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Accepted Paper:
Dreaming of steam engines: accounting for colonial nostalgia in post-liberation Angola
Jon Schubert
(University of Basel)
Paper short abstract:
How can we as researchers do justice to sentiments of colonial nostalgia that our interlocutors may attach to colonial photos?
Paper long abstract:
In the current intellectual climate, marked by both long-overdue calls to decolonize Western social sciences and revisionist tendencies from the political right, how can we as researchers do justice to our interlocutors’ sentiments of colonial nostalgia? This input starts from a series of dusty and faded photographs of steam engines and mechanical workshops taken during the Benguela Railway’s colonial heydays to reflect on infrastructural decay, people’s affective entanglements with such cycles of construction and disrepair, and the epistemological and ethical challenges accounting for these sentiments pose to researchers.