A workshop with Christian David Alvarado

KAPLAN HALL ROOM #348

1:00-2:30pm Workshop

2:30-3:00pm Reception

The chapter we will be discussing in this workshop examines a key episode in the history of global conspiracist thought: speculative accounts and narratives regarding the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya across mid-20th century Britain and its empire. In it, I argue that contemporary allegations about the uprising’s aim of “white genocide,” the Satanic rituals conducted by those who participated in it, and its role in global Communist plots should all be read as conspiracy theories which fundamentally shaped its history and attempts to suppress it. Reframing them as such allows us to see how speculative thinking about Mau Mau is part of a longer tradition of reading world events that continues to inform many of the most prominent iterations of conspiracism that shape Western politics and culture today. Developing this chapter also led to my second major research project, which aims to understand how the history of conspiracist literary production in European and African contexts shaped imperial governance and engagements with processes of decolonization on both of these continents.

About the Speaker

Christian Alvarado received his PhD in History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz and is President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the African American and African Studies Department at the University of California, Davis. His current book project situates the event most commonly known as the Mau Mau Uprising in late-colonial Kenya within the broader historical and narratological landscape of 20th century Africa. By tracing how understandings of this event circulated across transnational networks and cultural formations, his work aims to show how the frameworks to which Mau Mau is put illuminate novel insights into the global dimensions of knowledge production regarding African decolonization.