00:00:00: This is the Urban

00:00:01: Political.

00:00:03: The podcast on urban theory, research and activism.

00:00:33: Millions are being displaced and there's a pervasive uncertainty that is gripping millions more, whether it be in the never-ending genocide in Gaza.

00:00:43: The needless war on the Iranian people or the War on Refugees & Migrants On the Streets of Cities In the US Or even on minorities in India.

00:00:54: Amidst the remaking of world through what some have described new illiberalism the very facade of humanitarianism, what constitutes as being human is falling apart.

00:01:06: In today's episode we have brought together the authors of two books into conversation that allow us to better engage with these issues.

00:01:14: Together With The Authors Nifrati Taidar and Anuradha Ayer Siddiqui will be discussing the book's Remainded Life And Architects Of Migration, Dada Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement respectively in a cross-cutting dialogue with the authors.

00:01:32: So welcome to the episode, Neferti and Anu!

00:01:35: It would be lovely if you could briefly introduce yourselves too...to the listeners.

00:01:39: maybe we can begin with Nefertiti?

00:01:42: Thank You Nitin and thank you for the invitation to be on this podcast.

00:01:47: my name is Nefertitidiar.

00:01:49: I am a professor of women's gender and sexuality studies teaching at Barnard College.

00:01:55: I was born in the Philippines on the western coast of northern Luzon.

00:02:03: And I moved to the city for college, and I move through

00:02:07: U.S.,

00:02:09: for graduate school...I mentioned my life because it was also during a period of dictatorship.

00:02:15: that has consequently shaped quite a lot in understanding about what perspective I bring into this world.

00:02:24: The author of several books Remainded Life is the last one.

00:02:30: in the Philippines, in the north.

00:02:35: Thank you Nitin and thank you Neferti.

00:02:38: it's really an honor for me to be here with two of my favorite people.

00:02:42: I am also a professor at Barnard College.

00:02:46: um i was born in Chennai In India which we was called Madras At The Time That I Was Born There between India and the United States for most of my life.

00:02:59: I've lived all over the world, but these are two main places that i have lived.

00:03:03: Part of this is because I'm a descendant of migrants who were forced to move for various reasons.

00:03:10: so... The issues we'll talk about today has been both very personal.

00:03:18: They have been part of a long kind of professional journey and understanding my own discipline of art history, an architectural history which is sort of formed as a colonial discipline.

00:03:30: And trying to also understand how those of us who are most impacted by built environments that were made by others let's say try to decolonize the narratives.

00:03:45: Thanks Neferty, thanks Anu.

00:03:47: Thanks for being part of this podcast and thanks for sharing your work today.

00:03:54: I wanted to start with an opening question To each of you.

00:03:57: so how did concepts have remained at life?

00:03:59: And architecture migration emerged in our work.

00:04:03: When did you stop thinking?

00:04:04: if these concept these ideas How do these concept allow us to see what we're living through At the moment better?

00:04:13: Maybe we can start with Nifoti again.

00:04:16: Thanks,

00:04:19: Nitin!

00:04:19: If I think about where it emerged...I feel like i have to say first that after I wrote it I retrospectively realized If I may, i just wanted to say that the genealogy of it.

00:04:43: you know my first book was called fantasy production sexual economies and other Philippine consequences.

00:04:49: Of The New World Order.

00:04:50: And That Was An Attempt To Grapple Really With As I Mentioned The Dictatorship That I Grew Up Under In Its Aftermath.

00:04:58: Um...and It Was Also An Atttempt To Think About Globalization.

00:05:01: But There I Was Very Much Concerned With The Organizing concepts and codes of political economy, and what their consequences were for the lived lives of people.

00:05:12: Particularly um...what I saw as a state-sponsored sex economy prostitution economy that had been bolstered by the dictatorship.

00:05:23: so having done wanted to focus more on historical experiences, not just the codes and protocols organizing our lives.

00:05:34: but you know historical experience as processes that were shaped.

00:05:39: But are we're also shaping social movements?

00:05:42: And there I undertook a study of Social Movements Feminist Urban Activists in Revolutionary Movements or proper political subjective ideals in these political movements issued because of their tethering to certain modern ideas of political subjectivity.

00:06:06: And so, I was urged to look for other experiences that acted as as part of the very forces of change that movements drew on, but nevertheless also exceeded those movements.

00:06:21: That they subsequently got captured or subsumed by forces of globalization.

00:06:28: so that was what The Second Book is about.

00:06:31: So you can already hear Manifest in the title of that book which was called Things Fall Away.

00:06:36: You can already here the emergence of this concept Of Remaindered Life y'know?

00:06:41: The stirrings of that concept In terms this subalternization of social experiences here by modern political ideals even within political movements, right?

00:06:53: And not just by states and capital.

00:06:55: That it was these norms the way that we understand politics.

00:07:00: so that was subalternizing these social experiences.

00:07:05: but

00:07:05: what's equally important for me is how I saw... Not to suggest a foreclosure of these social experiences, but actually their persistence.

00:07:15: Their persistence at the social experience.

00:07:18: is there mutation what I saw as they're role in this large scale transformations so that these were historical experiences that we are retrospectively remainder.

00:07:30: and yet how to had a historic force?

00:07:34: uh... then we misrecognize because we attribute much of these historical transformations to the big forces that we habitually credit.

00:07:44: transformation with, you know imperial states post-colonial governments global capital.

00:07:49: These were as a feminist We recognize very much The Big Agents Of World Historical Change.

00:07:55: so... ...the emergence of the concept of Remainded Life comes out of that project of looking for this historical experiences that emerge, um...that exceeded some of these political ideals.

00:08:09: But I have to say it also emerged out at the point where my grappling with global war on terror had just launched shortly after the bombing of World Trade Center in New York in If we all remember that Blitzkrieg, shock and awe bombing of Afghanistan in the wake of nine eleven.

00:08:33: For decades I had...I was grappling with it at the same time that i was grappling With the rise of finance And its outsize role In determining capitalist life not just capitalist life, but the normative conducting of everyday lives.

00:08:51: So these two forces—war and finance was what I was grappling with

00:08:57: that

00:08:58: created what you mentioned in your opening remarks as this massive disposability and that I was witnessing across these decades of the opening of the twenty-first century.

00:09:16: So, Remaindered Life is my effort to grapple with this massive disposability.

00:09:24: It also emerged, but more attuned to the dynamics of value production than in my previous work.

00:09:32: Because I also saw that as rising to the forefront of what I saw is a new global political economy of life where Life has become the object-the raw material The fuel... the medium of Value Production and accumulation of capitalist wealth.

00:09:52: So in some ways you can say the book, The Book of Remaindered Life and the concept is an attempt to think about what falls away if you will from a situation in which capital seeks to subsume every moment and modality of living by valuing What falls away is what I understand to be the excess of social reproduction.

00:10:20: The ways that communities are designated for disposability, including what Anu writes about which are refugees and migrant workers... All these communities who are designed for disposablility or whether they're disposable in a sense at the disposition of others in forms of servitude or absolutely disposable, or absolutely expendable as most evident these contexts of outright genocidal war.

00:10:58: That is where

00:11:03: Thanks Neferti, thanks for sharing taking us back and also contextualizing it within your larger body of work.

00:11:10: And the thinking that you've been doing I know i would like to invite you perhaps next uh...to share The same about architecture migration.

00:11:21: Yeah thank You um..and um....I appreciate Nefertiy though we you laid out the arc of these three books.

00:11:31: I was thinking as you were talking that um, i've been working on architecture of migration for...I think fifteen years.

00:11:38: so at that pace- I don't know if I'll ever write three books but but there are certainly maybe three books in this book.

00:11:48: But what I wanted to kind of start with is just say that architecture of migration, the title was very carefully crafted concept for this book and you know it's used really very... With regard to the historically specific referent of Dadaab, The Architecture Of Dadaabe Kenya And the settlements That were made There by Somalis & Other Africans who had for generations migrated within this land, across the land and they even settled in various ways.

00:12:21: in migratory modes, and more recent history have been migrants than refugees.

00:12:27: These settlements were also made by aid workers who themselves are migrants mostly from the global north or other parts of Kenya.

00:12:39: they're brought into this region through a humanitarian regime.

00:12:43: so together these groups affected what I call which is an oxymoron because emergency settlement in the context of humanitarian crisis is regularly understood as temporary.

00:12:59: It has no history, it has no future and only this immediate present.

00:13:03: but I think what we see are the logics And in a way it provides an object lesson, exactly of what you've just described Neferti.

00:13:22: Of this thing that we have been told to understand as remaindered.

00:13:28: and yet the forces are acting very differently.

00:13:33: but maybe I'll talk about how to the book through.

00:13:39: The book builds on a few major arguments and I think each of these will say about my own way in, you know?

00:13:46: My first like Nefertis' book, this is attempting to make an intervention in the realm of social and political.

00:13:55: But it's also really intervening within aesthetic.

00:14:00: And that has been very important for me—and I mean aesthetic in three ways —in a conventional way, reference-to-beauty or as thesis, but also in the philosophical reading of aesthetics.

00:14:15: So at the core of architecture migration I'm really demanding that we look closely at architecture.

00:14:29: or a remainder in the very ways that Nefertis is talking about, of The Nation-State System.

00:14:54: But I do think that...I've asked us to think about it precisely in terms of architectural form as this centering not only of architectural forms but something like architectural symbolism.

00:15:09: So that kind of aesthetic orientation is one thing, and that comes from my own training as an artist.

00:15:14: As an architect- as a art historian...as an architectural historian.

00:15:18: The second thrust though I spoke about this for a second at the beginning Is About Migration And particularly migration as method Not migration as historical subject.

00:15:30: I'm actually really interested in thinking with migration and what migration allows us to think about.

00:15:35: And if we start to think About migration, an architecture together We see a real paradox because were made To think of architecture as something fixed As predicated on fixity.

00:15:48: Its architectural history is predicated On documents from landed archives.

00:15:58: But the third thing, and this is maybe most personal way I came into this work.

00:16:04: The third kind of orientation in that book was what it really takes seriously are traditions about black consciousness or planetary thought.

00:16:14: In this book i braid together intellectuals for whom global Black Thought and quite situated African worlds our home.

00:16:28: And I think that quite literally this thinking comes from my own parents and the causes that they believed in, fought for.

00:16:36: When my father first came to The United States he found himself thrust into the Jim Crow world of the United States and occupying a very strange position within it maybe occupying both sides of a divide.

00:16:51: these are anti-apartheid activists I have thought in this book and written with African people living through forced displacement, with Somali intellectuals building on long intergenerational oral material cultural and academic traditions.

00:17:11: And also artists architects historians who study everything from ancient interlocking cave systems that cross the African continent the relational water bodies of Africa from rivers to oceans, to subterranean aquifers.

00:17:31: So I've read with Steve Biko to really think about black consciousness.

00:17:47: And I think that is what impregnates these pages and it's been my home base,

00:18:04: How the humanitarian present is also perhaps a refraction of this colonial history of land.

00:18:11: So you talk about how Dadaab emerges as a contingent territory, which is nestled as a ghost space and contested territory on the dividing line between British Kenya and Italian Somaliland refracted in this sort of humanitarian present.

00:18:37: So, I mean there's also interesting methodological maneuver.

00:18:42: as i see it um in the way how you sort of um alter position.

00:18:48: architecture is a way to see territory and land history as well .I wanted to maybe hear a little bit more about that.

00:18:57: if Yeah,

00:19:00: there's a couple of points I'd like to make.

00:19:03: And the book delves into pre-colonial colonial history and also post-colonal history if you want to think about it in a periodized way.

00:19:17: It is important for me that we are taught not look at them by assuming that we know their history already, or which regimes of history they might fit into.

00:19:34: And I think one of the things I really wanted to do was push against it and say no this place where taught to see as a refugee camp is actually holding multiple regimes first-of all but also very long history.

00:19:57: But some of what you've pointed to, I found through a lot of archival research and a lot like oral history research really found the ways in which this strange space where these refugee camps are located today happens to have very long history.

00:20:16: Like many iterations being contested territory under different political regimes One of the political regime's that i'd like.

00:20:23: point too.

00:20:28: One small thing that Nefertiti just said, I believe if we want to think about the global war on terror.

00:20:36: We could very well go back The day that the camps at Dadaab were instituted, I would say this war on terror we are still dealing with today predates the twenty-first century.

00:20:52: At least by a little bit and you know... We can look to the collapse of the Soviet Union or other things in what ways it was taking place in Africa.

00:20:59: but Dadaabe itself and how the camps got turned into an apartheid space effectively has a lot to do with the U.S.-led global war on terror, and it has to do creating an iteration of the security state in East

00:21:17: Africa.".

00:21:18: That's maybe one iteration.

00:21:20: I think this long history way which is certain territory constructed as an emergency territory.

00:21:27: Dadaab-as-the refugee camp happens be the latest iteration.

00:21:35: these other iterations in the past, I look at what we could call quote-unquote humanitarian environments for liberated slaves and the nineteenth century.

00:21:44: Look at all kinds of ways that territory was constructed there in East Africa.

00:21:50: One thing important to note about this is particularly evident.

00:21:58: It is built on the foundation of migration and people who settle a place through migrating across it.

00:22:16: One of them really unusual things that happened in the nineteen sixties when all these African countries were decolonizing, In the organization of african unity meetings while effectively The european borders of Africa where eventually adopted for new states.

00:22:34: One state that was vehemently arguing for getting rid of all borders, was Somalia.

00:22:42: And the Somalis in a sense wanted to have no borders across the entire continent but this was particularly important to them in East Africa.

00:22:52: they thought most of East Africa as a place where it's their home Putting all of this quite simply.

00:23:01: It's obviously more complicated than this, but I think something about that really struck me That to be people who migrate as the sort of fundamental life way.

00:23:13: one of these kind of Fundamental life worlds that I think is being erased Is to be working against I think the broader global demand for settlement, sedentarization of people.

00:23:31: This nineteen sixties question was a big question to me and another big question as someone who did come of age.

00:23:36: you know during the anti-apartheid movement in the nineties we grew up hearing this word failed state failed State Failed State.

00:23:45: And i always thought what is it that these Somalis have actually failed at?

00:23:50: What they've learned is that what they failed at was participating in this global capitalistic regime.

00:23:56: And they, they've failed at making themselves into territory and the ways you know other powers wanted them to?

00:24:06: So these were also ways.

00:24:10: many of things that Remaindered Life writes about, Neferti writes about.

00:24:15: These are kind of crystallized for me as I read that book because I do think that this is a fundamental way in which an entire state, in this case has been remaindered.

00:24:28: Because it wasn't behaving according to the order that had been laid out for it... We see the afterlife of that as something like a refugee camp but i suppose i just want to say that you know In this case This Is Much More Than A Refugee Camp.

00:24:46: It's An Actual Form Of Archival Evidence At This Moment that we've found ourselves in.

00:24:53: Thanks Anu, thanks for that.

00:24:56: There's something that really stuck with me while I was reading especially the introduction of your book how you sort of positioned this triad of value waste and remainder as a thing that prefigures uh The Book at Different Scales As You Write About In The Introduction.

00:25:16: And iI was thinking about triad that's been quite important for many of us, which is Vinay Gidwani's Triad of Waste Value and Commons.

00:25:26: And I think he's making some similar arguments.

00:25:30: but...and i'm not sort-of like asking to go into that..but a lot people writing about waste have always thought about.

00:25:38: you know how these practices you know, again back into capitalism.

00:25:45: So how not things work or many good vani's works?

00:25:49: What does Ramayanda illustrate for us?

00:25:51: so what is it allows to see?

00:25:54: Thanks for that.

00:25:54: Nithya and I mean Vinaya and I have been in conversation for a very long time And my very much rely on...I both rely on him and i'm in conversation with his the waste value dialectic that he elaborates.

00:26:10: And like Vinay... I see a much longer, and here i will have to actually say something Anu about the colonial genealogy of the war on terror which i do write.

00:26:26: Part of the reason that it's launched is obviously in the first twenty-first century because the name global war on terror, but certainly we could date it to nineteen ninety one and much longer.

00:26:42: But It was my way of thinking about The Emergence Of The Concept itself Remaindered Life during that time from two thousand to the current moment.

00:26:52: And I'm going To get into your question Nitin as a Way of Thinking About What Remainder life brings which is both A Longer Genealogy Genealogical Timeline for these logics, codes and protocols of capitalist value making because there's also a theory about imperialism.

00:27:14: And the role of Imperial War particularly in relationship to what we understand to be formal capitalism right?

00:27:20: The notion of waste-and-value dialectic is very much contained within as I understand it okay uh within a capitalist framework.

00:27:29: but what i was concerned with thinking about imperialist that active wars of dispossession you know continuous all throughout these centuries and how they punctuate, support the capital relation which is one of exploitation.

00:27:45: That's where Remindered Life emerges out those places that are in... The Imperial Relation has a very paradoxical relationship as Claude Maisou talks about it because this is what destroys and preserves.

00:28:03: It destroys and preserves because you require that this seemingly outside spheres of capitalism to generate modes of reproduction, that are unaccounted for.

00:28:15: And certainly valued at

00:28:17: nothing."

00:28:18: for the capital labor relation which is remunerated with wages and formally exploitative, right?

00:28:25: But this space of imperial war seemingly outside that even though it's not.

00:28:33: So if seeing and understanding.

00:28:38: And remember, for me, Remaindered Life is also heuristic it's not an object It isn't just something that we find a method of interpreting or understanding it as a form of attention.

00:28:50: This what I was talking about.

00:28:52: But this is the attention shaped by this waste value dialectic Of seeing more things become valued even out of waste, you sometimes lose perspective like well where is the outside?

00:29:07: Even if these lives are being um genocided right now.

00:29:11: Like how were they and values being created then?

00:29:14: Where Is The Leftover

00:29:16: Right?!

00:29:16: And there I don't so much find comments but it's related to comments...I Find Capacities!

00:29:24: The life capacities Of People That Are Cooperative & Shared.

00:29:28: So perhaps that that is in conversation with the idea of the commons.

00:29:32: The commons are theoretically very tricky, it's been critiqued by indigenous theorists because if its genealogy to the idea of what is common to all and it's still seen in forms of possession, right?

00:29:55: In forms of property.

00:29:56: And to think completely outside that we would have other words for it.

00:30:01: So Remaindered Life is a placeholder thinking about these capacities These modes of living that are inherited, improvised and invented.

00:30:13: It's also not just standing there for us to discover because it behooves us as analysts to think about what would mean in terms of our capacity rather than to objectify it, make another object that we can valorize or make into a procedure so that we sell our theory.

00:30:39: It's very difficult to evade this valorizing impulse but is more an invitation for certain kind of regard already in us, I think if we participate.

00:30:54: If you are the descendants of the colonize You bear with you things that have not been entirely destroyed But you have capacities so that you have inherited as just a form Of your shared life-making.

00:31:08: So there's a very long timeline for that equally as along this colonialism longer than Anu mentioned pre-colonial.

00:31:17: I do draw on some work that mentions pre-colonial practices, not to say nothing has changed but there are inheritances we bring forward and create with in the present.

00:31:32: And thats where also i think my conversation A whole variety of scholars, indigenous feminists postcolonial black feminist queer and trans folks are.

00:31:44: because if they're focused on all these other kinds of capacities that people bear under conditions of great duress and survival.

00:31:55: That don't come from blank slates.

00:31:57: They not blank slate even If there invented in shared life And therefore They do have a longer timeline than the capitalist one of invention.

00:32:11: Neferti, that was really interesting and I wanted to maybe pose this question to both of you which is regarding political imaginaries Which is something we are very interested in here at The Urban Political Podcast.

00:32:25: So what kind of political imagineries emerge when we theorize from Remaindered Life an architecture migration both as heuristic and as concepts, right?

00:32:37: Like sir could you perhaps maybe Nifoti.

00:32:40: Could you talk about it

00:32:41: first?".

00:32:42: And of course we know each other's work is well served.

00:32:45: I mean As usual they can also always Talk through each others ideas as well.

00:32:51: Maybe i should start with a few ideas from Anu that I feel, you know my talking about shared life is very much in the spirit of her talking for example about insurgent domesticities and ways of thinking about homemaking as forms of architecture.

00:33:12: That they are building capacities.

00:33:15: people bring with them these contingent spaces.

00:33:22: As I mentioned the longer timelines, I appreciated these... The way that Anu when she thinks about migration.

00:33:32: She's thinking about migratory ways of being that emerges as migratary because this drive to sedentarization and partition.

00:33:43: you know we see them as exceeding but these territories that are laid down by colonial orders

00:33:51: and yet

00:33:52: they have longer histories as ways of being for whole communities.

00:33:58: Therefore, the ways of living against moralized forms or at least in resonant to me, thinking about these capacities and practices of social life that I mentioned.

00:34:17: So when we begin think like this then were able other ways of organizing life that don't depend on the nation-state, and these borders.

00:34:30: It opens up an imagination about how we could re-craft other ways.

00:34:48: I would say that the forms of making homes, for example don't depend on again a settlement imaginary.

00:35:00: Some of the homes and kinship networks and social cooperative networks that i talk about in my book with migrant workers really take place across continents Certainly helped by some of these technologies, but you could also say the reverse that they... These practices and the need to stay connected in attachments are also what fueled development of these technologies.

00:35:29: So you start to begin to see that this creative capacities, living on a part people drive very technology's of their predation, the technologies of their subsumption under capitalism but also exceed them so as an active force a force for remaking life more broadly, severed from the institutions of their capture and the institution's of their predation.

00:35:59: You see them in their own right as bearing not future possibilities but political imaginaries in the current moment that are so devalued has to be rendered worth nothing Precisely because they present the possibility of another way of living that could proliferate.

00:36:28: Just to close this, it's like Palestinian Sumod, Palestinian survival.

00:36:33: all those ways that Palestine survived these genocide are so threatening precisely because they can't rely on very same kinds protocols necessarily of life worth living under capitalism, what's a good life under capitalism?

00:36:50: Because they're already completely prohibited from living under those terms given the situation of settler colonialism.

00:37:01: And therefore their threatening because in other spaces, you know largely for me it is Philippine forms of survival under similar conditions of war that these political imaginaries can be in conversation with each other not to replicate each other but uh in other kinds of exchange and other kinds.

00:37:30: You've said a lot of things there, Neferti.

00:37:32: And I have to say...I'm actually still chewing on a couple of things you had said earlier.

00:37:37: One of the things that I suppose started really think about in this work on the dub specifically but really thinking what is an architecture or migration?

00:37:49: What are these territories?

00:37:50: In way the humanitarian environment is kind incidental The nation state territory for me as sort.

00:37:57: I too was also oriented toward thinking beyond all that.

00:38:04: You know, what did come before...I love this notion of capacities as a way to start to think about something we might think of.

00:38:13: it is shared experience and resource.

00:38:17: you said two things earlier than to me have been maybe problem.

00:38:21: i've been grappling with one even talking like the global war on terror What I think is very interesting and explosive about the way you've written about it, And also in certain ways of out the way i've written About It.

00:38:37: Is that what we're both doing is demanding That these things didn't start on a certain date.

00:38:46: We are demanding A kind of acknowledgement Of The colonial and imperial like long-standing history of these ways, making life into something that as you write becomes so parsed.

00:39:06: and yet we still have to call it Life.

00:39:09: We're not able to think about it as lifelessness like this is life but in the way I've written about it i think that at some point it really quite literally takes the taste out of their mouth.

00:39:23: It's not a life in the end, but yet this is what Life Is and Life Is being used as the primary thing from which to extract...to kind-of continue all the things you were just saying.

00:39:37: To me though way maybe this comes form.

00:39:39: my disciplinary orientation Turns me to a question of then how do we write the history?

00:39:47: Of this.

00:39:47: How do we right its past?

00:39:49: How did you write about it's kind of long-standing existence?

00:39:53: and yet, how Do We do that with our feet standing on the ground in The present?

00:39:57: because I think we must write those pasts While acknowledging the politics of the present.

00:40:04: And That To Me is why It's like interesting to unpack A refugee camp In the Present Who Think About a Long Past?

00:40:09: or even to Unpack Something Like the global war on terror as a war to be human.

00:40:17: I feel like that is really powerful move because it It demands that we liberate ourselves from, as many people have written.

00:40:28: One of the colonizers don't only colonize space they colonized time and also colonize our ability to understand Time.

00:40:35: I feel like it really liberates us form the chokehold for this temporal reality.

00:40:40: That was a big part what i actually trying do in This book but honestly I learned quite a lot about that from your own articulations of this thing you referred to, the first pages in your book as war.

00:41:09: using something, and how do I write architecture in a way that is pushing against what i'm told to think as architecture.

00:41:15: And been in conversation with you.

00:41:26: And Neferti and I have been in a conversation for many years, we've been part of this working group called Insurgent Donasticities.

00:41:32: One of the things that unlocked me when i first read your book long...many years ago When it first came out was um..that You're precisely not writing about remainders.

00:41:43: That's NOT THE RIGHT WAY TO TALK ABOUT YOUR BOOK!

00:41:46: YOU'RE ACTUALLY WRITING ABOUT LIFE!

00:41:49: You are such a precise writer but using remainder as an adjective It makes it into a force that has its own agents who are committing the remaindering.

00:42:01: And I think this is the force, you know from the outset of your book to your declaring war on and To me that Declaration Of War That You Make In The Book.

00:42:10: that Is A Political Imaginary?

00:42:14: i have made a call for peace in my book.

00:42:16: Peace For Me Comes Only With Justice.

00:42:18: But I do Think That I've Also Said That This Book that I'm writing is a call for peace.

00:42:25: I interviewed hundreds of mothers, who had fled and took whatever children remained in the house because their older boys had been kidnapped so they could be conscripted to be fighters.

00:42:41: I had a three-year old son at the time.

00:42:43: So, many things about it were very personal for me or just felt like if we can't see ourselves in these actions... I mean especially…I'm a citizen of The United States so I feel a personal sense of responsibility whenever i study this thing.

00:43:00: but.. I was really seeing that um These ways of conditioning life!

00:43:07: So that Life For Some looks Like This and it can only look like this.

00:43:12: That to me is maybe the war that I'm in, so writing that differently was also a way of starting to think about political imaginary.

00:43:22: what would be different life?

00:43:24: I don't know if peace's right word or not because we need calling for something.

00:43:39: I wanted to just say one, you know other thing about this the way i read your book another kind of crucial way.

00:43:45: Just You were talking About The Homemaking that I write about and I think a lot about making home quite literally through architecture And also home-making in these Other ways That we do that are more about an imaginary creating A life beyond as many Of These Mothers did for their children.

00:44:03: um...I don't mean particularly valorize the mother or anything like that, I think we can turn to many critiques of that as well.

00:44:12: But i'm just using this as a concrete example because of the people I interviewed-I think one of the thrusts of your book is around the ways that labor and we can think of domestic labour but there are many kinds of labour...and labour particularly as constitutive of capital has undergone this transformation from the frame of this colonial humanism that you write about, in which the labor-capital relation was maybe born.

00:44:44: In which reproductive labour was a supplement as you write and instead it becomes constitutive... And one of the moments that really struck me is when we start talking how life IS labour meaning which is the kind of central element to production, it's The Remainder.

00:45:08: It IS THE THING THAT IS REMAINDERED and I've appreciated that so much because its a sort-of demand to keep our eye on the enemy Keep an Eye On Who Is Doing The Remandering And Its A Kind Of Targeting Of The Real Criminals.

00:45:27: For Me That Formed A Kind of Shelter.

00:45:31: It was the political imaginary that was created.

00:45:36: You've said in your book, you're not only talking about this opposition between the valuing and devaluing of human life but it's also... Your fight is against this relentless and continuous parsing of value-and-disposability relationship That to me I have really identified with in thinking about what does it mean for a refugee to have to undergo a self-partitioning, simply in order to be recognized?

00:46:09: What is it meant to be?

00:46:11: in a refugee camp?

00:46:12: that's the result of partition and land existing because this kind continuous parsing.

00:46:21: Those are fights we can actually take up.

00:46:26: I don't know if peace will end But to me, peace is a target to set my sights on while we do this work of struggling and fighting against this parsing in partitioning.

00:46:42: That's political imaginary if I can think up one.

00:46:46: I think that it's very beautiful horizon as well which sometimes unattainable but definitely an interesting horizon to have one.

00:46:57: You know, both your books have been very useful for me especially because I work in a very troubled context.

00:47:04: Both in India and Europe where you know authoritarian pasts and authoritarian present sort of conditioned this palimpsest on which i'm often studying... ...a very present time.

00:47:19: This idea of remainder life and architecture migration has always allowed to see this palimpsest of territory differently.

00:47:30: So I just wanted to maybe pose a question, as you unpacked the palimpests if space-time of colonization rationalizations and warfare while acknowledging that present how do think of inhabitation otherwise through vocabularies and concepts introduced in your book?

00:47:50: In terms life making or capacities accommodation in the book.

00:47:57: So maybe we could start with Anu this time?

00:48:01: I think i'm gonna turn back to kind of a demand for aesthetic accountability, it's been so important to me to think about inhabitation not only as social thing but also not just political things...I really believe that there can be no political without I think that's something, you know down a very deep rabbit hole in my work and in life.

00:48:32: You know?

00:48:32: Something unlocked for me in Dadaab itself is seeing buildings that are literally growing out of the ground And they're woven together from branches.

00:48:52: See family stories woven into some of the The cladding on some of these buildings.

00:49:01: There's very particular weaves that are only known by certain people.

00:49:06: this kind of detail I think aesthetic detail and you know, that grows out of long-long generations Of the passing down of knowledge of how to make something And also This will sound very exoticizing, but just as objects these were quite beautiful environments.

00:49:27: In my mind I'd never seen environments like this and i think it was struck being in the presence of a place like this to witness that and walk through those streets and be part.

00:49:49: I described the makers of Dadaab as the avant-garde, and i do think in our ecological horizon this is the avant garde.

00:50:01: These are people who know how to live in let's say the roughest conditions.

00:50:06: these are.

00:50:07: I don't know, actually that i would call this inhabitation otherwise.

00:50:19: But we are now in the moment not to kind of have a crisis umbrella around this conversation.

00:50:27: but For me, the insurgent domesticity of this is how to make not just the shelter but the domesticity.

00:50:48: To have the intimacy in home and creating ways for ourselves through something like built shelter.

00:51:00: These are things that I still try think about a lot.

00:51:03: But what i've tried not lose was an idea.

00:51:07: these weren't just put up ad hoc, and they certainly weren't put up by nation states or NGOs.

00:51:13: They were handcrafted by people who learned that from their grandmothers and great-grandmothers when it goes on for a very long time.

00:51:23: So again as I think about how do we write histories?

00:51:27: How to tell ourselves our own stories of pasts To me these are the things to include in this story what we made and how we make them beautiful.

00:51:39: Thanks Anil, that was very, very touching.

00:51:42: I just wanted to add quickly something here.

00:51:45: yesterday i gave a tour through photographic exhibition at the museum for design in Zurich.

00:51:54: there is one photograph which especially touched me.

00:51:58: it speaks too much about as thesis and you know kind of the power of aesthetics in also visualizing sometimes, if not inhabitation otherwise but these sort of very subaltern forms of inhabitation which are... Not just alternatives.

00:52:16: But they're futurities.

00:52:18: I was going through this image by a photographer called Gideon Mendel And he does photography on climate change and people living with climate change.

00:52:30: There was a very beautiful image from someone, the Sindh province in Pakistan close to Karachi where since few years there's cycle of floods.

00:52:42: It is beautifully composed image With person who standing In his house during flood And what you see behind him is a scale of previous floodlines that have not been erased and are part of the inhabitation itself.

00:53:04: It's something in these scales, where state puts out close to rivers or other places about what are hundred year flood lines?

00:53:15: Then this person had very beautifully integrated into the life history of the house itself.

00:53:23: So I just thought sharing that, for listeners before I pass it to Neferti, would you like comment as well please?

00:53:33: Thanks, Nitin and thanks Anu for both your comments about war in aesthetics because this is where real conversation between our works.

00:53:44: And you're right to say, this question of inhabitation is a question about how do we live life?

00:53:54: Inhabitation isn't just space and shelter but it's the mode.

00:53:58: A mode of inhabitation basically a way of living.

00:54:04: That is posed precisely by the fact that something like abstraction of life is the object of capitalist valorization.

00:54:13: And I say this early on in the book that it poses the question, what kind of life?

00:54:18: What kind of live are we after?

00:54:21: and points us into other forms... You know you talk about home-making but yes i'm talking about life making.

00:54:27: Other forms of life making here.... The question of life or vitality exceeds what I say is capitalism's own vitalism, where it thinks that it understands life and makes money out of value.

00:54:44: But there's a vitalism that exceeds both our sense of organic life, the biological life.

00:54:50: The life we essentialize in the same scientific ways as we have made distinctions between living and dead... ...between living and inanimate.... ...between objects & subjects.

00:55:03: That this vitality also doesn't necessarily happen simply like inside of organic entities, but really even what passes across.

00:55:16: you know these what I talk about as vibrations across existences and relations.

00:55:23: It does bring up the question of the aesthetic which i have written quite a lot in the book itself, you know.

00:55:29: In the book I do not only write about artworks especially art works that are better in conversation and the wake of the age of decolonization which is allowing us to attend what i see also as forms of Remaindered Life in these filmmakers artists etc.

00:55:48: but The Remaindered Life political aesthetic heuristic.

00:55:54: And by this, I do not actually mean the beautiful in this case because one of things that i talk about is its aesthetics.

00:56:04: the killing all of these people has scum that there is an implied aesthetics of disgust.

00:56:14: and those who supported Duterte's war also were for life, they were for revaluing Filipino life.

00:56:22: And there was an aesthetic a sensorial enjoyment both to the killing into redeeming the life by these drug addicts.

00:56:35: In response to that, I see so many of the ways people's forms of survival and fighting back notice even though i talk about war What it means for the becoming human to live in a time of war, that's my main object is living in a Time Of War.

00:57:01: Not...that we are IN A WAR FOR SURE!

00:57:04: And I would also be ANTI-War In The Sense Stopping Existing Wars Declared By These Military Industrial Complexes.

00:57:14: But i do see That War Happening quite across, you know soft wars.

00:57:18: Across the whole social sphere in very small scales.

00:57:23: and that war is there.

00:57:25: And therefore what are the aesthetics of Remainded Life In this time Of War?

00:57:30: The ways That people Are able to steal enjoyments.

00:57:34: I write a lot about splendor About these fleeting moments of almost gratuitous living.

00:57:39: in spite of that There's other kinds of aesthetics.

00:57:44: i'm not normative about it.

00:57:46: There are many kinds of aesthetics in these places, complete degradation.

00:57:52: And here I go to the slum dwellers who were being targeted by the Duterte War Machine... ...to see that drug addicts themselves and their capacities.... ....and their enjoyments,... ..are not necessarily inspiring ideals for us but they... do give us pause for what we aestheticize as really part of the life that is still worth living.

00:58:19: And I try to upend that by thinking about these other forms of aesthetics, this other kinds of moments and sensorial pleasures That can't easily be converted into value even political value because The book that i wrote before-the political value was a much of the problem As capitalist value.

00:58:42: and that creating political value, degrading all of these other ways of living in favor an understanding what was politically valuable.

00:58:54: was really to me what happened with the war on drugs that they were not politically valuable subjects.

00:59:00: No political movement wanted to take them up, there were some of course... There were some political movements but they weren't readily taken up precisely because they exceeded the norms-the ideals and the subject's life worth living for.

00:59:20: also like creating aesthetic pleasures out of because one of the things I critique is you know some of the institutions that also make aesthetic value out-of-waste.

00:59:30: You don't

00:59:30: only make capitalist value out of waste, you make aesthetic values out of wastes and i think Anum in some ways touches upon this.

00:59:38: on the chapter design.

00:59:40: The way it's.

00:59:41: paradoxically all these infrastructures created by humanitarian practices also commodify the aesthetics of their own life-saving emergency apparatuses.

00:59:56: So to me, the forms of inhabitation that we not necessarily otherwise I suppose or maybe otherwise has to be relentlessly against value formation.

01:00:10: so you really have to think about what is life without value?

01:00:14: Not in this negative sense therefore disposable, but what is living without value that has an aesthetics of abundance and pleasure?

01:00:26: And splendor for us where it gives you more anyway.

01:00:31: You know because it's without value.

01:00:33: and yet... That's the last chapter!

01:00:37: ...and then yet you get some....And then some you get more out-of life.

01:00:45: These examples that I see in these spaces of Remainded Life have led me to be instructed by, to be inspired

01:00:54: by

01:00:55: not necessarily to emulate and make normative for everybody else.

01:01:00: But it's a form of regard as mentioned allows us ask the question what kind life?

01:01:08: we want, and that is not to be answered by any single person.

01:01:12: Obviously it can only be answered from communities or those who are sharing the life they want to define as

01:01:21: theirs.".

01:01:22: Thank you Neferti!

01:01:25: That was really out of words for me.

01:01:32: How much I learned today in this podcast and through talking with both of you.

01:01:38: Um, i think there's a lot to process here but uh...I think our listeners will definitely enjoy listening to what he just talked about But also reading your book so..i would really encourage our listeners To read both these books perhaps best together because I think they speak a lot to each other.

01:02:03: It's a must read in, especially now our current times which are as we said at the start of this episode very not just unprecedented but very urgent and very encompassingly uncertain.

01:02:18: thanks a lot both of you for doing this And taking time and sharing your thoughts.

01:02:24: Thank You and gratitude To Both Of You.

01:02:27: thank you Anu For Writing Your

01:02:29: Book.

01:02:30: You know, I think yet you're right Nitin that the conversation is very close and they would be good companion books

01:02:39: to read.

01:02:41: Yeah thank-you so much for making this space and Neferti too not just what you've written but all

01:02:54: of

01:02:58: it.

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