Bristol Benjamin Meaker Distinguished Visiting Professor Nandita Sharma, University of Hawai’i Manoa, Hawaii, USA

nandita sharma 2The Hydra Rising

21 June - 21 July 2022

Biography

Nandita Sharma is Professor of Racism, Migration and Transnationalism in the Department of Sociology at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Her research interests address themes of human mobility, the production of the state categories (and political figures) of Native and Migrant, the national form of state power, ideologies of racism, nationalism and autochthony, processes of identification and self-understanding, and social movements for justice. Professor Sharma is an activist scholar whose research is shaped by the social movements she is active in, including No Borders movements and those struggling for the worldwide commons. She has co-edited Special Issues of the journal Transnational Social Review – A Social Work Journal (2015, 5(1)) on “Borders, Transborders, No Borders: Problematizing The “Figure Of The Migrant,” (with Cornelia Schweppe); the journal Refuge (2009 [2011], 26:2). on “No Borders as a Practical Political Project” (with Bridget Anderson and Cynthia Wright), and the journal Canadian Woman Studies (2002, 21 (3 & 4) on “Women, Globalization and International Trade.” In addition to numerous book chapters in scholarly anthologies, Professor Sharma is the author of numerous journal articles, including in Mobilities; Anti-Trafficking Review; National Women’s Studies Association Journal; Studies in Political Economy; and The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology. Professor Sharma is also the author of two books: Home Economics: Nationalism and the Making of 'Migrant Workers' in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2006) and Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (Duke University Press, 2020).

Summary

The Many Headed Hydra: sailors, slaves, commoners and the hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic is an internationally renowned book written by social historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker that discusses the history of the disorderly mass that was opposed the emergence of a global system of exploitable labour in the eighteenth century. Professor Bridget Anderson and Professor Sharma are editing a volume that examines the contemporary Hydra, by which we understand political struggles and movements that challenge concepts that were highly contested when international capitalism was emerging but which are now taken for granted. This include ideas of property, family, money and nation. Each chapter will develop the ideas, relationships and actions described in a chapter of the original book, as they are now being made and experienced in the contemporary world. We are particularly interested in building on The Many Headed Hydra’s engagement with Bristol history.

This builds on Professor Sharma’s previous book Home Rule: national sovereignty and the separation of natives and migrants published by Duke University Press in February 2020. This traces the historical formation and political separation of ‘natives’ and ‘migrants’, to challenge claims that migrants are contemporary ‘settler colonists’ and calls for new ways of analysing and doing politics that bring together ‘migrants’ and ‘indigenous people and move away from sovereignty and statehood. It also builds on Professor Anderson’s current interest in methodological de-nationalism. Dr Sharma’s fellowship will run alongside a research visit to the UoB from the New School for Social Research in New York, with whom both Professor Anderson and Professor Sharma have been collaborating for several years.

Professor Sharma is hosted by Professor Bridget Anderson, Sociology, Politics and International Studies and the Migration Mobilities Bristol (MMB). A blog post has been written about her on their website here.

Planned events include:

A Public lecture
Are immigration controls racist? Lessons from History
Wednesday 29th June, 6-8pm

Following the Second World War, two related processes took place. First, there was a wide scale effort to delegitimize racist ideologies by demonstrating that ‘race’ was socially and historically constructed. Second, state sovereignty was nearly universally nationalized and, as a result, immigration and border controls proliferated. Nationalist ideologies were rendered not only legitimate but practically mandatory in politics, leading to the normalization of distinctions between Nationals and Migrants. This talk charts this history to understand how racism, as a consequence of nationalism, is organized, practised and resisted in an era of postcolonialism.

Discussant: Dr Maya Goodfellow, University College London

Registration required, please book here

Departmental Lecture
Decolonization and Mobility: Decentering the ‘foreign’ and liberating movement
Monday 4th July, 5-7 pm

This seminar will explore how class relations are sidelined when anti-colonial struggles come to be seen as largely being about the achievement of national territorial sovereignty. By making ‘home rule’ the accepted vehicle for decolonization, the problem of colonization is presented as a problem of foreign rule. Consequently, people’s ongoing struggle against expropriation of land, exploitation of labour, and oppression of their ways of life, are separated from the struggle against colonialism. By demanding liberation for the ‘nation’ from rulers and profiteers who are not ‘one’s own’, the power of nation-states or those portrayed as ‘national capitalists’ is normalized as a sort of nonpower, notwithstanding nationalist bromides about the ‘People’s power’. By foregrounding the social relationships of colonialism rather than the nationality of either rulers or those they rule over, the possibility of decolonization is strengthened

Registration details will be available on the MMB webpage

Postgraduate workshop
How not to think like a state: non-exclusion as the basis of political community
Tuesday 12th July, 4-6 pm

Ten places will be available for this exclusive workshop with activist scholar Nandita Sharma, hosted by MMB during her visiting professorship in Bristol. Postgraduates at all stages of their PhD will have the opportunity to explore and debate ways of thinking outside the nation state with Nandita, whose work addresses the production of categories of Native and Migrant, the national form of state power, ideologies of racism, and nationalism and autochthony. Participants will have the opportunity to discuss their own research and future research plans in the workshop and think through the ethical, epistemological and political challenges and opportunities of working with and beyond state categories.