June 3–4, 2021

This conference is closed to the public.

This workshop is for contributors to an edited volume entitled The Anticolonial Transnational: Networks, Connections, and Movements in the Making of the Postcolonial World. The volume will be coedited by Erez Manela (Harvard University) and Heather Streets-Salter (Northeastern University) and published in the Global and International History series at Cambridge University Press. Multiauthored volumes are much stronger and more coherent when contributors have the chance to meet in an intensive workshop environment prior to final submission of chapters. The workshop allows contributors and editors to provide feedback on individual essays, to suggest revisions or additions, and to reflect on the common themes and arguments of the volume as a whole.

Understanding of anticolonialism as a fundamentally transnational phenomenon has deep implications for understanding the twenty-first century world. What does it mean that so many anticolonial movements understood imperialism as a global phenomenon that required coordinated strategies and networks of solidarity? Just as important, what can account for the amnesia—both by historians and the people of so many new nations—that has erased so much of these transnational connections? This volume seeks to explore these questions by bringing together scholars who are actively engaged in answering such questions in different regions around the world. In spite of the recent surge of work exploring the anticolonial transnational, no single volume yet exists that explores it from all regions of the world and across the chronological divide of World War II. Part of the reason for this is because the combined regional and temporal specializations needed for such a project are vast, as are the language skills. This project seeks to overcome these obstacles through the creation of a coherent, coordinated volume written by scholars who collective expertise spans the globe.