Connected Histories: Decolonization and the 20th Century
Keynote Speaker: Professor Barbara Keys (University of Melbourne)
In the past few years, the project of writing global history has become increasingly celebrated. Many historians argue for the utility and indeed necessity of globalizing history. Others still remain concerned about what a global optic can occlude.
This conference invites senior and emerging scholars to interrogate what the “global turn” can offer to histories of decolonization and anti-colonial thought in the twentieth century. This would involve moving beyond the direct connections between colony and metropole and to think about other connected and conceptual geographies and terrains. We understand decolonization to encompass not only the formal transference of powers, but also the larger processes by which individuals and societies confronted the legacy and violence of empire – in political memory, intellectual thought, and public history.
The planning committee therefore invites papers on the following topics:
- Intellectual genealogies of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary ideas, as well as their transmission across space and time
- Decolonization and its transnational debates
- Connected visions of violence
- Public memory and the legacy of empire
- Law, Legality and Decolonization
- Nodes, networks and hubs of transnational/trans-imperial activism
- Gender and internationalism
- Transnational efforts to challenge the global “color line”
- Transnational histories of the counter-revolutionary right
- Mapping international connections: prospects and possibilities from the Digital Humanities
- Methods in global intellectual and cultural history