How I Experience History Is How I Must Write: A Take On Dr. Taymiya Zaman's Talk

I just want to say, this was one of the best talks and the most fascinating piece of academic writing that I have came across in my time in LUMS. There were many aspects regarding Dr. Zaman's talk that I want to write about, but I'll focus on one that particularly stood out to me, which was the way she wrote her paper and how she elevated the ordinary in her paper. 

We have discussed in class how colonialism was an entire enterprise whose extraction was not just limited to extracting materials or civilizing the "savages". It molded the ways in which we conceptualize the world, and created epistemic categories on which knowledge was predicated. Colonial knowledge bifurcated "knowing" into "knower", the white man, and "known", the world around him. He was leading this mission of uncovering the world for what it really is, for what being human means and how we construct our experiences of being human (or specifically, being European, civilized humans). 

Dr. Zaman's paper showed ways of knowing and "doing" history that, in my opinion, are radically different. Dr. Zaman's paper "flows like water", as she described it herself. It is her personal experience, as a brown woman living in Mexico City and swoops from personal anecdotes to facts in history. At one point, she talks about how marigolds in the streets, masalay daar fruits and flowers in her bungalows remind her of Karachi. She also talks about how she sympathizes with the indigenous peoples when she looks at how colonialism dealt destruction on them but also finds herself appreciating the colonizer when she reads indigenous rituals that have human sacrifice, carving out a beating heart and other practices in it. Such experience forces her to confront the possibility that the experience and view of the colonized is not ubiquitous in all communities. The methods of knowing that we have, the template of a disinterested academic who writes after subtracting his personal experience from his research to write objectively can never produce the kind of knowledge that is a must for us in order to enrich our understanding of how we experience colonialism and its legacies. Her paper was personal and her evidence was linkages with history that she able to make by not trying to be a historian of nowhere, but a historian that brought the experience of what it means to be a brown, female historian into her paper. 

It also shed light on the kind of phenomenon colonialism is. It is a dispersed phenomenon whose effects our lives in ways that we might not even think of. I might be going out on a limb here -but it is a lot like gender or power. It exists all across the social landscape. And if that is the case, then memory and emotion should be integral epistemic categories to understand colonialism. What is the point of doing history that does not capture the way history actually plays in our lives?

I honestly was in awe. This blog would have been just me praising the talk and how eloquent she was if it was up to me. Incredible.