Seventh Satadru Sen Memorial Lecture 2025

The Value of Reparations, or the values of reparation

Anticolonial thinkers such as Gandhi and Fanon saw repair at the level of the self,  for both colonizer and colonised, as necessary to decolonization. This lecture reflects on the British backlash against reparations in terms of the failure of this  collective shift in consciousness. It explores how attachment to colonial-era values has fuelled both neocolonialism and persistent objections to reparations for colonialism and slavery on practical grounds - such as the difficulty of precisely calculating the colonial drain of wealth. Such objections--and the past itself--turn out to be red herrings in discussion of reparation in our time of climate crisis.

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