Parting Gifts of Empire: Palestine and India at the Dawn of Decolonisation
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
5:00 pm
- Venue
- SOAS, University of London
- Room
- Djam Lecture Theatre
About this event
Join us for a discussion on Parting Gifts of Empire, a book by Esmat Elhalaby that explores how Arab and South Asian thinkers forged new solidarities and ideas in the fight against colonial legacies.
Parting Gifts of Empire narrates an untold story of how Arabs and South Asians in the 20th century sought to decolonise their minds. The histories of Palestine and India—both partitioned by the British Empire—are intimately linked. In the face of similar imperially-created chasms, Arab and Indian intellectuals reinvigorated centuries of shared histories to forge new horizons, new solidarities, new institutions, and new fields of knowledge.
In this book, Esmat Elhalaby traces the forgotten lives of scholars like Wadi’ al-Bustani, revisits Arab and Indian feminist meetings, highlights gatherings such as Delhi’s 1947 Asian Relations Conference, and argues for the centrality of Palestine to the rise of the Third World. This book breaks new ground to unfold a global intellectual history of anticolonialism, Asian unity, pan-Islamism, and nonalignment in the making of what became known as the Global South.
Registered audience members will receive excerpts of the book to read in advance to set up a deep and lively discussion of the book.
About the speaker
Esmat Elhalaby is a historian of the transnational Middle East and South Asia. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. He received his BA from UCLA and his PhD from Rice University. Previously he was a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Davis and a Humanities Research Fellow at NYU Abu Dhabi. For his article 'Empire and Arab Indology', he received the Amílcar Cabral Prize from the Instituto de História Contemporânea, Universidade Nova de Lisboa.
Book cover
