Articulated Sorrows: Intercolonial Imaginings and the National Singular

Abstract

The 1960s was a moment when expressions about oppression provided the common intelligibility to connect Third World liberation in places like Vietnam to revolutionary movements of colour in the United States. The sorrows arising from this common oppression allow for articulation, after Stuart Hall, between groups subject to the differential effects of colonial power. Written at the intercolonial moment in 1920s Paris, the birth of the anti-colonial nation in 1940s Vietnam, and the anti-imperialist, anti-racist moment of the 1960s in the US, the selections examined here rely on a language depicting racial abjection to unite the oppressed into revolutionary action that promises to redeem them into the future human subject. Yet, such redemptive structure of this subject can itself be repressive because it relies on the singular mode of identification in nationalism. This article proposes a poetics of incommensurability to think through the potentials of anti-imperialist, anti-racist Afro-Asian solidarity.