Rethinking colonial warfare: Epistemic freedom and art as decolonial resistance

Discourses on colonial warfare and African anti-colonial resistance often centre on the violent interactions between the bodies of coloniser and the colonised. These dynamics have been keenly explored by African and diaspora postcolonial philosopher-thinkers such as, Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Amilcar Cabral and more contemporarily Achille Mbembe. However, the role of local aesthetic actors within processes of resistance, is often undermined and relegated to “the cultural”.

This event not only addresses African artistic agency in decolonisation, it also seeks to centre such mobilisations within a tradition of indigenous resistance to atemporal colonial conflict. The event will include an in-conversation style panel, and an intimate curation of space, with an exhibition of selected artforms, produced in collaboration with local African artisans. In so doing, the event will encourage active engagement with notions of slow violence, decoloniality and ongoing material and epistemic liberation.

About the Speakers

Majdouline Elhichou - Majdouline is an anthropologist, educator and artivist, with a double BA in International Development and African studies from Al Akhawayn University, Morocco (AUI). She also holds an MA in Social Anthropology of Development from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Her research and practice focus on liberation narratives, art as resistance, autonomies and women’s empowerment from the grassroots, and pluriversal and decolonial
pedagogies. She is the founder of OUMMY AFRIKA, a postcolonial fashion brand, led by female artisans, centered around the preservation of African ancestral textile traditions through participatory design and archiving.

Amarachi Iheke - Amarachi is a PhD Candidate in the Department of War Studies and the Coordinator of the Africa Research Group. Her research interests lie in African post-colonial nationbuilding, post-conflict reconciliation and arts-based transitional justice. Her thesis project applies such themes within the context of post-civil war Nigeria and the production of memory narratives in a Biafran literary canon. She holds a BA in International Relations and African Studies, from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and an MA in Conflict, Security and Development from King’s College London (KCL).

Amarachi’s research is funded by the Economic Social Research Council (ESRC), through the London Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership (LISS DTP).

Christina Peake - Christina Peake is a British Bajan transdisciplinary artist, creator and educator whose research and practice focuses on where the narratives of multispecies engagement, marine contextualised Afro-descendent and re/indigenised communities sit in relation to the global and localised narratives of environmental and social justice.

Christina's practice is research-led combining fieldwork, primarily engaging communities and/or the natural environment, grounding academic research within immersive experience informing work standing between mythopoeic narrative and allegory. Christina takes a synergistic approach sourcing material from individual testimony to historical narrative, creating new stories that are as mercurial as the many worlds that informed them.

One of Christina's major projects and exemplary collaborative kinships is the creation of 'The Future Imaginarium - The Ancestors' Gaze' specifically created and in development to explore decolonisation, liberatory practice and decentring hierarchies within the multiple disciplines, movements and industries that she and her collaborative kin work within to be launched later this year.

Yaa Addae - Yaa Addae is a British-Ghanaian cultural strategist, curator, and design researcher. Currently, Yaa is developing The Heartbreak Church, a mobile love evangelist participatory space for cultivating intimacy. They have spoken at Southbank Centre,Nubuke Foundation, Goethe Instiut Lisbon, and The Barbican, and led workshops with Autograph ABP, The Church of Black Feminist Thought, The Library of Africa + The African Diaspora and Rumpus Room. Her writing has been published in Bitch Media, Gal-Dem, Trippin, The Republic, and Everything Passes Except The Past (Sternberg Press March 2021) and her curatorial work was featured in Time Magazine.