Colonial Repair Network

European imperialism has produced, and continues to produce, global power dynamics of ongoing colonial (dis)order. While “former” colonising states imagine a disjuncture between their colonial past and their liberal democratic present, Indigenous and postcolonial activists and scholars highlight a different reality. In demanding redress for the legacies of colonisation, activists and scholars also draw attention to the ongoing structures and logics that reproduce colonialism in the present.

This project examines the impacts of colonial (dis)order through an analysis of the contemporary reparative policy responses among “former” colonisers including Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Australia, Colombia and Canada. An interdisciplinary team of historians, literature and visual art scholars, legal scholars, and political scientists will conduct a transnational and comparative analysis of the ways these states are responding to public calls for reparations, restitutions, and justice both in the political and cultural realms. We will question the ways in which history and various forms of cultural representation are used in the production of policy, and assess the capacity of these responses to disrupt or further relations of colonial (dis)order.