03.07.2019 Vortragsreihe "Postcolonial Securities"| Dr. Meera Sabaratnam (SOAS University of London) "The war-colonialism nexus: Rethinking 1914-18 in southern Africa"| 08. Juli 2019, 16:00 Uhr

08. Juli 2019, 16-18 Uhr

Deutschhausstraße 3, Raum 109

The war-colonialism nexus: Re-thinking 1914-18 in southern Africa

In developing a contrapuntal reading of the Great War, this paper makes an offering to the emerging conversations on history, theory, empire and method. It elaborates ways in which postcolonial historiographical concepts of ‘connected histories’ and ‘contrapuntal reading’ have informed various works within IR. It goes onto argue however that contrapuntal reading as a technique has a more disruptive potential than simply telling ‘connected histories’. It illustrates this by methodologically re-grounding the war of 1914-1919 in its global colonial context, specifically within southern East Africa / Mozambique. As a result, distinctive understandings of the patterns of organised violence structuring global relations at the time emerge. Specifically, these are the significant continuities between structures of military conscription and labour predation, the materiality of racial indifference, the effects of white imperial prestige as a strategic ideology and the deep historical roots of anti-colonial resistance. Overall, the paper argues for a serious engagement with the constitutive character of political violence within global colonial modernity, through looking at interlocking horizontal and vertical configurations of it.

Der Vortrag ist Teil einer Vortragsreihe über „Postcolonial Securities“, die Prof. Thorsten Bonacker (FB 03, Zentrum für Konfliktforschung) und Prof. Benedikt Stuchtey (FB 06) am Sonderforschungsbereich „Dynamiken der Sicherheit“ organisieren.