Dr. Joseph Kasule
Intimate Colonialities: Public Intellectualism & Political revolution in Buganda/Bergen
Abstract
My project uses a comparative approach to investigate microscopic elements of horizontal coloniality in Buganda and Norway. I critique the premise that the modern university is the institutional space where political discourse originates before it circulates to the public realm. I argue that the modern university is a core institutional legacy of late European colonial and neo-colonial modernity. I extend the claim that intellectual thought is a core ingredient of pre-contact coloniality, especially its recognition of the concrete vis-à-vis abstraction. I use two units of analysis: the Sammi question in Norway and the Balaalo question in Buganda to reveal the banality of how forms of oppression/injustice produce a positive consciousness in political subjects to imagine discussive practices seeking emancipation from subjugation. Parallelisms between the Sammi and Balaalo reveal a history of deep cultural and social integration with other groups, which ensured harmony. The difficulty of political integration has, however, produced what I call intimate colonialities, due to the continuous/recurring contestation between domination or hegemony. The project centralizes the discursive role of violence in political formations and the discursive practices by which elitism penetrates or merges with popular discourse to achieve intellectual synthesis. While intellectual revolution has produced a new political class that successfully inverted its historical political negation in Buganda, the Sammi question has merely produced political change anchored in the arena of human rights recognition.
Date: 8th of February 2024, 12:00-14:00 (Research Section Moralities meeting)