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CONTESTING FREEDOM AND “WHITE FREEDOM”

January 4, 2022 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the historian Tyler Stovall and the idea of “white freedom”, was my Observer column this week. It was published 2 January 2022, under the headline “We talk a lot about freedom – but not enough about whose freedom is at stake”. “For me, history is the record not only of how things change, but how people make things change, how they act individually and collectively to create a better world.” So wrote American historian Tyler Stovall about his approach to his […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History, Justice & Liberties • Tags: abraham lincoln, enlightenment, france, freedom, freedom struggles, french colonialism, french revolution, kant, liberalism, putney debates, race, race and class, radical enlightenment, tyler stovall, white freedom, whiteness

DECOLONIZING OUR MINDS?

February 19, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This essay was published in the Observer, 19 February 2017. ‘They Kant be serious!’, spluttered the Daily Mail headline in its most McEnroish tone. ‘PC students demand white philosophers including Plato and Descartes be dropped from university syllabus’. ‘Great thinkers too male and pale, students declare’, declared the Times. The Daily Telegraph, too, was outraged: ‘They are said to be the founding fathers of Western philosophy, whose ideas underpin civilised society. But students at a prestigious London university are demanding that […]

Categories: Academia, History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: decolonising, diversity, enlightenment, frantz fanon, identity politics, jonathan israel, kant, kwame anthony appiah, locke, racism, radical enlightenment, soas, toussaint l'ouverture, university, whiteness

TO CAST THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN A RADICAL LIGHT

June 20, 2013 by Kenan Malik

There is no period of history that has been more analysed, debated, celebrated and disparaged than the Enlightenment. Unlike, say, the Renaissance or the Reformation, the Enlightenment is not simply a historical moment but one through which debates about the contemporary world are played out. From the role of science to the war on terror, from free speech to racism, there are few contemporary debates that do not engage with the Enlightenment, or, at least, with what we imagine the […]

Categories: History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: christianity, descartes, dualism, enlightenment, ernst cassirer, hobbes, jonathan israel, kant, locke, max horkenheimer, monism, peter gay, radical enlightenment, reformation, religion, religious freedom, spinoza, theodor adorno