The Postcolonial Bauman Lecture Series

An open-to-the-public online lecture series co-hosted by the Bauman Institute and the Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies (University of Leeds), together with the Postcolonial Intellectuals and their European Publics Network (PIN). 

One of the most prominent and influential intellectuals of our times, Zygmunt Bauman – who had a longstanding association with the University of Leeds –envisaged and practised sociology as a dialogic exercise. In that spirit, this online lecture series proceeds by inviting a dialogue between Bauman and postcolonial studies. Though he is better known for being a postmodern than a postcolonial figure, the series seeks to turn the tables by asking what Bauman might have to offer postcolonial studies, and by corollary what postcolonial critics, who have only rarely engaged with him, might have to say about his work. In stimulating new reflections on Bauman’s work, the series also aims to produce a suitably nuanced reconsideration of the function of postcolonial intellectuals at a time when the idea of intellectual labour is increasingly democratised, but democracy itself – not least in Europe – is increasingly at threat.

The full lecture series is now available to watch online, and features lectures by Julian Go, Manuela Boatcă, Shalini Randeria and Griselda Pollock. 

All lectures are available to watch here. 

Out of the Dark Night

Achille Mbembe
Published by Columbia University Press, January 2021
 

Achille Mbembe is one of the world’s most profound critics of colonialism and its consequences, a major figure in the emergence of a new wave of French critical theory. His writings examine the complexities of decolonization for African subjectivities and the possibilities emerging in its wake. In Out of the Dark Night, he offers a rich analysis of the paradoxes of the postcolonial moment that points toward new liberatory models of community, humanity, and planetarity.

In a nuanced consideration of the African experience, Mbembe makes sweeping interventions into debates about citizenship, identity, democracy, and modernity. He eruditely ranges across European and African thought to provide a powerful assessment of common ways of writing and thinking about the world. Mbembe criticizes the blinders of European intellectuals, analyzing France’s failure to heed postcolonial critiques of ongoing exclusions masked by pretenses of universalism. He develops a new reading of African modernity that further develops the notion of Afropolitanism, a novel way of being in the world that has arisen in decolonized Africa in the midst of both destruction and the birth of new societies. Out of the Dark Night reconstructs critical theory’s historical and philosophical framework for understanding colonial and postcolonial events and expands our sense of the futures made possible by decolonization.

For more information, see here. 

The COVID-19 Catastrophe: What's Gone Wrong and How To Stop It Happening Again, 2nd Edition

Richard Horton
Published by Polity Books, January 2021
 

This expanded, updated, and completely revised edition of The COVID-19 Catastrophe is the authoritative guide to a global health crisis that has consumed the world. Richard Horton, editor of the medical journal The Lancet, scrutinises the actions taken by governments as they sought to contain the novel coronavirus. He shows that indecision and disregard for scientific evidence has led many political leaders to preside over hundreds of thousands of needless deaths and the worst global economic crisis for three centuries.

This new edition provides a systematic discussion of the pandemic’s course, national responses, more transmissible mutant variants of the virus, and the launch of the world’s largest ever vaccination programme.

Only now are we beginning to understand the full scale of the COVID-19 crisis. We need to learn the lessons of this pandemic, and we need to learn them fast, because the next pandemic may arrive sooner than we think.

For more information, see here. 

Indigenous Knowledge in Taiwan and Beyond

Edited by Shu-mei Shih and Lin-chin Tsai
Published by Springer Singapore, January 2021
 

This book situates Taiwan’s indigenous knowledge in comparative contexts across other indigenous knowledge formations. The content is divided into four distinct but interrelated sections to highlight the importance and diversity of indigenous knowledge in Taiwan and beyond. It begins with an exploration of the recent development and construction of an indigenous knowledge and educational system in Taiwan, as well as issues concerning research ethics and indigenous knowledge. This is followed by a section that illustrates diverse forms of indigenous knowledge, and in turn, a theoretical dialogue between indigenous studies and settler colonial studies. Lastly, the Paiwan indigenous author Dadelavan Ibau’s trans-indigenous journey to Tibet rounds out the coverage. 

This book is useful to readers in indigenous, settler colonial, and decolonial studies around the world, not just because it offers substantive content on indigenous knowledge in Taiwan, but also because it offers conceptual tools for studying indigenous knowledge from comparative and relational perspectives. It also greatly benefits anyone interested in Taiwan studies, offering an ethical approach to indigeneity in a classic settler colony. 

For more information, see here. 

Border images, border narratives: The political aesthetics of boundaries and crossings

Edited by Johan Schimanski and Jopi Nyman
Published by Manchester University Press, January 2021
 

This interdisciplinary volume explores the role of images and narratives in different borderscapes. Written by experienced scholars in the field, Border images, border narratives provides fresh insight into how borders, borderscapes, and migration are imagined and narrated in public and private spheres. Offering new ways to approach the political aesthetics of the border and its ambiguities, this volume makes a valuable contribution to the methodological renewal of border studies and presents ways of discussing cultural representations of borders and related processes.

Influenced by the thinking of philosopher Jacques Rancière, this timely volume argues that narrated and mediated images of borders and borderscapes are central to the political process, as they contribute to the public negotiation of borders and address issues such as the in/visiblity of migrants and the formation of alternative borderscapes. The contributions analyse narratives and images in literary texts, political and popular imagery, surveillance data, border art, and documentaries, as well as problems related to borderland identities, migration, and trauma. The case studies provide a highly comparative range of geographical contexts ranging from Northern Europe and Britain, via Mediterranean and Mexican-USA borderlands, to Chinese borderlands from the perspectives of critical theory, literary studies, social anthropology, media studies, and political geography.

For more information, see here. 

Waiting: A Project in Conversation

Edited by Shahram Khosravi
Published by Columbia University Press, January 2021
 

Waiting is an inescapable part of life in modern societies. We all wait, albeit differently and for different reasons. What does it mean to wait for a long period of time? How do people narrate their waiting?

Waiting is about the senses. If you do not sense it, there is no waiting. We sense waiting in the form of boredom, despair, anxiety and restlessness, but also anticipation and hope. Prolonged waiting is like insomnia ─ a state of wakefulness, a kind of mood, an emotional state. But it is also about politics; affecting and affected by gender, citizenship, class, and race.

Blending ethnography, philosophy, poetry, art, and fiction, this book is a collection of works by scholars, visual artists, writers, architects and curators, exploring different forms of waiting in diverse geographical contexts, and the enduring effects of history, power, class, and coloniality.

For more information, see here. 

Crisis and Coloniality at Europe's Margins: Creating Exotic Iceland

Kristín Loftsdóttir
Published by Routledge, June 2020
 

Crisis and Coloniality at Europe’s Margins: Creating Exotic Iceland provides a fresh look at the current politics of identity in Europe, using a crisis at the margins of Europe to shed light on the continued embeddedness of coloniality in everyday aspirations and identities. Examining Iceland’s response to its collapse into bankruptcy in 2008, the author explores the way in which the country sought to brand itself as an exotic tourist destination. With attention to the nation’s aspirations, rooted in the late 19^th century, of belonging as part of Europe, rather than being classified with colonized countries, the book examines the engagement with ideas of otherness across and within Europe, as European discourses continue to be based on racialized ideas of ‘civilized’ people. With its focus on coloniality at a time of crisis, this volume contributes to our understanding of how racism endures in the present and the significance of nationalistic sentiments in a world of precariousness. Anchored in part in personal narrative, this critical analysis of coloniality, racism, whiteness and national identities will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in national identity-making, European politics and race in a world characterised by crisis.

For more information, see here. 

Transcultural Italies: Mobility, Memory and Translation

Charles Burdett, Loredana Polezzi and Barbare Spadaro
Published by Liverpool University Press, December 2020
 

The history of Italians and of modern Italian culture stems from multiple experiences of mobility and migration: between the late 19th century and the early 20th century, 27 million Italians migrated and 60 to 80 million people worldwide see their identity as connected with the Italian diaspora. Since the time of Italian unification, a series of narratives about mobility have been produced both inside and outside the boundaries of Italy, by agents such as the Italian state, international organizations or migrant communities themselves.

The essays in Transcultural Italies follow the multiple trajectories of this complex history and of its representations. They do so by focusing on the key concepts and practices of mobility, memory and translation. Taken together, they represent a contrapuntal series of case studies that offers a fresh perspective on the study of modern and contemporary Italy. The essays in the volume explore the meanings that ‘transnational’ and ‘transcultural’ assume when applied to the notion of Italian culture.

For more information, see here.