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)?