Julia Stephens, "Worldly Afterlives: Tracing Family Trails Between India and Empire" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Julia Stevens' groundbreaking book, *Worldly Afterlives: Tracing Family Trails Between India and Empire*, reframes colonial history not as a linear narrative of empire and resistance, but as a living, breathing continuum of family memory and material inheritance that stretches from the 19th century to today. Rather than relying solely on official archives, Stevens weaves together legal documents, photographs, jewelry, and even Instagram posts to reconstruct the lives of Indian migrants across the British Empire and its settler colonial offshoots—places like Zanzibar, Malaya, South Africa, and the U.S. Her most powerful insight? That diaspora isn’t defined by ethnicity or religion, but by the ongoing, often contradictory, ways families negotiate mobility, trauma, and power across generations. She reveals how a South African matriarch wore a pendant of Queen Victoria not as a symbol of loyalty, but as an act of reclamation—transforming imperial iconography into personal sovereignty. The book’s radical structure, organized not chronologically but as an 'arc of an afterlife,' mirrors how families actually live history: through funerals, inheritance disputes, photo albums, and stories that refuse to stay in the past. Stevens ultimately argues that all of us are both documented and undocumented—our lives exceed the bureaucratic records that claim to define us. This project reshapes how we think about migration, identity, and history itself.