Short Abstract

This panel discusses colonial and postcolonial confinement in Africa and beyond. We welcome interdisciplinary proposals analyzing confinement as a device shaping social, political and artistic practices in past and present.

Long Abstract

In the 1940s, Eugene M. Kulischer introduced the term “displaced persons” to refer to people who were placed in camps. It is in this sense that detention (as a practice of control) and segregation (as a mechanism for producing difference) were exercised in spaces conceived and instituted as spaces of “exception” (Agamben, 1996), functioning as instruments for managing people considered “surplus” or dangerous to the dominant order. The concept of “camp form” proposed by Federico Rahola (2007), implies a reinterpretation of colonial and postcolonial confinements, both in terms of their long-duration perspective and their contemporary adaptation in detention practices, including for those whom Didier Fassin describes as “precarious transnational nomads – refugees or migrants, asylum seekers or undocumented foreigners” (Fassin, 2021). Spaces and policies of confinement (Dikötter & Brown, 2007; Morelle, Le Marcis & Hornberger, 2021) reveal much about geographies of exclusion and inequality (Gilmore, 2023). This panel aims to discuss, from a transdisciplinary perspective, the practices and policies of colonial and postcolonial confinement in Africa and other contexts. Proposals from different disciplinary fields are welcome that analyze confinement as a device that cuts across and interrogates the construction of social, political, and artistic practices in both the past and the present.

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