Mayaki Kimba

Mayaki Kimba is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. As a political theorist and historian of political thought, he works on questions of the state and freedom, bureaucracy and domination, liberalism and empire, the family and the intimate sphere, race and multiculturalism, and the way in which those questions manifest in 20th-century Western Europe following large-scale migrations from (former) colonies to (post-)imperial nation-states. He in addition maintains a methodological interest in political theory’s archival turn and a substantive interest in Black and anticolonial political thought, especially from Suriname and the Dutch Caribbean. Originally from the Netherlands, Kimba gained his B. A. in political science from Reed College in Portland, Oregon. His current projects include an essay on solidarity in the work of Afro-Surinamese anticolonial activist and writer Anton de Kom, and the introduction to a special section in the journal Small Axe on Black Caribbean radicals Otto and Hermina Huiswoud. In his dissertation, Kimba studies ideas among Black migrants in 1970s Britain, France, and the Netherlands on the emancipatory potential of the state, focusing on the development of those ideas by Black activists and social workers in relation to state practices in the intimate sphere.