Candid with Lubna: 'Lubna & Tommy have a Candid chat'
https://www.youtube.com/embed/qFpfRDIbhjo
About: Lubna Farhan https://www.youtube.com/@Lubna.Candid https://www.imdb.com/name/nm17625100/ who identifies as British Pakistani chats with https://twitter.com/CandidwithLubna/status/1965083549486514478 British far-right activist/ethnonationalist http://newpractices.co.uk/horizons/#jaSSHsJQpu4 and prominent anti-Islam campaigner Stephen Yaxley-Lennon AKA Tommy Robinson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Robinson about their shared experience growing up in Luton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luton Criticism: The piece rests on the assumption that Farhan's perspective is somehow representative of all British Pakistanis (because her ancestry/parents are/were Pakistani Muslims) and that there is an assumed incompatibility between white and non-white British people - with the corollary being, that 'race' is a valid determinant - despite being widely understood to be a cultural construct and pseudoscientific belief. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism Instead, her perspective is better understood as a case of what Kimberlé Crenshaw describes as 'intersectionality' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality http://newpractices.co.uk/SubjectivistEpistemology/#O1islM0ytkE where as Crenshaw explains, our identities are the product of various overlapping social, cultural and political identities (such as ethnicity/cultural heritage, gender, class, and sexuality) i.e. https://newpractices.co.uk/SubjectivistEpistemology/#O1islM0ytkE Where in the case of the Farhan + Yaxley-Lennon interview, both have significant overlap in terms of their lived experience centring on their shared experience of growing up in Luton (as well as seemingly, more general sociocultural circumstances). Additionally, Farhan's criticism of Pakistani citizens (and recent British immigrants) and their supposed "victimhood mentality" can be understood in terms of the phenomenon known as 'displaced abjection' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjection - where as Elizaveta Gaufman and Bharath Ganesh explain, is a phenomenon characterised by the behaviour of 'punching down' (attacking those who are perceived to be lower down the same social hierarchy). They discuss this in context with Mikhail Bakhtin's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakhtin theory of the 'carnivalesque' - where as they explain: "carnival culture degrades a marginalized group... This degradation of a targeted marginalized group is what we frame as 'displaced abjection,' in which the carnival protagonists focus their anger against someone who is lower than them in social hierarchy" (Gaufman, E. and B. Ganesh, 2024, p.52). Significantly, Yaxley-Lennon seeks to attribute British Pakistanis (which he presumably intends as a proxy for a particular characterisation of 'Muslims') for a so-called failure of their own 'cultural integration' - as if all British Pakistanis have absolute agency over their own circumstances (and are not beholden to anyone else). And for comparison, consider this in relation to so-called 'British expats' and their resistance to integrating with local cultures (choosing instead to form "Little England" 'enclaves/bubbles'). And so, Yaxley-Lennon's comments here allude to the misapprehension that we - especially, groups who are defined in terms of their ethnicity - are 'genetically predisposed/determined/hard-wired' to behave in a stereotyped manner e.g. 'Muslims are by nature separatist' etc. and therefore, represent an existential threat to non-Muslims (such as Yaxley-Lennon et al.). It's a conspiracy theory known as 'the great replacement' - a phenomenon, which Bharath Ganesh theorises as 'white thymos'. Which as he explains "white thymos describes a complex of pride, rage, resentment, and anger that is created through informational and affective circuits that create the perception of a loss of white entitlement" (Ganesh, B., 2020, p.894). It's a 'grievance politics', whose particular anti-Muslim manifestation is sometimes pejoratively characterised as 'Eurabia' e.g. http://trigg.gr/t/122659 where supposedly Muslins are conspiring to usurp the authority of 'legitimate Brits'. For Sara Ahmed, it's a phenomenon, which represents a type of warped conception of love/patriotism known as 'nativism'. She describes the phenomenon through her analysis of the US the Aryan Nations Web site (2004). http://trigg.gr/tag/IRLScholarSaraAhmed#135761B888823;A1 Bibliography: Gaufman, E. and B. Ganesh (2024). 'Chapter 5: Displaced Abjection. The Trump Carnival'. Berlin, Boston, De Gruyter: 51–64. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111238135-005 Ganesh, B. (2020). "Weaponizing white thymos: flows of rage in the online audiences of the alt-right." Cultural Studies 34(6): 892–924. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2020.1714687 Ahmed, S. (2004). 'Affective Economies.' Social Text 22(2 (79)): 117-139. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-22-2_79-117
