From a legal-historical perspective, it is not difficult to draw the lines from the early 20th-Century populism of the great wars to contemporary expressions of populism in Europe and the United States: from the scaling back of civil liberties, to the broadening forms of surveillance, to the curtailment of free movement, to an emphasis on the carceral capacity of the state. However, it is important not to provincialise or exceptionalise this social and political trajectory. It is imperative to consider global forms of colonialism in this context as productive of the continuities of racism and populism. It is equally important to examine the ways in which such continuities we now face themselves affect the ways we produce knowledge within the academy.
In this talk, Bruce-Jones will introduce several vignettes from his research on British colonial indenture in South Asia and racial discrimination in Europe to unpack how historical colonial racial and labour relations shape not only the way we view our history and contemporary citizenship, but also the very terms in which we are able to gain access to that history as researchers, writers and thinkers. He will engage with law, social science, critical theory and literature and ultimately posit that some of the most meaningful questions we ask of our work as academics in the 21st Century demand a constant triangulation between and transcendence of the rigid constraints of our disciplines.
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