Resistance and Empire, com participação de Marta Macedo e Cláudia Castelo

CONFERENCE OUTLINE

Since the early twentieth century, the notion of resistance became common currency in colonial language and anti-colonial ideologies to refer to military, political, and other forms of countering the authority of the colonizing institutions and agents in the colonies. After World War II and the boom of decolonization, it became an important tool in the critical and conceptual analysis of colonialism as a relationship of domination and opposition. Consequently, a wealth of studies was produced that focused on the ways though which indigenous people actively opposed, rebelled, or contested – militarily, politically, symbolically, culturally – the colonizing presence of Europeans. In the 1990s-2000s the validity of taking on “resistance” as a privileged concept and empirical topic was criticized for reducing the colonial phenomenon to a simplistic dichotomy – and since it appeared to have lost much of its early vitality in historical and anthropological research on empires and colonialism. Yet, since decolonization, ideas of “liberation” and anti-colonial resistance did not lose their significance as powerful tropes in retrospective nationalist readings of the birth of post- colonial nation-states. More recently, across the social sciences, “resistance” as a concept and a research trope seems to be revived, and a trans-disciplinary field of

‘resistance studies’ appears to come into emergence. What it means to study “resistance” both conceptually and comparatively in colonial and imperial history today? How can this notion be valuably re-conceptualized in current imperial and post- colonial studies? What are its potential and limitations? What phenomena should be considered under the notion of “resistance”? What specificities resistance(s) phenomena take over time and across spaces? How to address the plural manifestations of resistance comparatively, across different empires, different colonial situations, and different historical periods?

The conference Resistance and Empire: New Approaches and Comparisonsaims at addressing these questions and rediscovering the vitality of resistance both as a concept and as an empirical phenomenon in the study of European empires, colonialisms, and their legacies. As such, it brings together students of French, British, Portuguese, German, and other European colonialisms to analytically address the multiple expressions of “resistance” in colonial history by engaging with empirical

material and theoretical explorations. The conference has two main purposes. On the one hand, it seeks to cross-fertilize the study of anti-colonial resistance(s) as a multiple historical phenomenon across the different geographies and temporalities of the European overseas expansion in Asia, Africa, America, and Oceania since the sixteenthcentury. On the other hand, it will reassess the potential and limitations of “resistance” as an analytical concept in imperial history, anthropology, and post-colonial studies, relating it to other notions in these domains, such as “order”, “rule”, “protest”, “rebellion”, “subaltern”, “agency”, or “domination”. The conference will adopt a broad conceptual, geographical and chronological framework, encouraging a comparative examination of “resistance” in relation to diverse places and historical periods, acros distinct Western imperial formations, from the sixteenth to the twentieth-first century.

Schedule

Day One: 27 June 2016

• 8.30-9.00– Registration (ICS-ULisboa, foyer)
• 9.00 - Welcome remarks
• 9.15-10.45 - Session I: Archives of subaltern resistance
  • Lipika Kamra (University of Oxford), Subaltern Resistance, Counterinsurgency, and Statemaking in Colonial India
    • Orna Darr (Carmel Academic Center), Hidden transcripts of resistance in the colonial courtroom: an analysis of a rape case in Mandate Palestine
    • Kim Wagner (Queen Mary, University of London/George Washington University), Gandhi ki Jai!’: (Mis)reading Resistance in early twentieth century Colonial India
    • Uday Chandra (Georgetown University), Rediscovering the Primitive: Adivasi Histories and Radical Historiography in Postcolonial India
• Coffee-break – 10.45-11.00
• 11.00-12.30 - Session II: Resistance stories
  • Sameetah Agah (Pratt Institute), Stories from the Field: Pukhtun Resistance and Colonial Warfare in the North-West Frontier of British India
  • Manjeet Baruah (Jawaharlal Nehru University), Between Burmese and British Imperialisms: Space, Orality and Resistance in Nineteenth Century Assam
  • Christine Gilmore (University of Leeds), Contested Histories: Nubian Writing and Resistance in Postcolonial Egypt
  • Stephanie Lämmert (European University Institute), The story of Osale and Paulo: outlaws or freedom fighters?
• Lunch: 12.30-14.00
• 14.00-15.30 - Session III: Liberation and memory
  • Paolo Israel (University of the Western Cape), ‘May the White of Mueda Die’: Song, Resistance, and the Mueda Massacre
  • Ana Sousa Santos (Durham University), ‘We fought to liberate the country’: memory, resistance and the enduring legacy of war in northern Cabo Delgado
  • Nadine Siegert (University of Bayreuth), The visuality of militant femininity in the context of the revolution of Angola and Mozambique
  • Rebecca Granato (Al Quds Bard College), The Rhetoric and Imagery of Colonial Resistance: The Dialectic Between the Irish and Palestinian National Movements
• Coffee-break – 15.30-15.40
• 15.40-17.20 – Session IV: Accommodation and colonial law
  • Sarah Ghabrial (Columbia University), Women between resistance and accommodation: Muslim litigation in French colonial Algerian courts, 1870-1930
  • Sarath Pillai (University of Chicago), Palimpsest of Domination: Treaties with and resistances to the British empire in an Indian princely state
  • Raymond Orr (University of Melbourne), Historical Institutionalism, Treaties and Comparative Indigenous Self-Governing Power in British Settler Societies: Early Formidability and its Legacy in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States
  • Hedi Viterbo (SOAS, University of London), Resistance, comparison, and generational segregation
• 17.30-19.30 – Keynote Address
  • Professor James C. Scott (Yale University), A Brief History of Flight from the State

Day Two: 28 June 2016

• 9.00-10.30 - Session VI: Slavery, freedom, and exile
  • Stephanie Mawson (University of Cambridge), Slave Raiding and Resistance in the Seventeenth Century Philippines
  • Helen McKee (Max Planck Institute for European Legal History), Resistance and Runaways: The Jamaican Maroons in the Eighteenth Century
  • Matthew Nielsen (Carnegie Mellon University), Freedom and Flight: The Politics of Runaway Slaves in the Lower Orinoco River Basin in Late Eighteenth Century
  • Uma Kothari (Manchester University), Transnational networks of resistance: contesting colonial rule and the politics of exile
• Coffee-break – 10.30-10.45
• 10.45-12.15 - Session VII: Control and agency
  • Federica Morelli (University of Turin), Land and freedom. Slaves and free coloreds in a border region of the Spanish empire
  • Adolfo Polo y La Borda (University of Maryland), Controlling Subversion in the Early Modern Spanish Empire
  • Marie Rodet (SOAS, University of London), Exploring resistance against internal slavery in Kayes, Mali at the turn of the twentieth century
  • Ilaria Berti (Pablo de Olavide University), The Agency of the Slaves in the West Indian Kitchens of the Nineteenth Century
• Lunch: 12.30-14.00
• Session VIII - 14.00-15.30: Value and colonial economies
  • Jake Richards (Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge), Cape Town liberalism as neither an imperialist nor a resistance project
  • Patricia Hayes (University of the Western Cape), Taxing subjects, colonial systems and African publics in the Union of South Africa and Northern Namibia, 1929-46
  • Tijl Vanneste (Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne), A Resistant Society: Diamond Smuggling & the Rise of a Brazilian Sentiment
  • Todd Cleveland (University of Arkansas), Resisting the Conceptualization of Theft as Resistance: Capitalization Strategies on Angola’s Colonial-Era Diamond Mines, 1917-1975
• Coffee-break – 15.30-15.45
• Session IX - 15.45-17.15: Environment and science
  • Claire Edington (University of California, San Diego), Re-thinking resistance: families, experts and the ‘micropolitics’ of psychiatric care in French colonial Vietnam
  • Cláudia Castelo (CIUHCT-FC/University of Lisbon), Cattle rising, indigenous knowledge and ecological resilience in the Cunene region
  • Kent Mathewson (Louisiana State University), Agent of Resistance, Oil of Oppression: The Castor Bean in Historical and Geographical Colonial Contexts
  • Marta Macedo (CIUHCT-FC/University of Lisbon), Beyond human resistance: cocoa ecologies in the tropical island of São Tomé
• 17.30: End of day two
• Conference dinner (venue tbc)

Day Three: 29 June 2016

• Session XI: 9.00-10.30: Diplomacy and international dynamics
  • Mads Bomholt Nielsen (King’s College London), Colonial Resistance and Anglo-German diplomacy: The case of Jakob Marengo
  • José Pedro Monteiro (ICS-ULisboa), The international dimensions of resistance: Portuguese colonial labour policies and its critics abroad (1953-1962)
  • Candace Sobers (Carleton University), From “the bush to the conference table”: International resistance and Angolan independence, 1968-1973
  • Branwen Gruffydd Jones (Cardiff University), ‘Struggling in defence of international legality’: African anticolonial resistance in international law
• Coffee-break – 10.30-10.45
• Session XII: 10.45-12.00: Transnational mobilities
  • Felicitas Fischer von Weikersthal (Karl-Ruprecht University, Heidelberg), Terrorism and Resistance Against Russian Imperial Rule
  • Alexander Kais (University of Illinois), Of internal and external imperialisms: International Law and Confucianist visions of empire in the late Qing
  • Isa Blumi (Stockholm University), Transitional resistance: the global Ottoman Refugee and colonial terror
• Lunch: 12.30-14.00
• Session XIII: 14.00-15.30: National histories and comparisons
  • Jacob Smith (Queen Mary, University of London), Resistance or robbery? The development of the ‘Rebel-Dacoit’ problem and transformation of the Indian Uprising post-1857
  • Adeline Darrigol (University of Maine, France), La résistance anticoloniale en Guinée espagnole (*)
  • Yavuz Tuyloglu (University of Sussex), Eastern connections: International Constitution of Iranian and Turkish Nationalisms
  • Inês Galvão (ICS, University of Lisbon) and Catarina Laranjeiro (CES, University of Coimbra), Struggling gender at the liberation front: questions on equality and complementarity in the making of Guinea-Bissau’s modern nation
• Coffee-break – 15.30-15.45
• Session XIV: 15.45-16.45: Religion, writing and the circulation of ideas
  • Parashar Kulkarni (Yale NUS College), The Origins of Reformist Hinduism in Colonial India
  • Naveen Kanalu, (University of California, Los Angeles), Writing Precolonial History as Resisting Empire: Narrating the Life and Times of Aurangzeb under Late Colonial Rule in South Asia
  • Isadora Fonseca Ataíde (Independent scholar), Journalism and resistance in the press of Portuguese Africa
  • Adelaide Machado (CHAM/FCSH-UNL), Cátia M. Costa (ISCTE-IUL) & Sandra A. Lobo (CHAM/FCSH-UNL),Colonial Periodical Press as form and space of resistance: a comparative study within the twentieth-century Portuguese empire
• Coffee-break –16.45-17.00
• Session XV: 17.00-18.30 Post- and Neo-colonial landscapes
  • Camille Jacob (University of Portsmouth), Decolonising languages - questioning "English as Resistance" in Algeria
  • Ralph Wilde (University College London), ‘Human rights’ as a colonial and neo-colonial resistance strategy: lessons from the experiences of international law
  • Sharri Plonski (SOAS, University of London), New Borders: Carving out Palestinian Space in the Israeli-Zionist landscape
  • Emilio Distretti (Al Quds Bard College & Kenyon Institute, Council for British Research in the Levant), Writing Jerusalem 2016. A bio-dictionary for a capital Ghost Town.