Colonial Knowledge and Rural Insurgency: From the Self-Emancipation of Slaves and Serfs to Decolonization

A Green College Special Lecture in association with the German Historical Institute

Drawing on his earlier and current research, Andrew Zimmerman will highlight the constitutive role of rural insurgent knowledge in both the creation and the destruction of counterinsurgent colonial knowledge. The first part of the talk will consider how Hegel and Marx developed their own thought in dialogue with rural insurgent knowledge from Central Europe, Haiti and the Southern United States. The second part will discuss the elite forms of knowledge that emerged to counter, and to redirect, these prior insurgencies, above all the racialized social sciences of Max Weber, Robert Park and others in Europe, West Africa, and the Southern United States. The final part of the talk will look at the insurgent responses to this counterinsurgent knowledge, including the transnational Black sociology of W.E.B. Du Bois and others, as well as decolonial and subaltern studies – the very forms of knowledge that animate this talk.

Professor Zimmermann’s lecture is part of the workshop Empires of Knowledge: Expertise and Power across the Long Twentieth Century taking place at the Liu Institute for Global Issues, UBC, 15-16 September. “Empires of Knowledge” is the first workshop organized by GHI West, the new Pacific Regional Office of the German Historical Institute Washington DC.