Word to the Wise | Dr. Anaheed Al-Hardan

by India Crowe

While living in London, Dr. Anaheed Al-Hardan witnessed firsthand collective resistance against colonialism.  She watched the city’s large-scale demonstrations against the United Kingdom’s support of the United States’ invasions, and subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

As Associate Professor of Sociology in Howard University’s Department of Sociology and Criminology Al-Hardan's research focuses on decoloniality and resistance across the Global South with a particular eye on West Asia and North Africa. This past September, Cambridge University Press published her co-edited book, “Anticolonialism and Social Thought”, a diverse collection of essays on anticolonial thought and theory. The Sway sat down with Al-Hardan to learn more about her recent publication.

The Sway (TS): Could you tell us a little bit about your academic background and how you arrived at Howard?

Anaheed Al-Hardan (AA): I was trained as a historian and a sociologist in the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London) and Trinity College (University of Dublin). In between my postdoctoral training at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, my first tenure-track position as an assistant professor of sociology at the American University of Beirut, and an Arcapita Visiting Professorship in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University, I had the privilege to lecture about my first award-winning book, Palestinians in Syria: Nakba Memories of Shattered Communities (Columbia University Press, 2016), at HBCUs in the US. I left New Orleans and Atlanta all too briefly, but the students’ engagement and the conversations with colleagues stayed with me, especially as I began examining questions that emerge from historic and contemporary anticolonial solidarity among colonized and dispossessed peoples around that time. From there, it was only a matter of time before the opportunity to join the Department of Sociology and Criminology at HU would find me!
 

TS: Your recent co-edited book (with Dr. Julian Go) entitled Anticolonialism and Social Thought (Cambridge University press, 2025) - what was the inspiration behind it? How did you choose the authors/contributors?

AA: In 2019, I established an interdisciplinary and international team of early-career scholars from the American University of Beirut, the University of Ghana, the University of Cape Town and the University of the Witwatersrand. We were awarded a major Andrew W. Mellon research grant to establish a research program, “Afro-Asian Futures Past.” The purpose of this program, in which Howard University became a partner in 2022, is to revisit the African-Asian pasts of the decolonization era in the aftermath of the Second World War, known as the Bandung era, and from there, to develop a theoretically- and conceptually-relevant language with which to understand the changed realities of the African and Asian worlds today. The program is based on archival research, publications, pedagogical innovation at the partner institutions, and a public programming component, including three workshops and an international conference.

I am the Principal Investigator on the research program and also the lead researcher on our social theory research track. In 2020, I organized one of our online workshops given the pandemic on “Colonialism, Anticolonialism and Dissident Sociology Traditions.” The purpose of the workshop was to understand how recent shifts in the discipline of sociology have allowed sociologists to center the works of anticolonial thinkers as social theorists in their own right, and how these insights can allow us to better understand ongoing empirical questions that result from considering imperialism and colonialism as ongoing social processes in the present. I invited twelve international junior sociologists to contribute to this emerging sociological research agenda, as well as two senior scholars, including my eventual collaborator on the edited volume, Julian Go, to act as discussants. Upon the completion of the workshop, it became clear that our discussions had been about social theorists from the African and Asian worlds, rather than anticolonial social theorists as such.

From there, Julian and I decided to collaborate on co-organizing a second in-person meeting at the University of Chicago’s Paris Center on “Anticolonialism as Social Thought” in May 2022, to which we invited colleagues to engage in a conversation on how we could understand a certain political positionality that is in opposition to imperialism and colonialism as the driver of a dissident social theory and imaginary with relevance for today. We invited colleagues working on these topics, and in doing so, we also strove to ensure that we had diverse global institutional representation. We also had the honor of being joined by the Chair of the Frantz Fanon Foundation in Paris, Mireille Fanon Mendès-France, as a keynote speaker.

TS: What was the book publication process like (for our graduate students) from start to finish? Any lessons learned or challenges that can be shared? Was it difficult to find a publisher for example?

AA: We were fortunate to be joined by our colleague George Lawson, who is a professor of international relations and a series editor at Cambridge University Press’s London School of Economics and Political Science International Studies Series, at our Paris workshop. His enthusiasm for our project meant that we could submit a proposal based on the papers from the Paris meeting of those who wished to be a part of an edited volume fairly quickly. After the peer review of the proposal, the series editors made and reviewers made recommendations on how we could further strengthen the collection, including bringing in themes and topics that weren’t discussed at the workshop. From there, it was really just a question of diligence and keeping up with the process as editors, co-authors of an introduction, and in my case, also an author of an individual chapter. The book editing process from workshop to eventual publication took just under three and a half years, so I would say to graduate students that perseverance in any kind of academic undertaking is key.

TS: The themes in the book are particularly relevant today - any thoughts about that?

AA: Our societies today continue to be structured by the world’s colonial legacies and neocolonial realities, and to understand these as sociologists and social scientists, we must develop theoretical tools that are historical, comparative, global and aware of how our past continues to shape our present. For example, there was a recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times by Chicago, LA and DC Council members on how their cities need to prepare to stand up to the President’s recent declaration of a “war within.” Well, the Martiniquan anticolonial thinker and politician Aime Césaire, in his 1950 poetic essay Discourse on Colonialism, spoke about the “boomerang effect” of imperialism and colonialism. He did so in the context of what he argued was a selective moral outrage by European elites after the Second World War, when the Germans finally brought European racial supremacist ideas that they had developed and perfected in the colonies home to Europe. Following Césaire, an anticolonial understanding of the “war within” would necessitate understanding it as the boomerang effect of US imperialism, rather than as something exceptional or new, situating recent developments at home within the context of the long history of US imperialist expansion and conquest abroad.

TS: In what context do you hope the book will be read/utilized?

AA: As an academic book published with a university press, the book will be read by students and educators in higher education institutions and used in the classroom. Of course, I do wish for it to have a broader impact, and to be read by an informed general reader as well.

TS: What are your hopes for the book - perhaps raising consciousness about the critical role of anti-colonialism (and in how it is taught)?

AA: My modest hopes for the book are for it to advance the study of imperialism and colonialism in the past and the present, and anticolonial and anti-imperialist social theory in sociology and social science classrooms. Sociologists often begin the story of our discipline with the Industrial Revolution and the resultant dislocations in Europe; it is generally understood that sociology emerged around this time to understand these changes. Our volume could help foreground the processes that enabled the capital accumulation that would eventually lead to the Industrial Revolution and the establishment of the modern world system such as the conquest of the Americas, the genocide of the Indigenous population, and the transatlantic slave trade. This is one example of a starting point that could reframe our understanding of modernity and the modern world in the classroom as a result of an engagement with our book, and one that necessitates centering the analyses of anticolonial theorists who have long sought to understand a world they knew to be fundamentally structured by imperialism and colonialism in order to overcome these processes