We all wear our passports on our faces
From the 1948 Nationality Act until now there has been a tension in the UK between those who belong and those who do not and the added tension of governments …
Archives: Key sayings
Who you are is what you do
The politics of identity which led individuals to use an innate aspect (their gender, colour etc) as ipso facto a right from which to judge others, could itself become a …
The personal is not political, the political is personal
In his take on the personal v. the political, Sivanandan was starting from the position that racialism, i.e. attitude or prejudice, was not what was meant by racism, which was …
When memory dies, a people die
In his 1997 novel on Sri Lanka, When Memory Dies, Sivanandan shows the importance of community-based and national memory and the way false memories can distort a people’s history, a …
The function of knowledge is to liberate
This bold and radical statement was made by Sivanandan in an editorial when, in 1974, he had been asked to take over the editorship of the IRR’s journal RACE and …
Build Communities of Resistance
Sivanandan was an organiser. He did not, as many thinkers do, spend time on purifying a particular left interpretation of a political line, nor was he a party man. What …
Black is a political colour, not the colour of our skins
Sivanandan, despite his adherence to the combusting power of nationalism in the anti-colonial struggle, was emphatic about its negative potential when it became inward looking, naval-gazing – exclusive as opposed …
We are here because you were there
Today in the dominant anti-migration, anti-refugee climate it is imperative to underline how movements of people are intimately connected to the global interventions (economic, political, military, ecological and technological) of …
The violence of the violated
In his earliest pieces, Sivanandan was at pains to show liberals and orthodox Marxists that a violent black rejection of white society should not be read simply as a form …