Dark Academia How Universities Die, Peter Fleming, Pluto Press, 2021, 244 p.

Writing in parallel, I create from the margins to unsettle and contaminate the central logics that structure Peter Fleming’s book, Dark Academia, How Universities Die. I do this to challenge the universalising assumptions that underpin Dark Academia so that its narration of History makes room for stories otherwise. I want to make space for counter-narratives in contemporary accounts of universities so that they might destabilise the linearity of white masculine despair that marks Fleming’s version. To do this, I draw on my lived experiences of collaborating with decolonial and anti-racist movements in UK universities. These experiences have been enriched by cultivating a politics of dialoguing and alliancing with scholars and students based in different parts of the world. Intentional involvement with, and caring deeply for, these relationships have helped me to challenge Eurocentric notions about academic purpose, job security, and academic freedom. By intentionally and actively cultivating collective struggles and international alliances that cross disciplinary and intersectional boundaries, I have experienced the possibilities of building strategies for surviving and thriving in the racist business school. More recently, I have translated this experience into texts by developing biographical methodologies for un/learning and creating conditions for solidarity with marginalised peoples. I build on these interventions in the present essay. I develop this parallel text in line with decolonial feminist politics that insist on the right to live, to regenerate life, to relate to our world, her people, her land, her pluriversal abundance in ways that premise a radical co-existence. This effort is one that is both epistemic and praxistical; de-(b)ordering hierarchies of difference and circulating knowledges otherwise cannot be a purely theoretical project. I write about what I know as a woman and a Kashmiri Pandit born and raised in the imperial center of the “modern world”; my/her body, and what she knows, is a consequence of a paradox comprising both innate privileges and experiences of marginalisation. I work with this ambiguity to challenge Fleming’s master narrative about what is deemed dark and what is deemed dying, so that this description may be revised in relation to how racialised women in the university exist as unseen and unheard elements of an institution that remembers itself as collegial and common sense (Fleming 2021: 2). My entry point to understanding death and life in the university is therefore quite different from Fleming’s. This disjuncture is made somewhat perverse because we have shared space and an occupation; our academic journeys have crossed more than once. How do I know the university? I carry multiple histories of privilege, migration, and displacement in my body that appear on my tongue as fragments of Indo-Persian languages and in my memories as oral histories of the colonial wound and its associated ritual humiliations, containment, enforced movement, state sanctioned killings, and administered subordination. With every day that passes, I lose a little more of my grasp over these senses and sensibilities that connect me to familial histories. These grow ever distant with each elder passing on, with more time spent in ubiquitous white institutions. A southern woman barely gripping onto her feeling of difference, my detachment from what the colonised know can reconfigure as ignorance and make one’s colonial memories opaque—forcing a vulnerability towards collective amnesia and a nostalgia for the good life, that is, how the good life is imagined by imperial state narratives. I am not white; I am not Southern; I am not Northern, yet these sociogenic constructs work through my body and beyond it so that my privileges, as well as my marginalisation, are yoked to these materialities of intersectional difference. It is the knowledge …