Description
This BISA roundtable is Part one of two that seek to extend a number of rolling conversations among IR scholars concerning the relations but also tensions within and between logics and forms of coloniality as well as the conditions under which anti-colonial activism and solidarity can take root. Inspired by the work of Stoler and McGranahan (2007), Lowe (2015) and Puar (2007), we seek to both examine how colonial linkages are shaped in and through (intimate) circuits of practice as well as how comparative/relational analytics can perform and produce additional modes of colonial governance. We will further these discussions through posing questions that consider the politics of comparison and relationality as inherently historical matters that can never be politically disinvested; and thus can be part of but also efface the possibility of anti-colonial solidarities and movements. Taking this as our guiding premise, the participants of this first panel will consider the way colonial and imperial grammars operate across space and time, through exploring the tensions between claims to uniqueness (exception/singularity) and comparative teleologies and their mutual capacity to entrench colonial grammars. Participants will reflect on their work – which spans transversal nodes and apparatuses of policing, technology, child removal and knowledge production across multiple contexts, to help further decipher how colonialism continues to circulate, and thus produce new spaces and cause ‘the circulation of other things’ (Li 2018: 470).
