This post contains my regular roundup of the past year and a look forward to the next. However, its main focus is to address the question of how we build from where we are—especially considering the current state of the world. In this, my summary of the previous year serves as a useful reminder for me of what has happened in it and helps me position myself for the next. (I believe I first started this series in 2016. You can also read the roundups for 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022). For personal reasons that I will not go into here, 2023 to date has been a bit rough on me emotionally. This has not been helped by what seems like a global meltdown on reason, which has included watching the lack of political will to stop the powerful from using their power to pulverise lives in places like Palestine and Sudan. Each year seems to take us farther and farther into perdition. Into the ruin of the earth and humanity.
The amount of dead bodies I have seen on my screen should be enough to break anyone’s brain. There has always been a certain imbalance in the world, yet hope for a new one that will rise from the ashes of this one drifts off into the distance. It is against this backdrop that I attempted to write in 2024 and retain some hope for 2025.
But where do we go from here?
The simple answer to this is I don’t know. “Civilisations” crumble into dust around us, while we cling to our illusions that tell us human progress is inevitably linear. The world around us is incredibly fragile, as anyone who has lived through any form of trauma will tell you. Yet, there are many on this planet for whom “no loss of human life, no amount of suffering, no degree of degradation [is] too much, so long as the economic interests of [present-day] colonial companies and states [are] served.”. (Hickel 2017: 99). To be honest, I don’t know that humanity can survive the horrors that it has unleashed through inaction, greed, wilful dehumanisation, and selfishness. Here we stand in the ruins. Quiet in the midst of ruins. Our hope, even when seemingly pointless, is a melody, harmonising the scattering. It is a symphony to accompany destruction. Hoping that someone else will hear it and play it back to us. So we can build from the ruins together. Again. It is in the midst of these ruins that I write. Sometimes hopefully. Often in despair.
Foluke’s African Skies in 2024: Building in Ruins
I began with my usual roundup of the previous year; 2023 dazzled us with its necropolitics. 2024 upped the ante and went into hold-my-beer mode. Looking through the previous roundups, it is clear that some things are going from bad to worse. I also realise that we have a tendency to anthropomorphise years in a way that obscures human [in]action.
My next blog post was a summary of an edited collection I worked on with Ntina Tzouvala and Suhraiya Jivraj on global efforts to bring decolonisation and anti-racism into legal pedagogies. It summarised what we did in the collection, what we did to bring the collection together, what we could have done better, as well as what we hope readers will do. I followed that with a blog post that made me exceedingly hungry! I wrote about how difficult it has been to bring international cuisine into international events hosted within UK universities. The University Caterers Organisation republished this essay in their October 2024 issue.
For a while now, I have been writing about how the profit-making/not life-protecting character of Euro-modern law replicates itself from cases like the Zong to environmental harm. In 2024, I wrote a reflection on that work and ways to think through the law for ways out of the Anthropocene. This was inspired by the judgments project I was a part of, where I considered what would happen if the sea decided to judge humanity. Spoiler Alert! It does not end well for humanity.
I also published a blog post that contains reviews of “Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge.” It is updated as regularly as possible. Do let me know if you have written a review.
The next posts were reproductions of work I have published elsewhere. First, an interview for the Black Agenda Report about “Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge.” In it, I talk about what I hope readers will take from the book and some of my literary influences. I have a lot! (That should be its own article!) Next, I reproduced the text and video of the plenary talk I gave at the SLSA Annual Conference 2021. It is a contemplation of what Paul Robeson’s life can teach us about decolonisation and our work in law schools. What are we willing to give for change?
In the next blog post I published in 2024, I returned to writing about necropolitics and the law. A section of that work was titled, How We Can No Longer Breathe and Run (in vain) to the Law for Air. In much of my work, I acknowledge that many people have looked to the law in vain for succour. We need to think differently about our presumptions of law. How do we fashion it into a discipline that we can look to for epistemologies with which we can preserve life and the planet?
Later, I recommended 20 African novels that we can incorporate into our teaching to ensure we produce learning environments that do not consign Africa and her peoples to the silence of ignorance and distorted narratives. Further suggestions are very welcome!!! Please follow the link and add your suggestions to the comment box on the post.
The next few posts were poetically inclined. For some reason it took me 4 years to write this short poem!! It arose from a juxtaposition between the ways colonialism forces its subjects to abandon objects of culture labelled “primitive,” while the metropole’s emotional attachment to statues is “cultured.” In essence, for some, reverence of the earth is deemed primitive; for others, reverence of mere men is cultural.
“Why do you hide your history in hollow hunks of stone and metal?
Are we not past your wonderful age of enlightenment?
When will YOU cast YOUR idols into the sea?”
I followed that up with another look at poetry. Kofi Awoonor’s poem “The Weaver Bird” feeds into a reflection on the various ways in which imperialism produces exile through loss of home. Still on poetry. I published what I consider to be a cathartic poem that is helping me to process grief felt on various scales. I hope it helps anyone who needs it.
My final blog post of 2024 was an essay on the uses of despair as we teach, experience, and research racial injustice in law schools in universities across the world. The despair is real; it is here; it is felt. And that is where I ended 2024 and have begun 2025. We start with despair. We recognise the despair. But then we should act.
So, what will I blog/write about in 2025?
These are some of the things I have been working on that will probably not all get done in 2025:
- A textbook for law and race
- An essay on Vatanım Sensin: VS is a Turkish television drama set during the last years of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish War of Independence and is a must-watch!
- A collection of poems
- A science fiction novel about African history
- An accompanying blog post for my podcast [See below]
- A reader blog series for Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge
- A review of Supacell [2024]
- An essay on reparations
- More quizzes [See some of the previous ones here and here and here.]
Ruins: A reprise
I think one of the problems we face is that too many people presume that the current world is working. But you cannot see so many dead bodies and so much hate and continue to believe that—except through self-deception. But to accept that the world is broken is in itself an invitation to repair. Humanity stands here, side by side with history’s ghosts in the ongoing ruins of Euro-modernity. Empire has no new lyrics, no new tracks to play. And it is in these ruins that we must find the power to repair… to build something new… from these ruins.
