Call for Book Chapters: Imperial Debt: Colonial Theft, Postcolonial Repair

Maureen Ruprecht Fadem Announcement
Location
New York, United States
Subject Fields
Atlantic History / Studies, Colonial and Post-Colonial History / Studies, Economic History / Studies, European History / Studies, Slavery

 

Dear Colleagues, 

 

This is a Call for Papers for a new collection I'm working on: Imperial Debt: Colonial Theft, Postcolonial Repair. This would be the first collection of its kind, forwarding a case for reparations---restorative, reparative justice---in the context of modern era imperialism. (This will be my second book on reparations, the first being my monograph that came out late last year on Morrison’s Beloved.) The collection will offer a set of chapters that consider the matter from various points of view, disciplinary, national, theoretical, historical, some comparative, all more than likely interdisciplinary. 

 

Work collected in the volume is to focus on reparations both in national frameworks and also internationally. It takes up the matter of restorative justice “after empire," if you will—not that empire is over, rather in consideration of its longue durée, what kind of economic equilibrations are called for today? The idea is to consider, assess and theorize empire through the triptych: theft, debt, repair -- imperial. Any one of those, any two, or all three. Any discipline, any geography, history, empire, any methodology, data, material as long as it is probing and answering these questions in some way.

 

What does Britain owe South Asia given even just one incident in which they loaded the entire treasury of the state of Bengal onto a hundred ships and left with it? Far beyond their wrongly charging Haiti “reverse-reparations” for the Haitian revolution, what besides that does France owe Haiti? How even begin to taxonomize the matter of “land reform” in the context of Native North America? And what does the U.S. owe mass incarcerated America, endemically police-brutalized America? Quite apart from civil suits, what is owed to Kalief Browder’s family, Breonna Taylor’s family, Eric Garner’s family, Jacob Blake and his family, in the name of the nation-state? Beyond the U.S. and what we owe to the descendants of slaves, what does Britain also owe to those same descendants of the institution? For it was under the British empire—with its laissez faire policy regarding how the colonizers built the colonies—that chattel slavery became the unbridled, brutally savage force in the North American colonies, and later the new republic. What is owed to numerous African nations for the “scramble” sanctioned by the Berlin Africa conference? We think, then, of materialist readings of modern era imperialist chattel enslavement that forward a clear, convincing case for restorative justice, the same with regard to First Peoples. We think likewise of Armenia, Palestine and Israel, the former Soviet bloc, as well as Hong Kong and some of the under-researched African nations -- perhaps Tunisia, Sudan, Liberia -- or places like Cyprus, Scotland, Ireland. However, given that this type of reading is generally unfamiliar to postcolonial criticism, all locations, histories, colonies will be under consideration.

 

This is, in part, a revisionist project that redefines empire as a criminal enterprise, a massive capital campaign founded upon thievery and the appropriation of resources and trade routes belonging to others. And, whether the equilibrations occur, the return of goods, the repayments for stolen trade routes, betrayed treaties, and the mass of additional imperialist appropriations; to whatever extent such assertions of a necessary repairing are heeded or might be successful; the documentation of such debt, the barely or non-started or unfinished processes of reparative justice must be represented, must enter the record, the archive, and indeed the conversation. Few people are doing this work; there is some in Economics but little besides, surprisingly little in Postcolonial studies where one assumes we’d find more work that takes the question of reparations seriously, that considers the matter of a necessary international equilibration after empire given the global distribution of wealth and how it got that way.

 

As argued in the 2021 collection I edited with Michael O'Sullivan, The Economics of Empire, such forms of materialist analysis are vital and we hope defining for the future of postcolonial studies, empire studies, policy studies, legal studies, and the many other research areas touching empire and the racial capital inextricably tied to it. As with that collection, one role I hope the book will play is to bring to light a fuller awareness and knowledge of areas touched by imperialism that often go unregistered and are under-studied and under-taught. 

 

That collection was published in Routledge’s Postcolonial Politics series, and I will submit this one to the same series. I would like to have all proposals by end of summer, so let's look to a deadline of 8/31/21.

 

If you could respond with a one or two page abstract and a short CV to my CUNY email: mfadem@kbcc.cuny.edu and with a cc: to my personal email: meruprecht@yahoo.com  Any questions, I am happy to discuss ideas.

 

In solidarity, 

~Maureen Ellen Ruprecht

The City University of New York / Kingsborough

mfadem@kbcc.cuny.edu | meruprecht@yahoo.com

 

Contact Information

Maureen Ruprecht Fadem

Contact Email
mfadem@kbcc.cuny.edu