Mahmood Mamdani Doesn’t Want to Talk About Zohran

“L et’s not talk about the mayor thing.” Thus Mahmood Mamdani made clear that he did not want to discuss his son, Zohran, who 48 hours earlier had been elected the next mayor of New York City. If the father was feeling anything other than exhaustion — and he did look very tired — he wasn’t saying. Long before Mahmood Mamdani’s surname became ubiquitous in national politics, it loomed large in the field of postcolonial studies. In several major books, he explored the enduring effects of colonialism — specifically, how various political and legal statuses, such as “citizen” and “subject” (the title of his 1996 book) explain various inequities and power differentials in postcolonial societies. Last month, Harvard University Press published his new book, Slow Poison. Mamdani tells the story of post-independence Uganda through the lens of two national leaders — Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni — and his own experiences as a scholar at the Makerere Institute of Social Research, in Kampala, and a

“L et’s not talk about the mayor thing.” Thus Mahmood Mamdani made clear that he did not want to discuss his son, Zohran, who 48 hours earlier had been elected the next mayor of New York City. If the father was feeling anything other than exhaustion — and he did look very tired — he wasn’t saying. Long before Mahmood Mamdani’s surname became ubiquitous in national politics, it loomed large in the field of postcolonial studies. In several major books, he explored the enduring effects of colonialism — specifically, how various political and legal statuses, such as “citizen” and “subject” (the ti