Abstract
Political Science, University of California, Irvine, CA
Worldmaking after Empire addresses a large gap in the literature of political theory, exploring the vital, world-shaping role of the African postcolonial nationalists of the mid-twentieth century. Adom Getachew argues that these innovators were up to something very special: a nationalist-internationalist project that could not be reduced to the old nationalisms of previous decades nor to the liberal internationalism already in play at that time. Her book highlights the novel contributions of people who were both political actors and deep thinkers in the project of postcoloniality, figures as varied as George Padmore, C. L. R. James, Michael Manley, Julius Nyerere, Kwame Nkrumah, and Eric Williams. Their distinctive contributions are expressed in visions of nationalism that are creatively intertwined with pan-Africanism, socialist internationalism, and novel institutional configurations such as the New International Economic Order. By reconstructing these visions, Getachew recovers a set of innovations that have received far too little attention while providing a rich commentary on the features that make them unique.
Worldmaking after Empire is a beautifully poetic title that is layered with meaning. It enfolds at least two senses of worldmaking. Most obvious is the sense in which a generation of postcolonial thinkers envisioned new forms of political order. These prominently included new internationalisms to buttress and complete their nation-building projects, intertwining the national and the international in novel ways. This is worldmaking in the sense of creating new international orders through institutional and legal innovation. The second sense of worldmaking is what phenomenologists might call world disclosure, Welterschließung. It is the practice of forging new understandings of the world in the broadest and most robust sense. Such worldmaking is deeply cultural and ideational, a collaborative construction of meaning that produces shared imaginaries and common horizons of thought and value.
Getachew’s insightful discussion focuses on the first sense—tracing the development of innovative treaties, international institutions, and policy measures designed to stabilize new postcolonial orders. This is an indispensable history, rendered in admirable complexity and detail. However, it seems to me that some of the unique vision of these thinkers is lost by not also bringing that other sense of worldmaking more fully into the picture. It would describe the imaginaries of postcolonial life that animate and operate alongside more specific institutional arrangements. My intuition is that an expanded conception of worldmaking in the domain of the imaginary might greatly enrich our understanding of worldmaking in the realm of international agreements and treaties.
Such an approach points us down a parallel interpretive track, reading the same archive in a different way. It aims to draw out the ineffable imaginaries that add vitality, meaning, and force to postcolonial politics. 1 This perspective would give us a more vivid sense of their worldmaking, revolutionary character. It might explore the ideational and conceptual resources drawn on to produce various visions of political collectivity by these hybrid, nationalist-internationalist projects, for instance. It might suggest how various ideas were drawn together into broader imaginaries of postcolonial life, or shed light on the tensions and interconnections within such imaginaries. I believe that this approach might yield unexpected results, more fully reconstructing the conceptually and politically revolutionary visions that the midcentury African nationalists were creating.
I am hoping that such an invitation would be welcome on Getachew’s part. This mode of interpretation is not foreign to her work. It is very much in play, for instance, in her previous writing on Haiti. There she probes the deep background of Haitians’ ideas about independence in the years leading up to the formal declaration in 1804. This involves a careful parsing out of different visions of freedom—agrarian autonomy, a federal commonwealth, national sovereignty, and empire. She shows great sensitivity there to the subtle ideational shadings of various forms of imagination. 2
One can easily envision a similar interpretation of the intellectual history in Worldmaking after Empire. For example, freedom forges the ideational link between the national and the international in Getachew’s lucid account: postcolonial freedom requires interconnected forms of political organization at both levels. Drawing on Philip Pettit’s work, she reads these conceptions of freedom as aiming at nondomination. 3 That idea functions as a portable standard of comparison, showing how different conceptions of anticolonial nationalism seek the conditions of nondomination in different ways. It reveals how various forms of national self-determination might have been supported and made possible by the international.
The use of nondomination in this context strikes me as something of a theorist’s shorthand, however. It provides a conceptual rubric to render various positions surveyable. This is a reasonable choice in many ways, especially given the complexity of Getachew’s discussion. However, nondomination in Pettit’s sense is not a goal explicitly put forward by any of the actors themselves. They use other vocabularies and idioms to articulate their visions. Even when they draw on the language of domination to criticize colonialism, their use of it is complex and polyvalent. By reframing such views in terms of nondomination, we are distracted away from exploring the rich diversity of those actual visions of freedom.
If we continue focusing on freedom as an example of how one might read this archive differently, we would want to learn more about the broader worlds and different visions of freedom being imagined by the postcolonial African internationalists. Julius Nyerere, for instance, figures importantly in Getachew’s account. He was the thoughtful Tanzanian president who tried to craft a postcolonial future for Africa in the 1960s. Getachew shows us how Nyerere envisioned an international nationalism for Tanzania, one that would create a postcolonial identity for the new nation-state partly by means of pan-African associations. As a supplement to this institutional worldmaking, we might also examine the broader political imaginaries at work in Nyerere’s thinking—worldmaking in the more expansive sense I have been describing.
The institutional dimensions of Nyerere’s views were largely motivated by a unique vision of freedom, one aimed as a riposte to colonialism. For him, this freedom would arise from a nationalist internationalism that was materially based in socialist policies. Nyerere was careful to explain how socialism would be manifested in this context, specifically as a form of political imaginary. He wrote, “Socialism—like democracy—is an attitude of mind. In a socialist society it is the socialist attitude of mind, and not the rigid adherence to a standard political pattern, which is needed to ensure that the people care for each other’s welfare.” He imagined this complex, socialist vision of freedom as having a particular socially and culturally embedded character. It was to be a Tanzanian and more broadly African socialism. This involved refashioning traditional attitudes of communalism and cooperative labor for a socialist society. At the same time, Nyerere saw socialism as a powerful solvent for the residues of racial thinking left over from colonialism. 4 In these ways, he proves to be a probing thinker about what was required to repurpose the Tanzanian cultural heritage as a contemporary postcolonial politics. He raises many interesting issues about the fusion of African and Euro-American ideas and the creative rethinking of both legacies in conjunction with one another. Nyerere’s fecund anticolonial vision discloses complex and interesting worlds that we miss when viewing it only through the lens of nondomination.
This brief reconsideration of Julius Nyerere and the theme of freedom shows how a somewhat different interpretive strategy might yield interesting results. I do not think it would change the important conclusions of Getachew’s work, but it might reveal additional texture and flavor in these views, casting new light on their motivations and persuasive force. The payoff, I think, is to highlight the senses in which these postcolonial imaginaries are unique and pathbreaking exercises of freedom themselves.
My proposal, in short, is to further explore the rich forms of imagination that are folded into postcolonial worldmaking—the diverse notions of freedom that animated these visions; the way its architects created shared, public visions of a political future; the fusion of cultures and traditions that characterizes these uniquely modern, African endeavors. Adom Getachew has already provided us with a compelling discussion of these views, so I could not ask for anything more from this already complex book. My suggestion instead envisions a different way to read the same archive, extending her work in new directions that could enrich our understanding of the postcolonial movements she so insightfully brings to our attention.