Next week Dr. Kris Manjapra will be joining the Department of History as Scholar-in-Residence from Northeastern University.
Dr. Manjapra works at the intersection of global history and the critical study of race and colonialism. His research connects the Caribbean and Indian Ocean worlds. His books include a comparative study of global emancipation processes and the implications for reparations movements today: Black Ghost of Empire: The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation (Scribner and Penguin, 2022), shortlisted for the 2022 New England Book Award and the 2023 British Academy Book Prize. His previous book, Colonialism in Global Perspective (Cambridge, 2020), contributes to the emerging field of global race, colonialism, and diaspora studies. Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectual across Empire (Harvard, 2014) won the 2019 International Merck-Tagore Prize. Professor Manjapra is a general editor of The Cambridge History of Colonialism and Decolonization. He is the founder of a site-based nonprofit, , dedicated to the restoration and reactivation of a Black cultural heritage center in Cambridge, MA. Professor Manjapra directs the at Northeastern University.
As part of Dr. Manjapra's time at Queen's, we will be hosting the following events. We hope to see you there!
March 4: 5:30-7:00 pm, Watson 517
The Young Subaltern School: A Phonic History
Over the period of ten years, I recorded oral history with major figures who contributed to Subaltern Studies and to adjacent projects in 1970s and 1980s critical thought. Together, the oral histories point to the importance of institutions, personal relations, and urban space in forging new formations of knowledge after the fall of formal empire. In this presentation, I share the key findings of this postcolonial intellectual history, interspersed with excerpts from interviews with Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Chakravarty-Spivak, Partha Chatterjee, and others.
Presentation by , followed by conversations with Amitava Chowdhury.
March 6: 11:30-1:00, Watson 517
Rotten Times: Fungal Disease and Chemical Governance on the Global Plantation Belt, 1900-1950
In the creation of the modern plantation, the unruly agency of life seems to disappear into the mass production of cash crops. By examining the fungal histories of plantations in the Caribbean and in South East Asia during the first half of the twentieth century, this paper seeks to dispel this perception. This essay, by thinking through global comparisons and connections across the global plantation belt, highlights the rise of a new imperial chemical regime that sought to control the rising threats to monoculture by more-than-human life.
Talk by
