Discourse on (Anti)Colonialism: Transdisciplinary Analyses toward Transnational Strategies

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

As Aimé Césaire writes in Discourse on Colonialism (1950), “it is the colonized man who wants to move forward, and the colonizer who holds things back,” and this roundtable will explore transnational practices and paradigms of this movement forward and of resistance to colonial and neocolonial forms of state power and violence, taking a critical transdisciplinary approach to create a map of potential points of anticolonial exchange and collaboration. Collectively, our scholarship travels along multiple global routes that intersect at specific sites, hence mapping multiple possibilities for both comparative analysis and concrete strategies for collective liberation. This map contains global Indigenous theories and practices of decolonial and anticolonial resistance as a lens on Russian colonialism in Siberia and the Arctic; histories of decolonization in Ghana and the Pan-African movement’s uniquely revealing relationships with Western Imperialism, Soviet expansionism and influence, and Marxist-Leninist thought; Vietnamese and Polish exchanges, practices, and narratives of socialist solidarity before and after unification of Vietnam; Black feminist internationalism, Eurasian knowledge production, and multiple, resonant modes of resistance to state violence; and the complexities of multi-directional applications of decolonial theories that were born alongside active anticolonial strategies within specific historical contexts. Through dialogue and exchange, this roundtable will highlight confluences and divergences in enactments of expansionist forms of state power, even those that are discursively constructed as distant or even oppositional, in turn revealing confluences and divergences in global practices of anticolonial resistance and allowing for collective navigation in movement forward toward noncolonial futures.

Sub Unit

• Sociology, Public Health, Education

Chair

• Erin K Krafft, U of Massachusetts Dartmouth

Roundtable Members

• Erin K Krafft, U of Massachusetts Dartmouth

• Thuc Linh Nguyen Vu, U of Vienna (Austria) / Harvard U

• Nana Osei-Opare, Rice U

• Tatsiana Shchurko, U of South Florida

• Brian Yang, U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign