Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

The decolonizing discussion would benefit from a nuanced look at the lived histories of the anticolonial experience. Oral history with survivors of Cypriot intercommunal violence across the Left/Right axis shows divergent views on coloniality, highlighting the grey zone in which history lives.

Paper long abstract

The decolonizing turn in anthropology needs historicization. Drawing from philosophy, much of the decolonizing discussion seems to be ignoring the existing histories of anticolonial struggles. As such histories are built in people’s biographies, looking into the oral history of anticolonial fighting should then be an obvious place to begin an assessment of what coloniality was and, crucially, still is. When the ethnographer investigates the memories of people who lived under colonial regimes and were embroiled in anticolonial mobilization, nuanced narratives arise. As colonized peoples were enmeshed in ideologies of modernity, including the political axis of Left and Right, many claimed an alternative modernity of liberation for their own communities. Within this horizon, communities were often divided on the form of state independence. The contested futurity built in anticolonial struggles still lingers in contemporary communities, dividing them decades after decolonization.

This paper looks at communist and far-right stories by survivors of a conflict in a Cypriot village during the late 1950s and the EOKA-led anticolonial insurgency against the British. Based on interviews with elderly people, it argues that the different, often widely divergent ideas of a futurity for Cyprus that brought left and right-leaning activists to violent conflict are ongoing. It also argues that the decolonizing discussion in anthropology would benefit from a nuanced look at the lived histories of the anticolonial experience. Colonized by the shape of postcolonial statehood, which celebrates anticolonial insurgency and denigrates other visions for modernity, contemporary narratives replicate a never-finished division on the horizon of modernity.