This article presents itself as an autoethnographic reflection on my positionality as a veiled, South African Muslim of Cape Malay descent and lower middle class background, attempting to navigate access to white educational space, as part of my doctoral research in Flemish primary schools. I explore what it means to be racialized as ‘other’ whilst also assuming a position of ‘authority’ as researcher, and occupying a particular space (positioned as neutral and secular) as a ‘body out of place’ (Puwar, 2004), in which a symmetry can be seen between myself and those categorised as ‘other’. The aim of this article is to reflect on how this occurs through certain processes, namely: (in)visibilisation; reprimanding; compartmentalisation; and, interpellation. I also reflect on the body of the anthropologist and the idea of the ‘objective researcher’ in order to illuminate how the mechanisms of racialization work. I engage the ensuing psychological burden brought about by the encounter with the ‘white gaze’ (Fanon, 2008). As a complement to the autoethnography, I make use of literary fiction as a method of analysis, in order to highlight the way in which literature can stimulate the formation of analytical insights (see Craith & Kockel, 2014) and, I draw on film.

Many years ago, my master thesis advisor told me that if I wanted to understand the history of a country, I should read novels. His statement caused me to reflect seriously on what it is that novels do, the truths (and untruths) they yield. This creative piece is inspired primarily by literature and is an attempt to understand how the needless death of a black university student could occur in a society that doggedly continues to view racism as something other societies do. It is simultaneously an attempt to explore how silences in the telling of history have been challenged by authors of colour, how the past reverberates into the present, and the implications for those living in the (African) diaspora. I draw on research that I conducted in two Flemish primary schools, which explored how doxic conceptions of education and belonging, equally racialized, are both reproduced and contested.

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This paper is a creative, poetic and experimental intervention in the form of collective reflections and writings on Anthropology, as the discipline we have experienced and/or been a part of within the University. It is also a reflection on the process of how the authors came together to form the River and Fire Collective. As a collective we have studied, worked and taught in more than 15 universities, and the aspects we point to here are fragments of our experiences and observations of the emotionality of the discipline. These are experiences from different forms of Anthropology from Northern Europe and settler-colonial contexts including Great Turtle Island Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand. In a metaphorical manner we invite the reader to our collective fireside dialogues and reflections, to be inspired, to disagree or agree and to continue a process of transformation. The paper sets out to provocatively question whether Anthropology is salvageable or whether one should ‘let it burn’ (Jobson, 2020). Exploring this question is done by way of discussing decolonial potentialities within the discipline(s), the classroom and exploring fire and water as a radical potential to think through the tensions between abolition and transformation. The reflections engage with concepts of decolonization, whiteness/white innocence, knowledge creation and -sharing, the anthropological self, ethics and accountability and language. The paper emphasizes Anthropology’s embeddedness in colonial narratives, structures and legacies and draws attention to how these colonial, able-bodied realities are being continuously reaffirmed through multiple educational practices and methodologies. It suggests that collectivity in writing, thinking and being is part of a healing process for those of us feeling our way through colonial continuities and prospective potentialities of Anthropology.