The Manifesto and Postcolonial Thought
Description
In August 1857, Frederick Douglass delivered a speech on West India Emancipation, famously saying “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Two months later, as if heeding Douglass’s call, the people of Morant Bay rebelled. Before the eruption of violence, several rebels sent a petition to Governor Eyre, saying that they were “compelled to resist” unjust treatment. Rather than a petition, the document reads today more as a manifesto, both exhorting supporters to resist and issuing demands to an oppressor. Starting in the nineteenth century and continuing to the present day—think only of Rhodes Must Fall or the Black Lives Matter movement—demands for emancipation and sovereignty increasingly come in the form of manifestos and closely related genres, such as declarations, petitions, open letters, resolutions, and revolutionary chants. As types of writing that bridge the gap between speech and action, manifestos have both illocutionary and perlocutionary force. Postcolonial scholars have given a great deal of attention to fiction and poetry, but our assertion in this seminar is that anticolonial thought developed first and foremost through nonfiction genres. Thinking about short, polemical nonfiction as a set of literary practices is overdue.
On behalf of the Association of Postcolonial Thought, we encourage submissions that take an expansive view of the manifesto as form – including for instance, Ngũgĩ’s call for the abolition of the English Department, feminist calls for wages against housework, declarations of occupation, abolition, and radical alliance, archives of such conferences as the Tricontinental and Bandung, and keystone speeches marking the dawn of decolonization. Although influential studies like Martin Puchner’s Poetry of the Revolution attribute the spread of the genre to The Communist Manifesto, our seminar will explore the origins and development of the anticolonial manifesto as a form that engages with but also extends beyond the avant-garde practices described by Puchner. As China Mieville writes in A Spectre, Haunting, “A manifesto embraces contradiction. It’s unafraid of paradox. It delights in outrage.” We should thus not approach it “as if its tenets could be falsified or verified like mathematical proofs” but learn to read its “apocalyptic and poetic style.” This seminar invites explorations of the manifesto as anticolonial form and its ongoing relevance to a revitalized postcolonial project in the present.
Papers should focus on at least one primary document. Questions may include:
-how has the anticolonial manifesto evolved in response to particular historical circumstances?
-what is the relationship between the manifesto’s form and the movements with which it is associated?
-how do manifestos and related genres adapt to different forms of dissemination (oral delivery, pamphlet or periodical publication, clandestine or electronic circulation)?
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Peter Kalliney teaches at the University of Kentucky. He is author of four books, including The Aesthetic Cold War: Decolonization and Global Literature. His essays have appeared MLQ, Modern Fiction Studies, PMLA, Post45, Research in African Literatures, Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. His research has been recognized with fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and NEH. He is coediting the anthology Anticolonial Thought and Writing with Harris Feinsod and Leah Feldman.
Speaker Bio
Dennis M. Hogan is a lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University. His scholarly work has appeared in ELH, the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, and Oxford Bibliographies in Victorian Literature as well as in volumes from Bloomsbury and Johns Hopkins. His book, on the literary history of nineteenth-century efforts to control the interoceanic crossings across Central America, is under contract at Oxford University Press.
Speaker Bio
Abhipsa Chakraborty is Assistant Professor of English at Berry College, GA. She received a PhD in English from SUNY Buffalo, specializing in global modernist and postcolonial literatures. She holds a BA, MA, and MPhil from the Department of English, University of Delhi, and previously taught as an Assistant Professor at the University of Delhi. Her work has been published/is forthcoming in Journal of Modern Literature, Modernism/modernity, Textual Cultures and The Review of English Studies.
Speaker Bio
Rijuta Mehta is an assistant professor of English at the University of Toronto.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Seck is an Assistant Professor of French at Stanford University. She specializes in the literatures and cultures of Africa and the African diaspora, with a focus on history, popular culture, and politics in the French-speaking world. Her book manuscript, Materializing Imaginaries: Cultural Revolution in Senegal and the Making of Modern African Literature is a cultural history of the Senegalese left and its impact on modern African literature, cinema and political thought.
Speaker Bio
Arnav Adhikari is an assistant professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. His current book project traces artistic experiments with political form in Cold War South Asia, theorizing “processual realism” as a framework for examining shifting modes of empire at a time of fraught national self-reckoning. Arnav's scholarship has appeared in venues including Cultural Critique, Global South Studies, and Postcolonial Text.
Speaker Bio
Kaneesha Parsard is assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago. Her first book Desiring Freedom: Counterimaginaries of Work, Sex, and Family after West Indian Emancipation will be published on the University of Chicago Press in the fall of 2026, and traces how British West Indian aesthetics imagined freedom from work and domesticity. She is at work on a new project that explores how aspirations to redress chafe against the unresolved legacies of slavery and colonialism.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Yogita Goyal (she/her) is Professor of African American Studies and English at UCLA and author of Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (2010) and Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery (2019), winner of the René Wellek and Perkins Prizes. She is the co-editor of American Literary History and is working on a monograph about mid-twentieth century anticolonial thought and its current revival, called “Anticolonialism, Lost and Found.”
Speaker Bio
Anna Thomas is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto, where she researches and teaches African American and Caribbean literature. She is working on her first book, Moved But Not Destroyed, which examines comparative racialization, ethics, and form. Her writing has appeared in ASAP/Journal, Interventions, Prac Crit, and Cultural Critique.
Speaker Bio
Sara Kazmi is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a scholar and translator whose work takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of anticolonial, left, and radical literary production in the global south, with a focus on South Asia. She is currently working on a monograph tentatively titled Ante/ Anti-Border: Writing Resistance in India and Pakistan.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Lienau is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Her first book, Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference: Global Arabic and Counter-Imperial Literatures (Princeton, 2024), won the ACLA’s Harry Levin Prize. She is now completing a second book on twenty-first-century revolutionary movements and their cultural afterlives, focusing on the literary legacies of anti-authoritarian protest in Egypt and Indonesia. Her research has been funded by NEH, ACLS, and Mellon grants.
Speaker Bio
Moinak Banerjee is a PhD candidate in the Department of English, McGill University. His dissertation posits modernism as a political aesthetic in South Asia by concentrating on the Global Sixties and the Cultural Cold War. Specifically. he investigates literary as well as cultural forms like the novel, long poem, manifesto, reportage, and photographs to trace how they articulate a politics of commitment and aesthetics of dissidence.
Speaker Bio
Asha Nadkarni (she/her) is Professor of English and the Co-Director of the World Studies Interdisciplinary Project at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In addition to many articles and book chapters, she is author of Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India (Minnesota, 2014) and co-editor (with Cathy Schlund-Vials) of Asian American Literature in Transition, 1965-1996: Volume Three (Cambridge University Press, 2021).