• CRISIS

    The language of crisis suffuses current imaginings of past, present, and future. This symposium invites ambitious and expansive critical reflections on the concept of crisis and the postcolony across time and space. We welcome interdisciplinary provocations in the humanities, arts, and social sciences that offer the potential for thinking about crisis alongside forms of resilience, resistance, and collaboration.

    How do we understand the crisis of postcolonial longings for freedom today when the struggles for sovereignty that inspired decolonization movements have been beset by internal and external threats to pluralism, diversity, and self-governance? How do different constituencies across the globe find common ground in the context of spiraling economic crises, capitalist extraction, climate change, territorial disputes, and racial, religious, and ethno-national conflict? How do political and cultural solidarities generate the foundation for alternative sovereignties grounded in the articulation of anti-colonial alliances? How do histories of revolution and decolonization rethink crisis?

    In the face of multiple declarations of economic and ecological crises, constitutional crises and the threat to democracy, border crisis and border imperialism, how do we reimagine futurities and collectivities? How might historical forms of political sovereignty (such as those imagined by anti-colonial nationalisms) reanimate contemporary struggles for justice and calls for solidarities (ranging, for example, across the anti-apartheid movement, the anti-Iraq War movement, advocacy of Indigenous rights, Immigrants Peoples Movement, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, the Prison Abolition Movement, and the Movement for Black Lives)?

    This symposium, held at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, is the second in a sequence planned by the Association of Postcolonial Thought and is aimed at fostering the future of the field.

    Co-organizer: Yogita Goyal (UCLA)

    Co-organizer: Supriya M. Nair (University of Michigan-Ann Arbor)

    Co-organizer: Salah D. Hassan (Michigan State University)

    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: 8.45-9.15

    Rackham Amphitheatre, 4 th Floor, Rackham Building

    Session 1: 9.15-10.30

    Rackham Amphitheatre, 4 th Floor, Rackham Building

    Anticolonialism and Forms of Crisis

    Chair: Aida Levy-Hussen

    1. Sophia Azeb, Black Anticolonialism as Radical Relation

    2. Yogita Goyal, Genres of Anticolonialism

    3. Jordan Stein, Infrastructure Crisis in Postcolonial Haiti

    4. Farah Bakaari, Irruptive Form and the Crisis of Narration in the Postcolonial African Novel

    Session 2: 10.45-12

    Rackham Amphitheatre, 4 th Floor, Rackham Building

    Translating the Past, Present, and Future of Crisis  

    Chair: Salah Hassan

    1. Gil Hochberg, Native, Refuge, Exile: Thoughts on the Future of Palestine 

    2. Khaled Mattawa, Cultural Transitioning: Self-Translation and Postcolonial Double-Agency

    3. Mona Kareem, Translating Kindred into Arabic: Writing History in Genre-Fiction 

    4. Milad Odabaei, Incapacitation and Renewal: A Political Theology of Crisis

    Lunch: 12-1 (for panelists)

    Rackham Assembly Hall, 4 th Floor, Rackham Building

    Two streams: Sessions 3 & 4 1.15-2.30

    Session 3

    Rackham Amphitheatre, 4 th Floor, Rackham Building

    Reproduction and Crisis

    Chair: Aliyah Khan

    1. Iyko Day, Reproduction and Crisis after Black Marxism

    2. Tanya Agathocleous, The Content of Eugenical Form: Romance and Eros in Marriage Hygiene

    3. Paul Vanouse, Fitness Anxiety: Revisiting Charles Davenport’s ‘Race Crossing in Jamaica’ Examinations

    4. Asha Nadkarni, Queering Genealogy: Competing Diasporic Imaginaries in Shani Mootoo’s He Drown She in the Sea

    Session 4

    West Conference Room, 4 th Floor, Rackham Building

    Troubling Form, Troubling Aftermath 

    Chair: Niloofar Sarlati

    1. Angela Naimou, Regimes of Refuge and the Lives of International Law

    2. Joy Mazahreh, Ismuha Falasteen: Fragmentary Anachronisms in Contemporary Palestinian Women’s Writings 

    3. Avni Sejpal, Palestine Cuts: Postcolonial Detail and the Crisis of Realism

    4. Haider Shahbaz, Anticolonial Relation: Afro-Asian Solidarity in Urdu Magazines 1930-1990

    Sessions 5 and 6: 2.45-4.15

    Session 5

    Rackham Amphitheatre, 4 th Floor, Rackham Building

    Fugitive Forms of Becoming 

    Chair: Leila Neti 

    1. Nikhil Pandhi, The Caste of Crisis: Fugitive Belonging in End-Times

    2. Laura Brueck, Detective Fiction and the Crisis of Caste

    3. Raina Bhagat, Supercharged: Writing the Nuclear Body

    4. Praseeda Gopinath, Dalit Masculinity and the Crisis of the ‘Real’

    Session 6

    West Conference Room, 4 th Floor, Rackham Building

    Ecologies of Crisis and Repair

    Chair: Mrinalini Chakravorty 

    1. Kirk B. Sides, Ecologies of Disruption: Towards an Ecological Imaginary in African Literatures

    2. Laura Winkiel, Lianedialectique: Suzanne Césaire’s Anticolonial Ecology

    3. Bassam Sidiki, Writ in Water: Postcolonial River-Writing and Pakistan’s Flood Crisis

    4. Rebecca Oh, Apocalyptic Realism: Environmental Crisis, Temporal Antinomies, and Infrastructural Contradictions

    5. Annabelle Haynes, ‘Conquistadorial Habits:’ Mothering the Past and Denaturalizing Disaster

    Session 7: 4.30-5.30

    Rackham Amphitheatre, 4 th Floor, Rackham Building

    Keywords for Postcolonial Studies 1

    Chair: Arvind-Pal Mandair

    1. Comfort Azubuko-Udah, Charisma

    2. Sarah Quesada, Latin-Africa

    3. Preeti Singh, Emergency

    4. Harris Feinsod, Deglobalization

    5. Akshya Saxena, Language

    6. Sonali Thakkar, Reparation

  • Session 8: 9-10.15

    Rackham Amphitheatre, 4 th Floor, Rackham Building

    Blackness, the State, and Crises of Time and Space  

    Chair: Yanie Fecu

    1. Justin L. Mann, Racial Tectonics

    2. Sakiru Adebayo, Ethical Afropolitanism: Reading Africa’s Mobile Subjects in Helon Habila’s Travellers

    3. Arielle Stambler, The Jamaican 1970s and the Temporality of Crisis

    4. William Pruitt, Following The Man (1964) to A Promised Land (2020): Black U.S. Presidencies as Solutions to the World’s Crises

    Session 9: 10.30-11.45

    Rackham Amphitheatre, 4 th Floor, Rackham Building

    Cold War, Decolonization, and Crisis

    Chair: Zahid Chaudhary

    1. Joseph Keith, C.L.R. James, State Capitalism, and the “Crisis” of the Cold War

    2. Christopher J. Lee, Fanon and the Vietnamese

    3. Paul Nadal, The Asian American Character of Logistics

    4. Jini Kim Watson, Cold War Models, Dependentistas, and the Crisis of Development

    Lunch: 12-1 (for panelists)

    Rackham Assembly Hall, 4 th Floor, Rackham Building

    Two streams: Sessions 10 and 11 1.15-2.45

    Session 10

    Rackham Amphitheatre, 4 th Floor, Rackham Building

    The Futures of Postcolonial Literature

    Chair: Renée Michelle Ragin Randall

    1. Sangeeta Ray, Objects and Things: Unfolding Thought in Sri Lankan Civil War Narratives

    2. Liam Kruger, Crisis Management and the Postcolonial Literary Canon

    3. Ben Baer, Useless Literature

    4. Nasser Mufti, Caricatures of Modernity: The Farces of Postcolonial Enlightenment

    Session 11

    West Conference Room, 4 th Floor, Rackham Building

    Catastrophe, Internationalism, and Activism

    Chair: Salik Basharat Geelani

    1. Alexia Alkadi-Barbaro, Organizing Earth, Ordering Liberation: Revisiting the Plantation Economy in the dawn of Environmental Catastrophe

    2. Noah Hansen, “We Dug the Ditch, We Built the Dam”: The Panama Canal Zone and the Rise of Black Labor Internationalism”

    3. Nico Millman, Ecological Crisis, Postcoloniality, and the Environmentalism of the Poor in India and Mexico

    4. Rijuta Mehta, Visual Enigmas of Counterinsurgency 

    5. Anirbaan Banerjee, On a Different Terrain: The Periodical Poetics of Linton Kwesi Johnson and Race Today Magazine

    Sessions 12 and 13: 3-4.30

    Session 12

    Rackham Amphitheatre, 4 th Floor, Rackham Building

    Crisis, Sanction, and Refusal

    Chair: Stéphane Robolin 

    1.Purnima Bose, Afghanistan, Crisis, and Temporality

    2. Sarah Abolail, Crisis; Decolonization, and Arrested Revolutions in Zaat: A Girl from Egypt 

    3. Akshaya Tankha, The ‘houseness’ of the Naga house museum: exhibitionary forms of endurance in postcolonial South Asia

    4. Karim Mattar, Palestine: An American Crisis  

    Session 13

    West Conference Room, 4 th Floor, Rackham Building

    Global Entanglements of Colonial History and Media

    Chair: Neetu Khanna 

    1. Juan Carlos “JC” Fermin, A “Phantasmagoric Europe” and Its Long Shadows: The Crisis of the Philippine Ego-Ideal

    2. Sheng-mei Ma, Taiwan Meets Its Unmaker: Precarity Potential in Circum-I(sle) and gHost Films

    3. Subhalakshmi Gooptu, A Crisis of Inheritance: Reproductive Restraints and Resistance in the Afterlife of Indentured Servitude

    4. Kavita Daiya, Beyond the Migrant Crisis: Drawing Postcolonial Development

    Session 14: 4.30-5.30

    Rackham Amphitheatre, 4 th Floor, Rackham Building

    Keywords for Postcolonial Studies 2

    Chair: Madhumita Lahiri

    1. Lakshmi Padmanabhan, Mediation

    2. Nikhita Obeegadoo, Archipelagic

    3. Mukti Lakhi Mangharam, Freedom

    4. Peter Kalliney, Autonomy

    5. Leah Feldman, Agitation

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

  • We thank our sponsors for their generous support.

    University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

    African Studies Center

    Asian and Pacific Islander American Studies Program (A/PIA)

    Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (LACS)

    Center for South Asian Studies (CSAS)

    College of Literature, Science and the Arts (LSA)

    Department of American Culture

    Department of Comparative Literature

    Department of English Language and Literature

    Department of History

    Global Postcolonialisms Collective (GPC)

    Institute for the Humanities

    The Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWG),

    The UM Office of Research (UMOR)

    Michigan State University

    College of Arts and Letters

    Department of English

    Global Studies in the Arts and Humanities

    Muslim Studies Program