“Colonizing Accra: Experiments in Storytelling" with Sarah Balakrishnan

Biography: Sarah Balakrishnan is a Canadian-Indian writer and scholar based in the Department of History at Duke University. Balakrishnan is the 2022 Narrative Prize winner, the winner of Narrative Magazine’s Best Under 30 writing contest, and a finalist for the Cecilia Joyce Johnson Award for Short Fiction from the Key West Literary Seminar. Since 2020, BalaKRISH NIN has served as a fiction editor at The Maple Tree Literary Supplement. Her fiction writing has been supported by grants from Craigardan, Hedgebrook, and American Short Fiction. Balakrishnan received a PhD in History from Harvard University in 2020 and a BA in History and Political Theory from McGill University in 2014. She was a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge, a postdoctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia, and a postdoctoral fellow in the History Department at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Balakrishnan scholarly research has appeared in a number of prestigious venues, including The Journal of African History, The Journal of Social History, and Comparative Studies in Society and History.Show Notes: Welcome to Everything Is Ideology a cultural Studies Podcast  I’m Lee Caplan, and in this episode I’m joined by Dr. Sarah Balakrishnan, a Canadian Indian writer and historian based in the Department of History at Duke University In our conversation, we discuss her wonderful essay, “Colonizing Accra: Experiments in Storytelling,” In our conversation we discuss how she approaches the colonial archive not simply as a record of imperial power, but as something more textured, layered, and contested—something like a woven cloth. We talk about what it means to read for stories within the archive, how narrative can make abstract structures like colonialism concrete and lived, and why history from below can reveal a very different account of when and how colonial rule was actually experienced on the ground. We also explore the relationship between storytelling and historical method, the role of contingency in the making of history, and the challenge of recovering voices and events that dominant historical canons have obscured. Along the way, Balakrishnan reflects on writing as both a historian and a fiction writer, on the influence of narrative form in her scholarship, and on the possibilities and limits of the archive itself. If you like what we do here make sure to like to subscribe and support us on our Patreon account where you will have access to all of our episodes.Links: https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/130/4/1677/8404816