Description
During the period of mid-twentieth century decolonization, anticolonial activists and international representatives held a wide range of views on issues of relationality, power and (national) identity, and citizen-state relations, in which questions of race and ethnicity were often paramount, if at times unspoken. The ways in which race, ethnicity, and indigeneity were understood informed ways of belonging in a newly-independent state and within the international community. These perceptions, while shaped in part by the geopolitics of the Cold War, were often the result of longer patterns of knowledge production, including race science and nationalism, that emerged through uneven colonizer-colonised relations. This panel brings together four papers to explore how different ideas of race and ethnicity became key to anticolonial movements both within and across former colonies and before, during, and after the ‘moment’ of flag independence. Delving into the heterogeneity of ‘anticolonial movements’, the panel interrogates how different racial and ethnic frameworks led to both the inclusion and marginalisation of campaigners within transnational and international spaces. This panel thus draws attention to relations of difference within anticolonial movements, the influence of race and ethnicity on smaller anticolonial campaigns, and the consequences of this for newly-independent states and global governance.
