Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 224: The Reason for Reason — with Samir Gandesha
Speakers: Kathy Feng, Am Johal, Samir Gandesha
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Kathy Feng 0:05
Hello listeners! I am Kathy Feng with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.
On this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal is joined by Samir Gandesha, Associate Professor at SFU’s Department of the Humanities and the Director of the Institute for the Humanities. Samir and Am are in conversation about the history and 40 year anniversary of the Institute for the Humanities, the importance of challenging ideas in academia, and how family trauma has impacted his perspectives. We hope you enjoy the episode!
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Am Johal 0:45
Hello, welcome to Below the Radar. Delighted that you could join us again this week. We have a special guest right here from SFU, Samir Ganesha, who is the director of the Institute for Humanities and also a professor in the Department of Humanities. Welcome, Samir.
Samir Gandesha 1:04
Thanks, Am. It's always a pleasure to talk with you, especially on your podcast. So yeah, thanks very much.
Am Johal 1:09
Great. You're joining us today from Vienna, I assume. Wondering if we could begin with you introducing yourself a little bit.
Samir Gandesha 1:19
Sure. I've been at SFU, now for almost exactly 20 years. I started in 2003. And it's been in the Department of Humanities, but since last year, we've been called the Department of Global Humanities. And there's a there's a, I think, a good reason for that, which I'll come back to. I did my undergraduate kind of all over the place. I started at SFU, went to UBC. I went to the London School of Economics, and I came back to finish at UBC. So, when I got offered the job in 2003, it was really quite a blessing to be able to come back to my hometown, and come back to SFU, which was really wonderful. I did both my MA and PhD at York University, which is probably one of the premier left-wing, at least departments, of political science, and also the social political thought program is really, you know, world class and some really wonderful professors there when I was there.
And then I went on to do a two year postdoc at UC Berkeley, which was a great experience. I was hosted there by Martin Jay. He's a noted historian of the Frankfurt School, amongst other things. And then I came back and taught a little bit in, in Toronto at a college, Centennial College, got hired on in a permanent job. And then I had the good fortune to receive an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, which took me to Berlin for a couple of years. And then, then I came here to Vancouver and SFU.
So, I teach in the areas of political philosophy, art and aesthetics. And that's, you know, reflected in, in some of my publications. So, I've got a book out with Johan Hartle, who's director of the Academy of Fine Arts here in Vienna and spending some time with him. We're discussing various projects that we’re embarked on, including and especially two projects that I've mentioned, one is the Journal of Adorno Studies, which is now being hosted at SFU, I'm pleased to say and it's going to be relaunched imminently. So within the next couple months, we're gonna have a new version of the journal out, which I think is going to be quite, quite wonderful.
And the other thing is, we've got a, a conference happening in about three weeks in Budapest, on the 100th anniversary of Georg Lukács's History and Class Consciousness. And that's especially exciting, because it's not only the Institute and the Academy of Fine Arts, but also the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Lukács Archive that will be co-hosting this. And the archive has been a source of tremendous controversy in Hungary, because, of course, Lukács is a very important left-wing thinker, who was a prominent intellectual within the Communist Party. And now, his legacy is—along with the legacy of the left overall, I'd say globally, but especially in Hungary, is being systematically dismantled. And the archive was a flashpoint of this. So, we said, we really need to have this conference, we need to have it in Budapest, we need to have one, one evening in the archive itself, in a way to make a statement about how important this work is and how important it is not to allow it to be trashed, which is what the Orbán regime was trying to do. So, those are some of the projects we've been thinking about working on.
And I should also say in this connection, that as soon as I arrived at SFU, in 2003, I got involved with the Institute for the Humanities, in fact, when I was being interviewed for the job, I was essentially also being interviewed as a possible director of the Institute. And I leapt at this this opportunity, you know, I said, "No, this is this is one of the things that really attracts me to the university, it attracts me to the department—is an opportunity, not just to work on academic things, but to work on academic things in a public facing way," much the same way that you do, Am.
And I think you would agree that it's especially exciting to be able to bring ideas, intellectual debate and discourse and maybe sometimes some provocation to public sphere that's becoming what Marcuse called evermore one dimensional, where opposition of viewpoints are either negated, if they're properly oppositional, say they challenge capitalism, or they become incorporated, which is what we're seeing now with this whole equity diversity inclusion agenda. It's being completely instrumentalized and weaponized by a neoliberal institution. We see that happening at SFU at this very moment, and I think this has to be opposed. And I think it's independent institutions, like the Institute for the Humanities—and it's independent because it has its own endowment and it's got an autonomy because of that. And so it can raise questions that are uncomfortable on many different sides. We antagonize a lot of different groups and a lot of different individuals because, in a way, it's important to have difficult discussions. And that's one of the things, I think, that's marked my directorship, is trying to create those spaces for those difficult discussions.
Am Johal 6:22
Samir, wonder if we can start a little bit with—in terms of your own graduate studies, you, of course, are a scholar of Adorno and other areas, but wondering if you can speak a little bit to the work that you were doing in your doctorate that sort of brought you to SFU eventually?
Samir Gandesha 6:38
Yeah, thanks for the question. I wrote a doctoral dissertation called Tragedy and Enlightenment, where I traced the idea of enlightenment, in the sense of rational, self-reflection, through a number of texts that really centered on Ancient Greek tragedy. So, I looked at figures like Lukács and his early writings on tragedy, I looked at Hegel, and I looked at Horkheimer and Adorno's work, Dialectic of Enlightenment.
And the idea of tragedy is so fascinating. And it has sort of enduring value, because it points to some of the contradictions in the very idea of reason, right? Today, you could say, reason—certain form of instrumental rationality is the source of our troubles. It's the source of the domination of nature, it's a source of climate change, especially if you see that reason is inherent, a certain kind of reason, is inherent in our capitalist social relations, right. And that's a reason that's completely subordinated to capital accumulation. And that's a form of reason that is deeply disruptive to nature.
But at the same time, we still require a reason as a means by which we can critique and transcend capitalism. So, it's this sort of double edged sword and something interesting that Horkheimer and Adorno take from Wagner, and it's a statement that only the hand that wields the sword can cure the wound. And that hand is, in a sense, reason. It's both the source of the wound, and potentially, the source of the healing. And I think that some of the basic commitments I lay out in that in that work, I adhere to today, which is that, however much we want to, we may want to abandon reason, for the very reasons I just mentioned, it is an extremely perilous and dangerous thing to do. And I think that this is, what's at issue with some of the trends in thinking today that seem to want to embrace the typical form of irrationalism, a certain form of particularism, essentialism, and so on. And this is actually what, what Georg Lukács called, in his massive tome that diagnoses the intellectual sources of fascism, The Destruction of Reason. So, this is in a way the continuity of my work, and, and my thinking from that point to today.
Am Johal 9:16
Samir, so at the Institute for the Humanities, you've you've been director for some time now, and of course, the Institute is about to have its 40th anniversary, and I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to its history, its founding and kind of the role in space it has both, not just in the institution, but largely in the public sphere in Vancouver, but also internationally. It's played a really incredible role in terms of the intellectual output, the writing, the convening, that's happened over the past four decades.
Samir Gandesha 9:50
Yeah. Well, thanks a lot, Am. That's a great question. And coincidentally, the Institute's founding converged with my enrollment at SFU. I enrolled at SFU in 1983 and that's the year that the, the Institute was founded. Of course, I didn't have any idea about the Institute at that time. And, and I think we have the same sort of challenge right now, which is to introduce our students to the Institute and get them involved and have them, in a sense, lifelong learners there. I mean, one can, in a way, consolidate an enormous amount of knowledge just by attending the various activities that the Institute has put on over the last 40 years.
I should say that the Institute is the brainchild of somebody who, who we both love very much, and that's the late Jerry Zaslove. Jerry had tremendous wisdom and foresight to present to the institute—to the university, the idea of an interdisciplinary institution that would bring together academics and writers and artists across the humanities to address some of our most pressing questions in a way that would be accessible to the broader public. And Jerry did this tirelessly, he built all kinds of relationships with organizations, community groups, social movements, within Vancouver, within the province, and I think to some extent across the country, but at that stage, really, the, the focus was quite local. And I should say that not only did Jerry build relationships with social movements, he actually thought of the university itself as a kind of social movement. And this is extraordinary.
But I have to say that it's also ambivalent, I think if you have a certain kind of understanding of what that social movement is trying to accomplish, as you know, universities as social movement, it has a certain sort of grounding in scholarship and science and at the same time activism, it wants to make the world a better place, then that's one thing. However, there's a danger if the university becomes too politicized and too beholden to ideology. That is to say, it loses its critical distance from the very things that it maybe wants to pursue. That's a dangerous thing. And I think we're seeing that today, right, where everything is politicized. Science is politicized. Right, we see, we've seen this with COVID. And we've seen, we see it in a number of other areas. And this is dangerous. And it speaks to a larger crisis of legitimacy of our institutions overall. So, I'm quite mindful of this. And that's why I think at the Institute, I've tried to create spaces for all kinds of discussions happen, not just the ones that I or the steering committee would agree with, and would want to see, but other ones that maybe challenge us, maybe challenge our students, maybe challenge our colleagues, but we have to, as a public institution, create those sorts of spaces. Very, very important. So, I would, I would really insist on that.
So, over 40 years, yeah, the Institute has really developed a lot. We've had various different directors who have put their own stamp on the direction the Institute has taken, in people like Don Grayston, and Anne-Marie Feenberg, and then myself, I've, I've been there since, I guess 2010. So, it's about 13 years now. And yeah, over the years, you know, each director tries to bring in the kinds of things that they're interested in, even if we keep him on the proviso of what I said, to try and keep things open as well, to things that other people want to do, people on the steering committee, students, other colleagues. I think our record has been quite good.
I'm, I'm especially proud of two major events. The first was the 2014 conference on the state of extraction, which was a conference that was, in a sense, critically analyzing the then Harper government's attempts to transform Canada into an energy superpower. And we see all the fallout of that, to this very day with the Trudeau government's, you know, commitment to trans mountain pipeline, and so on, while at the same time talking about renewables and talking about energy transitions, and so on. We've seen the exact fallout of that this summer. We're seeing it now unfold in real time before our very eyes, in terms of this, you know, the forest fires that are happening—wildfires that are happening all over the province, and it will only continue to get worse. So, I think this was a huge success, because it really centered Indigenous, Indigenous voices, and not just from BC in Canada, but also from Africa, and from Latin America. But then there were also environmental lawyers, there were activists, there were, of course, academics and journalists. So, it was a fantastic conference and I'm extremely proud of it. I can't take credit fully for it, of course, there's people like Steve Collis, and others—other colleagues and community members who played massive roles in bringing this together.
And then in 2017/2018, we were very disturbed by some of the developments that were happening with the election of Trump, with Brexit, with what's been a kind of ongoing problem in Eastern Europe and—or Central and Eastern Europe, places like Hungary and Poland—developments in Greece. So, we decided to have a—basically a year long free school, called Specters of Fascism. And it's funny because we had a discussion at that time, is it not a little bit extreme to call this fascism? It's certainly a kind of authoritarianism, but fascism seems a bit strong. Then within about a year's time, it just became a concept that was being discussed seriously in the pages of the New York Times. So, I think we were quite prescient in terms of seeing some of the writing on the walls. And now the election of actual fascists, neo-fascists in Italy and Sweden, shows exactly how sadly prescient we were. So, I'm quite happy about, about that free school, because it actually turned into a book. And the book has, has received quite a good reception. It's just been translated to Spanish, and various other chapters are being—have been translated into Portuguese and, and other languages.
So, from, from Vancouver, BC, we've had quite a global resonance. We've also sought to do this quite consciously in terms of not only addressing global issues from a Canadian perspective, but also we've got a number now of associates. So, we have something like 25 Associates. Am, you're you're one of them, of course. People drawn from the universities, not just SFU, but other universities, but also from the world of journalism, from the arts, from music. And a number of those associates are located in places like, like Europe, like India, and other parts of the world. So we're very, very pleased about that. And that has, in a way, both mirrored and pushed the department in the direction of being also more globally focused.
And there's a specific reason for that. And that is to say, we really emphasize the importance the ongoing and enduring legacy of the Western tradition, however, compromised it has been with forces of white supremacy, Eurocentrism, and colonialism, and is ongoing. And if you look at what's happening in France today, it's not something in the past, it's very much alive today. Very real, and geopolitically consequential, right. But there are aspects of the Western tradition that form the basis of our own possibility of being critical and engaging in transformative politics. So, we try to see the both—you know, both sides of that, as Cornell West would say, you know, we need to confront the worst of the European tradition, tradition with its best, right? And I think this is the idea of immanent critique. And it's still very important to maintain. That gets back to my point about the self-criticism of reason. We shouldn't abandon reason. But we should allow reason, in a sense, to critique—criticize itself. And I think this is a really important focus.
So, not only is it attempting to look at the internal contradictions of Europe, and European culture and its legacy, but also bring it—bring those traditions into dialogues with other very rich traditions, including, and especially the Indigenous traditions on Turtle Island and elsewhere. East Asian and South Asian traditions of thought, as well. And that's a kind of commitment to reshaping the curriculum in the Department of Global Humanities. Do you see these things are working in parallel, and I think it's very exciting. We maintain a strong grounding in the Western tradition. But we open that tradition up to criticism, to dialogue, to constructive debate with other competing and complementary traditions.
Am Johal 19:00
Samir, I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to—I know the Institute, has the Contours journal, you do a number of special issues over the years, but can speak a little bit to the kind of scholarly output besides the books and other symposia that are happening? There's, there's the journal that has a long history?
Samir Gandesha 19:19
Yeah, I'm not sure the history is that long. It's maybe what, five or six years, but it is something we hope to eventually have a long history. And it's something that we are trying to develop as a kind of peer review, academic journal that will also have a more, let's say, public facing dimension. So, it will really mirror what the Institute does, both being an academic source and a resource, but then also a space where more, let's say, contemporary discussions can be had. I wouldn't say necessarily journalism, but a little bit more open and accessible kinds of things will be published. And I think, you know, this is also very important.
The university has been attacked from outside from the far-right, from the right, from conservatives, who, at the end of the day benefit from an ignorant citizenry. Let's just be very direct and frank about that. But it's also being critiqued by your average citizen, who often finds themselves completely excluded by everything that's happening in the university, because often academics only want to talk to themselves and they only want to use jargon that they don't explain. And I think this is a problem. It's a real problem of legitimacy. And the charge of elitism is not always misplaced when it comes to these critiques of the university.
So, we've tried to, in a way, counteract this to some extent, not only in terms of the kinds of events, the panels and conferences and talks that we host, but also what we're trying to publish. And I think your, your subscribers might be interested to know as well that I've been doing a bit of work in Mexico establishing connections with colleagues, at a university in Puebla. And it looks like it might be possible for us to both have some of our work that we've already published in Contours translated into Spanish and published in a journal there and vice versa. So, this is, again, another global dimension.
And some of the journals that as a graduate student, I always really enjoyed reading—so back then, more recently, not as much and I'm thinking specifically of Telos, which was really a great journal of critical theory, very much on the left, and now it's gone quite right-wing. But one of the things that Telos did early on was it did a lot of really important translations of Italian thinkers, of French thinkers, like Baudrillard, right—of course, critical theory from the Germans. So this was very valuable. This is the kind of scholarly exchange that's so important. And what's interesting about Telos, they said it wasn't an academic journal, in a strict sense. It wasn't located in university, the people who founded Telos were people who weren't wanted in the university, brilliant people, brilliant minds. But they weren't these cookie cutter academics you could easily slot into a position. They were real mavericks. I'm talking about Paul Piccone, in particular, real mavericks, who, who did their own thing, who were quite brilliant, and had quite an amazing vision for the future of academic, scholarly, and political discourse, but couldn't do it in the university. So I think there's a real space for this kind of work again.
Am Johal 22:33
Samir, there's a number of projects you have coming with the Institute, from a full day conference on Adorno, to the upcoming Apocalyptic Anxieties Conference, and also something that you guys have been working on already, for some time, a major conference on fascism, next fall, which incidentally precedes the voting in the American election. So, wondering if you can speak a little bit to that upcoming programming that sort of coincides with your 40th anniversary in late October this year, but also looking forward to the larger conference, which sort of goes along with the work that was done in the Specters of Fascism free school and the book that came out of it.
Samir Gandesha 23:17
Yeah, thanks a lot. So, I'll just do it chronologically. We have a conference coming up. By the time I think the podcast is out, it will already have happened. But it's basically a day-long symposium, co-hosted with the Journal of Adorno Studies, by the way. So, we're very excited about doing that together. Two of the journal—journal’s editors will be there, myself and Antonia Hofstätter. And it will look at questions of Adorno's contribution to ecology and environmentalism, his thinking through of the figure of childhood, and then I'll be giving a, what will be essentially a preview of a lecture that I've been invited to give in London in mid October, as the Gillian Rose Memorial Lecture.
Gillian Rose is a very important philosopher who wrote the first book in English on Adorno, I think 1977/78. And she's really quite a brilliant woman, also the sister of Jacqueline Rose, who continues to be very productive and very engaging as a writer. Gillian died, rather prematurely and rather, tragically, has left quite a legacy. So, I was very honored to be invited to do the lecture. And that's going to be a talk on the political valence of identity politics today.
So, in late October, this will be October 27 to 29th. We had, as you mentioned, a large international conference entitled, Apocalyptic Anxieties, which will essentially look from a psychoanalytic and political theoretical approach at the unfolding climate crisis. And again, sadly, this couldn't be more relevant to the moment we're living through now. I mean, people are being evacuated from their homes, people are dying from, you know, from some of the fires that we've seen around the globe, and especially we're concerned about what's going on in our backyard in BC. And this only brings home that much more, let's say vividly and intensely how we have to cope emotionally, psychologically, with the sense that, you know, climate crisis isn't something for the future. The future has arrived, and it had actually arrived some time ago. And how do we, how do we cope with this without becoming completely despairing, and therefore making the problem worse?
So, we have a number of amazing scholars who will be coming to address this, I'll mention three of our keynotes. First is Adrian Ivakhiv, who is coming in as a very distinguished—call him an ecological philosopher, cultural theorist. He's coming in to begin his tenure in January 2024, as a J.S. Woodsworth Chair in the Humanities, so very excited about that. I'm sure his talk is going to be phenomenal.
We also have Lewis Gordon, very noted and respected philosopher of African Studies or African/Africana philosophy. He's an expert in existentialism, psychology and his written important works on Franz Fanon. So, I'm excited to hear from him.
But I think the most exciting speaker, not to take anything away from the previous two, is Marina Silva, who is the current Minister of the Environment and Climate Change. The portfolio had been called simply the Minister of the Environment and when she took the position, she had it changed to Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change, to really declare a real intent to address the problem. So, we're absolutely delighted that she's going to be able to come. And then when she's here, I'd very much like to put her in touch with local Indigenous communities. The plan will be to invite elders to come and meet with her and to establish some long, what I hope will be long lasting relationships, even after then she, she leaves office, maybe they can maintain some, some relationships. Very excited about that, I hope people will—the program will be available. Well, by the time this is, this is up, the conference will be imminent, and the information will be widely available.
But one of the things I really would like your listeners to, to know those who are based in Vancouver, is that on the Friday night, the 27th, we're gonna have a big celebration. Starting at eight o'clock, it'll be at the Waldorf. This will be to mark the 40th anniversary. We'll have some some speeches, very short ones, I guarantee you. I'm also going to be very brief in my remark, so we can get on with having a good time. We have Charlie Demers as emcee and he's always a gaffe. He's such a great personality and, you know, great writer and comedian. We have a band called Los Empanadas. They'll be playing for—doing two 45 minutes sets. We're gonna have a DJ, food, and our colleague, Steve Collis, is organizing some poetry readings. So I think it should be a great night, it'll be from eight to late. So please come, come to that.
And then yeah, we're very excited to be getting in motion, the organizing of a conference that will happen in the following October, October 2024, which will be on basically neoliberal fascism. And we want to bring in the top experts in the field. And we're happy to get a book out of the Specters of Fascism free school, but that was really an intervention. This is planned as a real scholarly contribution that will, again, take a global perspective, I think this is something I haven't seen so much. There's often interest in, oh, there—you know, the kind of resurgence of the far-right in the United States, and maybe a comparison with Europe and so on. But there isn't enough of a global perspective on it. And I think this is what the Institute can bring. And I tell you the reason why this is important. It's important for a number of reasons.
But I think the key one, is that there's this easy kind of analysis of fascism in the United States in particular, that it's a resurgence of this kind of, you know, revanchist white supremacy. Fine. That makes sense to a degree, yes, in the United States. But it doesn't account for the rise of fascism or the reemergence of fascism in India. There's no way white supremacy can explain Hindutva. There's a different dynamic here, and it must be grasped alongside of Trump, the Proud Boys etc, right? And what's happened to the Republican Party, which is quite extraordinary.
So, I think we can really provide an excellent space within which these discussions can happen. Again, we're going to try and get the very top scholars in the field participating in this conference. So, I really hope people mark the dates, both of the conference this October 27 to 29th, and then essentially, keep in mind that the following October there must be something very worthwhile and people should come and check it out. All of our events, I'm very proud to say are free.
And I also must say this and this has to remain in the podcast. Jennifer Simons and Simon Foundation—Simons Foundation of Canada, were hugely influential in establishing the endowment for the Institute and also for the J.S. Woodsworth Chair, and that program, and without that, we wouldn't have been able to do any of this work. So, she deserves a huge, thank you, huge debt of gratitude for everyone who's attended any Institute events, because nobody has to pay anything. That's because the endowment is supporting it. So this is really something I want to make very clear.
Everything today is commodified. To do anything at the university, you have to pay money. To go and hear any kind of talk these days, it seems you have to pay something, even if it's sliding scale. Our events are free of charge. And I think this is the reason why—it also gives us the autonomy and independence that we've really benefited from, and I think the public sphere has benefited from. So, I also have to say that.
She'll be back to the October event, and she'll be saying a few words about her own activism in nuclear disarmament. Something today, as I note, the water from Fukushima is now being released in the Pacific Ocean, is more timely than ever, as is, of course, the threat of nuclear escalation in the Ukraine-Russian war. So, I think this is somebody who stood behind us and I'm very proud of the fact that somebody like this, who supported the Institute.
Am Johal 31:59
Samir, I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to your recent writing projects. I know that one of your books just got translated into Italian recently, but, kind of, what your—some of your current projects are, or recent projects in terms of your own intellectual concerns?
Samir Gandesha 32:18
Yeah. Thanks. So, I'm here in Europe for the Lukács conference. I was participating in a number of other workshops and conferences and giving talks and one of the the other things that I'm here for is a launch of the Italian translation that you were alluding to, of a book that was published in 2017, called, Spell of Capital. And it is, I think, a timely translation because it essentially deals with György Lukács's fundamental contribution, which was in History and Class Consciousness, he developed the concept of reification, or thing-ification, which essentially means the transformation of human beings, human capacities, human labour, into something that's thing—thing-like and static, and locks us into a—an understanding of society as unchangeable, and eternal, just like something that is natural, a natural thing. So it's timely that translation is happening. I'm very, very pleased about that.
And, so, what I'm working on now in a way is, is continuous with these concerns that, that I was addressing with Hartle—this book is also co-edited volume with Johan Hartle. And the, you know, so the first book was Aesthetic Marx, The Spell of Capital, and then, of course, Specters of Fascism. The two projects that, that I've got going right now is to look at Adorno, in two volumes that I'd like to complete by the end of my sabbatical, which would be the end of 20—it'll be the fall of 2025. One will be to look at the Adorno's non-identity thinking—his, let's say, dialectical approach to identity politics, which I think is really necessary today because so many organizations and institutions in the public sphere itself, the the art world,—you could even say the Ukraine war now has been affected by certain sort of identitarian thinking. And so this has to be challenged. And so that's one project.
And the other one is really, to try to understand what the philosophy of fascism is, and what a kind of anti-fascist philosophy might look like. I think this is something we really need to think through today because the fascism of our period, our era, or our epoch is very different from that of the 1920s and 1930s. So, we need to come to terms with this. And we have to do it conceptually, we have to think about the ontological and epistemological commitments that lie buried in what seems to most people to be a kind of thuggish ideology. It's not at all a thuggish ideology. It's one that has tremendous subtlety and complexity to it. That's why it must be understood and criticized and learned from to a certain extent insofar as we need to understand its appeal today. And that's—the only way we can do that is not by forbidding discussions of it, but actually deepening discussions of it and taking it seriously and knowing how to combat it. So, so that'll be the other, the other project, which is very much a—you know, the both of them are continuous with especially the last book, which is Spectres of Fascism.
Am Johal 35:35
Now, Samir, wondering if you could speak a little bit to just, you know, your own family story. I know that your parents and other relatives, you know, went from India to East Africa, via the UK before settling in Vancouver. I'm wondering if you can share a little bit of that.
Samir Gandesha 35:54
Sure, my nuclear family—so my immediate family left East Africa in the year that I was born, which is 1965. And then I basically grew up here or there in Canada. But my extended family, my on my dad's side, who were based in Uganda, were expelled in 1972. So, so both of my grandparents emigrated from the western part of India, the northwestern part of India called Gujarat, which is the state that Modi is from. He was, at one point, the governor of Gujarat and developed the so-called Gujarat neoliberal model before becoming Prime Minister.
So, my grandparents come from small villages in that part of India and so they emigrated to different parts of East Africa, Kenya, and Uganda, and my extended family—so my, my father's brothers and sisters and their, their families were expelled in 1972 by the Idi Amin regime. And this act of expulsion was, for me growing up, I mean, this happened, I was very young, seems quite traumatic. And then as I came to know the history more, it made me inherently skeptical, kind of identitarian claims, it made me skeptical of the claims of the Asians there who were expelled. And it made me skeptical, of course of, of the regime that expelled them on the basis of Africanization, right. They've mobilized a certain kind of communal hatred of South Asian, Indians and Pakistanis, as a means of consolidating the regime. And so I think in both—on both sides, I was skeptical, because I noticed a tremendous amount of racism on the part of the Indian community, in, not only in Uganda, but throughout East Africa, throughout the continent, and you see this also in Gandhi's response to, to Black South Africans. It was racist, there is no other way of describing it. I think he did go on to change his attitudes. But when he was a young man there practicing law, he was—he had these racist views. It is understandable, given a caste system within which Hindus are discriminated against themselves. So of course, out—members of our groups are going to be discriminated against even more.
So, I think I was always skeptical of group identity. I've always been skeptical and quite hostile to the idea that what defines one is there, a purely contingent accidental membership in some kind of group. And that this then becomes a signifier, a political identification and orientation. So, that has sort of really oriented my work a lot. And I think people might think I'm a little bit over obsessed with it. But I think it's a, it's an important thing to be obsessed by, I think.
So, that's some of my, my background, and some of my, my history and how, how that has shaped my own, my own views, in fact, and there's one other thing, and it's probably brought me to the Frankfurt School, and a certain, let's say, dialectical view of Europe. And that is, I went to visit my grandfather in 1973, before he died in England, and I noticed already there was a certain hostility, which as an eight year old, I couldn't really put my finger on. But I subsequently realized it had to do with the migrant crisis, not unlike the one we were seeing today, right. And that is to say, there was a hostility amongst a lot of English people to the refugees coming in from Africa. And I had a sense that this was in the air.
So I went back and then a few years later, there was a made for TV show. And it was quite, quite an influential show called The Holocaust simply, and it went into for the first time really, a kind of in depth view of what the Holocaust might have been like, you know, and I remember saying to myself, and this is something I never forget, I mean, this was, you know, I was maybe it was around the 10 or 12 or so, thinking, "Well, if this is what white people do to each other, what are they going to do to us?" I mean, the sense of insecurity, the sense of embattlement, the sense of what, you know, are we going to be next. Really was very profound at the time. So, I think that, you know, these sort of interest in far-right, deep systemic racism, questions of belonging and non-belonging, the Jewish experience in Europe, these things have really fascinated me since I was quite young, a child, basically.
Am Johal 40:36
Samir, is there anything you'd like to add?
Samir Gandesha 40:39
The only thing that I would like to add is that being the director for over 10 years of the Institute for the Humanities, one of the things that I've appreciated probably the most, is being able to work with people, being able to bring people together to be able to work with a plethora of different groups and organizations; artists, writers, political actors, politicians, activists, and also people like you, Am. We've, we've done a lot of work together. And this is something that I've really very much enjoyed and benefited from and learnt from. I've learnt.
I think this is probably what I want to say the most, is it since I came into the director's chair, about, yeah, about 13 years ago, I've learnt an enormous amount, because unlike just dealing with your scholarly colleagues who are working in the same fields, and reading the same literature, and so on, where you, you inherently feel comfortable, because this is the stuff you're doing, you're often in a position of not feeling that comfortable, because you don't have the knowledge that maybe some new speakers come come in and have, so you have to be able to work with people in this way. And you inevitably end up learning so much from them, right, that it has really enriched my, let's say, intellectual orientation. And it's simply been also very pleasurable just meeting a wide variety of people and working with a wide variety of people.
Am Johal 42:00
Samir, thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar and once again, to the entire community involved with the Institute for the Humanities as well. Congratulations on a rich 40 plus years, and hopefully right into the future.
Samir Gandesha 42:16
Thanks, Am. Can I just say one last thing. I haven't, haven't mentioned this, but it was a very sad thing about a week and a half, two weeks ago that I heard of the passing of a woman by the name of Trish Graham. And Trish Graham, had been with the Institute for decades, she was really the heart and soul of the Institute with Jerry. She was the control center, she did everything. And I just want to say this, that, you know, it's a really sad thing that she's passed away. But I want to honor her commitment. Her contributions to where we are today. It's people like this, who often don't get the credit that's due. They work behind the scenes. But without them, nothing happens.
And I'd also like to mention as well, somebody who came after Trish, that's Huyen Pham. Huyen has been—played a similar role to Trish Graham. Huyen has now gone on to bigger and better things. She's now Communications Director in the department, but she's still very much working with the Institute. But when she came on board, I think, 2014 or so, we were able to almost double our capacity simply because of her organizational ability. So, everything that we've been doing, since that time, really owes a huge debt of gratitude to Huyen Pham, and all the other staff members, all the other support people who are often unrecognized. So, I just want to acknowledge that labour that goes in. It's often over and above what needs to be done. But it's because of a love of the project. It's for a love of contribution that an organization like the Institute and like the Vancity Office for Community Engagement, other such organizations can make, and so I just want to acknowledge that very, very heartfully.
Am Johal 44:12
Samir, thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar.
Samir Gandesha 44:15
Thanks for inviting me. It was a pleasure.
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Kathy Feng 44:20
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to our episode with Samir Gandesha! Head to the show notes to learn more about the films and resources mentioned in the show. You can follow us on social media at sfu_voce to keep up to date on new podcast releases. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll catch you next time on Below the Radar.
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