A public lecture hosted by the Migration Mobilities Bristol (MMB) Research Institute, The School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, and Bristol Ideas.

Following the Second World War imperial states were largely replaced by nation states, leading to a proliferation of immigration and border controls around the globe. Nationalist ideologies became not only legitimate but practically mandatory in politics, resulting in a widely accepted distinction between ‘Natives’ and ‘Migrants’. At the same time, there was a wide-scale effort to delegitimise racist ideologies – associated with Nazi Germany – demonstrating that ‘race’ was socially and historically constructed.

Today, the racism of colonial hierarchies has been transferred onto foreignness and finds expression in the everyday nationalism that underpins national borders.

In this public lecture Nandita charts the post-war movement towards national sovereignty to understand how, in the postcolonial era, racism is organised, practised and resisted. In particular, she examines the growing ‘autochthonisation’ of politics: that is, how the ‘national’ is being reconfigured as the ‘native’, belonging to the soil. From White supremacists in the Rich World to anti-colonial movements of ‘indigenous’ people in old White British colonies she discusses a range of autochthonous movements in very different contexts, with very different political registers. Through these examples she shows us how today’s ‘migrants’ are being re-imagined as ‘colonisers’. She will also illustrate how national ideas of soil are being racialised and racist ideas of blood are being territorialised in these postcolonial narratives.

Following her lecture Nandita will be in discussion with Dr Maya Goodfellow, University College London, author of Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats (Verso, 2020), to explore further the connections between race and immigration controls in the UK and beyond.

The discussion will be followed by a reception in the foyer of the Fry Building from 7.30-8pm.

Professor Nandita Sharma is visiting Bristol as a Benjamin Meaker Distinguished Visiting Professor. Nandita is Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa and an activist scholar whose research is shaped by the social movements she is active in, including No Borders movements and those struggling for the planetary commons. Her latest book is Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (Duke University Press, 2020).

Read more about her visit

Attendance is free but registration is essential. Further information and a link to register here.