The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

An Open Letter to the Honourable Christopher Luxon, CEO... apologies, Prime Minister of Corporation New Zealand Dear Mr. Prime Minister, Greetings from one of the more awkward shareholders in the enterprise formerly known as Aotearoa New Zealand. I hope this letter finds you well, ideally between board meetings and that recurring democratic inconvenience known as Question Time. I will keep this brief, because I know your time is valuable and, presumably, billable. Racism is bad for the bottom line. There, I said it. Feel free to file it in the next quarterly report under "Risks to Brand Reputation and Operational Efficiency." You, of all people, should grasp this instinctively. You ran Air New Zealand. Imagine if the airline had started assigning seats based on who looked like they "belonged" in business class. Complaints would skyrocket. The Net Promoter Score would crater. The share price would perform that sad little nosedive that sends institutional investor...

  The Kindness That Silences: Naming the Racism of New Zealand First Three times. In the House of Representatives, the elected heart of this country's democracy, the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs told a sitting Member of Parliament to go back to his own country. Three times. Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan was born in Tianjin and has lived in Aotearoa New Zealand since the mid-1990s. He has spent more of his life here than many of the people who cheered the remark online. Winston Peters looked at him across the chamber and said, "I know you just came here five minutes ago. Go back to your own country," and then, warming to it, told the House that where Xu-Nan comes from they lie like a flatfish, that this thing we have here is called democracy, unlike what you are used to. When Xu-Nan and Ricardo Menéndez March objected, Peters told them to show some gratitude for being in New Zealand. Shane Jones, his deputy, added that Xu-Nan should know his place, and annou...

  The Garland and the Lawbook: Hindutva, the BJP, and the Making of a Rape Culture On the morning of August 15, 2022, the seventy-fifth anniversary of India's independence, Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood at the ramparts of the Red Fort and asked the nation to pledge respect for its women. Hours later, eleven men walked out of the Godhra sub-jail in Gujarat. They had been serving life sentences for gang raping Bilkis Bano, then twenty-one years old and five months pregnant, and for murdering seven members of her family, among them her three-year-old daughter Saleha, whose head was smashed against a rock as her mother watched. Outside the jail, the men were garlanded. They were fed sweets. Their feet were touched. The Gujarat government had granted them remission under a policy it had no jurisdiction to apply, a fact the Supreme Court would confirm in January 2024 when it quashed the release, ruling that the state had usurped powers belonging to Maharashtra. By then the men had ...

  The anti-national Every word in a political vocabulary has an owner, and you can tell who owns a word by watching which way it points. In India the word anti-national points in one direction only. It points at students, at Muslims, at farmers on a highway, at professors, at comedians, at anyone who suggests that a citizenship law which sorts people by religion might not be a good idea. It never points the other way. It has never once, in a decade of nightly use, been aimed at anyone with access to the Prime Minister's office. This is what I have spent years calling communicative inversion. A thing is renamed as its opposite, and the renaming is broadcast until it hardens into common sense, and then the common sense does the work that arguments used to do. Propaganda is renamed journalism. Stenography is renamed patriotism. And the people who are being stripped of their papers are renamed as the enemies of the country whose papers they are being stripped of. The inversion is not...

  The label arrives first Six years is a long time to be held for something you have not yet been charged with. Umar Khalid has been in a cell since the thirteenth of September 2020. Sharjeel Imam since August of the same year. In all that time no charge has been framed against them. There has been no trial. There has been no verdict. There has been a chargesheet running to hundreds of pages, and there have been bail hearings, and there have been adjournments, and there have been judges who reserved their orders and judges who delivered them, and there has been the slow administrative hum of a system doing something that looks from a distance like law. But there has been no trial. They have simply been kept. The keeping is the point, and the keeping is the sentence, and the sentence was passed long before either of them saw the inside of a courtroom. It was passed on television. This is the part that gets lost when people write about India's political prisoners as though the pr...