We all wear our passports on our faces
From the 1948 Nationality Act until now there has been a tension in the UK between those who belong and …
Archives: Key sayings
Who you are is what you do
The politics of identity which led individuals to use an innate aspect (their gender, colour etc) as ipso facto a …
The personal is not political, the political is personal
In his take on the personal v. the political, Sivanandan was starting from the position that racialism, i.e. attitude or …
When memory dies, a people die
In his 1997 novel on Sri Lanka, When Memory Dies, Sivanandan shows the importance of community-based and national memory and …
The function of knowledge is to liberate
This bold and radical statement was made by Sivanandan in an editorial when, in 1974, he had been asked to …
Build Communities of Resistance
Sivanandan was an organiser. He did not, as many thinkers do, spend time on purifying a particular left interpretation of …
Black is a political colour, not the colour of our skins
Sivanandan, despite his adherence to the combusting power of nationalism in the anti-colonial struggle, was emphatic about its negative potential …
We are here because you were there
Today in the dominant anti-migration, anti-refugee climate it is imperative to underline how movements of people are intimately connected to …
The violence of the violated
In his earliest pieces, Sivanandan was at pains to show liberals and orthodox Marxists that a violent black rejection of …