Criminalisation of Intellectual Thought: Representations for Consciousness about Dissent, Resistance and Remembrance

Abstract

Critical engagement, with that hidden or obscured, requires countering discipline-sutured scholarship and ways of seeing. Taking cognisance of the gaps, omissions and distortions when institutions archive themselves – particularly dark histories of social and political oppression – this article calls on critical scholars to trace continuities across past and present regimes of control on intellectual lives and thought. In this extended photo-essay, imagery and scholarship reverberate across time and place as markers of visuality in the context of broader anti-colonial, anti-war and anti-apartheid movements. The first part centres three African contexts’ responses to the memorialisation of past intellectual resistance enacted during various struggles in the Cold War period: Ghana, Uganda and South Africa. The second part traces cross-cutting continuities with contexts historically associated with British colonialism - including India, Palestine, Sudan and the USA – to surface repressive tactics enacted in, and on, the digital and global university. These include technologies of surveillance and erasure; cultures of exclusion, sanction and censorship; and the reappropriation of discourses, frames and rights against freedom. Considering the role of neoliberalism in particular, this article contributes to understandings of the criminalization of dissent, both through the weaponisation of state law, and through the strategic and selective wielding of university policy, memory and culture.