Movement Texts as Anti-Colonial Theory

Abstract

Despite the decolonial turn among sociologists, we have yet to engage a vast amount of thought produced by anti-colonial movements. The circumvention of much of this thought indexes overly restrictive understandings of what constitutes social theory, and I diagnose three ways in which this plays out. Anti-colonial movement texts provide striking demonstrations of this limitation, and of what is lost as a result. Through a close study of a banned 1970s pamphlet from Pakistan, I show that critically deepening the decolonial project through an engagement with movement texts raises ethical questions about the academy’s relationship to political struggle and demands new methodologies of archival retrieval that recognise the scattered, fragmented condition of texts subject to colonial violence. If addressed, southern movement texts reveal counter-infrastructures of knowledge production replete with counter-political vocabularies that challenge homogenising academic definitions of the Global South and enrich our theories of decolonial praxis.

Colonialism and Social Change: Structure of Society and its Construction during Colonial Period in Chagai District

“…Reading works from the anti-colonial movement is an eye-opening demonstration of this restriction and the losses it causes. By analysing a pamphlet that was banned in Pakistan in the 1970s, I demonstrate that critically engaging with movement texts raises ethical questions about the academy's relationship to political struggle and necessitates new methodologies of archival retrieval that acknowledge the dispersed, fragmented condition of texts subject to colonial violence (Ahmad, 2022). The finest explanation of the Baloch as a nation is provided by ethno-symbolists.…”

Dissonant intimacies: Coloniality and the failures of South–South collaboration

“…She uses the term as ‘a placeholder, even though I realize that there is really nothing called the global South and, indeed, there never was’ (in Chattopadhyay, 2018). See, however, Ahmad’s (2022) more recent insistence to think about the Global South as geography and not just epistemology alone (see also Sud & Sanchez-Ancochea, 2022).…”