果冻影院

Grafting Freedom - or the Evidence of Things Not Seen

Tuesday 16 January,听5-7辫尘听(followed by a drinks reception)
IAS Common Ground

Dr. Elizabeth Cooper (果冻影院, SPRC)

鈥淭he pleasure and paradox of my own exile is that I belong wherever I am. My role, it seems, has rather to do with time and change than with geography of circumstances; and yet there is always an acre of ground in the New World which keeps growing echoes in my head.鈥澨�

听听听听听听听听听 George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile听

Abstract:听You are warmly invited to join Sarah Parker Remond Centre Research Fellow Dr. Elizabeth Cooper who will share and discuss her current research on the historical and political praxis of diasporic Caribbean horticulture. 听

Those who moved to the UK from the Caribbean in the post-WWII era brought with them tangible and intangible horticultural knowledge that was deeply interwoven with the legacies and machinations of colonial exploitation.听

What historical and political imaginations are unearthed if we see 鈥淲indrush鈥澨� from the perspective of grassroots decolonisation that WWII interrupted rather than catalysed? And, more precisely, from the most enduring 鈥� yet ever-changing 鈥� subaltern expression of the simultaneously traumatic and creative conscription to modernity: popular Caribbean horticulture? 听

The love of strangers: "mixed marriage", family and migration in Senegal听

Tuesday听6 February, 5-7辫尘听(followed by a drinks reception)
IAS Common Ground

Dr. Helene Neveu-Kringelbach (果冻影院, SELCS-CMII)

Abstract:听In the Senegambian region, the history of intimate relationships and marriage with Europeans goes back to the 17th century and the early days of the Transatlantic slave trade, when European men sent to the region as traders often developed relationships with African women. 鈥楥ustomary marriage,鈥� as the practice was called, fostered the emergence of creole communities in coastal trading posts like Saint-Louis, Rufisque, and the Gor茅e Island. From the mid-19th century onwards, with formal colonisation, such relationships became the object of considerable European anxiety as they were seen to undermine the racial hierarchies on which colonial societies were founded (Saada 2007, Ray 2015, Jean-Baptiste 2023). When French-educated Senegalese and other West African men, or 鈥樏﹙olu茅s鈥�, started traveling to France in growing numbers in the first half of the 20th century, marriage to European women became a mark of status for many of them. On the French side however, such unions were seen as embodying the breakdown of the colonial racial order.

In this project, I have been looking at binational marriage, or 鈥榤ixed鈥� marriage, between Senegal and Europe. This presentation is a work-in-progress in which I draw from multi-sited fieldwork carried out over the past 10 years. I argue that the ways in which Senegalese families deal with mixed marriage between Senegal and Europe today is highly gendered, and that this gendering has to do with the memory of interracial intimacy during the transatlantic slave trade, and later the colonial period.

The Digital Imperium

Thursday 22 February, 5-7pm (followed by a drinks reception)
IAS Common Ground

Postcolonial Racialisation: On the Possibilities and Limitations of a Concept

Dr. Mahvish Ahmad (LSE, Sociology)

Abstract: Racialisation has recently been extended to make sense of violent hierarchical relations in the postcolony. Yet, in the postcolony, social difference goes by other names, and majoritarian formations are neither white nor European, carrying instead their own experiences and memories of racism, colonisation, and imperial intervention. This paper explores the possibilities and limits of stretching racialisation away from transatlantic conquest and slavery, and out of North America and Europe, through a case study of enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, and army operations of Pakistan鈥檚 Baloch communities. On the one hand, bringing the analytic of racialisation to this postcolony in South Asia challenges methodologically nationalist and presentist interpretations of violence as reflective of internal centre-periphery disputes and localised ethnic conflict. On the other hand, racialisation as a lens can also obscure other, more grounded vocabularies that describe social difference and hierarchy, like听zaat听(caste),听qom听(nation), and听qabila听(tribe). The paper, a work-in-progress, builds on over a decade of ethnographic and archival work with and on Baloch movements against enforced disappearances and military violence in Pakistan.

Everyone is warmly welcome.