Anticolonial Politics Research Articles

Appealing to the World: Du Bois and the Transnational Politics of Petition

As a mode of radical, anti-colonial politics, the petition and related genre of the appeal would seem to hold little promise. This paper uncovers the radical and transnational politics of petitioning in W. E. B. Du Bois's work with and against the United Nations in the 1940s. Examining a range of petitions beyond the more widely examined Appeal to the World (1947), this article argues that Du Bois subverts the familiar genre conventions of the petition and appeal. The effect is not an appeal to a higher political authority to correct domestic injustices but to contest the shape of the international order itself by highlighting the transnational connection between colonial domination and racial exclusion within the domestic jurisdiction of imperial nation-states and the racial hierarchies of the international order. Instead of leaving the authority of the international order defined by the primacy of the sovereign state system intact, Du Bois contests this authority by exposing how racial hierarchy and colonial rule cut against enshrined divisions between internal state sovereignty and international law. The essay closes by exploring how other anti-colonial figures in the twentieth century such as B. R. Ambedkar and Malcolm X similarly turned to the transnational politics of appeal.

Anti-Colonial Politics of Knowledge and Pan-Africanism in Eslanda Goode Robeson’s African Journey

Anti-Colonial Politics of Knowledge and Pan-Africanism in Eslanda Goode Robeson’s African Journey

Visionary or Voyeur: Lionel Wendt and the Contradictions of Late Colonial Modernity in Ceylon

The voyeuristic qualities that permeate the vast oeuvre of Ceylonese photographer Lionel Wendt (1900-1944) are a point of contention within scholarship on his work. Scholars counter claims of voyeurism by underscoring his national belonging to Ceylon, his anti-colonial politics, or the global modernist influences on his aesthetic. Many of these analyses rely on Wendt’s biography to contextualize the formal qualities of his photographs. While his biography is important for establishing his influences and motivations as a photographer, it can overshadow the insight offered by the images themselves. This paper draws on a selection of Wendt’s photographs to chart a dialogue between their formal qualities and the political and cultural context of their production, such as a modernist visual arts movement in Ceylon, and a changing political economy as the island approached independence from colonial rule. I argue for a more robust definition of Ceylon modernism that accounts for its relationship to the social modernity during the late colonial era. I then recalibrate the question of voyeurism through an examination of the most common recipient of Wendt’s gaze: the laborer. I pair a formal reading of Wendt’s photo series Men at Work with a discussion of Ceylon’s labor movement, including its contested and antagonistic relationship to the growing nationalist politics of the period. Through my analysis, I foreground the contradictions so characteristic of late colonial modernity in Ceylon, as well as the limitations of binary anti/post-colonial discursive frameworks in which Wendt has been understood.

The Perennial Solidarity of the East

Abstract While the intertwinement of Indian anti-colonial politics and Theosophy is well-known, the entanglement of esotericism and anti-colonial endeavors in the modern Arab world remains understudied. The article contributes to this area of research by demonstrating how certain strands of “Western” and “Eastern” esotericisms found resonance among early twentieth-century Arab intelligentsia and provided a useful global ideational backdrop for anti-colonial politics. Focusing on “Easternist” Egyptian intellectuals and their engagement with the French esotericist René Guénon, Theosophy, Sufism and Vedanta, the article shows how these esotericisms—and René Guénon’s in particular—provided valuable ammunition to the anti-colonial Easternist construction of a perennially united East. In doing so, the article proposes to nuance the existing interpretation of Guénon (living in Cairo from 1930) as “on the margins” of the Egyptian scene and, on a general level, to reevaluate the position of global esotericism in modern Arab thought.

“L’Européen Sait et ne sait pas”: Frantz Fanon and Epistemologies of Ignorance

ABSTRACT This article argues that Frantz Fanon’s critique of the epistemology of the colonial situation is a complex, pluralized, epistemology of ignorance, where ignorance takes three main forms. Fanon first produces a critique of colonial ideology, in which ignorance is the product of the colonizers’ false justificatory ideology. Fanon unveils how Europeans, through human sciences such as “ethnopsychiatry” and “ethnophilosophy,” deliberately produce ignorance and devaluation of colonized subjects and colonized knowledge for purposes of domination. Second, ignorance is the unintentional result of the partial, situated, standpoint of embodied knowers. Fanon does not intend to substitute a “black truth” to white ideology. He rather insists that while truth is unattainable under colonial conditions, the affective perspective of the oppressed/colonized is a necessary constitutive part of any objective account of the world. Third, by analyzing the “Conducts of confession in North Africa,” characterized by deliberate denial, lies, and opacity as resistance mechanisms, Fanon insists that no objective knowledge is possible in a colonial situation because of the total separation, and impossible epistemic collaboration, of dominant and dominated knowers. An anticolonial politics has to focus on producing the conditions of possibility of knowledge.

The caged bird sings of freedom: Maya Angelou’s anti-colonial journalism in the United Arab Republic and Ghana, 1961–1965

Abstract At the height of the ‘global 1960s’, hundreds of African Americans moved to Africa in search of a refuge from racism and the opportunity to participate in anti-colonial politics. One of the most prominent figures in this movement was Maya Angelou. Nine years before the publication of her first book, Angelou lived in Egypt, then known as the United Arab Republic, where she worked as a writer, editor, and broadcaster at state-directed media institutions. She continued this work in Ghana, where her journalism and political writing situated the civil rights struggle in the United States within wider campaigns against racism and imperialism. Using previously unexamined documents from Angelou’s personal archive and surviving records of her political writing, this article sheds light on the role of African American activists in global anti-colonial networks and the challenges faced by radical journalists across the decolonizing world.

Where is the North? Southern ruptures in decolonizing theory

Calls for decolonizing theory, knowledge, methods, and the university have taken hold of academia. However, critics have pointed out that these projects are primarily located in the global North and distanced from actual political struggles. This paper proposes a way to disaggregate different elements of the North and evaluate the “decolonization” potential in relation to broader anticolonial political geographies. We define the North as an orientation toward the capitalist-colonial world and Northness as a relational property along three axes of geographical location, social position, and institutional vocation. Applying this, we review historic trends in decolonization thought by using a stylistic scheme of three southern ruptures: resistance to colonial conquest, postcolonial arrivals into the Northern academy, and transnational convergence. This analytical lens cautions against giving primacy to issues of marginalized social position over geographic location and institutional vocation, while also offering a political economic focus on postcolonial engagements with anticolonial politics. We call for attending to the current conjuncture characterized by increasing decolonial discourse alongside southern ruination by aligning epistemic endeavors with social movement struggle.

Mapuche Anticolonial Politics and Chile's Social Uprising

This essay examines milestones in the life history of one subject, Mauricio Lepin, and his involvement in the Chilean social uprising. By exploring the encounter of his trajectory with the uprising, the essay reveals under-explored dimensions of the anticolonial character of this critical event in Chile's history of the present. Lepin's case shows the entanglement of a long history of dispossession and resistance of the Mapuche people with a biographical story of social marginalization, political exclusion, and economic precariousness, shared with large majorities of Mapuche and non-Mapuche youth. It concludes by analyzing how, through the uprising, Lepin appears before himself as an actor among a multitude in struggle by putting into action the plural right to appear and the self-determination of a sovereign people.

Postcolonial History in the Service of Anticolonial Politics: Critical Historiography and National Myth in Contemporary India

The article examines the relationship between the shaping of Indian foreign policy discourse, macro-historical processes that influence the formation of Indian political elites, and the development of historical knowledge about the Indian Ocean region. Its purpose is to ascertain the factors that influenced the specific perception of India’s place in the region by Indian elites and how this perception evolved within the framework of foreign policy discourse. Additionally, the role of historians who have studied the past of the Indian Ocean is explored. The author concludes that the changes in global political discourse following the First World War played a crucial role in shaping the ideas of India’s position in the world among the elites. These elites adopted the stance that the nation-state, with its own industrial base, was the only viable option. From the early stages of independent India, its political elites, influenced by British or Anglicized upbringing and education, rejected the notion of continuity between the new Indian state and the British Raj and the possessions of the East India Company. Instead, they attempted to establish historical continuity with pre-British Indian polities. Indian and foreign historians supported them in this endeavor. The author demonstrates how India’s political elites utilized the findings of scholars to serve their own purposes, selectively adopting suitable historical narratives while discarding others. This process gradually drew the community of historians into the production of discourse. During the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, the Mughal Empire received the most attention as the last pre-British Indian polity. However, with the Bharatiya Janata Party coming into power, research on Hindu polities and personalities is now encouraged.

The View from the Future: Aurobindo Ghose’s Anticolonial Darwinism

Darwinism and evolutionary theory have a bad track record in political theory, given their entanglements with fin-de-siècle militarist imperialisms, racialized hierarchies, and eugenic reformism. In colonial contexts, however, Darwinism had an entirely different afterlife as anticolonialists marshaled evolutionist frameworks to contest the parameters of colonial rule. This article exhumes just such an evolutionary anticolonialism in the political thought of Aurobindo Ghose, radical firebrand of the early Indian independence movement. I argue that Ghose drew on a nuanced reform Darwinism to criticize British imperialism and advance an alternative grounded in the Indian polity’s mutualism. Evolutionism formed a conceptual ecosystem framing his understanding of progress—national, civilizational, and spiritual—and reformulating the temporal and conceptual coordinates of the liberal empire he resisted. The article thus exposes the constructiveness of anticolonial politics, the hybridity of South Asian intellectual history, and the surprising critical potential of Darwinism in colonial settings.

At the Crossroads of Anti-Colonialism, Axis Propaganda and International Communism

The bi-lingual (English/German) periodical Azad Hind/Freies Indien (‘Free India’) was published in Berlin from 1942 till at least 1944. It was the mouthpiece of the Free India Centre, established in Berlin by the Indian nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose with the help of the German Foreign Ministry, to conduct diasporic anti-colonial politics. Based mainly on unutilized archival material, this article focusses on the following facets of this magazine: (i) its role in synthesizing Indian anti-colonialism with Nazi propaganda and Axis military goals. (ii) intersections between the knowledge production for the magazine and the dynamic political trajectories of the Indians who produced such knowledge, particularly the expression of certain leftist visions and ideals in the magazine by a number of Marxist anti-colonialist Indians. Notably, the Nazis displayed remarkable pragmatism in suspending their ideological antagonism to all forms of leftist politics as far as Azad Hind was concerned.

Introduction to “Peter Weiss and Hans Magnus Enzensberger: A Controversy”

This introduction situates the 1966 essays by Peter Weiss and Hans Magnus Enzensberger in the context of decolonization, taking into account Gary Wilder’s and Michael Rothberg’s reframing of the immediate postwar decades. More precisely, the introduction discusses Weiss’s and Enzensberger’s texts as engaging Frantz Fanon’s “On Violence,” published in Kursbuch, together with Enzensberger’s “Europäische Peripherie” (1965), the article to which Weiss responds with “Enzensberger’s Illusions.” Analyzing their present moment in global terms, the authors debate the role of European intellectuals. Although Weiss and Enzensberger do not address the relationship between politics and aesthetics directly, the introduction asks us to rethink postwar modernisms. Keeping in mind the connection between anticolonial politics and surrealism in the writings of Fanon and Aimé Césaire, the introduction briefly traces the political and aesthetic significance of surrealism in Weiss’s thought and writing.

The Red and the Black: The Russian Revolution and the Black Atlantic ed. by David Featherstone and Christian Høgsbjerg

Reviewed by: The Red and the Black: The Russian Revolution and the Black Atlantic ed. by David Featherstone and Christian Høgsbjerg Natalia Telepneva Featherstone, David and Høgsbjerg, Christian (eds). The Red and the Black: The Russian Revolution and the Black Atlantic. Racism, Resistance and Social Change. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2021. xvi + 287 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. £85.00: $130.00. In this collection of articles, editors David Featherstone and Christian Høgsbjerg set out to contribute to a growing body of literature that investigates the impact of the Russian Revolution on black radicals during the interwar period and beyond. As outlined in the introduction, the ambition of the volume is three-fold: to show how black radicals understood and engaged with ideas generated by the Russian Revolution; to recover the history of physical and ideational connections forged among the black left across the Black Atlantic; and to show how these individuals engaged with the Soviet Union. In a helpful introduction that succinctly outlines the state of the field, the editors argue the collection will challenge the notion that Communism was a solely European phenomenon and reassert the 'missing and erased connections of antiracist politics and resistance' (p. 19). The ideas generated by black left intellectuals in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution constitute an important theme in this volume. Most chapters confirm what we already knew, namely that the events of 1917 had a major impact on black radicals who heralded Bolshevism because, as they saw it, it eliminated ethnic prejudice in the USSR. We learn some important details about how Claude McKay, a Jamaican-American black activist, adopted an 'unsentimental view of anti-imperialist struggle' (p. 68) largely, argues Winston James, due to his complex experiences of white proletarian nationalism in interwar London. Mathieu Renault adds to the portrait of American poet and activist Langston Hughes, who celebrated the impact of socialism in Soviet Central Asia, even though he still saw the region from an 'Orientalist perspective' as a 'massive harem' (p. 92). Cathy Begin draws our attention to the specific timing and the inadequacy of the local left in the USA to explain the appeal of Bolshevism, while Marika Sherwood similarly points to the continuous failure of the Left to take seriously the demands of anticolonial activists in post-war Britain. One wonders, however, whether the volume could shed have further light on exactly how these activists and movements, as the editors posit in the introduction, shaped 'Communist practices and ideas' (p. 16). For example, Olga Panova's excellent chapter argues that Soviet literary critics by and large toed the official line in their responses to African American literature. These chapters recover the diversity and originality of these important ideas, but their larger impact is left somewhat obscure. Another theme is black radicals' relationship with the Soviet Union and the Comintern. A number of authors address the developments in the aftermath [End Page 772] of the Sixth World Congress in 1928 — the peak of Soviet support for black liberation. Nigel Westmaas adds important details about the pre-war history of racialism in Guyana; Holger Weiss describes the activities of the International of Seamen and Harbour Workers based in Hamburg; and Sandra Pujals describes the work of the Comintern's Caribbean Bureau in the 1930s. The story is a fairly familiar one, as many black radicals who admired and/or worked for the Comintern became disillusioned with the organization by the mid 1930s. Pujals's chapter probably goes the furthest in explaining why the Comintern's project in the Caribbean failed, as it ran up against divergent conceptions of race and local resistance to centrally-imposed bureaucratic structure. A number of chapters reconstruct the 'erased' connections of anticolonial politics across the Atlantic, but several leave the reader wanting to learn more about how these functioned in practice. For example, we learn about the existence of the International of Seamen and Harbour Workers, but little in terms of how the organization operated to, say, spread the radical messages across the Atlantic. Besides, Africa occupies little room in the volume. As the editors explain in the introduction, such a 'silence' exists because these conversations between Bolshevism and...

Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility by Kōjin Karatani, and: Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition by Cedric J. Robinson, and: Marx in Motion: A New Materialist Marxism by Thomas Nail, and: Transgender Marxism ed. by Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O'Rourke

Reviewed by: Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibilityby Kōjin Karatani, and: Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Traditionby Cedric J. Robinson, and: Marx in Motion: A New Materialist Marxismby Thomas Nail, and: Transgender Marxismed. by Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O'Rourke Matthew Bost Kōjin Karatani, Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility. Trans. Gavin Walker. London: Verso Books, 2020. 160 pp. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. 3rdEd. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 429 pp. Thomas Nail, Marx in Motion: A New Materialist Marxism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 247 pp. Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O'Rourke, eds. Transgender Marxism. London: Pluto Press, 2021. 305 pp. In the conclusion to "What is an Author?" Michel Foucault singles out Karl Marx as one example of an "uncommon kind of author" whose name is not merely attached to a set of texts, a system of belief or a scientific discipline. Whereas these more common forms of authorship treat the author of a text or theory as an originary point that can be imitated, challenged, or discredited, Marx functions instead as someone who produces a set of "rules for the formation of other texts" that render his thinking internally heterogeneous, "creat[ing] a possibility for […] texts, concepts and hypotheses" that differ from Marx's while nonetheless belonging to the discursive field he founded. This sense of internal heterogeneity prompts a continual "return to origin" on the part of those indebted to Marx, a "reexamination of Marx's [texts]" that "modifies Marxism" by re-performing it from new perspectives and in new historical conjunctures, while retaining Marx's relevance as the proper name attached to an evolving logic of practices. One can find examples of this heterogeneity in Marx's continual revision of [End Page 268]his theories throughout his own life, from his immanent critique of philosophy to his working-through of the failure of the 1848 revolutions, his turn to political economy, and his late grappling with the Paris Commune. Insights like Foucault's have also grounded a robust tradition of conceptually focused re-readings of Marx that emphasize the internal heterogeneity of his thought. These readings include, at a minimum, Louis Althusser's diagnosis of an "epistemological break" between an earlier humanist and later materialist Marx, Jean-François Lyotard's pluralization of Marx into a swarm of desires and affects, Jacques Derrida's interrogation of the ambivalent specters haunting Marx's work, Thomas Kemple's and Charles Barbour's engagement with Marx's criticism of other authors as a form of rhetorical invention, and Barbour's reading of Marx's texts in The Marx Machineas a fragmentary collection of conceptual machines, "disassembled in a manner that opens onto innumerable possible assemblages" outside the circumstances of their composition. Finally, the power of continual returns to Marx has been felt every time his work has been re-performed in a new political context, from the debates in the various Internationals, to those who used Marx's work as a standpoint from which to critique the USSR and other "actually existing socialisms." It also extends to the ways that Marx's work has been a resource for anti-colonial politics, traditions of Black radicalism and Indigenous resistance, feminist and queer analyses of reproductive labor and sexuality under capitalism, and recent discussions of communicative and platform capitalism, tendencies discussed respectively by Vijay Prashad, Robin D.G. Kelley, Glen Sean Coulthard, Silvia Federici, Kevin Floyd, and Nick Snricek, to name just a few. This brief sketch indicates the vast resources that have emerged from thinking through Marx's differences and breaks with himself, from re-signifying his concepts, and from subjecting him to immanent critique that points out the partiality of his perspective while maintaining the radical horizon of his work. It also prompts more specific questions that might guide future scholarly and political uses of Marx's work: What rhetorical or critical moves have accompanied the return(s) to origin Foucault discusses? What can these moves tell us about useful ways to place Marx's texts in conversation with new perspectives and contexts? And...

The Seer Writes Back Examining the Anti-Colonial Politics in Swam Vivekananda’s “Raja Yoga”

As a thinker and reformer of the period ascribed as the “Bengal Renaissance”, Swami Vivekananda is usually read and studied in the light of his impact on social andreligious reforms in India. This has elicited multiple responses to Vivekananda’s works and life ranging from profound spiriualism to political connotations. The latter again has come to be defined either in terms of eulogies for his contribution to social and political reforms during colonial rule or, much recently owing to postcolonial studies, in terms of omplicity with colonial presumptions about the Orient such as the “effeminate Bengalee”. The latter variety of critical discourse has come to closely resemble what Partha Chatterjee has aptly described as “derivative discourse”. However, my principal contention in this paper is that while the derivative nature of Vivekanada’s discourse has good enough claims to be made in its favour particularly when considered from the historical and social contexts of their formulation, its resistive potential as an anti-colonial intellectual exercise is too often missed due to a lack of serious textual engagement with them. This paper will attempt to focus on the textual aspect of Vivekanda’s thought that establishes not only its critique to the foundations of Western discourse on logic, science and politics, but also identify possible sites of subversion of these foundations in the light of Vedantic interpretation.

Becoming Visible: Travel Documents and Travelling Ayahs in the British Empire

This article explores the lives of Indian travelling ayahs (nannies and servants), who are usually hard to find in the historical records of the imperial state, using travel documents, such as ships’ manifests, passage slips, passage permissions and most significantly passports. Passports have recently been studied as sites of colonial and anti-colonial politics. This article puts passports and other travel documents to a different use, exploring the way they expose fleeting voices and choices in personal representation (in those documents) which reveal elements of the identities, experiences and agency of these colonised subjects. The central argument of this article is that, whilst travel documents, particularly passports were hegemonic documents, created as means of surveillance which enabled discrimination between coloniser and colonised, they also compelled colonial administrators to recognise and even humanise certain subaltern subjects, whose individual identities had often been erased in other documents. In an archival context wherein written and visual records left by travelling ayahs are scarce, this article thus also highlights the value of surviving passports for historians in re-visioning the histories of subaltern subjects.

Sex, Sovereignty, and the Biological in the Interwar Arab East

This article frames the history of anticolonialism in the Arab world as a history of gender, sex, and power. By thinking with early twentieth-century Arab intellectuals, it revises the assumption that the heterosexual body enters into politics primarily as a site of regulation and control. Europeans justified colonialism in the Arab East by arguing that Arabs were like children who needed tutelage before self-rule. Arab writers contested these temporal assumptions through their own theories of human development. Some figured childrearing as a form of temporal engineering through which Arab women would control human and civilizational growth. Others, like cosmopolitan Arab nationalist Fuʾad Sarruf, advocated an anticolonial nationalism that tied the temporality of rupture and event to the sexual development of the male body. These responses by Arab intellectuals to assumptions of colonial belatedness show how the biological body entered anticolonial politics as an active agent of political transformation.

Migrant Memory, Movement, and Misrecognition: Reactivating Diasporic Experience Toward an Anticolonial Politics of Place

How might diasporic experiences of loss and displacement aid immigrants in responding to and acknowledging Indigenous lands and territories? Drawing from my own immigrant experience, I retrace and reinvent my movement in Tkaronto through walking practices that recover memories of migrancy as a newcomer to the land known as Canada. Such memories can be useful sources for immigrants to consider their relationship to settler colonialism. Reactivating them through movement might elicit a new responsiveness to the land as well as recognition of its caretakers and their struggles. I reflect on the possibilities that such a practice of walking and thinking through embodied memories can open up for undoing the coloniality of thought that underpins migrant aspirations for “a better-than-survival kind of living” (Berlant) and that so often results in assimilation to, and participation in, a settler colonial state.

‘The League Will Not Ignore the Cry of the Negro Race for Justice’: Marcus Garvey, the League of Nations and South-West Africa

Marcus Garvey’s petitions to the League of Nations on behalf of the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1922 and 1928 were a central but overlooked component of his anti-colonial politics in the 1920s. In both cases, Garvey’s main objective was to have the League of Nations mandate for South-West Africa transferred from South Africa and given to the Universal Negro Improvement Association, particularly in the wake of the Bondelswarts rebellion and what he considered to be South Africa’s white supremacist colonial rule following the end of German imperialism in the area. These petitions reflect the significant place of southern African racial and colonial politics in the USA in this period and further reveal the agency of Namibians in political movements beyond Africa and throughout the African diaspora. Far from being ineffectual, these petitions called attention to racial injustice and set a pattern for post-Second World War diasporic politics and decolonisation movements that scholars have not hitherto appreciated.

Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote

Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote