At what point does colonialism’s impact end for a person living and dying under its rule? Perhaps not even after death, said Kris Manjapra, an interdisciplinary historian and professor of history and global studies at Northeastern University. Manjapra explores this question in his next book, “Necroempire,” which examines the “afterlives of people who die under colonialism,” from those targeted in the Jim Crow South of the United States to Indigenous people of South Asia.
“The global story of the different long afterlives that colonized peoples live, for example, in museums, in medical schools, in prisons. There are different institutions that come to light, and I’m telling that tale,” Manjapra said. While death is one part of this book, Manjapra noted, it is also about survival and descendants, and community and ancestor activism, or how descendants “give peace to those who have departed.”
