Editorial Statement
After two years of conversations, collective thinking and community-building, we welcome you to Voices from BoisMitidja, a new blog edited by the British International Studies Association’s Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group (BISA CPD). We have developed this project as a platform to amplify the incredible work of our comrades, colleagues and students, as they contend with what it means to write, create, think and act against the grain of empire, coloniality, and injustice in our world. The name BoisMitidja is a portmanteau of Bois Caïman – in present-day Haiti – where a secret anti-slavery meeting between Africans in the Caribbean took place in 1791 to plan what later became the great Haitian Revolution, and the Mitidja Plain, the site of Algerian anti-colonial resistance against French colonialism from 1830. Mitidja in Arabic means ‘crowned’, thus also Bois Caïman crowned.
Voices from BoisMitidja seeks to reflect the beauty, resilience, joy and power of this anti-colonial heritage; a platform that reflects the persistence of life, love and resistance, in the face of both spectacular and every-day coloniality. In addition to pieces discussing, analysing and exposing forms of injustice, the blog, therefore, will showcase the continuity of the long traditions of struggle against all forms of oppression, injustice and inequality.
In holding space for diverse voices, practices and approaches, we hope to generate a collective practice of care for our CPD community and the amazing work you all do. We see its strength in its adoption of post-colonial, decolonial, anti-racist methods rather than fixated on a particular theme, topic or policy, and we encourage you to submit work that allows you and inspires others to be creative, generative and reflexive.
How to get involved/share your submissions:
- The blog has rolling submissions – please feel free to send us your work, any time.
- We invite innovative submissions: not only text-based, but also visual/audio format.
- Most submissions will be published through one of four outlets (but we are open to those that also don’t quite fit)"
- Diary: here we solicit pieces that are reflective in nature, and meaningfully speak to a range of issues, such as positionality, materiality of socio-economic status, complicity in academia, etc...
- Conversations: here we hope to encourage submissions which engage with prominent scholarship in direct conversation with the work of ECRs, CPD-sponsored roundtables, etc...
- Storytelling: breaking away from the 'distance-as-rigour' approach to scholarship and to engage more meaningfully with narrative as method.
- Comment: we hope our members will send us commentary, engagement, discussions, reviews on politics, academia and the state of our world.
To submit, please email your submission to our dedicated blog email, CPDblog@bisa.ac.uk, with a short bio. If you have any questions or concerns, please email us and we will get back to you ASAP.
The image for our beautiful blog artwork is created by Habiba Nabisubi, who can be found here: https://www.instagram.com/illustratedbyhabiba/.