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• 31 déc 2015

  Lisbon

  Call for papers - Africa

  Resistance and Empire, new approaches and comparisons

  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?

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