Shiera S El-Malik
Biographic Data
| ID | 3046963 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Shiera S El-Malik |
| GIVEN NAMES | Shiera S |
| FAMILY NAME | El-Malik |
| SIGNATURE | EL-MALIK S S |
| AFFILIATIONS | DePaul University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2423-371X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
A Meditation on Poetics
The following essay meditates on how an orientation to poetics, with its creative modes of thinking, unlearning, and intervention, may aid contemplation of worlds as they are and worlds as they might be. It begins with the question of how we might think about the contemporary sociopolitical function of poetics, and explores relations among poetics, imaginative capacities, and the plausibility of futures beyond existing precarities. The exploratio…
The violence that hangs in the air
This article asks questions of ambient violence, its analytic value, and how to affectively illustrate that value. Comprised of six thematically-interwoven essays, it examines Fanon’s oeuvre to show how his analysis of, and claims about, (colonial) violence might be connected to eugenicist modes-of-thinking, or how a project of eugenics conditioned Fanon’s work on sociogenics. If I were to title the six sections, they would be: A poetics of relat…
A letter to Baba
This is a piece of creative non-fiction. The letter from a daughter to a father is an attempt to understand intergenerationally shared histories, experiences, and different orientations. It aims to imagine what decolonial thinking could look and feel like. Interdisciplinary in its orientation, the letter moves between personal stories and the broader scholarly quest to contemplate the embodied racialized violence of the current conjuncture. The l…
On another story
Freedom time
It is a common refrain that anti-colonialism and the arguments that fall under its oeuvre is a failed project, that the new postcolonial states failed one after another, and that those argumentativ
Reading Imaginative Futures across Historical Moments; Or Speaking Surreptitiously in Imperial Centres
Léopold Sédar Senghor’s 1961 Speech at Oxford University is a provocative and critical intervention during what is generally considered to be a decolonisation period. It is a speech that engages across eras, and one from which we can glean insights on how to nourish ideas and modes of thinking that may be needed in this historical moment. With it, Senghor illustrates the importance of humanism for interlocutory dialogue, which is necessary to tra…
Why Orientalism still matters
In 2007, the British Journal of Politics and International Relations ( BJPIR ) devoted an issue to gendering International Relations. It opens with Cynthia Enloe addressing the ‘politics of casual forgetting’. I investigate this notion of casual forgetting using a framework informed by postcolonial and feminist scholarship. Working with ideas drawn from critiques of Orientalism and neoliberalism, I examine knowledge practices that centre binaries…
African political thought of the twentieth century
This special issue focuses on African political thought, as it emerged in the context of and contributed to fundamental changes in world order during the twentieth century, and as it continues to s
Interruptive discourses
This paper suggests that Senghor's political and poetic work can be understood as connected to his position as a sophisticated critical thinker. In order to move past a hasty rejection of his work, one might analyse Senghor's work as part of the more serious anti-colonial, epistemological activism that emerges in the mid-twentieth century. I argue that, for Senghor, politics is an art of interrupting discursive closures. I characterize Senghor's …
Against epistemic totalitarianism
This paper argues that South African writer, Bessie Head, crafted art that refuses discursive closure, or epistemic totalitarianism. The essay demonstrates this by examining Head's commitment to analysing power in the context of people's daily lives and her attention to the insurrectionary role of imagination in intervening in established dynamics of power. The first section draws connections between Head's practice of writing about ordinary peop…
Rattling the binary
In 2009, the 18-year-old South African runner Caster Semenya was accused of being male and forced to undergo gender testing. After much obfuscation and misreporting, Semenya was cleared to compete as a woman. Semenya's experience exposes the problematic ways in which masculinity and femininity are harnessed to the categories of male and female as well as the ways in which they are embodied by men and women. This paper contemplates how binaries ar…
Critical pedagogy as interruptingThingification
This article suggests that a critical pedagogy meets students where they are and recognizes the ideological conditions of existence of both teachers and students as subjects. Using a set of examples that range from the author's own experiences both inside and outside of the classroom, an Emile Zola novel (The Ladies Paradise) and Timothy Mitchell's world-as-exhibition, the article suggests that critical pedagogies expose, and potentially disrupt,…
Darker than Blue
In this work, Paul Gilroy charges academics including scholars of the African and Black Diaspora with inadequately addressing ethical questions of racial hierarchy. He posits that academics apply a uniquely American framework of racial hierarchy to their analyses of places other than the U.S. The result, according to Gilroy, is that American conceptions of blackness (and whiteness) then substitute for social structures regardless of people's live…
Neo African-Americans
Rattling the binary
In 2009, the 18-year-old South African runner Caster Semenya was accused of being male and forced to undergo gender testing. After much obfuscation and misreporting, Semenya was cleared to compete as a woman. Semenya's experience exposes the problematic ways in which masculinity and femininity are harnessed to the categories of male and female as well as the ways in which they are embodied by men and women. This paper contemplates how binaries ar…
A Meditation on Poetics
The following essay meditates on how an orientation to poetics, with its creative modes of thinking, unlearning, and intervention, may aid contemplation of worlds as they are and worlds as they might be. It begins with the question of how we might think about the contemporary sociopolitical function of poetics, and explores relations among poetics, imaginative capacities, and the plausibility of futures beyond existing precarities. The exploratio…
Interruptive discourses
This paper suggests that Senghor's political and poetic work can be understood as connected to his position as a sophisticated critical thinker. In order to move past a hasty rejection of his work, one might analyse Senghor's work as part of the more serious anti-colonial, epistemological activism that emerges in the mid-twentieth century. I argue that, for Senghor, politics is an art of interrupting discursive closures. I characterize Senghor's …
Against epistemic totalitarianism
This paper argues that South African writer, Bessie Head, crafted art that refuses discursive closure, or epistemic totalitarianism. The essay demonstrates this by examining Head's commitment to analysing power in the context of people's daily lives and her attention to the insurrectionary role of imagination in intervening in established dynamics of power. The first section draws connections between Head's practice of writing about ordinary peop…
Neo African-Americans
Darker than Blue
In this work, Paul Gilroy charges academics including scholars of the African and Black Diaspora with inadequately addressing ethical questions of racial hierarchy. He posits that academics apply a uniquely American framework of racial hierarchy to their analyses of places other than the U.S. The result, according to Gilroy, is that American conceptions of blackness (and whiteness) then substitute for social structures regardless of people's live…
Rattling the binary
In 2009, the 18-year-old South African runner Caster Semenya was accused of being male and forced to undergo gender testing. After much obfuscation and misreporting, Semenya was cleared to compete as a woman. Semenya's experience exposes the problematic ways in which masculinity and femininity are harnessed to the categories of male and female as well as the ways in which they are embodied by men and women. This paper contemplates how binaries ar…
Critical pedagogy as interruptingThingification
This article suggests that a critical pedagogy meets students where they are and recognizes the ideological conditions of existence of both teachers and students as subjects. Using a set of examples that range from the author's own experiences both inside and outside of the classroom, an Emile Zola novel (The Ladies Paradise) and Timothy Mitchell's world-as-exhibition, the article suggests that critical pedagogies expose, and potentially disrupt,…
Against epistemic totalitarianism
This paper argues that South African writer, Bessie Head, crafted art that refuses discursive closure, or epistemic totalitarianism. The essay demonstrates this by examining Head's commitment to analysing power in the context of people's daily lives and her attention to the insurrectionary role of imagination in intervening in established dynamics of power. The first section draws connections between Head's practice of writing about ordinary peop…
Why Orientalism still matters
In 2007, the British Journal of Politics and International Relations ( BJPIR ) devoted an issue to gendering International Relations. It opens with Cynthia Enloe addressing the ‘politics of casual forgetting’. I investigate this notion of casual forgetting using a framework informed by postcolonial and feminist scholarship. Working with ideas drawn from critiques of Orientalism and neoliberalism, I examine knowledge practices that centre binaries…
African political thought of the twentieth century
This special issue focuses on African political thought, as it emerged in the context of and contributed to fundamental changes in world order during the twentieth century, and as it continues to s
Interruptive discourses
This paper suggests that Senghor's political and poetic work can be understood as connected to his position as a sophisticated critical thinker. In order to move past a hasty rejection of his work, one might analyse Senghor's work as part of the more serious anti-colonial, epistemological activism that emerges in the mid-twentieth century. I argue that, for Senghor, politics is an art of interrupting discursive closures. I characterize Senghor's …
Freedom time
It is a common refrain that anti-colonialism and the arguments that fall under its oeuvre is a failed project, that the new postcolonial states failed one after another, and that those argumentativ
Reading Imaginative Futures across Historical Moments; Or Speaking Surreptitiously in Imperial Centres
Léopold Sédar Senghor’s 1961 Speech at Oxford University is a provocative and critical intervention during what is generally considered to be a decolonisation period. It is a speech that engages across eras, and one from which we can glean insights on how to nourish ideas and modes of thinking that may be needed in this historical moment. With it, Senghor illustrates the importance of humanism for interlocutory dialogue, which is necessary to tra…
On another story
The violence that hangs in the air
This article asks questions of ambient violence, its analytic value, and how to affectively illustrate that value. Comprised of six thematically-interwoven essays, it examines Fanon’s oeuvre to show how his analysis of, and claims about, (colonial) violence might be connected to eugenicist modes-of-thinking, or how a project of eugenics conditioned Fanon’s work on sociogenics. If I were to title the six sections, they would be: A poetics of relat…
A letter to Baba
This is a piece of creative non-fiction. The letter from a daughter to a father is an attempt to understand intergenerationally shared histories, experiences, and different orientations. It aims to imagine what decolonial thinking could look and feel like. Interdisciplinary in its orientation, the letter moves between personal stories and the broader scholarly quest to contemplate the embodied racialized violence of the current conjuncture. The l…
A Meditation on Poetics
The following essay meditates on how an orientation to poetics, with its creative modes of thinking, unlearning, and intervention, may aid contemplation of worlds as they are and worlds as they might be. It begins with the question of how we might think about the contemporary sociopolitical function of poetics, and explores relations among poetics, imaginative capacities, and the plausibility of futures beyond existing precarities. The exploratio…
Law (11 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Political science (10 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Gender Studies (6 works)