Imperial Inheritances: A Meditation in Five Parts

Abstract:This essay queries the dynamics of history and diasporic memory, difference and affiliation, in the context of empire, by dwelling on the spectral presence of my great uncle, D. K. Sharda, in stories passed on to me by my mother and grandmother. Sharda was a journalist in British East Africa, part of a network of leftist anticolonial activists who used the independent press to advocate for Black-Asian alliance in the Kenyan struggle for independence. Grappling with the fragmentary nature of diasporic memory, I engage personal family history in order to disrupt the conventional politics of knowledge production in the academy, particularly scholarly disinterest and critical distance. Drawing on and juxtaposing archival research, personal interviews, and analyses of family photographs, I examine the gendered visual, narrative, and affective mechanisms by which histories and knowledges of imperial migration and diaspora are transmitted, and the political imaginaries such transmissions might produce.