Description:
This workshop will be a discussion with Esmat Elhalaby, moderated by Neelofer Qadir, on his new book on the intellectual history of decolonization and solidarity: Parting Gifts of Empire: Palestine and India at the Dawn of Decolonization. The book is about decolonization and its forms of knowledge. It is a history of largely unknown and undigested intellectuals from West and South Asia (philologists, historians, librarians, etc.) and their efforts to produce institutions for knowledge production amidst the incomplete political decolonizations of the twentieth century. It examines the content and conditions of thought in the Third World, attending both to ideas of translation, solidarity, liberation, and geography, alongside the parties, journals, conferences, and departments that were the products and vessels of those ideas. The kindred partitions of British Palestine and British India sit at the center of the book.
Facilitator Bio:
Esmat Elhalaby is an Assistant Professor of Transnational History at the University of Toronto and author of Parting Gifts of Empire: Palestine and India at the Dawn of Decolonization. Elhalaby’s research focuses on the Middle East’s global connections, particularly its links with South Asia.
Moderator Bio:
Neelofer Qadir is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and the Program of International Global Studies at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Currently, Neelofer is working on her first book project, tentatively titled Afrasian Imaginaries: Global Capitalism in Indian Ocean Worlds. The book is an interdisciplinary, multi-sited study that attends to the rich historical and contemporary relationships between African and Asian Indian Ocean communities.