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

Maureen Ruprecht Fadem Announcement
Location
New York, United States
Subject Fields
Slavery, Public Policy, Economic History / Studies, Colonial and Post-Colonial History / Studies, Political Science

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 for empire both in national frameworks and internationally. It takes up the matter of restorative justice “after empire"—not that empire is over---but rather in consideration of its longue durée. What economic equilibrations should be being called for today? How do we consider, assess, and theorize modern era imperialism, including settler and administrative forms of colonialism and including slavery---a structure of and in empire---through the triptych: theft, debt, and repair? Any one of those variables, any two, or all three.

Few people scholars are doing this specific work; there is some in Economics, surprisingly little in Postcolonial studies where one assumes we’d find more work taking the question of imperial reparations seriously, considering the necessary equilibrations called for after empire, especially given the global distribution of wealth and how it got that way. Work collected here is to ask questions not generally asked—in postcolonial studies, in the scholarship on slavery—as Declan Kiberd puts it in After Ireland, simply “what is owed and to whom?” That enquiry regards both sides of the wealth coin: what was profited and how did it profit, and what was taken and what did that takenness/tookenness do or wring or bring about? The critical other side to racism is white privilege; this volume looks at critical other sides of empire, not only the damages inflicted on colonized peoples and places but the capitalist appropriation (of material resources, trade and trade routes, under- or uncompensated labor) and how empire produced massive security as a result in the form of massive wealth legacies as well as intense precarity in the form of poverty and disenfranchisement perhaps best evidenced by today’s wildly unequal global distribution of wealth. Contributors will for example unpack the institution of slavery as not merely a humanitarian emergency but as an imperial economy, matters to which processes of justice (remuneration, restitution, repair) attach and remain outstanding, owed as debts are owed.

Work appropriate to this volume will likely fall within the rubrics of Postcolonial, North-South, Atlantic or Decolonial approaches. However any discipline, approach or framework---historical, literary, political science, economics, social scientific, public or urban policy, peace and conflict studies, the new histories of capital, the new materialism, etc.---as well as any geographic or national history, any methodology, data or material as long as it is probing and theorizing these questions. So 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 and Ireland.

However, given that such readings are generally unfamiliar to postcolonial criticism, all locations and colonial histories will be under consideration. 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 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, to Eric Garner’s 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 American 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, that it did. What is owed to numerous African nations for the “scramble” sanctioned by the Berlin Africa conference? 

This is, in part, a revisionist project that redefines empire as a massive criminal capital campaign, one founded upon thievery---including thieved labor---and the appropriation of natural resources and trade routes. To whatever extent such assertions of a necessary repairing are heeded or might be successful; whether the equilibrations occur, the return of goods, remuneration for the stolen trade routes, the betrayed treaties, the uncompensated labor, or the whole mass of thievings; still, the documentation of these long outstanding debts, the documentation of the injuriouness---to colonized economies themselves as to their sustainability and resilience, the ability to bounce back from intermittent drags, the documentation of the non-started or unfinished processes of reparative justice---these must be represented, must enter the historical record finally, the archive, the public policy discussion, and indeed the conversation and the discourse very broadly.

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, economic studies, and the many other research areas touching empire and the racial capital symbiotically embedded with it. That collection was published in Routledge’s Postcolonial Politics series, and I will submit this one to it again.

I would like to have all proposals by end of summer, so will look to a deadline of 8/31/21 for this Call.

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