Consortium of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora hosts inaugural workshop

The Consortium of Studies in Race, Colonialism and Diaspora hosted its inaugural workshop, titled "Comparative Colonialisms: Approaches to the Global Humanities," on Saturday in Alumnae Lounge. The event, which featured four individual sessions and a keynote lecture, covered a variety of topics related to the study of colonialism in both a historical and contemporary context in different parts of the world.

Partha Chatterjee, professor of anthropology and Middle Eastern, South Asian and African studies at Columbia University, and honorary professor of political science at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, presented his paper, titled "The Afterlives of Empires: Nationalism, Internationalism and Cosmopolitanism," for the keynote lecture of the workshop.

Kris Manjapra, associate professor of history, introduced Chatterjee, citing his contributions to the field of colonialism studies.

Chatterjee opened his lecture by noting the contemporary aspect of the discussions thus far in the workshop.

"I was particularly struck by the number of speakers who explicitly acknowledged that their treatment and looking back at the histories of colonialism [were] very much prompted by our concerns today, that in fact there is a very presentist position from which we feel compelled to look back on the history of colonialism," he said.

Chatterjee discussed the history of colonialism and the anti-colonialist movement in India through the lens of three themes: nationalism, internationalism and cosmopolitanism.

He spoke about the beginning of the anti-colonialist movement and the development of democratic nationalism in India. He added that the new nationalists rejected the principles of colonialism, claiming that Indian self-rule would serve as a better form of government than one controlled by a foreign power.

"Democratic nationalism was incompatible with empire," Chatterjee noted.

The development of a bilingual middle class in India that was educated or traveled abroad also brought in new ideas and inspiration from similar struggles or movements in other parts of the world, such as in Italy, Ireland or Japan, according to Chatterjee.

He also discussed the different concepts of statehood and sovereignty espoused by Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir Lenin at the beginning of the 20th century.

Chatterjee underscored the inequality in terms of which countries qualified for independent statehood and how countries were categorized based on their perceived social development insofar as concerned the League of Nations, which was first proposed by Wilson, noting the double standard for recognition of countries such as Albania.

"Despite the fact that their sovereign status was ambiguous, they qualified as members because they were seen to be potential or actual nation states," he said.

The League of Nations ultimately perpetuated the old liberal colonial project, according to Chatterjee. He added that this period also endorsed international supervision of standard government practices around the world for fields such as safety, health and sanitation.

"Much has been said of the ineffectiveness and indeed the failure of most of these efforts of the League of Nations," he said.

Chatterjee also discussed the history of the communist movement in regard to the "colonial question."

He explained that Lenin believed in supporting the working class in European colonies to fight against capitalism and imperialism, but there arose a similar debate over the stages of social development in different colonies. Further, there was a strong centralization of the international communist movements from Moscow, and only one communist party in a country could be affiliated with the Communist International.

"The Communist International, while opening up entirely new dimensions through its consideration of the colonial question ... ended up as dominated by the foreign policy interest of the Soviet Union," he noted.

Chatterjee also discussed the development of the agendas of the United Nations and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and their influence on postcolonial states. He added that NAM in particular encouraged ideas of mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, nonaggression, non-interefence, equality and peaceful coexistence.

He also spoke about the normalization of the nation state as the dominant form of the world order, the struggle for self-determination in African and Asian postcolonial countries, the debate surrounding intervention and the continuation of colonial power structures, as embodied in the United Nations Security Council, according to Chatterjee.

"Even though the old forms of imperialism and colonialism may no longer exist, there are new forms of imperial power that remain the object of theoretical critique and political resistance today," he said.

Chatterjee concluded by underscoring that the lessons he has drawn from his research are based on historical studies of political movements, rather than purely theoretical studies.

The workshop was co-sponsored by the Toupin-Bolwell Fund for the Arts, the Department of English, the Department of History, the Department of Religion, the Department of German, Russian and Asian Languages and Literatures, the Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Peace and Justice Studies, International Literary and Visual Studies, the Center for the Humanities at Tufts and the Digital Library of the Center for South Asian and Pacific Ocean Studies.