• Anticolonialism, as historical process and political philosophy, concerns itself with the quest for liberation. Our symposium centers anticolonialism as a vital resource for the rethinking of past, present, and future visions of the end of empire. We understand anticolonialism in a temporally and geographically expansive sense and know the “post” of postcolonialism to not mean “past.” Postcolonial critique is a comparative project, inclusive of the literature and culture of former European colonies, alongside insurgent minority forms from across the globe, and claims of Indigenous peoples to cultural and territorial sovereignty. In this spirit, we invite promiscuous, speculative, and recombinant work from the humanities and social sciences that proposes a fresh understanding of the field of postcolonial studies, its legacies, and its futures.

    We proceed from a commitment to the imaginative possibilities inaugurated by anticolonial thought and the urgency of critique now. The uncertain present of endless war, converging catastrophes, and worsening global inequality reveals the exigency and relevance of postcolonial studies and, at the same time, demands new modes of critical theory.

    This two-day symposium, hosted by the Association of Postcolonial Thought and the University of California-Berkeley, brings together a diverse, interdisciplinary body of scholars and instigators to revive anticolonialism as theory.

    Co-organizer: Yogita Goyal (UCLA)

    Co-organizer: Poulomi Saha (UC Berkeley)

    Note on format: The symposium will not be recorded or live-streamed. All are welcome to attend in person, and expected to comply with Covid safety procedures. No advance registration is required.

  • Welcome 9 - 9:30 (315 Wheeler)

    Sara Guyer, Dean of Arts and Humanities, UC Berkeley

    Raka Ray, Dean of Social Sciences, UC Berkeley

    Poulomi Saha, Associate Professor, UC Berkeley

    Yogita Goyal, Professor, UCLA


    Panel 1 9:30 - 11:00 (315 Wheeler)

    Chair: Debarati Sanyal
    Deborah Thomas, “Sovereignty is Violence, Sovereignty is Fractal”
    Yogita Goyal, “On Failure”
    Minkah Makalani, “Emancipate the World: C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney, and Decolonizing Black Power in the Caribbean”

    Panel 2 11:10 - 12:40 (315 Wheeler)

    Chair: Praseeda Gopinath
    Leela Gandhi, “Nonviolent, Nonperformative”
    Poulomi Saha, “A Political Theory of the Seance”
    Sonali Thakkar, “The Reeducation of Race”

    Speaker Lunch 12:45 - 1:45

    Roundtables 3 & 4 1:45 - 3:15

    Roundtable 3, 315 Wheeler

    Chair: Angela Naimou
    Kaneesha Parsard, “Siphon, or Revisiting Sylvia Wynter’s ‘Novel and History, Plot and Plantation’ (1971)”
    Farah Bakaari, “Qabyo: A Theory of (Anti)Coloniality”
    Nijah Cunningham, “African Dawn and the Heliological Metaphor of Decolonization”
    Alexia Alkadi-Barbaro, “ Pauulu Kamarakafego and Audley Moore on Plantation Logics as Debris of the Colony at the Dawn of Decolonization (c. 1945-1970)”
    Leila Ben Abdallah, “Unsettling Occupation: Anticolonial Organizing and the 1969 Takeover of Alcatraz Island”
    Respondent: Neetu Khanna

    Roundtable 4, Anthony Hall, Native Community Center

    Chair: Asha Nadkarni
    Anna Stielau, “Tense Presents, Present Tenses: Unsettling the Contemporary in South African Anticolonial Visual Culture”
    Stephane Robolin, “Reading an Antiapartheid Library”
    Leila Neti, “Filthy Rich, Filthy Water”
    Nadine Attewell, “A Matter of Life and Death: Care, Survival, and Anticolonial Thought Under Occupation”
    Respondent: Swati Rana

    Panels 5 & 6 3:30 - 5:00

    Roundtable 5, 315 Wheeler

    Chair: Supriya Nair
    Najnin Islam, “Indian, Madrasi, Creole: Lexicons of Race, Caste, and Anticolonialism in postemancipation British Guiana”
    Kelvin Ng, “Itineraries of Self-Respect: Anti-Casteism as Anti-Colonialism, c. 1929-1940”
    Aditya Bahl, “Green, Red: The Lost Archives of the Punjabi Underground, 1960s-70s”
    Stephanie Reist, “Transatlantic Fugitive History in Beatiz Nascimento’s Ôrí ”
    Respondent: Yanie Fecu

    Roundtable 6, Anthony Hall, Native Community Center

    Chair: Nasser Mufti
    Banu Subramaniam and Sushmita Chatterjee, “Matters of Science: The (Anti)colonial Roots of Vitalism”
    Kartik Maini, “On Learning to Love the World: Swami Sahajanand Saraswati and the Occluded Lives of Ascetic Anticolonialism”
    Ronald Mendoza de Jesus, “Assuming a Body? Abject Sovereignty and Racialized Anthropogenesis in Giannina Braschi’s ‘Close-Up’”
    Respondent: Sukanya Banerjee

    Speakers Drinks & Dinner 5pm

  • Speaker Breakfast 9 - 9:30

    Panel 7 9:30 - 11:00 (315 Wheeler)

    Chair: Kalyan Nadiminti
    Mrinalini Chakravorty, “Anticolonialism’s ‘Homosexual Territory’”
    David Eng, “The History of the Subject and the Subject of History”
    Shakirah Hudani, “Rethinking Anti-colonial Theory from the African Metropolis”

    Panel 8 11:10 - 12:40 (315 Wheeler)

    Chair: Sangeeta Ray
    Jill Jarvis, “Forget Decolonizing: Atomic Visions from the Radioactive Sahara (After Mahmadoun Hawad)”
    Christina Leon, “Suture/Knot: Raquel Salas Rivera’s Trans Poetics of Anticolonial Return”
    María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo    , “Aura + Mexican Gothic + Zombies = Latinx Speculative Fiction as Post-Revolutionary Imagination”

    Speaker Lunch 12:45 - 1:45

    Panel 9 1:45 - 3:15 (315 Wheeler)

    Chair: Greta LaFleur
    Esmat Elhalaby “Between Gaza and the Third World”
    Anthony Alessandrini “At the Level of Description, Any Decolonization is a Success: Anti-Colonialism Now”
    Zahid Chaudhary “The Afterlife of Hysteria”

    Closing Salon 3:30 - 5 (315 Wheeler)

    Reception & Dinner 5 – Close (Tilden Room, MLK Building)

  • For any questions or more information, please contact: anticolonialismastheory@gmail.com

    A campus map of Wheeler Hall can be found at: https://www.berkeley.edu/map?wheeler

  • Thank you to the support of our generous sponsors.

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