(Anticolonial) Revolution as a Felt Archive

Abstract

Arwa Salih begins her memoir about Egypt’s anticolonial revolution by invoking haunting: “I felt profoundly disconnected from the ‘national struggle’ that haunts every sentence of this book.” Salih, a prominent Egyptian communist, evocatively named her memoir The Stillborn, referencing a project that was unfinished, that had seemingly “failed”, and yet that haunts us all. This article argues that frames such as feeling haunted or experiencing failure open up possibilities around exploring anticolonialism and its afterlives as an affective landscape. I engage Arwa Salih’s understanding of “haunting” and Dian Million’s work on affective archives and “felt theory” in order to explore anticolonial struggle and postcolonial politics through the lens of feeling. What would it mean to make sense of these moments by attending to feelings such as hope, promise, grief, and more? I argue that the affective understandings of revolutionary events are central to theorising the anticolonial moment and its afterlives.