'What happens in the deep, washes in the shallows': the global afterlives of Lachlan Macquarie

qUCL and GFRN are pleased to welcome Dr Rahul Rao (University of St Andrews) to give their joint annual lecture.

While we work out what to do with bad memorials, what affective and political possibilities for solidarity and resistance are opened up when we tarry with the bad feelings that they produce? Taking the mausoleum of Lachlan Macquarie (a former colonial governor of New South Wales) on the Scottish Isle of Mull as an example, I ask whether injurious memorials – in reminding us of the connections between colony and metropolis – can be made to speak despite themselves, allowing racialised subjects in the metropolis to say, again, 'we are here because you were there'. Such memorials will always be scars on the landscape. Yet their very existence sharpens the contradiction between imperial nostalgia and amnesia – the affects between which the political Right endlessly oscillates.

About the Speaker

Dr Rahul Rao

Reader in International Political Thought at School of International Relations, University of St Andrews

Previously, he taught at SOAS University of London, where he remains a Professorial Research Associate, and the University of Oxford. He is the author of Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality (2020) and Third World Protest: Between Home and the World (2010), both published by Oxford University Press. He is currently writing a book about the politics of falling and rising statues. His work has appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Social Text, Journal of Historical Geography, The Caravan, Critical Times, Millennium, GLQ and London Review of International Law, amongst other journals. He is a member of the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy.

More about Dr Rahul Rao