In this afterword, I begin by sharing a brief history of my early career as a non-Anglo-Celtic academic in an overwhelmingly Anglo-Celtic university environment in Australia. I examine how questions of non-Anglo-Celtic academic authority and accent play out in the process of teaching. I also explore the decolonizing impetus behind my early work White Nation (2000) both in terms of its conceptualization of Whiteness and Third-World-looking people and in terms of its reversal of the traditional research relations (a Lebanese analysing Anglo-Australians). I argue that despite this history there are many dimensions of the new politics of decolonization within anthropology that comes from outside my own tradition. I offer an examination of some of the features of this ‘new wave’ of decolonization and finish by looking into the decolonizing dimensions of my recent call to ‘respect anthropology’s elders’.
Ghassan Hage is Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He has held many visiting professorships around the world, including at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the University of Copenhagen, the University of Amsterdam and Harvard University. His research interests include Critical Anthropological Theory, comparative nationalism, colonialism and racism, the work of Pierre Bourdieu, the anthropology of the Palestinian question, and the anthropology of Lebanon and the Lebanese diaspora. His more recent works include Alter-Politics: Critical Anthropological Thought and the Radical Imagination (Melbourne University Press, 2016) and Is Racism an Environmental Threat? (Polity, 2017).