Rethinking revolutionary times

Insurgent Universality: An Alternative Legacy of Modernity begins with a vivid image. Human history is likened to a river, hemmed in by conservative forces on one side and progressive reformers on the other; when common people, like the river, rise up and overflow the banks, their excess reshapes the land. “Insurgent universality can be compared to this river,” Massimiliano Tomba (2019) explains “when the practice of democracy exceeds the constitutional shell of the state” (1). Tomba's book mines modern history for such moments of overflow and asks how they unsettle our understanding not only of the present but also of the workings of time itself. Looking to examples like the Sans-culottes in 18th-century France and the Communards a century later, or Russian revolutionaries at the beginning of the 20th century and the Zapatistas who emerged near its end, Tomba shows how popular challenges to conservative and liberal forms of state-centered politics outlive the repression that attempts to contain them and the restoration that follows. By dispensing with the idea that history moves along a single trajectory, Insurgent Universality aims to arouse and instigate. Time is plural, Tomba insists, and he lays out a dynamically constructed and provocative argument for what he calls “reactivating archaic institutions as democratic counterthrusts to statism” (26).

Insurgent Universality is a stunning book. At the risk of shortchanging its many accomplishments, my comments will begin by touching on three dimensions of the argument that are particularly impressive: its conceptual, historical, and rhetorical innovations. Reading Tomba's aim to “decolonize[e] modern history” in relation to recent work on colonial legacies and debates about the politics of memory, I then consider how Insurgent Universality might contribute to these conversations and what possibilities its anti-statism forecloses. Finally, I press these issues further to ask what gets lost in formulations of modernity that do not come to terms with racialized forms of bondage and dispossession and to invite Tomba to speculate about how radical theories of politics might navigate between romantic figurations of democratic excess, on one hand, and tragic preoccupations with aftermaths, on the other.

To recast time as plural, as Tomba does, is to demand a fundamental rethinking of the central concepts of modern political thought. Thus, Insurgent Universality takes aim at “the modern conception of historical time” for three reasons: first, its singular, linear trajectory has the effect of exceptionalizing or explaining away events that disrupt narrations of the smooth development of the state, capitalist production, and private property; second, it generates a Eurocentric universalism allied with colonialism; and third, “empty and homogenous time is purely abstract, but it has real effects” (9). The alternative Tomba advances emerges from the practices and institutions of insurgent actors who have found ways to exercise collective power in their own time. Eschewing leader-centered approaches to political thought that valorize hierarchy and individual charisma, Tomba taps into occluded histories of metropolitan revolutionaries and of insurgents actors in settings as far apart as San-Domingue and Baku. Closely reading their declarations and manifestos and reconstructing largely forgotten ways of organizing power and relating to the land, Tomba uncovers compelling evidence of the kind of embodied theorizing he advocates. Out of the embers of (often) lost causes, he revives alternative conceptions of citizenship, property, and institution-building, showing that they are not simply bygone but coexistent with the less democratic conceptions that enjoy canonical status.

Insurgent Universality is both an argument about history and a work of history. The richness of the book is an education in itself; it brims with detail about revolutionary activities, and I took pages of notes. By attending to anachronism and to trajectories that exist in tension with dominant understandings of the forward march of history, Tomba discloses otherwise invisible webs of connection between insurrectionary moments that are conventionally remembered in isolation from each other. For example, he vivifies links between the French Declaration of 1793, the Paris Commune, the experimental features of the Soviet Constitution in ways that undercut simple oppositions between revolutionary politics and institutional form and that model other ways of reimagining popular power and property relations through the revitalization of practices that both reshape the state and locate powers beyond it.

Part of what makes the argument of Insurgent Universality so compelling is that is captivating to read. Revolutionary aspirations and unexpected connections come alive, as Tomba traces the details of historical demonstrations of democratic excess in which the relatively powerless stake their claim for a reimagined future. Animated by “the poetic nature” of political action, Tomba's argument not only draws on such literary figures as Aimé Césaire and T.S. Eliot but also evinces a sensibility akin to the one Robin Kelley finds in Césaire's essay on “Poetry and Knowledge”: “poetry…is not simply what we recognize as the formal ‘poem,’ but a revolt: a scream in the night, an emancipation of language and old ways of thinking” (2002: 9). In addition to its deep attunement to the creative work of words, Insurgent Universality makes effective use of a device more familiar to empirical political scientists, reinforcing the argument through visual displays of information. The side-by-side excerpts from revolutionary and constitutional documents enable readers to see the difference that political language makes and to judge for ourselves how power can be generated through or be wrested away from the activities of the marginal and exploited.

Insurgent Universality announces its intervention in debates about the meanings of the modern and the politics of history from the opening page of the introduction, which is subtitled “decolonizing modern history.” Taking this announcement seriously suggests that Tomba's argument could be extended in directions it does not explicitly take by putting the accent on “decolonizing.” One of the most arresting historical conjunctions in Insurgent Universality, for example, is Tomba's account of the interplay between the Paris Commune and the 1871 Arab and Berber uprising in Algeria. Although the Algerian Communards claimed “communal freedoms” on behalf of “the whole of Algeria,” Tomba notes, they could not envision a common cause with popular struggles for anti-colonial liberation (72–73). Instances such as this one indicate how Tomba's argument might be read in conversation (and in tension) with Lowe’s (2015) reconstruction of forgotten colonial intimacies across lines of race, gender, and nationality. Both Tomba and Lowe disrupt linear histories, emphasize coexistent temporalities, and consider the political practices of those presumed to be powerless to open up liberatory alternatives. Where Lowe works against the grain of liberal histories and colonial archives to explore a “past conditional temporality” of “what could have been” and dwell in possibilities that could not be thought at the time (like a coalition of anticolonial radicals and communards in Algeria); however, Tomba emphasizes the neglected practices and institutions that, despite their limitations, offer a concrete counterpoint to the inevitabilization of present legal and political arrangements. The point is not to conclude that one approach is more generative but to suggest that engaging them together might yield new insights into the relationship between different kinds of modern subjects—those who have been able to sustain the democratic anachronisms Tomba celebrates and those whose revolutionary ideas and practices have been “unthought,” in Lowe's words, through the colonial partition of humanity.

Another way to think about “decolonizing modern history” as a political practice is to reflect on reparative projects that address what Achille Mbembe calls the “cuts and scars left by history” (2017: 183). Clearly, examining history through chronotones, as Tomba does, discredits arguments for the “supercession” of colonial crimes and troubles ideas of “transitional justice” as a way of settling with the past (as if there were only one past and as if it were past). But what might this approach say to insurgent demands for reparation that reflect imaginative engagements with the past and the interpenetration of different temporalities? These demands often incorporate creative memorial practices, even as they refute “the kind of history that can be embalmed in a museum” (187). Tomba's chapter on the Zapatistas introduces a conception of “restorative temporality” (201) in which a violated order becomes a reservoir for new democratic practices, and Subcomandante Marcos's discussion of indigenous juridical practices draws on the language of repair explicitly (193). Still, the identification and cultivation of local traditions of justice does not answer the challenge posed by widespread calls for a reckoning with the most damaging legacies of modernity. Part of the difficulty is that the rigorous anti-statism of Tomba's “trans-local insurgent universality” undercuts arguments for enlisting—and thereby possibly reconceiving and reconstructing—the state through practices of repair, such as the formal return of lands and artifacts to indigenous people and policies that tackle the sedimented effects of stolen time and labor. Thinking with and learning from insurgents who have emphasized creative forms of reparations and decolonizing modern history as a matter of politics may require something other than or in addition to the revitalization of democratic traditions beyond the state. Following Mahmood Mamdani, for example, might we imagine “replacing the nation-state with the mere state” (2020: 327–55)? Is it possible to reconceive insurgent politics in productive tension with state power, working within and against the different layers of state institutions to reshape its authority?

As the foregoing comments intimate, my final questions focus on how to locate Tomba's argument vis-à-vis alternative readings of “an alternative legacy of modernity.” To what extent does the replacement of a linear history with “a historical multiverse” come at the cost of identifying distinctions that make a difference? Maybe most obviously, I am troubled by the general absence of race or its incorporation into the argument as one among many apparently coequal features of subaltern status (as in the treatment of women, slaves, peasants, the poor, and the foreigners as “true citizens” in the French Revolution [41–52]). To say that Césaire was doubly right when he wrote that “to study Saint-Domingue is to study one of the origins, one of the sources of Western civilization” (44), for example, is not yet to come to terms with the profound and specific ways in which the Atlantic slave trade and colonial and settler colonial practices reset time for African, Indigenous, and European peoples through concepts of race. It is hard to know what happens, in Tomba's telling, to the unspeakable losses out of which “Afro-modern” insurgencies have grown and which are congealed in deadly hierarchies of skin and body. What does it mean to theorize property relations by “start[ing] from the priority of territory, and not of the subject” in settler colonial contexts where territory and genocide are entangled through the differentiation of human kinds (233)? Further, how does one narrate modernity and its legacies without emphasizing the terms that so often circulate in African American and Caribbean studies: catastrophe, tragedy, belatedness, abyss, predation, and trauma? How might one incorporate the specters of the angry dead into an account of “insurgent universality”?

The worry here is twofold. First, there is a concern about understandings of modernity that do not explicitly grapple with the forms of race, racism, and mass dispossession that emerged out of the 15th century and persist into the present. Of course, the canon against which Tomba writes so eloquently is notoriously insensitive to the entanglement of political concepts with colonial forms of power and racialized rule; and Insurgent Universality offers an important corrective. Tomba criticizes the doctrine of terra nullius that transformed so much of the globe into a European playground in the modern era, and he looks to Gandhi and to Indigenous activists in the Americas for alternatives to possessive property relations. Nonetheless, without confronting the racial legacies of modernity directly, references to “our common problem” and “common possession” risk leaving some colonial legacies intact.

These concerns reflect a vague uneasiness that political theorists, especially those of us most invested in radical democratic formations, may be caught between two orientations or genres of theorizing time. On one hand, Tomba calls attention to the heterogeneity of time, to the moments of democratic excess or overflow that interrupt the forward-thrust of modern history and reveal the friction between coexisting temporalities. He refuses the anti-political position of democratic despair by highlighting how revolutionary practices can travel across time and space and reemerge in new contexts where the people rise up. On the other hand, scholars who approach modern life through the prism of the slave trade, slavery, and colonial conquest emphasize the sedimented or cumulative effects of modern time, the fugitivity of uprisings against European/white domination, and the experience of a present shaped (even if not determined) by loss. When I first read Insurgent Universality, I thought about an analogy between these different perspectives and David Scott's much-debated distinction between romantic and tragic forms of emplotment (2004, 2014). Although I now see that the analogy is much too simple, Scott's work helps to pinpoint a challenge for Tomba: how might political theorists decolonize modern history in a way that nurtures what Benjamin calls “the spark of hope in the past” and adequately wrestles with the ongoingness of colonial modernity?

I will leave this question as an invitation and conclude with a return to the enormous contribution of Insurgent Universality. At a moment when many of the most incisive political thinkers are focused on conditions of impasse, impossibility, and subjection, there is something deeply attractive in Tomba's insistence that we shift our gaze to experimental forms of democratic practice and our study to those political actions, ideas, and institutions that both precede and exceed the repressions they incite. His appeal to the Zapatistas’ saying that “there are different paths but one longing” (234) captures the force of this argument. Whether or not the reader is persuaded that modern democratic movements evince a common longing, Tomba shows why remaining open to this possibility enables us to step outside the enclosures of the present and ask whether the disasters of modernity might yet yield other paths and more livable lives.