Abstract: In the early 1960s, dramatic events placed the Congo at the center of global attention. As Franz Fanon famously claimed after the assassination of the Congo’s first prime minister Patrice Lumumba in January 1961, it was the “fate of the whole world” that was at play in the Congo. This talk counters the tendency in histories of the so-called Congo crisis to reduce the Congolese to pawns in a game played by the cold war superpowers.  Monaville focuses on Congolese students and their understanding and imagination of the Congo’s relation with the world in the wake of a violent colonial occupation and of a chaotic decolonization. These students refused to accept the foreclosure of the future of sovereignty and dignity that Lumumba had announced. Their modes of being and thinking shaped Congolese postcolonial politics, while connecting the country to multiple horizons across the global 1960s.

Speaker Bio: Pedro Monaville is associate professor of history at McGill University. His research centers on revolutionary movements, political subjectivities, knowledge production, popular culture, and memory work in colonial and postcolonial Congo. His first book, Students of the World: Global 1968 and Decolonization in the Congo, was published by Duke University Press in 2022.

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