Activity

“Decolonize” is a big idea, but it does not yield, by itself, a systematic political program. Nor need it. Nothing wrong with starting on one statue and seeing what comes of it. The thing for the less engagé among us is to listen and learn what we can. Universities are resilient creatures and have …

If Oxford is worth reforming, as activists must believe it is since they’re not demanding that we tear it down and start from scratch, then it must be because it can be reformed, that this can be effected by argument and persuasion. But we should keep our expectations low. Oxford — and the mainstre…

Rhodes Must Fall was picked up in Oxford by student activists during my last term there, in response to a landscape just as marked as Cape Town by Rhodes and his money. They set their sights on similar goals: “the plague of colonial iconography,” the “Euro-centric curriculum . . . which frames the …

I’m chary of speaking too confidently about South Africa: my impression of things is pieced together from fragments of reportage and testimony.

I suppose this was what they call repressive tolerance. You could read what you liked — no one would stop you — but you would be met with incomprehension if you said anything that smacked of the New Left Review rather than the reliably liberal Philosophy & Public Affairs: “reify” or “heteronormativ…