Event details

In this talk, Kris Manjapra traces the emergence of practices of prospecting, salvaging, and spectating the colonial dead that generated new uses and value for the postmortem body during the age of Liberal Empire, 1850-1930, with implications for our own times.

A hidden dynamic underlies modern societies with imperialist roots: we do not put some of the Dead to rest; we keep them in bondage. The health and freedom of some rely on the entrapment and exploitation of others, even in death. Our societies still rely, in remarkably persistent ways, on pipelines that shunt the bodies of underprivileged and vulnerable people into our medical schools, our science labs, and our museums. An imperialist paradigm not only structures the relations among the living, but perpetuates harm committed against colonized and racialized people long after their mortal demise. An imperialist paradigm has generated immortal profits by harvesting value from racialized postmortem people and extracting rent from the derivatives of their bodies.

Kris Manjapra is Stearns Trustee Professor of History and Global Studies at Northeastern University. He is the author of Black Ghost of Empire (Scribner and Allen Lane, 2022), Colonialism in Global Perspective (Cambridge, 2020), and Age of Entanglement (Harvard, 2014), among other works. Web: www.historiesofresistance.com