Anticolonial Thought & Writing (RPA Pilot / Seed Project)

"We are gathering primary documents--especially manifestos, declarations, petitions, open letters, speeches, short opinion pieces, and closely related genres--from the world’s anticolonial movements with the goal of reproducing them in a collection. Such a scholarly anthology will allow us to see, for the first time, the range, depth, and abiding passion of the world’s statements of resistance to imperialism. Starting in the 1880s, as the western European powers greatly expanded their footprint in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, a modern tradition of anticolonial and antiracist writing emerged in nearly every part of the world. This unprecedented scholarly volume will allow us to compare and contrast the primary documents of the anticolonial movements from a wide range of contexts.

Every entry will be accompanied by short introductory headnotes and 3-5 suggestions for further reading. Writing the headnotes requires significant background research--work that the two project collaborators are in an excellent position to accomplish.

Peter Kalliney (PI) is an experienced researcher with four scholarly monographs and many peer-reviewed articles on these topics. He is the project designer and manager, overseeing all aspects of the work. His two UK collaborators on this project, Hannah Schultz and Terika Williams, are emerging scholars with strong primary research skills. Their main tasks include: locating first printings of the primary materials (some of these materials originally appeared in ephemeral publications now available only in archives and special collections); conducting bibliographic research on the authors and original venues of dissemination; learning about the contexts and occasions that help us place the document; transcribing the original document into a format the publisher can use (creating a word document); creating fair copy to ensure that we are not introducing any errors into our reproduction.

The project is under contract with Oxford University Press. The full manuscript is due in August 2026. The collaborators will be named as research associates when the anthology appears. "