On this week’s episode of Yeah Nah Pasaran! on 3CR we talk to Priyamvada Gopal [Twitter]. Priyamvada is Professor of Postcolonial Studies in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge and the author of Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (Verso, 2019):
Insurgent Empire shows how Britain’s enslaved and colonial subjects were active agents in their own liberation. What is more, they shaped British ideas of freedom and emancipation back in the United Kingdom.
Priyamvada Gopal examines a century of dissent on the question of empire and shows how British critics of empire were influenced by rebellions and resistance in the colonies, from the West Indies and East Africa to Egypt and India. In addition, a pivotal role in fomenting resistance was played by anticolonial campaigners based in London, right at the heart of empire.
Much has been written on how colonized peoples took up British and European ideas and turned them against empire when making claims to freedom and self-determination. Insurgent Empire sets the record straight in demonstrating that these people were much more than victims of imperialism or, subsequently, the passive beneficiaries of an enlightened British conscience—they were insurgents whose legacies shaped and benefited the nation that once oppressed them.
See also : Empire of Dissent, The Place, Race and Critical Theory Reading Group (PRCT), Sydney Review of Books, June 14, 2022 | Behind the UK government’s false flag ‘free speech’ campaign, Priyamvada Gopal, Al Jazeera, December 15, 2021 | Insurgent Empire by Priyamvada Gopal review – a superb study of anticolonial resistance, Miles Taylor, The Guardian, July 11, 2019 | The Anarchist Inquisition: Assassins, Activists, and Martyrs in Spain and France, Mark Bray, Cornell University Press, 2022 /// Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination, Benedict Anderson (Verso, 2007).
4.30pm, Thursday, August 11, 2022 /// 3CR /// 855AM / streaming live on the 3CR website
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