Anticolonialism

Anti-colonial nationalism in India was one of the first major movements towards the decolonization of the global south. This reading-and writing-intensive research seminar examines the story of the Indian nationalist movement and the effort to liberate the subcontinent from British colonial rule. Drawing on both primary and secondary sources, the course aims to chronologically explore the emergence and development of nationalist ideology and practice, and to introduce students to four broadly conceived historiographical schools and their interpretations of this movement-nationalist, Marxist, Cambridge, and Subaltern Studies. Students will thereby engage with a number of prominent historiographical debates about Indian nationalism and gain an in-depth appreciation of the triumphs, contradictions, and failures that marked the struggle for freedom in India, as well its troubled legacies. Writing assignments are designed to culminate in a substantial research paper. One class meeting per week.

Co-authored with Adom Getachew. Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory, 2021

This essay surveys some recent attempts to decolonize political theory and engage with non-western political thinkers and traditions, especially anticolonialism. Our concern is that these engagements remain too centered on western political thought as the object of critique and analysis. Through the example of Gandhi and Fanon, we argue that anticolonialism, while engaged in a critique of the west, also had a positive or reconstructive theoretical agenda, one that has been taken up in creative ways in postcolonial political thought. Taking cues from the work of Sudipta Kaviraj, Partha Chatterjee, and Mahmood Mamdani, the essay proposes an alternative mode of decolonizing political theory that takes as its central aim the generation of theory from a study of postcolonial politics. It argues for a historically attuned and comparative approach to postcolonial politics that aims to innovate new concepts and reanimate inherited ones. From this perspective, decolonizing political theory is less a recurring critique of Eurocentrism than an effort to shift the terrain of theorizing and thereby reinvigorate the practice of political theory as such.

A. Kempf (ed.), Breaching the Colonial Contract: Anti-Colonialism in the US and Canada, New York: Springer, 2009

Ours is a time of sophisticated empire on high. We need look no further than the US and Canadian military occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan to see the blunt end of the colonial encounter. This is but a fraction of the colonial tale. The US invasions of Iraq have produced an extreme, although not unfamiliar, insideroutsider paradigm, one expressed physically in Iraq (by the division between the Green Zone in central Baghdad and the rest of the country) and discursively in the United States (by the division between those “for us” and those “against us”). Naomi Klein has described a “global green zone,” an idea which sees the world and its people divided into binary spaces, thus: those inside the green zone have adequate infrastructure, food, security, water, and other resources; those outside this zone do not (The Possibility of Hope 2007). When extended by the anticolonial approach, this analysis can be applied to discursive as well as physical spaces. All green zones are, of course, contested spaces — spaces constituted as much by that within their borders as by that which is absent therein. Contestation, conflict, resistance, and domination create such spaces be they physical or discursive. While residents of Klein's green zone enjoy food, water, and at least some ability to control their surroundings, residents/members of a discursive green zone enjoy epistemic entitlement and legitimacy as well as the ability to confer normative truths on their mental surroundings. As the child of conflict, the green zone is conflicted; it understands itself by virtue of what it is not, and exists in perpetual opposition to this absence. Further, the green zone and its surroundings are mutually constitutive, thus blurring the binary. The dynamic relations between center and periphery on the one hand, and the overlap of the two spaces on the other makes one impossible without the other and makes the two zones indistinguishable at times (e.g., certain residents of Baghdad's Green Zone face gender and ethnic oppression despite their insider status, while many living outside of the Green Zone enjoy greater material and immaterial comforts than those on the inside). Foundational anticolonial theorist Memmi (1965) as well as contemporary scholar Minh-ha (2000) point out that within each colonizer there is a colonized, and vice versa — the same overlap found in the green zones. Green zones are empty without notions of identity and history, yet they also create both identity and history. The struggles (both military and discursive) of the twenty-first century are colonial in nature. Today's wars are the well-endowed grandchildren of European colonialism — the continuation of the family business. Colonialism has not been alone in its journey through the ages, however; with it has come resistance, refusal, and the agency of the oppressed. With it has come anticolonialism.

What do we mean by "postcolonialism"? Does it represent a distinctive way of being and seeing in the world after the collapse of the Eurocentric world order? Or does it refer more narrowly to a set of critical-theoretical perspectives on modern imperialism and its afterlives? What are the contributions and limitations of postcolonialism as an intellectual enterprise?

Entry in "The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism" (edited by Immanuel Ness and Zak Cope, published October 2015).

Contemporary Political Theory

boundary 2, 2005

, Rabindranath Tagore addressed a group of nationalists assembled at Calcutta University. He began by charting the familiar lines of his opposition to what he had elsewhere called the mechanistic ''logic of the Nation.'' 1 Blinded by the ''dust storm of modern history,'' Indian nationalists had succumbed to the global ''hunger'' for the central ''political feast'' of the age, namely, the goal of a sovereign nation-state. 2 Seduced by a statist imaginary, they were in danger, Tagore warned, of eclipsing ''the eternal grace of India [Bharat ]'' (198) that lay in the capacity to ''see all as part of ourselves'' (199) (its imminent universalism) and its ''acceptance of sacrifice'' (198) (its spiritual essence). At the turn of the century, in the context of the swadeshi (home manufactures) movement-the first attempt by the colonial middle class to

How did methods of identification first used in colonialism become routine state practices of counting and registering citizens? How do forms of surveillance, detention, and policing employed in imperial warfare return to the metropole? How do international hierarchies first defined under colonialism endure in today’s global order? This course will ask how colonial legacies and forms of colonial governance persist today. It does so by examining debates within anticolonial and postcolonial theory about the aftermath of colonialism. In particular, we will consider how postcolonial thought articulates conceptions of freedom, justice, the state, and democracy and how these challenge liberal and republican ideas. Moreover, the course considers how postcolonial and anticolonial thought have influenced the formation of other critical traditions including abolitionist thought, post-structuralism, surveillance studies, and critical border studies. In doing so, critical reflections on colonialism and empire offer new ways to think about the power of the state and capital, subjectivity, political violence, borders, and migration.