“Historians of slavery need to liberate ourselves from a method of study which naturalizes Eurocentric racial imaginations, histories and categories of race, caste and labor as uninterrogated and universal grounds for theorizing about all co-existent societies of the globe”. Last year, our sister site CSSAAME published a thematic issue on the question of comparative slavery. In this interview, we ask Indrani Chatterjee: What might a comparative analysis of transregional slaveries look like? What can we learn from reading Indian Ocean histories of slavery beyond trans-Atlantic and colonial terminologies of race and difference?

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By Gabriel Young

In Familiar Futures, Sara Pursley investigates how Western and Iraqi policymakers promoted changes in schooling, land ownership, and family law to better differentiate Iraq's citizens by class, sex, and age. Peasants were resettled on isolated family farms; rural boys received education limited to training in agricultural skills; girls were required to take home economics courses; and adolescents were educated on the formation of proper families. Future-oriented discourses about the importance of sexual difference to Iraq's modernization worked paradoxically, deferring demands for political change in the present and reproducing existing capitalist relations. Ultimately, the book shows how certain goods—most obviously, democratic ideals—were repeatedly sacrificed in the name of the nation's economic development in an ever-receding future.

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Renisa Mawani speaks with Hardeep Dhillon on ocean, law and historical methods.

“Often when people wrote on law and colonialism, both – law and colonialism – appeared as monolithic rather than layered multi-dimensional. I was trying to problematize both. Which laws governed land, labor, and mobility? How did they work together and in tension? And how did these various legalities produce and regulate colonial contact zones? For example, the overlapping projects of land, labor, and resource exploitation brought different people into the same space, as fishers and cannery workers. But these bodies needed to be taxonomized and organized through conceptions of race, time, and history.”

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How does one write the historical memory of the Partition of India, as told through the objects people carried with them while crossing borders? A string of pearls twisted into a dupatta, a scarf, or a cubic inch-sized Guru Grant Sahib hidden within the folds of a dastaar, a turban. What Aanchal Malhotra writes about, however, is not just these objects. She uncovers layers of material memory, finding nostalgia, trauma, and both personal and national identity within them. Radhika Shah converses with Aanchal Malhotra on materials, memory and history as seen through objects.

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Political theorist Aditya Nigam’s works have provided us with essential tools to theorize the contemporary experiences of capitalism, and to interrogate the received philosophical history of capital. This is the second part of a conversation to emerge out of the workshop "Equality and Difference: Theory from the South", on 29th September 2017. The questions were jointly addressed to Prathama Banerjee and Aditya Nigam over emails.

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Prathama Banerjee is one of the preeminent scholars in India to think of theory and history from the Global South. Her current work focuses on histories of the ‘political’ in colonial and post-colonial India. Sohini Chattopadhyay interviews her on what it means, both intellectually and in terms of academic labor, to conceive of theories from the South. The ideas discussed range from the use of the archaic, to universal history and theories of capital.

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Scott’s most recent work, Sex and Secularism, argues that there is a close relation between the formations of the secular and the confinement of women’s bodies. The book follows the journey of several questions raised by Scott in her earlier book, The Politics of the Veil, to contend how secularism is formulated as a discourse of sex and power.

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