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Radio ReOrient 13.7: "Linguistics, Citizenship and Belonging,” with Kamran Khan, hosted by Claudia Radiven and Marchella Ward
00:44:18
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Kamran Khan
Hello, everybody.
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Marshall Po
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder of the New Books Network, and if you're listening to this podcast on the New Books Network, I bet you like to read. I know that I do. That's why I founded the New Books Network. So as readers, we need to know what to read. And I have a podcast to recommend for you. That being the Proofread podcast. Do you have a goal to read more this year? How about a goal to read more of what you love and less of what you don't? The Proofread Podcast is here to help you. Hosted by Casey and Tyler, two English professors and avid readers with busy lives, Proofread helps you decide what books are worth spending your precious time on and what books aren't. They have 15 minute episodes that give you everything you need to know about a book to decide if you should read it or skip it. They offer a brief synopsis, there's fun and witty commentary, and there are no spoilers and no sponsored reviews. Life's too short to read a bad book, so subscribe to the Proofread podcast today. And by the way, there's a new season coming soon. Hello, everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast, or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Chella Ward
Foreign.
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Radio Reorient Host 1
Listeners. And welcome back to another episode of Radio Reorient. Your hosts today are Chella Ward, Claudia Radovan Saeed Khan and myself. In this episode, Chella and Claudia were joined by Kamran Khan.
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Chella Ward
Our conversation ranged from the UK riots in Bradford and Oldham in 2001 to through to the Prevent policy and especially looking into the linguistics of citizenship and belonging. We had the opportunity to talk about Khan's previous work on citizenship with a look to the future at what he's working on now.
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Claudia Radovan
He's currently developing ideas for his new project on the language of the war on terror as governance. Kamran Khan is an Associate professor at the University of Birmingham and is currently the director of the Mosaic Research Group on Multilingualism and an Associate press at professor of Language, Social justice and Education.
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Radio Reorient Host 2
It was a lively conversation on issues that are constantly developing in a global environment where security and citizenship are more relevant topics than ever before. So without further ado, let's listen in.
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Claudia Radovan
Assalamu alaikum, listeners, and welcome back to another episode of Radio Reorient. We're glad that you could join us and we're really glad today to be joined by a special guest, Kamran Khan, who is Associate professor in Language, Social justice and Education at the University of Birmingham and is going to be telling us about some really exciting work that he's been doing. My name is Chella Ward. I'm joined by my co host, Claudia Radovan, who is going to get us started with the first question.
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Chella Ward
Thank you for joining us, Cameron. We wanted to talk about a few.
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Saeed Khan
Different elements today related to some of the work you've done in the past on citizenship, particularly around your work becoming a citizen, where you spoke a lot about, you know, the legacies of citizenship in the uk, the rejection of multiculturalism for this more assimilation approach, incorporation, almost absorption of citizens. And I was wondering if you could talk to us a little bit about that work and how citizenship has become more than just simply legislation or a legal process, but how it's become inflected with the ideas around belonging and especially thinking about the recent climate that transition from the idea of people having citizenship, as it's not so much a right anymore, but rather a privilege.
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Kamran Khan
Yeah, no, thanks for inviting me. It's nice to be here. Yeah. So I really work on issues of language and citizenship and I think language is one of those things that people don't just take it for granted and it's quite a natural thing. We have a lot of assumptions that British people speak English and these type of things. Right. So what's really significant in the shaping of citizenship in especially this century and towards the back end of the last century is how English has played a role in really shaping who belongs and who doesn't belong. Now, obviously, English is probably the most powerful language in the world due to colonialism and globalization and all of these things. So you see English kind of expanding the borders of who's a subject and this kind of subjecthood under colonialism, for example. And then what's really significant is the way that there's kind of this big exhale and then this big inhale to bring those borders back about, okay, so who belongs and who doesn't. So the idea of the national citizenship with a language requirement, for example, really comes into play in 1981, which is the British National Nationality Act. So that's considered a really significant legislation in terms of kind of delinking from Commonwealth notions of citizenship and having it kind of national one. And that's also significant because it's dependent on immigration and immigrants. It's not just a standalone citizenship. This is who we are. It's actually a new iteration of immigration law. So as we go into the 21st century, then we see the rise of language testing. So even though there was a language requirement in 81, it was never really used and it was just assumed you could fit in and you could speak. Speak English and these things. And there's a shift in perception and suspicion then in this century in terms of there was a standardized test. And this comes at the same time as the fortress Europe kind of hardening of borders. So language is a really sensitive kind of barometer of what's happening. And even though we take it for granted that it's just this kind of like, everyone knows what English is, you have to think about it. English, or any language is a political project of deciding who belongs and who doesn't. And in the case of English, it's really, really clear. And then what you see over time, then, even when David Cameron gave his multiculturalism has failed speech, so that was at the security conference in Munich. And in that he's talking about language requirements as well. So he's talking about those requirements in relation to terrorism and things like that. So, yeah, so basically you see these kind of iterations of who gets to belong, who doesn't. And then even within English, you know, we have other hierarchies, even within the uk, right, of who's perceived, you know, a native speaker, issues of class, and, you know, and then you create these hierarchies about, you know, who's perceived as a non native speaker, and, you know, who, you know, who can fit in in those ways. So again, language looks like something that everyone kind of just understands instinctively, but there's just so much more going on behind that.
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Claudia Radovan
I'm thinking about how that relates to the changes around the Immigration act around a similar time where we get kind of this notion of the patriarchal, right? So there's a distinction between those who are British by heritage, right, and those who become British through conquest or through domination. That's to say, you know, as what would have been previously subjects of the British Empire. And I'm thinking about the way that what happens there is actually an epistemological shift, right? It's not just about a legal definition, it's actually about how we think about what Britishness is. Where Britishness becomes a family structure, it becomes something that you have through your parents, which means the idea that you can shift into or out of nationality becomes harder. Right. And there was a lot of criticism of the time, at the time of the way that that immigration act was racist by design because, you know, the, the idea of that act. In fact, I think there's all sor. Racist pronouncements at the time that this act would stop. And here I'm quoting, you know, the hordes of Anglo Indians. So it's this idea that there is a need to distinguish between the so called patriarchal, which is not always, but usually someone who is white British from other categories of Britishness. So it's really interesting to hear how language plays into that as well, because at the same time I'm thinking about, and here I'm thinking with my sort of philologist brain, I'm thinking about the way that language also is often understood as a kind of family structure. We talk about language families, we talk about the idea of common descent from, you know, what's known as Proto Indo European. And we talk about Romance family families of languages or Germanic families of languages, for instance. So the idea of the, the family tree, you know, that that was sort of always there in the way we have thought about languages. Or at least, you know, was always there through a kind of colonial model of philology becomes also how we structure ident. It's really interesting thinking about how that legal process and, and the linguistic process come together on the linguistic side of things. We still see that in kind of popular cultures today, don't we? We see people who, the, the standard story is someone who's speaking Welsh on a train and is presumed not to be British, despite the fact that, you know, many, many British people are Welsh speakers because the language is kind of misidentified do you see in your work those kind of processes of misidentification through language?
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Kamran Khan
Yeah, I mean, a lot. I mean, so there's really great work, for example, by Jonathan Rosa and Nelson Flores on the idea of racial linguistic perspectives of the ways in which there's a kind of an over determination of kind of bodies within inhabiting languages and vice versa, and how perceptions are made. And I think that's really significant. I mean, just to kind of stretch that out a little bit about what you were saying. One of the examples of like, you know, one of the most significant, you know, powerful languages is Spanish, right? And the idea of Spanish, you know, coincides with 1492. That's the publication of the lengua, you know, the. The Grammar of Spanish Language by Antonio de Nerija. Right. That comes at the same time as the, you know, what the, you know, expulsion of Jews and Muslims in Spain on the one hand, and the conquest of what they referred to as barbarians. I mean, Nabrija talks about this in the Americas, right? And so, you know, you've got Spanish going out in that way. And then if you were to kind of fast forward now, you know, who's considered a legitimate Spanish speaker, right? You know, if you took, you know, on the one hand, you've got your minority languages of historically being oppressed, like Catalan, Galician and Basque, for example. And then you've got the kind of the added dimension of immigrants now having to kind of show their integration and just need the language for daily life in terms of what languages they need, how they're perceived as legitimate speakers within the minority and the majority languages. And so all sorts of complexities come out that way as well about who gets to kind of be defined as a legitimate speaker. So, yeah, there's language on one hand there. And then some of my work as I've shifted is essentially the same ideas, but then also in relation to PREVENT and the ways in which, you know, these kind of counter extremism, you know, counter radicalization programs, essentially. What you're looking, you're the eyes and ears of the state, so you're looking for something. So what is it that you're looking for? What does it sound like? What does it look like? Right, so those are some of the things maybe I've been thinking about through my work.
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Saeed Khan
I just want to pull on that thread about Prevent especially. I think it's. I mean, we've just had yet another review by David Anderson, I believe, hot on the tails of the independent review from Shawcross. And I think one of the Core things about prevent, that just sort of, despite all these many reviews, that never changes is that sort of. That focus on British values and these notions of Britishness, which you could trade in for what you talking about earlier, this idea of Englishness, about what constitutes somebody belonging to the category of Britishness, and to prevent, this sort of coalesces around the British values, this idea of democracy, rule of law, and for me, my favorite and most ironic one, mutual respect and tolerances of different faiths and beliefs. And how's that sort of within your work related to the idea around language? Because I know you wrote in some of your earlier work about the 2001 riots and how the Cantal report, that focus on community cohesion and language as being such a core part of that. Does that still sort of ring as true when we think about prevent. And it's more modern iterations, this, this focus on Britishness, which for me is always sort of very much coded as whiteness. And therefore for a lot of the people that are subject to prevent, it's pretty much unattainable. It's not applied evenly, depending on who's been referred. How does that sort of fit in with some of the work that you've done on language?
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Kamran Khan
Yeah, so I think the. I feel like we underplay the 2001 riots sometimes about its significance because there you've got. I mean, the idea was that there were parallel lives and parallel communities. That's what Cantor was saying. And if you put the, you know, if you use language, lack of a common language, as the kind of, you know, one of the precursors for this, it's going to reflect more on those who are perceived as being deficient in that language for not stepping up. And that's, as you said, it's quite racially coded. Even though in those riots a lot of the people involved were born in the uk Right. Again, you know, we forget these things. Right. And then what you have in that summary is 9, 11. And so you've got this kind of. You've got this overlap of this problematic, you know, Muslim brown man, particularly kind of overlapping, and you get this kind of frame of references. This is kind of a problem to the national community. This is what's breaking things apart. And it obviously becomes highly securitized after that because the language requirements then become. Become also a kind of defense against, you know, we have to stop this type of violence again in the future. And, you know, that also takes into things. Sorry, it takes into account things like preemption, which was starting to become more of a thing in terms of security, you know, we need to intervene in terms of making sure their minds are not won over. And you saw this also in terms of the recruitment of ISIS in like 2015, around that period. So, you know, there was a point where David Cameron was promising investment for English language teaching for Muslim mothers, for example, to stop their children from going, you know, these things we forget, right? So the kind of link between all of this is that there's a particular legitimate way of speaking and doing things and even a proficiency that means you're integrated and less likely to do these things. Now, in the research empirically, it's never been shown really that the citizenship tests actually improve integration because people already live here, they've been here a long time, they work. There's all these other factors that come into why someone learns the language, right? And then you've got, you know, the idea of prevent that again, you know, that there are particularly linguistic or semiotic kind of things happening that we need to pay attention because the whole idea is that these are predictive characteristics and you're looking for those. So obviously, you know, in some cases it's going to be quite obvious if someone's, you know, really down that, that path. But you know, we've seen these cases, right, of children, you know, drawing things or the other issue with that is the role of interpretation, of perception. You know, these cases, you know, there's always one that I go back to which is some 11 year old was referred to prevent because they said they would give alms or arms to the oppressed. And that one single sound based on who it's being assigned to, you know, sets up all these things. But obviously, as with all things linguistic, these things are years, centuries, decades in the making to make that over determination.
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Claudia Radovan
It's fascinating. You know, in that example, you've just given arms and arms. It's fascinating also to think about how language can get completely detached from meaning in some of these conversations. I'm thinking about, you know, that moment in 2023 when in Paris, you know, there was a, a sister who had come home to her apartment building where she lived, and there were some Muslim construction workers working in the building. And she was Muslim and she said assalamu alaikum to the construction workers. And she was arrested and placed into police custody because this was presumed to be, you know, some kind of suspicious thing to do. And that has absolutely nothing to do with the meaning of the words assalamu alaikum. Right, Peace be, be with you. But it has Everything to do with a kind of, well, French Islamophobic climate of suspicion around language. Not even, I think, just Arabic language, but language that is presumed to be attached to the Islamicate in a certain way. And I remember that being reported, you know, as if the fact of having said the words assalamu alaikum meant that this woman was sort of secretly a member of the Muslim Brotherhood or something. So sometimes it seems to me that that meaning has actually very little to do with utterance in some of these cases.
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Kamran Khan
Yeah, I mean, the kind of, like, symbolic case or, like, philosophical case is one of the things that Jacques Derrida talks about. So, I mean, he was expelled. I mean, he was an Algerian. I mean, he lived in Algeria. He was a French Jew, had his citizenship revoked. Right. You know, due to the, you know, Vichy regime in. In 1940. He was eventually expelled. So he knew full well, you know, what it's like to lose your citizenship based on your religion and, you know, everything that goes with that. And one of the things he talks about is, you know, this idea of the shibboleth of, you know, of, you know, you know, there's two ethnic tribes having. Who have this war in the Old Testament, and when they're trying to pass to safety, they have to pronounce the word shibboleth. And one tribe is perceived as having the legitimate way of saying it, and the other tribe say sibilath because they don't have the same pronunciation. And so he uses that as a kind of symbol. And one of the things he talks about is two things, actually. There's two things. One is that language lives in the ear of the other, and that exactly what you're saying that, you know, you just can't control. And the thing is, you know, this happens every day in our lives, you know, whether you may be understood. The thing is, the stakes in these cases that we're talking about are so high and so securitized and have the kind of legal implications, and it destroys your life and all these things. His point generally was in times of assigning a particular group an enemy, these things will happen. This is what happens, right, when hostility is allowed to kind of elevate to this point. That was the one point. And then also, what he talks about is what's happening between the. The sound she and see, of sibboleth or shibboleth. And again, all of that is, you know, decades. And I mean, I always tell my students this is centuries in the making to get to the point where if a French Woman says aslam alaikum. You know, she's presumed basically, if you take it to its logical conclusion, she's being assumed to be a terrorist, that she's going to commit something. Right. And you know, why is that what's happening here? Right.
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Saeed Khan
I really like that idea of these issues that we're looking at today. People like to treat them as having sort of occurred in a vacuum, as being very recent, or a lot of people like to sort of refer to 911 as that kind of pivotal point where the entire, you know, world history began almost, which I imagine for some generations it's almost as if that's, that's the case for people born after 9 11. It probably feels like that's the case sometimes. But I think when we look at these, you know, these policies, these practices around citizenship and especially some of the, you know, counter terror, counter extremism policies we've mentioned thinking of prevent as well, a lot of people like to look at that as, you know, this, this came out, came about 2006, 2007, and this idea of British values as this is how we're now going to understand extremism. But from these conversations and from even just a cursory glance at the policy, you can see those roots going back to frameworks of colonial racial governance in any number of places where colonial rule was operating. And I think it's interesting as well to look at that relationship between when we look at citizenship policy to counterterror policy as well. And these two sort of areas of policymaking aren't really distinct anymore. They've become inextricably linked. And we can look at more modern iterations like the Nationalities and Borders bill that came about, the clause nine, the right to deprive citizenship without notice. And one of the observations that was made when that came in is how this makes precarious the citizenship of about 6 million people in the UK. And it brings sort of to the forefront that question of do non white citizens, are they ever able to attain Britishness? Are they ever sort of, are they ever allowed to become full citizens? When we look at this range of policy deployments, whether it's prevent or the citizenship bills, and I think the pogroms in 2024 after the Southport stabbing and obviously the more recent protest on September 13, make that clear again, that non white people in the UK will be consistently marginalized as not belonging, whether, whether they're citizens or not, whether they were born here or not. It all comes back to that idea of whether Britishness is attainable for non white citizens. And in terms of sort of the, you know, the linguistic relationship between all those policies. What, what are your thoughts on that in terms of the relationship to, you know, historic citizenship policies and obviously that colonial legacy.
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Radio Reorient Host 2
Yeah.
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Kamran Khan
So I mean, just going back to that example, like I said, of Derrid having his citizenship taken away. Now, one of his points, so he's got this book called the Monolingualism of the Other, where he talks about the relationship between language and all of this and his relationship with Arabic, for example, in French. And his point in that was that there was a lot of people in the Jewish community who'd basically over assimilated to the point where they'd lost maybe elements of, you know, of, you know, their Jewishness, basically. And his point was. But in the end it got turned back on them in any case because, you know, there were, you know, there were elements of that they were never going to be accepted. That's kind of one point he had. And so I think that there's sometimes that element that, you know, well, you know, well, take Rishi Sunak at the highest, highest level of, you know, highest office in the uk, spoke, you know, the most between, you know, parentheses. He had great English, all of these things. It didn't, didn't insulate him from any of the racism as well. Right. So that's one thing if you just take it as the kind of promise of language and what it offers you. But I want to go back like, I mean, knowing Cello's background as well. The idea of the barbarian, right? Barbarians are called barbarians because the noise they used to make, it was baa, baa, ba. And they were assigned characteristics and qualities by the Greeks of being, you know, uneducated and, you know, uncultured and brutish and all these things. And over history, if they learned some of the language, you know, they could elevate themselves a little bit, you know, over time and they could learn some cultural things. But there were still barbarians. And I think sometimes, you know, there's. There's kind of iterations of that of who considered the barbarians. It's not always all immigrants. I mean, sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. But I think we just need to stay a little bit flexible about these things, about, you know, just because you have the citizenship, it doesn't mean everything. It doesn't dissolve all the other inequalities. Right. And just because, well, I mean, we have lots of children of immigrants who've been educated here. And exactly what you're saying about the, you know, Having your citizenship deprived, it doesn't seem to be a defense against all of that. Right. They're vulnerable now. And I think that's this. That's actually central to what some of the things that Derrida was talking about being undecidable. Because the moment you have those lines in the sand about who does and doesn't belong, it becomes really, really dangerous for marginalized groups. And. And we're kind of seeing that play out. We've seen it in the US as well.
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Claudia Radovan
Right.
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Kamran Khan
With ice. You know, I don't know if you've seen it, but one of the things that happened in the Supreme Court was language. Speaking Spanish or being perceived to speak Spanish is now one of the identifiers to being, you know, legally accosted, I guess, arrested or, you know, grounds for reasonable suspicion. Right. You know, how did we get here? Right. So those conditionalities are really, really central to everything. And language is one of those conditionalities, or who's perceived more than that. I guess, going back to Chella's earlier point, it's the perception of the language and the speakers and everything that goes with it.
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Claudia Radovan
I want to take your bait to talk about the Greeks a little bit.
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Kamran Khan
And you know more about it than I do.
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Claudia Radovan
But, yeah, I want to also pick up on what you said about Spanish because I think it's absolutely right, you know, the way that Spanish has become a kind of sign of otherness for, you know, disgusting anti immigration programs or policies that involve ICE in the US But I'm also thinking about all those videos that I see on social media all the time of those kind of community protection groups. And I very often see them, you know, calling to the person inside the house in Spanish, not to open the door to the ICE agent who perhaps doesn't have a warrant signed by a judge and therefore has no lawful right of entry, for instance. So I suppose I'm thinking a little bit about resistance as well. And the way that, you know, often Spanish then becomes a language in which it's possible to oppose this kind of thing. And the reason that makes me think about the Greeks is because my absolute favorite example of people not speaking proper Greek happens in Aeschylus, Agamemnon. So this is a play of the 5th century BCE by Aeschylus, is probably, you know, usually said to be kind of the first of the three great Greek playwrights. Aeschylusophocles, Euripides. And he writes in the Agamemnon, which is the beginning of a trilogy, the Oresteia, which tells the Story of Agamemnon coming home after. After the war in Troy. And there's this amazing scene relatively close to the beginning of the play, where he brings with him a captive of war from Troy who's called Cassandra. And Cassandra has been cursed by the God Apollo so that she knows the truth, but no one believes her. And there's this amazing scene where she stands in front of the house of Atreus and. And prophesies basically that they're all going to get killed, that Agamemnon is going to walk through the door and. And be murdered and all of the kind of terrible things that are going to happen. She sees them, you know, exactly as they are, exactly as they play out. And the chorus say, we don't understand what she's saying. She's speaking strange Greek. You know, we. Her Greek is odd. We can't follow what she's saying. And what's kind of interesting about it is they say that, but when you read it on the page, there's nothing odd about her Greek. We can understand her Greek very well, as in we, you know, the audience well, or at least we, the latest scholarly audience. I imagine that the Greeks in the audience could understand her fine. And you know, the, the chorus keep going on about how weirdly she's speaking and it's because she's saying something that they don't expect. Right? But we of course, do expect it because we know it's very famous myth. We know how the myth goes. We know that Agamemnon does get killed. And what's amazing is they're saying we don't believe her because she's. She's speaking in a weird way. And we're thinking, oh, but. But she is. Right. So it becomes this almost moment of resistance where there's a space within speaking a language that's non normative for being able to say certain things that, you know, at the end of the play do turn out to come true, but that are at the time kind of speaking against power and at least against the. The chorus's idea of who should be empowered in that scene. So I suppose I'm wondering, is there a space in this kind of non normative language use which, you know, you're rightly saying is key to discrimination of various kinds? Is there a space within that for resistance? You know, can resistance be spoken in these kinds of languages that aren't perceived as kind of dominant or the normal in air quotes, way to speak the language?
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Kamran Khan
Yeah, I mean, just expanding the idea of the shibboleth the kind of. One of the things with. That Derek talks about is the terrifying ambiguity of belonging and discrimination, that these things are concealed with languages in themselves. So, you know, Spanish, for example, can be the language of conquest, but then it's a minoritized language in America, and then it becomes, you know, also like this, you know, area of protection as well. So it has those qualities. Yeah, I think we take that kind of inherent quality of language, I think also in terms of the ways in which this authority over discourses and the way they achieve this authority. The thing that we're dealing with right now, Charlie Kirk, right. Where there's a particular clamping down now on things that we know that he said, you know, you were just saying about. Because these are things that we understand that he said. Right. And now it's becoming, I don't know, like turned on its head as if. I mean, he did say those things. And yet, you know, there's this reverence for it. So I think, you know, it's challenging some of those discourses, which is really not easy. But at the same time, you know, there has to be space for hope. People are doing this on the streets and people are doing it, you know, against, prevent or whatever. So I think, you know, you can't promise anything, but you can, as always, you just try to work towards these things. And any justice in the end has some element of, like, linguistic justice as well in how we deal with these things. So I don't think I'm the one who's ever said that. I mean, there's plenty of other people who said that. So I think. I think it's one element maybe we overlook, but maybe we should keep in.
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Saeed Khan
Mind, I think that, I mean, there's some really interesting and, you know, for me, very important points there, particularly around, you know, the dominance of particular discourses and who gets to decide which discourses takes the forefront. And I think the Charlie Kirk situation is a really important one. And we can look at prevent and the kind of discourses that. That still become part of Counter extremism isn't just about counter extremism anymore. It's about citizenship. Citizenship isn't just about belonging. It's about who toes the line and that sort of thing. And I know I could pull at those threads until they were entirely strung out. Perhaps in another episode. Before we wrap up, I gather that.
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Chella Ward
You have.
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Saeed Khan
Another book in the mix. I was wondering if you want to briefly tell us about, perhaps a taster of what to expect with that.
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Kamran Khan
Yeah. So I started working on ideas of language insecurity during my PhD, like many years ago and life takes its courses and you put some things as more priority. But I've always had this long standing thing that I wanted to work on around language and security. We've talked briefly about some of that, but also theoretical, particularly about the role of terror, which I can expand on more in the book. And other issues about language. I mean, just for example, the highest one of the biggest employees of linguists is the intelligence services. I don't know how that's going to work with AI and all those things, but traditionally that's been one of the biggest employers. And so there's always been a connection between language and security. And so I'm hoping to just develop some of those ideas. And as always it will take the time it needs, but I'll be working on it until it happens, inshallah.
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Chella Ward
Well, I think that gives us something.
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Saeed Khan
To look forward to and I think suffice to say all that's left is thank you very much for joining us. I know I myself am really going to look forward to that work on language and security and thank you very much to our listeners for tuning in.
- [34:32]
Chella Ward
You're listening to Radio Reorient, the Decolonial podcast in partnership with with the New Books Network. This is Radio Reorient exploring the Islamosphere and navigating the post Western. How should we study the things that we study after the critique of Orientalism? Now let's discuss what we've heard with Saeed Khan, Hiza Miya, Chella Ward and Claudia Radevan. So it was a really enjoyable conversation with Kamaran, not so much regarding the content which sort of reflected what a kind of tumultuous and quite frightening situation we find ourselves in in the current political climate. But just for the the different roads that the conversation took us down, we looked at kind of the bigger themes of the conversation regarding terrorism, the war on terror, counterterrorism policy and the languages you language that's used, but also to more specific areas around citizenship, its relationship to things like the PREVENT policy in the uk. And I think for me particularly one of the most interesting aspects because of my own work on Prevent was looking at the kind of the coding that's involved when talking about Britishness and British values and the relationship between this notion of Britishness and what it means to be British and how that's coded with whiteness and how difficult it then becomes for, you know, a person of color to be viewed as a whole citizen and therefore as a whole person. When we think about how our conversation turned to discussions about the rise of the far right and the rioting that's been happened and the dehumanisation that's been going on. But we did also have the opportunity to look at broader contexts in. In the USA as well, in Spain and France. So it was a really extensive conversation.
- [36:34]
Radio Reorient Host 1
Thank you, Claudia. I thought that was really interesting, especially today, because they were recording this when we've had news of Sweller Brahman coming out and saying she identifies as British rather than English, and kind of just thinking about, you know, the UK as this multinational state and what actually all of that means. And I think you're right in the sense that Britishness and even Englishness, indeed, really are code for whiteness rather than an inclusive, multicultural notion. A lot of that is tied up within the kind of linguistics specificities there.
- [37:13]
Claudia Radovan
Yeah. It's interesting to think about the role that language plays in that as well and plays in the kind of misfiring of racism. I'm thinking about, you know, those classic examples where somebody's speaking Welsh on a train and they're presumed to be speaking Arabic, for instance. And, you know, we. It's interesting that Britishness gets tied to an idea of Englishness and whiteness because Britain has always been a multilingual place. Right. You know, there are many, many, many languages that, that people who, who are British speak. And that's something that is kind of, as you say, I mean, like at the core of this kind of multinational space. But I'm, for me, I'm thinking about it also in the context of this kind of policing of language that the rising tide of fascism seems to me to be responsible for. You know, I'm thinking about the way that Donald Trump's restrictions on researchers have often been framed around uses of language. Right. That list of words that were released you weren't allowed to use in your research if you received federal funding. And I was, you know, as someone who's in classical studies, I was really fascinated to see that the word historical is on that list. And there's all the other terms that you would expect to see on that list. If you imagine it as a list that's trying to roll back any kind of progressive moves of the last decade. But the idea that historical, the word historical is itself problematic is, I think, an interesting example of what we were talking about with Cameron when we were speaking about the way that language becomes uncoupled from meaning by fascism. And we were using the example of. Of assalamualaikum. Right, peace be. Be with you. And we were using the example of the criminalization of assalamu alaikum in France. So you know, the story about the woman who comes home from doing her shopping or whatever and says assalamu alaikum to the builders who are in her building and is then, you know, the police are called because aslam alaykum is presumed to be some kind of, you know, dangerous or, or violent greeting because it's associated with Muslimness, which is of course to dislocate the words asalamu alaykum from any translation or interpretation of, of, of what they might mean. And we could trace that across many attempts to, to. To police language, you know, coming, coming from the right. You could trace it back in, at the beginning of the, the mobilizations, the pro Palestinian mobilizations after the intensification of the genocide, after October 7th, when we had, you know, various politicians, not just in the UK but around the world, trying to claim that the words from the river to the sea were somehow essentially anti Semitic, as if, you know, their only meaning was this attachment to anti Semitism. When that attachment to antisemitism was actually being projected by those very politicians that were making that statement. It had nothing to do with the meanings of the words themselves. So I'm interested in the way we were able to outline in our conversation how language gets kind of discoupled from meaning and weaponized in these ways.
- [40:15]
Radio Reorient Host 2
Well, I mean, especially given the fact that that very phrase from the river to the sea is in the Likud party's charter as well. So then it's really very selective. I find the France example to be fascinating because I know culturally in France the phrase Salaam aliko may be seen as problematic and even as a threat that. But the phrase inshallah has seeped into the French vernacular. And to see this otherwise laicite on steroids. Society use this term very loosely as just to say, well, you know, I hope so in that way shows how language then is. Is really then monopolized by the powerful. Even that the language that doesn't belong to them. And I use the word belong in a very loaded way when it comes to this. But I'd also like to talk about how language is not just about the verbal. There is in England, of course, the whole idea of flags. And what is it that flags are projecting today, especially the. The cross at St. George versus the Union Jack. What does it say about belonging that end this year, of course we've lost, shall I say, Sir Norman Tebbett he of the notorious Tebbit Test, that if a team is coming to England for cricket, then for who to whom are you providing your loyalty and support? It's a question that's never asked of Australians, New Zealanders or even South Africans, but anyone from the subcontinent, and particularly from Pakistan, it becomes then a referendum on them.
- [42:01]
Chella Ward
I think that highlights a number of really important points and especially what, what you two have just said about, about the meaning ascribed to language and who gets to decide, and you know, it's even the very word terrorism, who gets to decide what that means. And it's invariably the people who hold power who hold sway. But when you actually look at the actions, the shared actions between what people are calling terrorism versus what state actors do, and that goes from their actions to their words. And I think there's, it sort of draws to mind for those that have seen it, a very V for vendetta sort of situation, this very kind of dystopian climate where, you know, words now hold particular meanings. Very 1984, very thought controlled. And the, you know, the imagery as well, like you say about the flags, something that sort of always gets brought up at these far right protests is we're not racist, we're just proud of our flags. But when you hear the other kinds of statements and comments that are being made, and of course there's a lot of racism at these events and now people that might have been tacitly proud to be British associate that flag instead with something very different, with this very kind of aggressive atmosphere. And I think that this is certainly a conversation that we could extend this indefinitely. And I have no doubt that a lot of these themes are going to be present in our other conversations. But for now, thank you to Kamran Khan for giving his time and thank you to our hosts and especially to our listeners. We hope to see you at another episode of Radio Reorient it.
- [44:36]
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