Partitions & Decolonization

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Post–World War II came an era of rapid decolonization across the Global South; a period about which Ghanaian revolutionary Kwame Nkrumah exultantly wrote that European direct rule was“everywhere in retreat.” Still, those anticolonial victories were experienced unevenly across the decolonizing world, often undone by new forms of neocolonial exploitation, partitions, rising authoritarianism, and counterinsurgent violence. For many peoples, especially in spaces remade by settler colonialism and native dispossession, independence remained out of reach. As the hopefulness of Nkrumah’s era has long since waned, the reality of a world divided between well-fed and hungry has only become more sharply defined, and naked forms of colonial violence—as with the ongoing genocide in Palestine—continue to shape our political horizons. This event brings together two recent publications and their authors: Esmat Elhalaby, author of Parting Gifts of Empire: Palestine and India at the Dawn of Decolonization (UC Press, 2025) and the editors of Radical History Review: Decolonization Now (153: October 2025) Manan Ahmed Asif, Marissa Moorman, and Jessica Namakkal. The panel will offer a presentation by Elhalaby and a discussion of *Decolonization Now* from the perspective of our ongoing partitions and dispossessions.

About the Speakers

Manan Ahmed is a historian of early modern and modern Indian Ocean World. He is the author, most recently, of Disrupted City (2024).

Esmat Elhalaby is an Assistant Professor of Transnational History at the University of Toronto. He is a historian of colonial and anti-colonial thought in modern West and South Asia and author of Parting Gifts of Empire: Palestine and India at the Dawn of Decolonization (UC Press, 2025).

Marissa J. Moorman is Professor of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin –Madison and the Faculty Director of the African Studies Program. Her research focuses on politics and culture in colonial and independent Angola. Author of two books: Powerful Frequencies: Radio, State Power, and the Cold War in Angola, 1931-2002 (Ohio University Press, 2019) and Intonations: a Social History of Music and Nation in Luanda, Angola, 1945-Recent Times (Ohio University Press, 2008), she is at work on a book about the Luanda Trial of Mercenaries in 1976, tentatively titled “Imperialism on Trial.” With Sean Jacobs, she is co-writing A People’s History of Contemporary Africa, under contract with Columbia University Press. She is currently a member of the School for Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University.

Jessica Namakkal is a historian of empire, colonialism, anti-colonialism, and decolonization. She teaches in International Comparative Studies, History, Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, and Asian American and Diaspora Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Unsettling Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of French India (2021) as well as numerous other scholarly and popular articles and essays. She is a member of the Radical History Review editorial collective and a co-editor on the website the Abusable Past.

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Host or Publisher The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities