PRIVACY AND COLONIALISM

Privacy and Colonialism is an initiative at the Centre for Privacy Studies for researchers specializing in colonial history to interrogate the politics and poetics of privacy, understood historically, in places where indigenous and native peoples were displaced from their land for the purposes of extraction and expansion that benefitted European empires in pre-modern times.

Colonization, as an inherently exploitative process, became crucial for the accumulation of resources, capital, and, ultimately, power, for colonizers. In this process, European colonial empires dominated and subjugated other parts of the world, producing stories of absence, erasure, enslavement and violence. Examining privacy in colonial contexts implicates asking questions about how displacement intersected with gender, sexuality, racialization, ethnicity, labour, class, and taste, for example. Our symposium provided a forum where we will articulate the fluid – and often unbalanced – relationships and negotiations of privacy in colonial environments. It also provided an opportunity for us to discuss how these negotiations might have affected theoretical discourses in the humanities, social sciences, and arts that deal with these histories:

  • How to think privacy materially in relation to the lived spaces that produce self and society in colonial environments and spaces? 
  • What are the disciplinary implications of using privacy as a critical lens to look at colonialism? 
  • Do private material expressions contest or cross geopolitical boundaries? 
  • Can domestic cultures propose new architectural and spatial outcomes in relation to spatial typologies?

We instigate the theorization of privacy across diverse geographical, political and cultural places and boundaries, starting from the assumption that, despite our increasingly fragmented world, we will find significant overlaps in the ways in which people might have sought privacy in their own contexts.

 

Seminar Colonisation, Indigenous peoples, and the denial of privacy, organized by Natacha Klein Käfer at the Centre for Privacy Studies (December 12, 2022).

Symposium Privacy and Colonialism, organized by Natacha Klein Käfer, Natália da Silva Perez, and Nuno Grancho at the Centre for Privacy Studies (October 6-7, 2022).

 

MEMBERS: Natacha Klein Käfer, Natália da Silva Perez, Nuno Grancho, Hanna Hjorth, Hui-Yi Yang