For Arabic-language theory to truly become a resource in Western scholarship rather than an object for analysis, however, we need more than a new hermeneutic. We need this theory to be made available in Western languages. And we need it in volumes, not merely anthologies with a few pages-long excerpts of a thinker’s work whose oeuvre is, like Amel’s, thousands of pages long.

Given how many histories and critical perspectives on the past Gandhi’s name conjures, his iconic presence prompts a parallactic reading of history and politics in India and South Africa. Parallactic readings uncover histories behind the easily predictable image crowding dominant lines of vision. Parallax and parallactic readings come together in recent scholarship and art, including Pakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander’s Parallax, an installation composed of hundreds of digitally animated images which focuses on the geostrategic position of the Strait of Hormuz as well as aims to orient viewers to perspectives on modern colonialism and post-colonial politics of the present.

“In the 1980s, the focus of women’s history was on nationalism (women’s role and/or participation in anti-colonial struggles) and women’s writing (to recover their agency and subjectivity). I have always found it somewhat paradoxical and ironical that Subaltern Studies, which gave us such a trenchant critique of elitism in nationalist histories, ended up justifying, even shoring up elitism in other ways. By designating women as subalterns and the recovery of their voice as the primary agenda, we limited the scope of women’s history to middle-class and upper-caste women. The bhadramahila became the focus of women’s history. We told and re-told stories of social reform. I was not convinced by this argument”.

In popular memory, Sri Lanka has no history of slavery. Nira Wickramasinghe's latest book, Slave in a Palanquin, challenges this using Dutch and British archival records to point to the lives of thousands of enslaved persons including men and women from across the Indonesian archipelago, local Sinhalese, Muslims, and Tamils. In the following conversation, conducted over email, Nira Wickramasinghe speaks to historians Kalyani Ramnath and Tamara Fernando.

Liberalism could no longer claim that it was ravaging and destroying worlds based on any good. So what happens? And that's what we start looking at — late liberalism. Liberalism says, in terms of its cultural logics, does this amazing thing. What a great trick! And it's what I and my colleagues at Belyuen were in the middle of in 1984.