“But it was so influential – initially within English literature but then the humanities more generally – that it built up a body of scholarship in its wake that came to be understood as post-colonial studies.” “I don’t think Said necessarily thought that he was setting out to create a field when he wrote this book,” Bhambra explains. Postcolonialism emerged after the publication of its “keystone text” – Edward Said’s Orientalism – in 1978. Each examines the legacy and lasting effects of European colonialism, but use different times and places as their starting points. Their talk begins with a quick primer of the origin of the complementary fields of post-colonialism and decoloniality. (Bhambra says she’s less focused on statues themselves than in “the histories that are embodied within them, and the extent to which people know and understand those histories and what it means for us, in the public sphere, to be defined by them.”) In this Social Science Bites podcast, she discusses with interviewer David Edmonds why we should speak about the Haitian revolution in the same breath as the contemporaneous American and French revolutions, how former empires conveniently forget the contributions of their colonies now that those empires have downgraded to mere ‘nations,’ and what lessons we should draw from the current iconoclastic impulse toward imperial statuary. This account and its summary – “people constructed their Britishness in opposition to me, as opposed to inclusive of me” – encapsulates Bhambra’s academic field: postcolonial and decolonial studies. We were seen to be British, and yet when we traveled within the imperial polity and ended up in Britain, somehow we became migrants.” Britain came to us, incorporated us within its polity, within its understanding. “So I’ve always been a British citizen, my parents have always been British citizens, and my grandparents have always been British citizens – not because we lived in Britain, but we lived in those parts of the world that were the British Empire at the time. He keeps things, so he pulled out his old passports, my grandparents’ old passports, and all the passports were British.” When the Brexit debates were happening, I was talking to my dad about this. School told me I was an immigrant the media told me I was immigrant everything around me was that I was immigrant. Bhambra, a professor at the University of Sussex’s School of Global Studies, “and I always thought I was an immigrant. There's civilization:imageTitles mapping json data in /src/data.json.“I grew up in this country,” says Gurminder K.