A room for the series of de-colonial lectures, public talks and everything around them
In Debt: The First 5000 Years, David Graeber wrote that the so-called “debts” of the Global South to the North are, in fact, a reversal of justice — it is the North that owes an unpayable debt to the South. His anthropological project aimed to expose these hidden power relations and to envision humanity based on solidarity, mutual aid, and the right of all people to imagine and build more just worlds.
The idea for this lecture series on colonial histories emerged after my first trip to Kenya, where I was struck by how vividly people remember their own colonial past — many still have grandparents who were imprisoned in British concentration camps after being driven from their land. Yet, at the same time, they often know little about the famines in India, the Opium Wars in China, the potato famine in Ireland, or the persistence of serfdom in Eastern Europe long after slavery had ended in the West.
This realization — that our understanding of colonial history is often deeply fragmented — led us to imagine a global, collective learning project. Initially, we thought of lectures tied to specific countries, but after a conversation with Radha D’Souza, we realized how this structure itself reproduces colonial logic. The very notion of “states” was largely a European invention, and one of the key mechanisms of post-colonial control has been to pit different peoples, now confined within artificially drawn borders, against one another.
We need to remember how deeply connected the world’s liberation movements once were. The Irish and the Indians cooperated in their struggles against British colonial rule. Our aim, therefore, is not to speak of “states” or “nations,” but to explore histories of international solidarity — and to imagine together what a truly just world could look like.
Feature image credit: Voronoi Map of Federally Recognized Tribes (detail). Image: Anders Sundell @Sundellviz for the Decolonial Atlas