Focusing on the interplay between “Desire and Collectivity,” the third symposium of the Association of Postcolonial Thought gestures to the many political, personal, and affective drives that structure our orientation to the past and to the possibilities of the present. It likewise speculates about the collectivities such desires engender and the futures they call into being. While the 2022 APT rubric, “Anticolonialism as Theory,”reconsidered the past through the foundations of postcolonial thought, and the 2023 APT topic, “Crisis,” contemplated the calamities of our present, the 2024 theme asks us to envision the possibilities of what could be. Welcoming postcolonial approaches to gender and sexuality in particular, we invite promiscuous provocations from the humanities and social sciences into postcolonial imaginaries that might lift us from the impasses of the present into more viable futures. 

Centering untimely and unruly desires for different, more habitable, worlds requires reimagining forms of collectivity. In a present marked by climate crisis, ongoing settler colonialism and war, increasing gender- and sexuality-based violence, ethno-national and religious fundamentalisms, and a rise in racial, ethnic, and economic inequality, what forms of collective action are possible? What new forms of desire and collectivity might obtain from the lessons of ongoing postcolonial crises and struggles? Finally, how might these desires and collectivities prepare us for a future we cannot know, but for which we must be ready?

Contemporary postcolonial thought is not limited to a focus on the relationship of the European metropole to the Afro/Caribbean/South Asian colony and postcolony; it addresses contemporary formations of US imperialism, South-South exchange, and Indigenous sovereignty. Within this expansive frame, we invite papers that explore such topics as: postcolonial and/or transnational feminist imaginaries and solidarities; postcolonial solarpunk, postcolonial futurisms, Latinx and Afro-futurisms; eco-socialist imaginaries; desire and social reproduction; postcolonial affects and their afterlives; psychoanalysis and postcoloniality; Indigeneity and Indigenous futures; postcolonial ecologies and the environmental humanities; reproduction and the new eugenics; postcolonial disabilities and Crip theory; theories of war, violence, genocide, and trauma; queer and trans geographies; the desires of global protest movements; forms of refusal, redress, and reparation; desires for abolition, annihilation, and revolution; the uses of the erotic; embodiment and artifice; human rights and sexual justice; digital colonialism, new media, and the digital commons.

We welcome submissions in three formats:

Individual papers on Desire and Collectivity

• Please submit an abstract of 750-1000 words and a brief bio to desirecollectivitypoco@gmail.com by April 15, 2024. We will prioritize papers that are conceptually ambitious and comparative, rather than papers focusing on narrow textual analysis or modest claims.

Keywords for Postcolonial Thought

• Speakers are invited to propose a new keyword for postcolonialism in the twenty-first century, with the goal of laying the intellectual groundwork for a revitalized postcolonial analysis, responsive to the urgency of the present. These are lightning talks of 5 minutes each, which do not provide a reading of a text or rehash outdated debates, but operate at a conceptual level. 

• Please submit your keyword, a 300-word abstract, and a brief bio to desirecollectivitypoco@gmail.com by April 15, 2024.

Roundtables 

• Fully constituted roundtable sessions (of up to six participants) are also welcome, and are encouraged to include participants from different institutions, disciplines, ranks, and geopolitical foci. Roundtables should explore a particular question or concept and speakers should respond to the questions in a coherent conversation, rather than read out short papers. 

• Please submit your roundtable topic, question, or concept, a 750-word abstract for the roundtable, and brief bios for each of the participants to desirecollectivitypoco@gmail.com by April 15, 2024.

The symposium, organized and hosted by Yogita Goyal (UCLA), Rachel Mordecai (UMass Amherst), and Asha Nadkarni (UMass Amherst), with collaboration from the World Studies Interdisciplinary Project, will be held September 27-28, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst/Five Colleges. This event is the third in a sequence planned by the Association of Postcolonial Thought and is aimed at fostering the future of the field. Abstracts are due April 15, 2024 and should be sent as a single Word document or PDF with the file name lastname.firstname. Decisions will be sent by June 15. There are no association or registration fees required, and all events are free and open to the public.

APT symposia are intended to provide maximum space for dialogue and collaboration, and are built around conviviality and intellectual exchange. Speakers should plan to attend and participate in the entire symposium and contact the organizers early on with any complications.

6-7.15: “Be Revolutionary" - Roundtable on Activism and Protest at UMass Amherst

Venue: Old Chapel

Chair: Asha Nadkarni

Sarah Ahmad

Laura Briggs

Cameron Awkward-Rich

Sigrid Schmalzer

7.15: Reception: Welcome by Kiran Asher, Chair of WGSS

A Celebration of 50 years of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at UMass Amherst

Venue: Old Chapel

9.00-9.30: Welcome and Opening Remarks

Venue: Old Chapel

Rachel Mordecai

Asha Nadkarni

Yogita Goyal, “Futures of Postcolonial Thought”

9.30-11: Panel 1: Aesthetics and Resistance: Laws, Institutions, and Genres

Venue: Old Chapel

Chair: Sangeeta Ray

Angela Naimou, “Protection and Liberation”

Sonali Thakkar, “The Conjectural and the Forensic: Modes of Repair in the Work of Michael Rakowitz”

Kalyan Nadiminti, “Insurgent Liberalism: Desire and Domesticity in the Indian Anglophone Novel”

Rovel Sequeira, “On Trying to Kill a Sexologist: Prison Science and the Minor Revolutionary Life of Homosexuality in India”

11.15-12.30: Panel 2: Rethinking Solidarities: Community Defense, Affective Dissonance, and Anticolonial Mobilization

Venue: Old Chapel

Chair: Harris Feinsod

Britt Rusert, “From Kropotkin to Du Bois: Reframing the History and Theory of Mutual Aid”

Marina Bilbija, “Tawdry Feelings”

Jordan Stein, “The Languages of Solidarity During the Haitian Revolution”

Lunch 12.45-1.45

Venue: Old Chapel

2-3.30: Panel 3: Unusual Antecedents: The Affective and Material Afterlives of Anticolonial Thought

Venue: Old Chapel

Chair: Themba Mbatha

Aditya Bahl, “The Passion of the Martyr: Fanon and the Sufis in Mao’s Punjab”

Noah Hansen, “Dread Book History: J.R.R. Casimir, the Garvey Movement, and the Book of Negro Poems and Songs: 1919”

Christian Alvarado, “‘The Tragic Silliness of Fanatic Man:" (Post)Colonial Despair and Conspiracist Desire”

3.45-5.15: Panel 4: Liminal intimacies: Geography, Time and Text in Empire’s Wake

Venue: Old Chapel

Chair: Peter Kalliney

Rebecca Oh, “Reading Better States: Utopian Method in Cape Town”

Adedoyin Teriba, “A Mask Counter-Civilizing African Diasporic Civilizers in Lagos”

Niloofar Sarlati, “Fears and Desires of the Semicolonial Predicament”

5.30-7

Venue: Old Chapel

Keynote address: Simon Gikandi

Introduction: Mwangi wa Githinji

“The Absent Cause: Postcolonial Thought and the Atlantic Archive”

(Dinner on your own; no planned events by us)

9-10.30: Panel 5: Imagining Otherwise: Colonial and Anti-Colonial Technologies of Space, Sex and Spirit

Venue: Old Chapel

Chair: Faith Smith

Shalini Puri, “Caribbean Postcards: Genre, Imaginative Infrastructure, and Environmental Desire”

Claire Blencowe, “Evangelical Desire and the Geology of Race: Biopolitical Religion and (Settler) Colonial Orders

Savita Maharaj, “Salvaging the Ruins and Reimagining”

Rachel Teukolsky, “Desire in Theory: Vodou and the Haitian Revolution”

Panel 6: Embodied Refusals: Solidarity, Heterogen(r)eity and Struggle

Venue: South College E470

Chair: Alexia Alkadi-Barbaro

Azadeh Safaeian, “The Possibility of Crip Care”

Swati Rana, “Wanting with Water: From South Asia to the American Southwest”

Lakshmi Padmanabhan, “Hysteric Solidarity”

Avni Sejpal, “Nobody’s Protest Novel”

10.45-12:

Roundtable: Queer Marxisms

Venue: Old Chapel

Chair: Jordy Rosenberg

Iyko Day

Jodi Kim

Eng-Beng Lim

Kelly Chung

Roundtable: Media Approaches to the Illegible

Venue: South College E470

Chair: Rijuta Mehta and Ani Maitra

David Bering-Porter

Kenneth Berger

Nathalie Etoke

Alexander Zahlten

12-1: Lunch

Venue: Old Chapel

1.15-2.30:

Roundtable: Race, Caste, Class

Venue: Old Chapel

Chair: Laura Brueck and Praseeda Gopinath

Tanya Agathocleous

Janet Neary

Nikhil Pandhi

Svati Shah

Shreyas Sreenath

Roundtable: Planetary Internationalism: Towards a Possibility of Re-imagining Afro-Asian Solidarities

Venue: South College E470

Chair: Pallavi Rastogi and Amatoritsero Ede

Qiyu Chen

Adanna Ogbonna-Oluikpe

Mathias Iroro Orhero

Moinak Banerjee

2.45-3.45:

Keywords for Postcolonial Thought 1

Venue: Old Chapel

Chair: René J. Kooiker

Aliya Ram: Persecution

Farah Bakaari: Generation 

Alicia Mireles Christoff: Community

Subhalakshmi Gooptu: Excess

Keywords for Postcolonial Thought 2

Venue: South College E470

Chair: Crystal Parikh

Alexander Fyfe: Practice 

Shwetha Chandrashekhar: Unpleasantness

Geronimo Sarmiento Cruz: Anational 

Saumya Lal: Empathy

4-5.30: The View from Gaza

Venue: Old Chapel

Chair: Rachel Mordecai

Isis Nusair, “Gendered, Racialized and Sexualized Torture from Abu Ghraib to Gaza”

Rebecca Stein, “Vanishing Acts and Perpetrator Aesthetics: How Israelis See Gaza”

Jim Hicks, Reading from forthcoming Massachusetts Review special issue: “The View from Gaza”

5.45-7.30

Closing Dinner for all speakers and chairs

Venue: Old Chapel