AHA Session 115
Friday, January 9, 2026: 1:30 PM-3:00 PM
Monroe Room (Palmer House Hilton, Sixth Floor)
Chair:
Adom Getachew, University of Chicago
Papers:
Session Abstract
Over a series of influential works, the anthropologist David Scott has charted a shift in the horizons of postcolonial politics, before and after the 1955 Bandung Asian-African Conference. This shift is evident, according to Scott, in our historical accounts of anticolonial revolution. Romantic narratives of emancipation and overcoming ceded to tragic plots about the stubborn endurance of the colonial past in the postcolonial present. This panel revisits Scott’s argument in light of more recent scholarship that spans from the Age of Revolutions (1776-1848) to Decolonization (1945-75). In particular, it interrogates the extent to which Scott’s argument about a tragic turn in our narratives of revolution has been vindicated by historians’ renewed emphasis on political economy: how the plantation left enduring legacies of underdevelopment and extraction; how emancipation in some regions precipitated colonial expansion elsewhere; how independence was undermined by debt and indemnity; and how postcolonial states liberated themselves into the neo-colonial structures of the twentieth-century world economy. Following Scott’s lead, the panel presents the Haitian Revolution in particular and Decolonization in general as two constitutive moments of our historical present in order to compare and contrast how these events are narrated in contemporary scholarship. We ask whether there are limits to comparison by way of tragedy. And whether answers to the question of reparations and the power of “reparatory history,” in other words of how to repair the irreparable as Scott has most recently queried, lie not just in the recognition of evil but in the historical understanding of the peculiarities of how and why resistance surfaced in the first place. To do so, each paper addresses a different theme in the study of anticolonial revolution: why they begin, how they are made and experienced, how and whether they can succeed, and what they have in common. Together, the papers aim to generate a discussion over whether we still remain, in our historical present, in Scott’s tragic problem space, or whether scrutiny of the revolutionary past can yield new narratives and futures.
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