Hello and welcome to Navara FM. I'm your host, Eleanor Penny.

This week I had the pleasure of talking to academic and author Oli Femi O' Taiwo about

his two recent works. The first title is Elite Capture, how the powerful took over identity

politics and everything else. It looks at the role of the elite in society and proposes

the way of reclaiming the insights of the convoy he river collective in the face of cynical

co-option and structural capture. The second, reconsidering reparations, calls on us to rewire

the global political economy in favour of decolonial climate justice. We talked about the possibilities

and pitfalls of identity politics, how we contend with the planetary challenges of the

climate crisis and what powers might lie in the way. Femi, thank you so much for joining

Thank you for having me. So I'd like to jump straight into your most recent title Elite Capture.

This delves into the much freighted, much debated topic of identity politics. It's one of those

terms like populism which sort of seems to shift depending on who's talking about it and who

they're leveling the charge at. So what would you define as identity politics in your work?

So when I think about identity politics, I think about what I take to be what the

combay river collective said in their original statement in the late 70s was basically the origin

of the term identity politics. So as I understand it, the point of identity politics was to answer

the question, how should we get started thinking and acting politically? Should it be from this kind

of bird's eye view abstract theory of what's wrong with the world, or in general, for everybody,

for anybody, or should it be starting from someplace more personal, your particular social location,

your social position, the kinds of priorities that make sense given where you are in the world.

And identity politics is simply to take the second answer. That's compatible with having

getting started thinking about what's going on in your life or your neighborhood,

...