"We did not come alive in Britain: From Anti-colonialism to Abolition" - Adam Elliott-Cooper

Please join Oxford Abolitionist Imaginaries and Praxis in welcoming Adam Elliott-Cooper, Lecturer in Social and Public Policy in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. He received his PhD from the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, in 2016. His first monograph, Black Resistance to British Policing, was published by Manchester University Press in May 2021. He is also co-author of Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State (Pluto Press, 2021).

In the summer of 2020, the largest anti-racist protest movement in both US and UK history emerged following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. As demonstrations spread across every continent, radical critiques of the legacies of colonialism and white supremacy proliferated. However, international Black protest have a longer history which stretches back to movements against slavery and colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Anti-colonial politics point to a deep history of Black international politics. These political projects understood racism as being a phenomenon which has spread across the globe through imperialism. Black Lives Matter, a movement which emerges in the 21st century, is navigating a very different political environment to the campaigns which proceeded it, and is thus articulating it’s politics through abolitionism, which reflect the changing nature of racism.

This discussion is presented in collaboration with the Race and Post-Colonial Geographies Series at the School of Geography.