Short Abstract

This workshop invites ethnographic reflections on living struggles for sovereignty and self-determination against imperialism and (neo)colonialism, examining the ideas, commitments and ideologies driving decolonisation, their place in the anthropological canon and their contradictions.

Long Abstract

Recent debates around ‘decolonizing the curriculum’ have focused on broadly epistemological questions about the adequate representation of formerly colonised societies in anthropological teaching, the proper conceptualisation of their modes of thought, and a criticism of Euro-American knowledge systems. While worthy criticisms in their own right, we suggest that one consequence of this focus is that anthropological attention has shifted away from living struggles against (neo)colonial empire. In this panel, we invite contributions that renew ethnographic attention towards what we term ‘living struggles’ against empire. In a fractured and fragmented world of extremes, colonialism’s legacies and continuities are invoked across a range of political fronts - whether the presence of the International Monetary Fund in governing macroeconomic policy in Kenya, the legacies of French neo-colonialism in the Sahel, or criticism of US military hegemony in the Middle-East. In short, (neo)colonialism continues to ‘move’ politics, animating political movements and commitments.

We welcome ethnographic, historical, and comparative contributions from different regions and scales, while inviting scholars to develop their analyses in relation to critical rereadings of anti-colonial classics such as Fanon, Césaire, Cabral, Memmi, Nkrumah, and Ngũgĩ to understand what we can take from their conceptualisations of liberation's necessary strategies, promises and contradictions. Papers may examine how colonial pasts and imperial durabilities shape political imaginaries; how decolonial claims intersect with nativism, migration, gender, class, racialisation, or geopolitical realignment; and how critical events render contradictions visible. Our aim is a comparative anthropology of decolonization that analyses how the promise of freedom continues to move.