it, we are then going to ask better questions. And if we ask better questions, then we will have better answers. If we are not going to see the possibilities of democracy that existed in many human civilizations and communities of a different kind, and then recognize that the enlightenment did raise a very important question of the equality between human beings. There's no question. As a person who comes from a deeply patriarchal and deeply caste divided society, I cannot but recognize, flag, the fact that this enlightenment idea that people are equal was important. No question about it. I would not be here today, were it not for the fact that my grandmother's generation and then my mother's generation, and my father and his father fought both caste and patriarchy in very substantive ways. So I think it's also important to recognize. And in a sense, those of us who are in the global south and who have a little bit of distance, we own, and yet we are not completely possessed by these ideas.
So we don't feel the need to vehemently defend one thing or the other. Human civilization is not created by these kind of petty battles. You have to take a step back, look at our past, understand our present, only then can we make a future. And if we are going to create silos in our past and silos in our present, then the possibilities are limited. And I'm saying that, I mean, for a long time people used to say, Madhulika works on traditional knowledge, I work on knowledges. They happen to be carried by people through many generations, which have immense value and many problems. I need to be able to access the value and I need to be able to critique the problems. And that is true of my tradition, as well as the tradition of eurocracy. No question. Then we are talking, then we are engaging.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Then we're in conversation. Okay.Madhulika Banerjee:
Then we are in conversation.Bayo Akomolafe:
Thank you, Didi. Let's do this in this way. I would like each of us to pose a question to another. I don't know, in Nigeria, did you play that... Was it called [inaudible 01:00:42] or something? Do you know [inaudible 01:00:43]Minna Salami:
No, I don't know [inaudible 01:00:43] what's that?Bayo Akomolafe:
The horrible playground thing. There was a slide which always burned your behind, because it was rusted in the sun. And then there was the other one, that you sat in a chair and then you had to pull a wheel, and then everyone... But they were always rusty, and so they had this nickname for it. We're going to do something of that kind here. And I'll like each of us, I know there are questions. I know your works. I know each of your works. I know Madhulika's work, I know Minna's work. And I'll like you to articulate from the heart of your project, the things that keep you up at night, diffractively with this theme of democracy and its exquisite others. Pose a question for someone else here. And let's see if we can rotate our questions in this way, and then we'll come back and see what happens. I've asked questions so far, who would like to go?Minna Salami:
I have a question for Madhulika. First I have a comment. The prayer that you say you recite every day, I think it's something that should be disseminated. If we all could recall that we are these elements, and I love that in Hinduism that you have five and that space is also an element, then I think we would just operate and relate to one another and to our planet in very different ways. And yet that said, and this is my question or my provocation to you maybe. I don't know that nature is democratic. I think if you look at much of the animal world and even the plant world, and nature generally, it can be very harsh, as we know. Earlier in Hamburg today, it was very windy and I got hit by a huge branch that had somehow loosened from a tree. It punched me straight in the eye. So a bit of a wow.It made me reflect on how this very tiny, mundane incident made me reflect on how harsh nature can be and how nature really doesn't give a shit about the way we go about conducting our days, running our errands, preparing our talk, whatever the case might be, let alone the ways in which animals fight wars in order to survive. So I guess how do we pull insight from these non-modern knowledges that you are working on, without glorifying or romanticizing the natural world? Because I think ultimately that if we do that, we also won't arrive at a true display and dance of a democratic principle that is perhaps instinctual to humans and to living beings.
Madhulika Banerjee:
But thank you, Minna, that was... Yeah. We've talked about that prayer before too, haven't we? Yeah. And I do think that it does drown one on an everyday basis. And that's why when we greet, we greet with folded hands, everyone, in the same way as you greet the maker, the universe, because you recognize that the universe resides in everyone. That's why you greet everyone with folded hands. Talking about the democracy with the nature, I should have clarified, what I was saying actually was about our relationship with nature, which was not extractive even while it was utilitarian. So in that sense, I meant that we had a more democratic relationship with nature. I certainly don't know enough to be able to claim that it is democratic. And I certainly know it in the way that you do actually and I see that there are so many processes which are very harsh within nature, which don't seem democratic at all.But the one thing that I do know, I do understand, and I'm sure this is something you shared as well, is that in nature, violence between species, within species, is recognized and allowed within the limits of basic need, in terms of when there is hunger or when you need to protect your young. There are very clear rules for when any kind of violence is allowed. But from what little I have learned, and the animal world really fascinates me as does the plant world, what little I have read and understood, simply to be able to dominate and create a sense of power that is autonomous of any kind of need, is not something that seems to be warranted within the animal world. Whether that qualifies to be understood as democratic in the way that we understand it, I don't know.
But I do think that our relation, human beings who used resources from nature but never felt... Always, simple example, when you collect medicinal plants to make herbal medicine, after all, most communities still today use herbal medicines, there are very strict rules by how you can access. Otherwise when you access a plant, if you were to just uproot it, who's going to be responsible for the regeneration of that plant, so that others can use it? Forget the future generations, even your own contemporaries should be able to use it. So there are very strict rules. And when you know that plant, their leaves or their flowers, or sometimes the roots of plants have medicinal value, there are rules by which part of the root you use, which part you leave in the earth.
So I'm talking about that as principles of democracy, where you are using, but you do not abuse. And I think that this is something that is systematically destroyed by industrial capitalism, because its temporality is different, its outcomes are different, its spatial considerations are different, and therefore that guides how you use it. So I have currently a doctoral student, [inaudible 01:08:58] who's working on what has happened to collection practices and how that affects. And the sad part is, because industrial capitalism is so hierarchical, the very people who collect are the people who are least rewarded. That of course is a different set of issues. But deeply undemocratic practices come from our undemocratic practices vis-a-vis nature as well. They're all completely intertwined. I believe that it's when we engage with the undemocratic nature of our lives at these fundamental levels, that is when we are beginning to ask the substantive questions of democracy. Until now, I think we are still stuck with the procedure reform. Can I ask my question? Should I ask my question to you?
Bayo Akomolafe:
Yes, of course.Madhulika Banerjee:
I have my question to you, which is, why would you want to couple democracy with belonging?Bayo Akomolafe:
Why would I want to do that? Do you know that I want to do that?Madhulika Banerjee:
Okay, tell me why you wouldn't?Bayo Akomolafe:
Let me dance with that. Democracy and belonging, there's something deeply aspirational in that framework. The longing for a world where everyone has agency and everyone has a say, and everyone has a seat. I'm exhausted with the idea of the seat at the table notion, but there you go. I'll just use it. But the idea of belonging, of course, in the ways that Elder John Powell and many of the scholars that have nourished this ground together, that idea of belonging just goes beyond, can we all get along? No. It notices disparities on evenness, and it notices how things move in and come out. It notices how paradigms die and paradigms swell in its place, in their place. But it still longs for a world that is free from the horrors of hierarchical arrangements, where bodies are racialized according to various attributes that they seemingly possess according to one sensorial affinity to that aspect, whether it's pigmentation or something else.So belonging wants to do that. And coupling with democracy is of course noticing that there is a sense in which democracy brings together our best political skills. It brings together the best of us. If we can furnish the world with a system that allows belonging to thrive, that would be democracy. That would be the definition of democracy to aspire to. My questions here and the work that I'm trying to articulate here, what I'm trying to notice and observe, and put to writing, and text, and questions, and conversation, is noticing that the vote is dying. And by the vote, I mean the materiality that made democracy as a people project possible, as an anthropocentric project, that materiality is fading away, if you will. Democracy has always been tied to the citizen, to the sovereignty of the citizen. And the way the citizen practices the sovereignty is by voting.
So there's something about the electoral process that seems to be interwoven with the heart of democracy. One man, one vote, as is often said. But I think that every monolith, every political arrangement, is indebted to unequal circumstances, is indebted to flows, is indebted to riverine phenomena, is indebted to the world in its posthumanism. And in some sense, what I started out with, by noticing the shrinking of brains and how the Anthropocene is not just a geological epoch, not just a climatic condition, it is thought. The Anthropocene is thought.
In some sense, the space of the citizen is shrinking rapidly. And the unevenness, like a tree branch that fell on Minna's face. Sorry about that. I apologize on behalf of all nature.
Minna Salami:
It didn't fall, it literally punched me in the eye.Bayo Akomolafe:
The tree branch that sucker punched my sister is part of this arrangement. It's part of democracy. It is part of how we have made a clearing in the wilds and tried to forge a political project in that clearing. But the wilds are now encroaching on that clearing and the space of the citizen, which has always been a humanist project, is giving away to something else. And we're not exactly sure what is being born here. We no longer have a confident response to the question, what is power and who has power, any longer. Because power doesn't seem to be even in the colonizer's hand, it doesn't seem to be in IMFs hand or the World Bank's hand.We now have to bring into the demos of democracy, microbes, and bacteria, and fungi, and the coronavirus. So it seems for me, belonging needs to be stretched out to take in alien others, that we would never have admitted if we had our head set on straight. Belonging has to be blasted open to accommodate others, exquisite others. So freedom will look radically different from how we perceive it right now. Perhaps freedom might actually be the postponement of the exquisite.
Democracy seems to be doing that right at this moment. That we are yearning for some kind of fellowship. We're yearning for a different kind of embodiment that is not available in our political practices. The left and the right are doing the same thing, we're stuck. And now in the spaces of democratic impasses, we're seeing the rise of fascist regimes. So I think right now, in those liminal spaces, something else wants to be born. I can only think of it as kolam. Madhulika, you know what I'm talking about? You would best describe it. What's kolam?
Madhulika Banerjee:
A kolam is beautiful set of designs that actually bring the geometric precision of the universe to align with the beauty of undefined lines.Bayo Akomolafe:
Yes.Madhulika Banerjee:
To the doorstep of every house in Tamil Nadu, but in other parts of South India as well. And the beauty is that the way it is drawn, it begins with dots, and then the dots are connected in different designs. And this is done with rice flour.Bayo Akomolafe:
Yes.Madhulika Banerjee:
And it's done every day. And the beauty is that it has its place. That beautiful creation, if you and I made it, Minna, we would want it preserved forever, framed, put up. This is every day. So it has a life of one day. Every day you begin afresh.Bayo Akomolafe:
Yes.Madhulika Banerjee:
So every day you reiterate the precision and the beauty of the universe.Minna Salami:
Is kolam K? K-O-L-A-M?Madhulika Banerjee:
That's correct, yeah.Bayo Akomolafe:
Go ahead, Madhulika.Madhulika Banerjee:
It's done on the doorstep of every... I mean just outside the house. And it is drawn by hand, usually by the woman of the house.Bayo Akomolafe:
Definitely.Madhulika Banerjee:
And it's drawn. And every morning it is wiped and you begin afresh. Because they do it from childhood onwards and people grow up watching the older women in the family do it, so it's done [inaudible 01:19:16] and it's done in a few minutes. It's that homage to the universe that is placed outside your home, so that you remember it as you go out and see it as you go in. And every day it is done anew. That's the kolam.Bayo Akomolafe:
That's the kolam. You know what's so fascinating about this art, which is a multi-species art arrangement, is I learned that the rice flour feeds the ants as well.Madhulika Banerjee:
Absolutely.Bayo Akomolafe:
It feeds the ants as well. So it's ant agency. It's a feminist arrangement. It's a multi-species arrangement. And it seems, to me, to be this collective yearning for an arrangement that is yet to come. It is temporal and fleeting. It is not stable or permanent, like some monolith that insists that this is the political arrangement for all time. This is universal and settlement. It flows. The wind participates in this art project. So I don't know what is to come, I do feel, in a creaturely fragile way, that settlement is heaving and breathing, and burdened, with this migrancy, that settlement is becoming migrant. That we are becoming fugitive. That the city can no longer endorse our continuity. And so the space of the citizen, the project of the city is shrinking. And all I can put in the space of what is yet to come is a kolam, is this thing that we don't know the name of yet. So that is belonging. Belonging looks like kolam to me. It looks like ants participating, and wind and tree branches sucker punching my dear sister's face.Minna Salami:
I'm really struck by this practice. It sounds incredible and I'm so much looking forward to learning more about it. But it immediately makes me think of sort of dendritic fractile patterns that exist in so much of nature, including in human nature, in our lungs and every part of our bodies really, our veins, everything. And how that too isn't anything static in a way that bringing us back to democracy. Maybe that democracy also shouldn't be seen as something static. And that's the terrible thing about eurocracy, because it tries to force it into this rigid box, rigid participatory function that excludes initially women and then people who are non-European. And yes, I concur completely with you Bayo, that we are invited to bring in other species into our way of doing democracy. But we haven't even yet invited children, for example, to participate in democracy as they should, let alone other animals and [inaudible 01:22:53] Last week, Madhulika was also present when one of our co-fellows, Frederick, shared a project whereby they were trying to understand the language of sperm whales through technology and eventually maybe getting them to be able to respond to questions about democracy. So it's definitely something that we should continue to keep as a feasible thought, but the question is how? And maybe the kolam and the fractal patterns that exist in those. The world can help us with that project.Madhulika Banerjee:
I think the important thing, Minna, is to believe in fluidity.Minna Salami:
Yes.Madhulika Banerjee:
Because we are so afraid of impermanence. The reason that eurocracy tries to pin us down, as you were just saying, and to box us into, is because we believe, and very foolishly, that structures bring certainty, and certainty will lead to some kind of permanence. It doesn't work like that. And every philosophy that we have inherited, asks us to begin with the assumption, with the understanding, that everything is impermanent. And we sort of dismiss that as, oh, that's some kind of spiritual belief. It's not, it's the biggest truth in the world, that nothing is permanent. We don't need to become fatalistic as a result of that, but certainly, the most important lesson from our impermanence that we can derive is our acceptance of fluidity. Things will change. They will flow. They go from one to the next. And it's when you flow that you can actually accommodate others. If you are very bound and restricted, then you will know who can be included and who cannot.So when you say, Minna, I completely agree. I cannot say that I have tried in any way to really practice, but yes, to think of spaces where we include different kinds of voices, inputs, children, others. And the fact that we think that when we say childlike curiosity or behaving without guide, if somebody is guideless, then that's childlike, which means that it's something that needs to be overcome, but that it can flow into an aspect of adulthood, which can be an asset, and therefore contribute to a different understanding of correlation between human beings. We are so afraid.
Minna Salami:
Yeah. It sounds to me like what we're desperately missing is that, as Bayo pointed out earlier, democracy is not just about the vote, it's not just about the civic participation, it's also about creating kolams, and children playing, and adults behaving in childlike ways, and meditation, and maybe even prayer. Like all of these human practices that are fluid, but that are also about, I think in some sense, deep in our historical nature, our character, is something about preservation as well. And perhaps we get it wrong and so far that we think that this need for preservation, this need to remember, to have memory, to have continuity, is something that we can actually institutionalize and turn into numbers, when actually that is the ephemeral, beautiful part of being human. And yeah, we really desperately need to make space for that in the democratic project, for the aesthetic, the art, the mysterious and the mystical, and the metaphysical. All of these elements that are just as true of our lived realities, as is the act of waking up one morning and putting your finger stamp, or writing something on a card and putting it in a ballot box. It's equally real that you relate with others, you relate with your environment, and we need that in the spaces where we're discussing democracy and how to further democracy.Bayo Akomolafe:
I think that's a beautiful sentiment. Where we three come from, time is also impermanent and fluid. But we also work with systems where time is precise and so that precision haunts us now, and it seems like a good place to punctuate our conversation around this. And I'm so grateful for this exploration that went in rhizomatic directions. It was never linear. It was never meant to arrive. It was meant to depart and in departing, it departs. I'm grateful. Madhulika, thank you so much.Madhulika Banerjee:
Thanks.Bayo Akomolafe:
Minna, thank you so very much. We will meet outside of this. And thank you everyone for listening and being part of this conspiracy, this breathing together. Yes, it continues in fugitive ways. So join us as we continue to unravel and stay with these cracks, and depths, and these troubling ideas. And hopefully our lives will be met and we will be encountered, and we will be supported to hold space for new worlds as they emerge. Thank you everyone.Madhulika Banerjee:
Thank you.Minna Salami:
Thank you.
