Amílcar Cabral, Ghassan Kanafani, and the Weapon of Theory w/ Zeyad el Nabolsy

Buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideologyShow notes: What does it mean to pursue liberation without romanticizing the past? Can modern science, historical materialism, and even ideas associated with European modernity become tools of anti-colonial struggle? And what might the thought of Amílcar Cabral have in common with the Palestinian intellectual Ghassan Kanafani?Joining me today is Zeyad El Nabolsy, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at York University. His work focuses on modern African intellectual history, African philosophy, the history and philosophy of science, Marxism, and anti-colonial political thought.We turn first to El Nabolsy’s work “Amílcar Cabral’s Modernist Philosophy of Culture and Cultural Liberation” where we examine Cabral’s relationship to modern science, modernity and modernization, and his insistence that ideas or practices cannot simply be dismissed as “Western” because of where they historically emerged. This raises larger questions about reason, progress, language, cultural autonomy, and whether something introduced through histories of conquest can eventually become endogenous to a society.In the second half of our conversation, we bring Cabral into dialogue with the Palestinian political theorist, Ghassan Kanafani. We discuss historical materialism, the Palestinian revolt of 1936, the failures of postcolonial nationalism, Afro-Arab solidarity, the relationship between Palestine and African liberation movements, and Cabral’s famous demand for the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie to commit what he called “class suicide.”Biography: Zeyad el Nabolsy has a Ph.D. in Africana Studies at Cornell University. He has an M.A. in philosophy and a B. Eng. (in chemical engineering) from McMaster University. Zeyad is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at York University. His main area of focus is modern African Intellectual History. His dissertation "Science, Modernity, and Progress in Nineteenth Century West and North Africa: A Comparative Study of Africanus Horton and Rifa’a al-Tahtawi" seeks to answer the question: how does our understanding of the role of modern science in African societies change when we cease to ignore the early reception of some of the modern sciences by nineteenth century African intellectuals such as Africanus Horton (1835–1883) in West Africa and Rifa'a al-Tahtawi (1801 - 1873) in North Africa, prior to the Scramble for Africa?Links: https://www.soufflesmonde.com/posts/amilcar-cabral-and-ghassan-kanafani-on-nation-and-class-in-colonized-societieshttps://philpapers.org/archive/NABACM.pdfhttps://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-89775-7