
Quote from Dr Shah read out at the eZine Launch at the Camberwell College of Art, UAL 4th of December, 2018
We can not decolonise until we acknowledge and understand our colonial pasts and the whitewashing of British history. In recent years, contemporary British identity appears to have become synonymous with whiteness and the histories of Empire have become slowly omitted from national consciousness. The nuanced and often difficult narratives of Empire that live as legacy in many facets of British society, are now replaced with binary narratives of white and black and immigration leading to white English poverty. Complexed identities and contexts reduced to simplified and bigoted narratives of difference and colourism.
The challenge that confronts movements like ours, are such barriers, that present in our societal structures and systems and that represent colonial legacies of erasure and omission. Without an acknowledgement of the invisible othered, a decolonisation process can not occur.
So I call on to all colleagues, practitioners, students, and peers to begin engaging with histories and stories of Empire to understand why decolonisation is so important. Without an existing knowledge of these contexts, we can not dismantle the dangerous messages that have become indoctrinated in to every layer of our knowledge systems and structures.
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