THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Biography:
Usama Rafi is a PhD Candidate in History, focusing on the British Empire in Asia and Africa, the history of race sciences, and twentieth century international history. He received an International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF) from the Social Sciences Research Council in 2019 and has conducted archival research in France, the United Kingdom, and Kenya. Rafi has extensive teaching experience at the University of Chicago, and most recently taught a class titled ‘Race, Decolonization, and Human Rights in the 20th Century,’ for which he was awarded a Graduate Prize Lectureship from the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights.
Dissertation: Equality out of Empire: Race, Citizenship, and Decolonization in the British Empire, 1941-68
Usama Rafi’s dissertation, Equality out of Empire: Race, Citizenship, and Decolonization in the British Empire, 1941-68, examines how debates about the meaning and implications of racial equality in certain ‘problem spaces’ of empire—colonized East Africa, the newly established United Nations, the Colonial Office in London, the migrant communities of ‘coloured colonials’ in post-war Britain—shaped the timing and scope of the major wave of decolonization in the British Empire during the mid-twentieth century. Drawing on official records, the political thought of African anti-colonial leaders, calypso music of Britain’s postwar migrant communities, and East African folktales about ancestral land, Equality out of Empire demonstrates that it was the incommensurability between official appropriations of the idea of equality as a means to sustain colonial rule after WWII and notions of equality as material redistribution articulated by colonized peoples which led anti-colonialism from demanding racially-equitable imperial citizenship towards decolonization into nation-states. Situating these discourses of equality alongside each other illustrates that how decolonization unfolded in the postwar British Empire was more a matter of chance than destiny. Focusing on debates around popular and elite aspirations for what racial equality should entail in a ‘non-colonial’ future, the dissertation also highlights a rich and vibrant collection of ideas about what decolonization could be, beyond simply the end of formal foreign rule in individual colonized societies.
Recent Research / Recent Publications
My dissertation is an intellectual history of how different ideas about human equality— that despite the exterior differences of race, caste, and ethnicity, all individuals are fundamentally similar and equal—came to be conceived, constrained, and institutionalized in debates about decolonization and expectations of a more equitable world after empire. I analyze these shifts within certain ‘problem-spaces,’ conjunctural and discursive contexts in which propositions, arguments, and resolutions arise to respond to largely implicit but urgent questions and problems. Drawing on the history of psychology and population genetics, anticolonial political thought, and Human Rights, my dissertation addresses the following questions: What did the diplomatic and scientific institutionalization of human equality mean for those who had suffered the most from racially hierarchical colonial rule? Was this the final victory their struggles against colonialism had aspired to? If not, what was missing from this concept that lent crucial support for the wave of decolonization in the 1960s which restored independence and legally recognized sovereignty to formerly colonized populations? With chapters situated in colonial India, British East Africa, and the UNESCO secretariat in Paris, my dissertation offers a rich intellectual history of decolonization, post-colonial international relations in the twentieth century.