The Liberation Calendar Has Been Shared With You
A calendar that disrupts colonial linear time-space

Reimagining calendars, The Liberation Calendar Has Been Shared With You is an online calendar that observes the emancipation of former colonies in America, Africa, and Asia between the 19th and the 20th centuries. Each holiday is written directly into a shared online calendar available for viewing/editing. The objective of this project is to emphasize the importance of binding past and present (and public and private) histories in order to collectively ground ongoing decolonial struggles.

Participants are encouraged to alter this calendar by responding to it. The accumulation of responses to emancipatory holidays becomes a way of reminding ourselves that liberation is not only a symbolic, fixed date that remains in the past, but a daily act that involves changing the ways we respond to evolving forms of nationalism. Moreover, participants’ responses may overcrowd the calendar, blurring the lines of colonial notions of linear time.

The Liberation Calendar Has Been Shared With You allows users to add new events in a shared calendar. Existing events can also be contested to expand the scope of what it means to remember independence in the present tense, on both a personal and political level.

Part of the violence of colonial projects is their imposition of structured time, ordered space, and as Ngozi Adichie discusses, the proliferation of a single narrative. Imposed holidays often mark the supposed “end” of colonial rule, when in reality, the legacies of occupation, enslavement, and extraction extend far beyond their recorded dates and continue to manifest in countless ways. “The Liberation Calendar” seeks to challenge the colonial “single narrative” structure and instead make space for all the different ways we experience, remember, record, and imagine liberation across communities.

As you click on different nations in the calendar, holidays that observe the emancipation of former colonies begin to layer over one another. Your entries will be read in conversation with those of others, and liberation stories will overlap across place and time.

You can directly input your holidays into the calendar on any available date. Click the drop down menu on the banner to change the year if needed.

For the purpose of this calendar, a holiday can be any personal event, memory, record, or hope for the future which represents (or is associated with) liberation for you. Holidays do not need to be “complete” or contained to one day or time—they may be written as fragments, or narrated across time.

Here, historical time can be recorded collectively on a daily basis, rather than colonially determined through national holidays such as Independence days. The holidays you input here become part of a larger tapestry of what liberation might mean on a personal, ongoing level.

 

Instructions to access, edit, and share the calendar:

Start by reaching out to us to receive the necessary permissions. Once added to the calendar, you will be able to view/edit/modify existing events and create new ones, as well as to invite more people to join in.