Decolonial historical adventures. New ways of engaging with colonial pasts.

Postcolonial and decolonial scholarship has challenged many previously dominant interpretations of the European colonial endeavours and their complex and painful legacies. How can these academic insights be shared with a wider audience in a way that opens up conversations on these topics that go beyond possibly existing boundaries? Studying the different experiences of and perspectives on colonial pasts has been an important touchstone of decolonial scholarship. This includes how these pasts legacies continue to shape our present. Critically engaging with (de)colonial histories is thus always rooted in the present and also depended on reflecting on one’s own position. Yet, remaining in a purely academic context cannot be sufficient for this endeavor. What role can different aesthetic forms play for stimulating broader conversations? How can they enable us to critically engage with narratives that have shaped and legitimated the European colonial project in the past and may still hold imaginative power? How can indigenous perspectives and critical takes on metropolitain colonial cultures be brought together? Which possible pitfalls and blind spots are common and how can they be addressed productively? On the occasion of the publication of In the Land of Lacandón which is a graphic history on a 1930s French ethnographer and his story about “discovering” a supposedly “lost tribe” in Chiapas, the session will bring together the book’s two authors with scholars from UvA and Leiden to dicuss these topics from different angles.