The history of African decolonization has been marked by two contrasting views. On the one hand, historians writing from the point of view of the decolonizing metropole have examined at length the political, diplomatic and economic strategies and policies undertaken to assure a favourable “transfer of power” – whatever that meant for the actors involved. On the other side of the colonial divide, historians have looked at trajectories of liberation struggles and colonial people’s quest for political independence and national belonging. Either way, histories of decolonization have strongly relied on the sharp distinction, if not on the opposition, between empire and nation as self-evident spaces, and colonizer and colonized, as fixed, stable, subjectivities.

This panel intends to bring together papers that unsettle these familiar historical accounts by offering new, fresh, perspectives on decolonization. By doing so, we address the Call for Papers of the 25th Biennial Conference of the Southern African Historical Society (SAHS), to take place 1-3 July 2015 in Stellenbosch, South Africa. Following the conference’s main theme “Unsettling stories and Unstable Subjects”, we particularly welcome contributions that complicate the geographies of empire and nation, as well as the historical subjectivities of both colonizer and colonized. This shift in focus is particularly relevant for Southern Africa, where decolonization proved strikingly difficult and occurred comparatively late, in a terrain not only marked by imperial intransigence (as in Portuguese colonies), but also by South Africa’s regional (political and economic) tentacles. At the same time, here decolonization became increasingly internationalized with the involvement of a myriad of unstable actors and factors, from corporations, the United Nations, the superpowers, Afro-Asian organizations, etc.

Contributors are encouraged to address any of the following indicative, but not exhaustive, issues:
- Unsettling the cartographies of decolonization: transnational networks, regional alliances, and political affinities across boundaries of (yet-to-be) nations or empires, e.g. migrant networks, oceans, international advocacy, Afro-Asia, etc.
- Unsettling the subjects of decolonization: histories of subjectivities and identities that do not easily fit the colonizer-colonized scheme, e.g. collaborators, middlemen, racial minorities, migrants, etc.
- Unsettling the historiography of decolonization: new methods and approaches, e.g. gender and sexuality, historical anthropology, transnational history, history of the body, micro-history, etc.

Contributors should submit an abstract (no more than 200 words) and a short CV (one paragraph, no more than 15 lines) before December 15th. Proposals or inquiries to be sent to: caio.simoes@graduateinstitute.ch