The exercise of British power abroad has also been a means of producing (widely disseminating, yet often unevenly distributing) forms, degrees, and configurations of knowledge. British Empire is also an information network. This roundtable is interested in the blockages, breakdowns, and strategic redeployments of knowledge and its uses as knowledge is embedded, contested, and counteracted within specific scenes of decolonial practice. How can we understand–or, more precisely, what frameworks do these scenes give us for understanding–the spaces (of skepticism, uncertainty, paranoia, discovery, and/or emergent expertise) opened in contests between those who are and are not authorized to produce knowledge, and the persons and places that this knowledge concerns?

Featuring Peter Kalliney (William J. Tuggle Chair in English, Social Theory, African American and Africana Studies, University of Kentucky); James Hevia (Director of Global Studies and Faculty Member, Center for East Asian Studies, University of Chicago); Nasser Mufti (Associate Head and Associate Professor of English, University of Illinois at Chicago); and Tariq Jazeel (Professor of Geography, University College London). With moderator Chris Taylor (Associate Professor of English, University of Chicago).