CORRECTED: 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, Public Policy, 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 is my second book on reparations, the first being a 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"—not that empire is over; rather in consideration of its longue durée, what economic equilibrations are called for today? The idea is to consider, assess, and theorize empire through the triptych: theft, debt, repair. Any one of those variables, 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 the single incident in which they loaded the entire treasury of the state of Bengal onto a hundred ships and left took it home with them? Far beyond their wrongly charging Haiti “reverse-reparations” for the Haitian revolution, what besides that does France owe Haiti? How begin to taxonomize the matter of “land reform” or restoration in the context of Native North America? 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 the descendants of slaves, what does Britain also owe to those same descendants? 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, later in the new republic. What is owed to numerous African nations for the “scramble” sanctioned by the Berlin Africa conference? We think 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 of Armenia, Palestine and Israel, the former Soviet bloc, as well as Hong Kong and some under-researched African nations -- perhaps Tunisia, Sudan, Liberia -- or places like Cyprus, Scotland, Ireland.

 

However, given that such readings are generally unfamiliar to postcolonial criticism, all locations, histories, colonies will be under consideration. It 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. And, whether the equilibrations occur, the return of goods, the repayments for stolen trade routes, betrayed treaties, stolen labor, or the mass of additional imperialist thievings that occurred; 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 taking the question of reparations seriously, considering the matter of a necessary international equilibration after empire, especially 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 symbiotically tied to it. 

 

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 please 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