All places are fish places

Patty 

I come across the coolest people on Twitter. And one of those cool people is Zoe Todd, who is the fish philosopher, and I love that. And another thing that I love I was going through, we have a questionnaire because you know, of course we do. And one of the things that Zoe mentions in the questionnaire because I asked, you know, what kind of books do you know she would? Or would you like to recommend because I am obsessed with books. And and you mentioned, Aimeé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, among other things. And I love that essay, so very much. It's I, a friend of mine recommended it to me, I'd never been exposed to it before. I don't know why. And I live tweeted my reading of it because it was just like, it's just like phrase after phrase of just this gorgeous language, completely dismembering, you know, white settler ideas of colonialism. And it's just, it's just an it's just an it's just an extraordinary essay.

Kerry 

Interesting, it's been brought, I haven't read it yet, but it is on my I just …

Patty 

It’s a quick read,  what maybe an hour because it's but it's just absolutely brilliant. I feel like and then Fanon, you mentioned him to and everybody I read mentions Fanon and I think it's inevitable I'm gonna have to .. Is he really dense and hard to read? Because that's …

Zoe

It depends which things you read, I think, so I've gone back and started rereading, Wretched of the Earth just to sort of, because it's really focuses on, you know, how to decolonize. And but I think, yeah, that's where I'm going back to, but I mean, obviously, so much of his work has shaped a lot of the current scholarship, especially in the US and around critical race theory and thinking through anti Black racism. And so, yeah, I felt like, I needed to go back and, and re-engage with him, especially now that I have more grasp on sort of, like, the issues that he's talking about. And, you know, I tried reading him in my PhD, and I brought him into my thesis. But yeah, that was like seven years ago. So I have, you know, different questions now, and different things that I want to be responsible to. So yeah, yeah.

Patty 

So what are those things? Because you, you’ve been through a lot like you've been pretty open about it on Twitter, about, you know, kind of your, your hopes when you went into graduate school, and then your experiences in the academy. So how, what are you bringing to, you know to Cesaire and Fanon,  which really isn't going to be the focus? I'm just curious. Yeah, you know, because we reread things, and they're different when we come back to them because we're different.

Zoe

Yeah. So I came to both of their, you know, like scholarship, at the end of my PhD, when I went to defend my thesis, and it was, it was a very difficult experience, because the work I was doing wasn't really in line with the kind of anthropology that was being done in that space in the UK at the time. But I did have a sympathetic internal examiner. And she said, you wrote a thesis of, like, you wrote an ethnography of colonialism. And so what if we just reorganize this and you open with all the decolonial theory? And I was like, okay, and that gave me the okay to then go and bring in these decolonial scholars, and just sort of unapologetically center that, because otherwise, you know, they were trying to take me down the path of, at the time in the early 2010s. Like, it was really, you know, multispecies ethnography, and like, these, like environmental anthropology, sort of discourses were happening that were, like, potentially useful, but they weren't attending to