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

Maureen Ruprecht Fadem Announcement
Subject Fields
Colonial and Post-Colonial History / Studies, Economic History / Studies, World History / Studies

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 a monograph on Morrison’s Beloved. I scoped out a vision for reparations for slavery in the U.S. in that book, a six-part schema involving financial remuneration, truth and reconciliation, education, memorialization, and community development, as well as instituting measures to stop the injuriousness by stopping mass incarceration and achieving a true and full and final abolition.

 

The question now, how develop such a plan for modern era empire? This collection will offer a set of chapters that consider the matter from various points of view, disciplinary, national, theoretical, historical, material, some comparative, all likely interdisciplinary. Work collected in the volume is to focus on reparations for empire in national and international contexts. That is, it will take up the matter of restorative justice “after empire" in consideration of the 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.

 

Work collected here is to ask questions not generally asked—in postcolonial studies, in the scholarship on slavery, etc.—surrounding the matter of “what is owed and to whom?,” as Declan Kiberd put it in After Ireland.[1] 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, under- or uncompensated labor) but also how empire produced massive security in the form of wealth legacies as well as massive precarity and poverty, disenfranchisements perhaps best evidenced by today’s wildly unequal national and global distributions of wealth.

 

So, we think of materialist readings of imperialist chattel enslavement that develop a clear, convincing case for restorative justice, unpacking the institution as not merely a humanitarian emergency but as an imperial economy, as massive labor theft, matters to which processes of remuneration, restitution, and repair remain outstanding, are owed as debts. The same analysis applies regarding colonizations of First Peoples. We think of some of the less researched colonial histories, Armenia, Palestine and Israel, or the former Soviet bloc, places like Cyprus, Scotland and Ireland, or Hong Kong, as well as under-researched African nations like Tunisia, Sudan, Angola, or Liberia. 

 

However, given that such readings are generally unfamiliar to the scholarship, all locations will be under consideration. What does Britain owe South Asia given even just the single incident when they loaded the entire treasury of the state of Bengal onto a hundred ships and absconded with it? Far beyond their wrongly charging Haiti “reverse-reparations” for the Haitian revolution, what besides that does France owe Haiti? What is owed to numerous African nations for the “scramble” sanctioned through the Berlin Africa conference? 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 owe 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 an unbridled, brutally savage force in the North American colonies, later the new republic. 

It is residues of this past that “[bind] present injustice to unaddressed wrongs,”[2] thus we remember too that one of the major reasons for the passing of the fugitive slave laws was “economic” in a way beyond the economics of the institution itself: that is that slavers, much like today’s prison industrialists, had mortgaged their slaves, investors had invested in “slave-backed securities,” much like today's mortgage-backed securities. This changed literally everything about the history of slavery, making it far worse for enslaved persons and far more profitable for Americans owning and abusing slaves and for those with money to invest. 

 

All that said, what about other forms of injury, the many other damages wrought by imperial power structures and the racial capital they were (and are) designed to procure? Of course there are the more obvious (though understudied) thefts of goods and trade as outlined above. But there are additional thievings and attenuations to which the matters of debt and repair also attach: history, memory and memorialization; language; education; subjectivity; as well as possibility and opportunity, reverie and pleasure. What were these damages? And, of course the development of capital was achieved through the use of lands that did not belong to colonizers and through the uncompensated labor of the colonized. But empire also involved the pilfering of privately owned land, assets, and even industries through plantation and other such schemes. How at the same time were local communities damaged, how did that damage coil and wend across time?

 

These are the questions we need to be asking and finding (scholarly) ways to answer. Still, few are taking on the matter of reckoning for empire; there is some research in Economics, surprisingly little in Postcolonial studies where one assumes they’d find more work taking the question of imperial reparations seriously, especially given the global distribution of wealth and how it got that way. Work appropriate to this volume will likely fall within the rubrics of Postcolonial, North-South, Atlantic, Decolonial, and Black or First Peoples studies approaches. However any discipline 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.—would be considered as well as any geographic or national history, any methodology, data or material, as long as it is probing and theorizing the questions outlined.

 

To whatever extent such assertions of a necessary repairing are heeded or might succeed; whether the equilibrations occur or the return of goods, whether the trade routes and betrayed treaties are remunerated, the uncompensated labor recompensated; still, documenting the debt and the non-started or unfinished processes of reparative justice, taking account of imperial injuriousness—to colonized people and their communities, their property, their economies and their economic sustainability, the ability to bounce back as Ireland’s Celtic Tiger proved ultimately unable to do—these must all be represented, must enter the historical record, the archive, the public policy work, and indeed the conversation quite broadly.

 

As argued in the 2021 collection I edited with Dr. 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 developed with it.

 

That collection was published in Routledge’s Postcolonial Politics series, and this book will be submitted to that series again. I’d like to have all proposals by 9/30/21. Full chapters would be due sometime during the Spring 2022 term, and they should range between 6,000 and 8,000 words, give or take. If you could respond with a one or two page abstract and your Bio to: mfadem@kbcc.cuny.edu

 

With thanks and in solidarity--

~Maureen Ellen Ruprecht, The City University of New York / Kingsborough

[1] Declan Kiberd, After Ireland: Writing the Nation from Beckett to the Present, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2018.

[2] Katherine Franke, Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019.

Contact Information

mfadem@kbcc.cuny.edu

Contact Email
mfadem@kbcc.cuny.edu