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SUMMARY:What is this thing called Mau Mau? The “Storm in Kenya” in Global Perspectives
DESCRIPTION:A Talk by Christian David Alvarado\n\nKaplan Hall Room #348\n5:00-8:00 PM\n\n[gravityform id=”25″ title=”false” description=”true” ajax=”true”]\nIn the opening pages of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s 1967 novel A Grain of Wheat\, a European district officer asks a version of the question at the core of discourse about the anticolonial movement that gripped Kenya in the 1950s: “What is this thing called Mau Mau?” As an icon of violent resistance to colonial domination\, one answer regarding the armed struggle that defined late-colonial Kenya has been to read it as an “unfinished revolution” whose decolonial aims remain unfulfilled (or\, more precisely\, betrayed). This talk attends to Mau Mau’s symbolic place in cultural politics in Kenya and beyond by exploring how narratives interpreting it as such have shaped transnational understandings of postcolonialism and decolonization. By tracing the rhetorical politics that cohere around it\, I argue that we should consider the invocation of the idea of Mau Mau — whether it be central to a text or present as an offhand reference — as a catalyst through which broader claims are made. I link how African and diasporic writers have positioned Mau Mau as an episode in the greater “African Revolution” to the challenge it represents to existing racial and ethnic structures. Drawing from Kenyan\, South African\, and American sources\, this talk explores how these dual interpretations have shaped Mau Mau’s prominent position in cultural production and the politics of dissent across the world. \n\nAbout the Speaker\nChristian 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.
URL:https://complit.ucla.edu/event/christian-alvarado-guest-lecture/
LOCATION:Kaplan Hall 348\, 415 Portola Plaza\, Los Angeles\, CA\, 90095\, United States
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CREATED:20241220T204033Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250225T003049Z
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SUMMARY:“The Same Frame of Mind\, but a Different Villain”: Conspiracist Narratology and the Decolonization of Africa
DESCRIPTION:A workshop with Christian David Alvarado\n\nKAPLAN HALL ROOM #348\n1:00-2:30pm Workshop\n2:30-3:00pm Reception\n  \nThis workshop is open to UCLA Comparative Literature graduate students\, UCLA English graduate students\, and UCLA African Studies Center students. \n[gravityform id=”26″ title=”false” description=”true” ajax=”true”]\n  \nRelated Document: Workshop Chapter \nThe 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. \n\nAbout the Speaker\nChristian 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.\n \n 
URL:https://complit.ucla.edu/event/the-same-frame-of-mind-but-a-different-villain-conspiracist-narratology-and-the-decolonization-of-africa/
LOCATION:Kaplan Hall 348\, 415 Portola Plaza\, Los Angeles\, CA\, 90095\, United States
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