I had no idea where this essay was headed when I started writing. I tried to make it thematic, but I suspected that it would probably end up as a stream of consciousness with no conclusion. This mirrors the various ways in which we are impelled to model hope, optimism, and self-congratulatory language in the face of racial injustice in the neoliberal university. And so we move with the waves that crash into us… unexpectedly… a stream. Thus, in this post, I will be using some stories and thoughts of hope – in the classroom, in the course of research, and beyond – to question the nature and value of the nebulous thing called ‘hope’ as we grapple in myriad ways with waves of racial injustice.

My ability to write in 2024 has been severely affected by a litany of things. I described this year to someone in the following words: “wonderful, terrible, fantastic, and tragic.” Over the last couple of years, and in 2024 in particular, I have lost some close family. All the losses have been sudden. The grief that has followed this has been compounded by the levels of global violence, uncertainty, and increasing fascism. I have also been burnt out and unwell. In addition to this, I have had many professional highlights. The resulting emotional and physical exhaustion has been difficult to put into words. I remind myself that I write poetry as a sort of therapeutic tool of catharsis. And so I wrote this in the middle of a night while trying to make sense of it all. For them and for us, I hope this verse helps…

George Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor-Williams (1935–2013) was a Ghanaian poet, author, and diplomat. From the 70s to the 90s, primary and secondary school students across English-speaking West Africa were very likely to have read his short poem, “The Weaver Bird”, as part of their compulsory Literature or English studies, alongside other political poetry like those of Leopold Sédar Senghor, David Diop, John Pepper Clark, Niyi Osundare, and Kwesi Brew. In this post, I reproduce the poem, followed by a few observations about the verse and the wider socio-political context into which it was written.

I wrote this poem around the time the statue of Colston was thrown into the river in Bristol. I think I was spurred to write it because I have always been a bit flummoxed by peoples’ attachment to bits of stone and steel. (This consternation is something I had already written about a few years ago. I called the poem below “Idols”, and it was one of those things that I wrote and thought I would come back to finish later. However, I completely forgot about it after that first draft was finished in 2020. So, it languished in my notes folder from 2020 till 2024 when I stumbled across it completely by accident. I realised that my thoughts on this have remained the same. So I have brushed it up, and here it is. I hope it resonates with you too.

I had been interested in writing about necropolitics for a long while. So, when Thomas Giddens and Luca Siliquini-Cinelli sent out a call to papers for the Biopolitics of Legal Education collection, it could only be described as exceedingly timely. This gave me an opportunity to write about the nature and role of legal education in the (re)production of the current state of the world. The resulting chapter was: “Educating for the End of a Necropolitical World: What Happens Beyond Decolonisation in Legal Education?” In Biopolitics and Resistance in Legal Education, pp. 9-23. Routledge, 2023. In this blog post, I recount and contextualise some of the arguments in that chapter. If you would like a copy of the chapter, please let me know.

Below is the text of my talk which was part of a Plenary session at SLSA 2021. In that year, the annual conference of The Socio-Legal Studies Association was hosted by Cardiff Law School and due to the COVID-19 pandemic held entirely online. The second plenary roundtable at the conference was titled “Decolonizing the Law School – Lessons from the Life and Work of Paul Robeson”. Through our talks, Professor Penelope Andrews, Professor Daniel Williams, and I explored challenges to legal professionalism and legal education through the frame of Paul Robeson’s immense life and work as a recovering lawyer and talented performer, all the while fighting racial and class injustice in Wales, the USA and globally. I reproduce most of the text of my talk below. (Readers of Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge will recognise some of the ideas as they were developing) The YouTube recording of it is at the end of the text.

This interview was originally published in the Black Agenda Report Book Forum on the 2nd of November 2022. In it I answer some questions about Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge: Reflections on Power and Possibility. I found it a very useful avenue so soon after I had finished writing the book – to step back and reflect on some of its central themes. Enjoy.

The starting point of this essay is my work on decolonisation and the law, which, of course, includes the monograph, Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge. But majorly this is a reflection on the ideas behind my chapter “The Sea Casts Its Net of Justice Wide: A Speculative Judgment for What Has Been Left to the Waters of Despair” in The Anthropocene Judgments Project, pp. 59-71. Routledge, 2023. In that chapter I use [among others] the frameworks of Black/African Science Fiction, Indigenous Knowledge, Earth Laws, and anticolonial logics to imagine the sea and its inhabitants as central to the legal imaginary. I take the case Gregson v Gilbert (1783) as my starting point to consider what justice for environmental damage could look like from the perspective of the ocean. The aim of that reflection is to address a question I continue to return to in my work: are the tools we currently have in legal knowledge sufficient to achieve justice in the present? This has involved taking a critical look at the nature of Euro-modern law that emerges from the ongoing project of colonial exploitation and its entangled afterlives. Or to put it differently, how does the law answer the question of what it means to live in the devastation of time – evidenced by global inequality, over-exploitation, continuing racial injustice and environmental disaster?