Professor Priyamvada Gopal: “There is such a thing as truth, and we are accountable to truth.”
“Once you understand that certain forms of intellectual production are ineluctably part of an unequal structure, rather than be dishonest about it, you choose to use it in ways that are more, rather than less, radical”
Dr. Priyamvada Gopal is a Professor in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Churchill College. Professor Gopal’s work centers around colonial and postcolonial studies, gender and feminism, Marxism, and critical race studies. Her most recent book, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (Verso, 2019), looks at how rebellious colonies changed British attitudes towards empire.
In the first of our series of interviews with academics, Professor Gopal talks to Editor-in-Chief Rosa Rahimi about the origins of her career and political orientation, the responsibilities of the public intellectual, and what it means to be ‘decolonising’ in our current political moment.
I thought we could start by talking about the origins of your academic career. Before starting your PhD at Cornell, you were a student at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi. What drew you away from India and towards the US to pursue doctoral studies focusing on colonialism and post-colonialism? Was there something about shifting contexts that felt necessary to inform your work?
Actually, I had not wanted to leave. I was very happy at JNU and I wanted to stay there and finish my work. But both my teachers and my family made it clear that in terms of doing research, having the facilities, and the funding, India was not equipped to provide the general apparatus that goes with a PhD. If I wanted an academic career (which I didn’t particularly plan on, but would have been the logical endpoint of a PhD) the argument was that it would make sense to go to the UK or USA. I didn’t really consider the UK at the time. It also wasn’t a big plan or anything, it just worked out in terms of professional advice that people who had PhDs from the US tended to have a better chance at an academic job, even in India. So it was kind of a pragmatic decision, not a particularly political one.
Academia is the sort of profession that allows your personal politics to become a part of your professional work, maybe more so than in many other careers. How did you come to develop your own personal politics? Did you enter academia with the intention of being a ‘radical’ academic, or did that come with time?
Oh no, I mean there was no intention either then or now to ‘be’ a radical academic, as you put it. I was always aware that I wanted my academic work to engage with political, social, cultural issues. I wanted to be in a field where I could work on those issues, rather than necessarily speak on them. Postcolonial studies was about ten years old at the point that I decided to shift there; I had a very preliminary introduction to it at JNU and it struck me as a field that would allow for a measure of interdisciplinarity and a measure of unashamed engagement with urgent questions. So it intrigued me, without me knowing very much about it.
I was always clear that I wanted to engage with urgent questions to do with social change, feminism, inequality – that kind of thing. But I didn’t particularly have plans to be one kind of academic or another. I think social engagement and political voice are things that really develop over time, and they can’t really be an intention, if that makes sense.
It does. That development towards a political voice that came with time – was being in a university environment like JNU particularly conducive to that? Or did it start earlier?
It was very much JNU that was fundamental to my sense of myself as an academic. If I had gone to Delhi University, where most of my classmates went, I don’t think the same would have happened. The two universities were and are very different in how they approach academia. At the time, JNU was perhaps in its last unambiguous years of being a radical campus. Most of my learning there – indeed, I would say all of it – happened outside the classroom. It happened in the form of lectures that happened as teach-ins, late-night talks and debates. I was doing linguistics there, but those experiences consciously fed into my decision to change disciplines into English. Partly in order to do colonial and postcolonial studies, but partly because linguistics would not allow me that kind of interdisciplinary engagement. So yes, JNU was absolutely vital.
It’s interesting you say that about the role JNU played in your learning, because I find myself thinking about what it means to be at an institution like Cambridge. How does that frame the way I am being politicized? Cambridge is a complicated institution to be a part of – here I am, learning in the same place that taught and trained colonial administrators not so long ago. There is, for example, still not a single Black lecturer in the Faculty of English. How, if at all, do you reconcile being part of an institution that was built on – and is in many ways, still functioning off of – the exclusion of work and identities like your own?
The thing is that even a place like JNU is built on very problematic exclusions. I would not particularly single out Cambridge or Cornell or any other university as being especially complicit. They are elite institutions, even when they are being radical like JNU. For all its radical politics. JNU was and remains, in many ways, an upper-caste university. Although they tried very hard to get away from the big-city focus that other Indian universities had, it nonetheless drew, as any institution with a degree of selective admissions does, on the intellectual elite of a country.
I’ve never been of the view that one necessarily can be in a non-exclusionary environment. I think we must start with the premise that institutions exclude. They are, for the most part, patriarchal. They are, at best, middle-class, if not actively elite. And all you can do is be honest about what the underpinnings of one’s position are and in a sense, work against them. I wouldn’t want to overstate the case for being able to change institutions from within. But I think from some point you decide: well if I’m doing a PhD, that is an elite qualification – wherever you do it from. In the world we live in, a graduate degree is an elite qualification. Once you understand that certain forms of intellectual production are ineluctably part of an unequal structure, rather than be dishonest about it, you choose to use it in ways that are more, rather than less, radical. One can’t say “well, I’m gonna change the world completely from where I am” but I think you can decide to parlay your position in more progressive ways.
So how do I reconcile being at Cambridge now? Well at Cambridge, one is aware of one’s race position in a way – and for many people, class position – that I didn’t have to be at JNU. There, I was part of an upper-caste structure where I didn’t have to be aware of that position because I belonged to the invisible, unmarked norm. For me, there is a certain kind of double-consciousness here at Cambridge to know what it is simultaneously to belong to a ruling elite and simultaneously to know what it is like to not belong to a ruling elite. Working with that particular double-consciousness has been helpful for me here. Which is to say yes, there are very significant exclusions on matters of race and class, but equally, it may not be all around me. Really, as an Indian, upper-caste woman, I am not especially a minority here. I’m part of a numerical minority, but upper-caste Indians have always had a very specific place in the colonial and therefore, Oxbridge vision of society. That has gotten me to think about more pertinent exclusions which have to do with class, with Blackness, and even within the spectrum of Asians – such as with the absence of Bangladeshis, rather than Indians. Really there’s never a simple exclusion. Exclusions are very tangled up in other things and I think I’ve found occasion to think about these entanglements, rather than to simply feel excluded or oppressed.
That speaks well to the debate going on around the term BME and the idea that it glosses over some of these exclusions. We’re identifying with the same label but are having such different experiences with it.
Yeah, and the one thing I would say is that when I got to Cambridge from the US, I was quite shocked. There is a vibrant campus culture in many places in the US where race is not an absence and this is because of those Latinx and African-American intellectuals who have been speaking about these issues for many years. I was shocked to find that there wasn’t an equivalent in Cambridge. Instead, there was a complete silence around race.
I don’t think I began to break that silence for myself until the numbers began to change, specifically around students. It’s really when students started to raise the issues that I felt that I had a constituency to whom I addressed myself and from whom I got my writ to speak – my legitimacy in speaking about these issues. The changing demographics of Cambridge have been very important in opening up discussions of race. However backward they still are, however basic they still are, those discussions weren’t at all happening when I first got here. And for me that was a very oppressive silence.
You felt like there was that big a cultural difference, coming from America to the UK?
Yes. It isn’t that Cornell isn’t a white institution or an elite institution. It is both and it was as recalcitrant to issues being raised as many such places are, but there was certainly a much larger number of Black, Latinx, Asian, and, to a lesser extent, Native American students and teachers. They put things on the table that the campus was forced to acknowledge, even when it didn’t want to. Whereas when I got here, I had an all white classroom for many years running and though I had wonderful students, there was no particular push from students to discuss race. We tended to discuss colonialism largely in the abstract, which I think is less the case now.
I was listening to your Critical Theory and Practice talk from 2015 where you discuss the ‘rescuing’ of universities and the obligation that more radical academics have to rescue universities from becoming “dreary, bureaucratic institutions” – given that they also have the potential to be spaces for “the luxury of thinking, studying, and exercising a measure of skeptical detachment.” That really is the beauty of a space that is made for learning. What kind of ‘rescuing’ do you think universities need right now?
I don’t have a memory of using this word, so I won’t try and reconstruct what I said then. I imagine I used it and would still use it in the context of a kind of neo-liberal assault, the kind of privatisation and profiteering principles which are coming back again. The Tories are talking about attacking the humanities, about only funding disciplines which result in well-paid jobs or profits for the corporate sector, and I think by rescuing, I was probably alluding to rescuing the intellectual project itself. The idea of thinking, researching, writing because knowledge is valuable in its own right, rather than because it leads to profit. The rescuing would be of knowledge in its own right or truth in its own right, and its transformative potential, rather than simply thinking about what the bottom-line is in terms of money.
I think that neo-liberal assault has been really felt by students in recent years with ongoing industrial action. Already, ‘making it’ in academia is such a notoriously competitive process and recurring industrial action – which you have been very outspoken on behalf of – is demonstrative of the precarity which undercuts the livelihoods of so many academics, particularly those in early stages of their careers. What advice would you give young scholars considering a career in the sector?
I would say two things. First, that young scholars should be very clear-eyed; they are coming into a sector that is under assault in many parts of the world. In fact, if I look at the three parts of the world where I have either studied or taught – India, the USA, and Britain – all three are facing right-wing attacks on the sector, in very different ways. In India, it is more ideological than it is financial. Dissident academics are literally being fired or locked up. In the USA, it has to do with defunding and state interference in academia, as well as the undermining of academics who don’t tow particular ideological or economic lines. In Britain, of course, manifestly, funding has been removed from the sector consistently from 2010 onwards. Academics are underpaid and as you pointed out, their jobs are increasingly precarious. Tenure in the US has been under attack for some time and its equivalent in the UK is also very much under attack. These are very dangerous and delicate times to come into academia. That’s why young people need to be clear-eyed and absolutely certain that this is what they want to do, so that the challenges are worth it at some level. Secondly, I would say to have a plan B. The sector is uncertain and we all ultimately need to live, survive, and eat – so having a pragmatic plan B is probably wise.
Something I wonder about, especially with what’s been going on with your presence on Twitter, is the concept of the academic who is a ‘public intellectual’ – which is something you’ve spoken on in the past. You have called Edward Said “one of the few true public intellectuals” and referenced his writing on the intellectual’s role “to challenge and defeat both an imposed silence and the normalized quiet of unseen power, wherever and whenever possible.”
It’s not a term I’ve ever used of myself. Partly because, as I said in relation to Said, I think very few people can claim that mantle. The reason Said is very much that for me is because there is this sort of misunderstanding now, that if you knock off a couple of pieces for The Guardian and write a blog, you’re a public intellectual. There’s a slight danger today that we’re not distinguishing between the public intellectual and the publicizing intellectual. Said was a great scholar and he parlayed the scholarship without necessarily collapsing it into public speaking. The scholarship was the solid basis from which he spoke about other issues. For me, the greatness there is that he never let up on the scholarship: that knowledge and research and writing in its own right were very important, separate from any public duties that he fulfilled. And then he used that as a basis from which to speak.
I would say I’ve been deeply inspired by that conception of the intellectual and I think that he was absolutely right in saying that intellectuals can perform the role of using their voice in ways that are tactically and substantially useful. So I identify with the task rather than the labour, and I slightly worry that public intellectual is a word used too casually these days and it’s not something I’d particularly apply to myself. I don’t reject the concept, but I don’t particularly apply it to myself.
So you don’t see yourself as assuming this role?
It’s certainly the role of what he lays out in terms of speaking up. I do think that being permanent, or being tenured, is immensely – I don’t want to call it a privilege – but it comes with certain responsibilities, right? Why do you have things like tenure, which we don’t in fact have in Britain, but that’s another story. You have it because, in theory, intellectuals are given the absolute freedom to speak their minds, as long as it's tied to facts and evidence and research. I think that not enough academics make use of tenure or permanency when they have it. What is the point of having it, of having job security without fear, if you can’t parlay that into speaking for people who are more vulnerable? Or speak up for, rather than on behalf of.
With this ‘task’ comes a lot of responsibility – to speak up for people, to push ideas that might be controversial or otherwise resisted. Are there certain standards or responsibilities that you actively hold yourself accountable to in your position at the University?
Absolutely. I’ll give you a recent example. When the controversy of about 2-3 weeks ago happened, one of the things that was repeatedly said in the public domain was that St. Edmund’s College fired Noah Carl [Carl’s non-peer-reviewed research on the links between race, IQ, and criminality came under scrutiny in 2018 and St. Edmund’s terminated his fellowship on grounds of “poor scholarship”] – and they’ve kept her. This was said in multiple places and letters were written to the University about the ‘double standard’. The implication was that I was allowed to get away with things as a woman of colour, and he was being punished because he was white. But the point is, in Carl’s case, the criteria used had to do with research principles, research ethics, and the content of the research, as well as certain procedural questions around that appointment.
I absolutely hold academics, including myself, accountable to questions of evidence, truth, and a certain care in speaking. I would absolutely say that you do not have the right to stand up and say, as David Starkey did, “damn” black people. But if you say “whiteness as ideology should be abolished” – that is a very different statement based on a long history of academically validated work on race and racial ideologies. Drawing on an academic tradition which is accountable to evidence and intellectual rigour to talk about the abolition of ideologies is not grounds for firing me. So yes, academics, including myself, are absolutely accountable to questions of evidence and academic rigour, of provability. This is where I do very much admire Said. In the postmodern moment, he was willing to stand up and say that there is such a thing as truth, and we are accountable to truth. Despite all the problematic uses to which truth has been put and its abuses, I do think that we are in great danger if we don’t hold onto something critically, but nonetheless determinately, like truth.
Said did not have to deal with the complexities of being a public figure pushing ideas in the age of Twitter. The Dossier of White-Hot Hatred you published on July 16th shows just how dangerous it can be to express ideas online, in real-time, and especially as a woman and person of colour. What were your intentions in making the contents of that Dossier public?
I really had sleepless nights over publishing it. Partly because I didn’t want to reiterate racist speech, because when you cite these things, you are reproducing them. But I decided, on balance, that it was important for people to understand that we do not live in anything like a post-racial world. We do not live in a world where racism and other forms of bigotry are articulated only by a small minority. The scale on which I got those messages shows that we are not looking at a minority discourse. We are looking at things that are just beneath the surface, and I’m afraid the fact that these things are just beneath the surface gives us renewed understanding of why we have phenomena like Brexit and Trump and Modi. That level of bile and hatred is barely two skin cells deep. I had a lot of nice letters sent to me saying, “Oh, I’m so sorry you’re being subjected to a small minority” and I wanted to say “No. No, no no. You are a small minority in not using these words.”
The whole notion of post-racialism is really disturbing. I grew up in Canada and we have that whole identity of being so multicultural, so post-racial. And I feel like that means you’re expected to point to the examples of the most vile experiences of racism you’ve had just to prove that it exists. Even when you know it’s something continuously there, beneath the surface.
You know the interesting thing is, and this was perhaps more shocking to me than some of the stuff that came to me from Poland, is that a good bit of the nastiness on Twitter and some of the hate mail was from Canada. This stuff was the equivalent of white supremacists in the US. They were talking in the exact same kind of language.
Shifting a bit to talk about your work. Your book Insurgent Empire builds on the premise that cultures share a tradition of having these strong streaks of radical, anti-authoritarian dissent. It’s the idea that there were many Britons who themselves criticized and opposed the imperial project in its time. Where do you see these strands of dissent in the UK today?
I see it in student movements which began in 2010 and are still on campus – on fees and the neoliberalization of higher education. Cambridge Defend Education was created in 2010 and they are still very much around. They’re there in parts of the trade union movement, though not consistently and it’s a very mixed bag. But nonetheless, challenges are issued from sectors of the trade union movement. They are there in the activism of trans people. They are there in some more intersectional versions of feminism and the women’s movement in Britain. They are there in anti-racist organizations. Even though BLM is the most recent iteration, communities that have been disproportionately affected by unfair or brutal policing have often gathered to push back; this most recent iteration is drawing on a long tradition of radical justice, anti-brutality, and anti-racist traditions in Britain. They’re also there in the activism around Grenfell, in the activism around renter’s rights, and housing rights. They’re there in a very large number of people who are determined to keep the NHS public.
I think the important thing about dissident strands is that they often come from unexpected quarters. They can come from quarters where somebody might not be great on issues around policing, but they might be extremely committed to a public health system. What you really have are dissident moments and they don’t necessarily cohere into one large dissident movement. What we have are pockets of resistance all around us and these are some of the sectors where you see it emerge. Right now the British iteration of Black Lives Matter has definitely created a significant anti-racist movement. In as much as it is cross-racial and in some ways trans-national, it does remind me of some of the moments and characters that I talk about in Insurgent Empire.
Do you think this idea of dissident moments is enough? Or does it speak to a lack of solidarity that needs to be worked on and improved?
Yes, and one of the points I make in Insurgent Empire is that solidarity has to be worked on. It doesn’t just emerge. It has to become part of a conscious decision to make alliances and to knit together a movement that gathers enough weight to have social significance over time. I’m often asked, “What would you say to anti-racists today? What would you say to so-called white allies today?” and I would say: learn from the movements of the past where solidarity was not exhumed. It was hard work, it was conflictual work, it was often painful work – but at certain moments in history, it was undertaken.
Absolutely, moments are not enough. But I think we are in a historical moment now, where we can knit together movements for public healthcare, movements against racism, against police brutality, movements for housing justice, anti-fascism – they all exist and in many places, not just in the Western world. I think this is a great moment to start thinking about how to knit together these different dissident strands into something that might become a movement. It’s not simple, but it can be done.
You bring up learning from the past and the notion of ‘undoing’ existing imperial amnesia is something you’ve spoken a lot on. These past two months have seen increased momentum to, for example, decolonise the school curriculum in the UK, on the basis that it perpetuates that exact amnesia. Hundreds of thousands of young people are signing and sharing petitions. They want to learn about “the evils of British imperialism and how members of the African diaspora contributed to the British nation-state”. What efforts do you think British schools – and systems of learning at large – need to undertake to facilitate anti-racist, anti-imperialist learning? What is holding them back?
I’ll start with the second question. Imperial amnesia is very deeply entrenched. It’s not just entrenched, it’s fostered. It is actively repeated, rehearsed, and very alive. The first question, what you’ve pointed to on things starting to happen around decolonising, I think the school curriculum has to be wrested from the hands of governments and returned to academics. With every talk I have given on Insurgent Empire, I have school teachers asking me “Will you come and talk to us? Will you help us?” and they also tell me, “Our hands are really tied. The only thing we can do is work within the little bit of wriggle room we do have.” I think that’s a terrible situation to be in, to be forced to teach a curriculum that you yourself don’t particularly think is a good one. I think the decades of partisan political interference in the school curriculum has to go. It is time for the school curriculum to be made independent of political interests and governments. There are very good reasons for the state to be a part of education, but there are also problems when the state becomes the arbiter of what is and isn’t taught. I think that has to end, if the movements we’re seeing now are to become full and flourishing movements – rather than a little bit of tinkering on the sides.
When you say ‘returning’ it to academics and teachers, are you envisioning a particular past model? Or is this about completely re-imagining how schools can take on this task of teaching?
I don’t know enough about different educational systems in different parts of the world to be able to say “Okay, this is a model.” I do think we have, and should have, systems of education which are less beholden to governmental interference – particularly the history curriculum. I think it is appalling that someone like Michael Gove had such a determining say in how history would be taught, and I think that level of interference doesn’t necessarily exist everywhere in the world.
For instance, we are seeing much more governmental interference with the content of textbooks in India today than we did, say, forty years ago. It isn’t that it was absent, but it was happening at a different level. There are models for less and more interference, models for less partisan work, and I think that greater collaboration between academics and schoolteachers is probably the way to go.
Applying this idea of decolonisation to Cambridge – you’ve been particularly vocal in the movement to decolonise the English curriculum. Your work frames decolonisation as a project that should prompt us to reframe our understanding of how we’re relating to other people, cultures and countries – to ask: “What can I learn about my historical relationship to Empire? And how does that shape my relationship with other people? With the world today?” How do you answer these questions for yourself?
I don’t have single answers to them. I ended the book with Jamaica Kincaid’s exhortation to think about how you come to be the way you are:
“And might not knowing why they are the way they are, why they do the things they do, why they live the way they live and in the place they live, why the things that happened to them happened, lead these people to a different relationship with the world, a more demanding relationship, a relationship in which they are not victims all the time of every bad idea that flits across the mind of the world?”
For me, that is an ongoing project. I’ve spoken about this to students and recently I’ve said it more explicitly, that decolonisation for me is a two-sided lens. It’s a lens which you use to look at society and other people, but you also turn that lens on yourself. It’s a kind of flexible lens, if you like. Decolonisation is sometimes in danger of just becoming about “Oh, how terrible the oppressors are” but the thing is that none of us are really free of being complicit in oppressive systems. When I ask white academics to think about their race or class position, I put myself under the same obligation. For me, that has taken the form of starting to think about caste more seriously and to educate myself around that. Just as if you’re white, you don’t need to think about race, if you’re upper-caste, you don’t need to think about caste. This means I actually have to go off and read. I have to go off and rectify my very deep ignorance on things I was privileged enough to not have to know about. For instance, because I am not trans, I find myself listening to the voices of trans people. It’s something I’m educating myself about, to understand – and I say this as someone who has a pretty decent academic understanding of gender, knowing that academic understanding hasn’t historically involved thinking about gender assignment or reassignment. That’s a gap I identified in my learning. I think we all have these gaps and the way I use them for myself is to say, “Mind the gap, address the gap” and that's something I would say is the general injunction that academic decolonisation puts upon all of us.
You talk about decolonisation as this personal project, but then I feel like these calls for reforming curricula come from younger people who maybe don’t know how to ask these questions for themselves or where to start looking for answers. They’re hoping these institutions of knowledge and learning can aid them and guide them in that process of decolonising. But many seem to be quite resistant to that.
Yeah and I think there is a slight – and I do worry about this – a slight sense of decolonisation as a magic bullet, that you’re gonna tell everybody to re-do their curricula and everything will be sorted. That’s not how it’s going to happen. It’s a process that will never end. It is simply, I think, self-defeating to think that you can decolonise in five years time.
Alright, my last question for you is to end on a lighter note. You tweeted this week about doing something “very ‘edgy” with your time off: reading for pleasure. What’s on your list?
Oh! I have two books on my list. The one I was referencing in that tweet was a biography of Frederick Douglass. It’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning book by David Blight, who is a professor at Yale. And then Imperial Intimacies, which is a memoir-slash-historical account by Hazel Karby. Both books are picking up on things I discussed in Insurgent Empire, but I think they also connect to Black Lives Matter. Both are life stories, so I think there’s that exact bringing together of the personal and the political.
This conversation has been edited for clarity.