Iâve been thinking a lot about the whole âRF Kuang is cancelled againâ discourse because she was invited to a fantasy conference in Dubai to talk about Babel, then withdrew after learning about the UAEâs involvement in extractivism and violence in Sudan. People are saying she âshould have known,â that itâs hypocritical for a decolonial author to attend, etc. And yes, Dubai is deeply implicated in whatâs happening in Sudan. Yes, Gulf states deserve critique. Yes, Arab people especially have every right to boycott influencers and institutions that profit from exploitation.
But I want to be very clear from the start: I respect the boycott when it comes from Sudanese and Palestinian movements themselves, and I understand why cultural institutions in the UAE are being called out through BDS. Boycott is a tool of solidarity, not a moral purity test. My issue is not with the boycott itself â itâs with how selectively people apply it.
I find it interesting how quickly the internet jumps to cancel a woman of colour for being associated with Dubai, while completely ignoring the fact that the United States is itself a colonial state. Every American city is built on stolen Native land. Europe is sliding into open fascism. Canada is still a settler colony. India is openly supremacist. And yet, no one screams scandal when RF Kuang travels to Oxford or Cambridge â institutions built on imperial extraction, scientific racism, and colonial wealth. Somehow Western colonialism remains invisible, unremarked, and even prestigious, while non-Western states become the sole terrain of moral outrage. Itâs a double standard that reveals far more about Western comfort than about actual solidarity.
I keep thinking about how people said âshe should have known,â as if Americans are magically omniscient about global politics. Iâm sorry, but Iâm a Belgian woman of colour, and when Angela Davis came to Belgium a few years ago â someone I admire deeply â she had no idea about the police violence Black and Arab communities were experiencing here. That same year, a young man had died from police brutality and we had massive protests across the country. If Angela Davis, with her decades of activism, didnât know about Belgian struggles until someone told her, why do we expect a fantasy author to automatically know everything about Sudan, UAE geopolitics and Gulf extractivism.
And to situate this within the BDS framework: the issue is not that RF Kuang was going to speak about colonialism. BDS targets state-backed cultural partnerships that whitewash oppression, not independent authors who come to critique power. Speaking about decolonial violence in Dubai is not the same as legitimizing the Emirati state. This distinction matters and people keep flattening it.
This is why Alinsky insists on being radical, not âpure.â Purity politics do nothing for oppressed people. They just create smaller and smaller circles of âacceptableâ activists. Movements donât win because individuals are morally flawless; they win because they act strategically. There is a difference between refusing to normalize a regime and refusing to let decolonial voices speak in difficult spaces. We have to know the difference.
Honestly, having a decolonial author present Babel in Dubai might have opened conversations that desperately need to happen in that region. Silencing those voices doesnât challenge authoritarianism. It reinforces Western cultural dominance by keeping decolonial critique confined to Western audiences only. There are other ways to boycott Dubai that hit harder (like not participating in the trendy Dubai chocolate craze) without shutting down opportunities to challenge narratives from within.
And Iâm tired of watching authors of colour get held to impossible standards while white authors face zero consequences. Colleen Hoover still sells millions. Emily Henry hasnât said a word about Palestine and no one seems to mind. Brandon Sanderson? Also silent. The fandomâs appetite for moral perfection applies almost exclusively to racialized authors, especially Asian and Black writers, while white authors are allowed to be apolitical by default. Thatâs not solidarity thatâs racialized scrutiny disguised as ethics.
To align with the joint PalestineâSudan call: yes, these struggles are linked, and yes, the UAE plays a role in both. But so do Western states. So does Europeâs border regime. So does the United Statesâ endless militarism. If weâre serious about solidarity, we cannot reserve outrage for non-Western states while normalizing oppression at home. Solidarity has to be global, or it becomes theatre.
So yes, critique Dubai. Yes, critique extractivism in Sudan. Yes, hold everyone accountable. But cancelling a decolonial author for an honest mistake, while giving Western institutions and white authors a free pass. It misses the structural point entirely. And it makes our movements smaller, not stronger.
