In search of decolonised political futures: Engaging Mahmood Mamdani's neither settler nor native

Abstract

This text offers a brief overview of the Special Issue on Mahmood Mamdani's book, Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (2020), and a reading of the contributions and of Mamdani's plea for the historic importance of epistemological revolution and of learning to imagine a community of survivors. My reading is mediated through an autobiographical critique of political modernity and ongoing state violence. I explore more deeply what Mamdani calls ‘settler autobiography’ and a community of survivors, other than a community of memory that is unified and homogenised. By turning to unauthorised autobiographies, the autobiographies of those subjected to colonialism as annihilatory violence, I take up Mamdani's call to rethink political violence and the possibility of living together as survivors in Iran as a ‘decolonised political community’. In order to do so I turn to memories of irredeemable destruction, displacement and incalculable losses that live on in our (my mother's and my) deferred autobiographies, alongside the epistemological revolution in Iran—Women. Life. Freedom.