HOMInG’s seminar 49_21 will be with prof. Nandita Sharma (@nsharma101) from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The seminar will take (virtually) place next February 16 at 6pm CET. It will be inspired by Nandita’s recent book Home Rule (Duke University Press, 2020).

See the abstract of Nandita’s presentation below.

Nandita Sharma examines today’s ever-hardening politics of nationalism in which no figure is better positioned to lay claim to national territory and sovereignty as those claiming Native-ness. She argues that geopolitical and biopolitical claims to Native-ness – or autochthony – establish the political grounds for turning National-Natives into the “people of the place.” Sharma shows the significance of autochthonous claims to the enactment of postcolonial partitions, exclusions, expulsions, and even exterminations. Contemporary autochthonous, anti-immigrant politics in Europe, as well as in select national liberation states in Africa and Asia are discussed, along with autochthonous politics in the nation-states of the former “White Settler” colonies, where both White and Indigenous people have staked national claims to sovereignty. Each of these claims to autochthony is made against – and are productive of – the figure of the Migrant. The quintessential “people out of place” in nationalist politics, Migrants are increasingly represented as settlers/colonizers who, as such, have no legitimized place within nation-states. Autochthonous politics, with their creation, maintenance and normalization of separations between National-Natives and Migrants, Sharma argues, is crucial to what she calls the Postcolonial New World Order. As a result, she argues that liberatory politics today require a dis-identification with the political categories of National-Native and Migrant.