Popular sovereignty and anti-colonialism

Мантена, Каруна

doi:10.1017/cbo9781316418024.013

Cited by 22 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…In fact, anticolonial nationalism had larger and different ambitions. 11 Black intellectuals and activists, for example, redefined national selfdetermination away from the Westphalian model of sovereignty. Viewing empire as enslavement, they envisioned an egalitarian world order premised on the end of racial and economic inequality.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction

Prakash¹,

Adelman²

2022

Inventing the Third World

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Inventing the Third WorldThe imagination of the Third World coincided with and changed the course of the Cold War. But the Third World also preceded and exceeded it. Its origins and ambitions lay in the energies released by decolonization and the struggles for a non-dominated world, which constitute the central epochal upheavals of the twentieth century. To return to the Third World, then, is to rethink the global history of the modern world from its margins, to challenge the definition of the period after the Second World War as the epoch of Cold War, and assert that efforts to reimagine an order free from imperial domination constituted a powerful historical arc of the epoch.This rethinking must begin with returning to anticolonialism as central to the aspirations that drove the emergence of the idea of the Third World. Empire came to be seen as the source of competition and conflict; it was also the machinery that held back the majority of the world's population. Of course, anticolonialism is as old as colonialism itself. We can go back to the Haitian Revolution of 1791 whose historical salience has been "silenced, " as Michel-Rolph Trouillot put it, by the historiography on the "age of revolutions. " 2 Then there was the 1857 Rebellion in India, the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica, the effort among Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Filipino insurgents to fight Spanish and then American occupiers after 1898. That year, a man called Surontiko Samin began to preach a withdrawal from the world in north-central Java, a rejection of bank credit, school fees, and despised tax collectors. His followers, when asked for their place of birth, could reply: "I was born on earth. " All the Dutch imperial authorities could hear were rumors of peasant revolt. Then came the 1899-1901 Boxer Revolt in China, the uprisings in southwestern Africa-and by 1907 there was, for all intents and purposes, an Afro-Asian underground of sedition. 3 But what was distinctive about the Third World project was not the resistance to imperialism but its internationalist character. Imperialism and colonialism constituted a system of worldwide domination, requiring its dismantling on a global scale. The origin of this internationalist idea can be found in the famous last sentence of Marx's Communist Manifesto: "The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. " Marx's words were directed against capitalism that, in his view, respected no national boundaries, and he saw colonialism as part of primitive accumulation. By the early twentieth century, Hobson and Lenin had developed Marx's formulation on capitalism's global nature into full-fledged theories of imperialism. The period leading up to the First World War and its aftermath witnessed outbreaks of anti-imperialist opposition that, if not immediately inspired by this legacy of critiques of imperialism, nevertheless began to confront it globally.Although the standard view attributes the Third World's internationalist imagination to the establishment of postcolonial n...

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction

Prakash¹,

Adelman²

2022

Inventing the Third World

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“…For most of the nineteenth century, Indian political thinkers took representative government to be the professed goal of their political movement (Bayly 2012, 161-187; Mantena 2016, 301–308). While there was plenty of discontent concerning the imperial present, the institutional framework of parliamentary representation, grounded in the principle of popular sovereignty, appeared to be a relatively stable set of ideals for the still-distant postcolonial future.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Between the Many and the One: Anticolonial Federalism and Popular Sovereignty

Sultan

2021

Political Theory

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Recovering a marginal body of pluralist political thought from early twentieth-century India, this article explores how the question of popular sovereignty shaped the federalist reconfiguration of the anticolonial democratic project. The turn to federalism was facilitated by the Indian reckoning with Hegel in the late nineteenth century, which led to the diagnosis that the universality ascribed to monist sovereignty relies on a “unilinear” theory of development. Through a sustained engagement with British pluralist and American progressive thought, Indian federalist thinkers eventually developed a many-willed conception of the people. In so doing, they hoped to overcome the denial of Indian peoplehood on the ground of its lack of national unity and historical backwardness. However, the alternative source of sovereignty the federalists pointed to—plural and many-willed—stood in tension with their simultaneous pursuit of a people speaking in one voice. In this way, the constitutive tension of the pluralist conception of sovereignty came strikingly alive in the colonial world.

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“…Indeed, anticolonial thinkers were deeply sensitive to these questions and had themselves advocated “anti-statist projects,” including various models of federation (Getachew 2019, 109; Mantena 2016, 313). Within Indian anticolonialism, the proposals for a “new popular, decentralised, postimperial polity” included Gandhi’s “radically decentralised peasant democracy based upon the revitalised village community as its core” (Mantena 2016, 312). In the Black Atlantic world, anticolonial nationalists envisioned “international institutions that would meaningfully transcend the nation-state” (Getachew 2019, 28), including a New International Economic Order that would address questions like the “ownership of natural resources on land and in the seas, the relationship of multinational corporations to state authority, and the transportation and distribution of traded goods” (144).…”

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The Nation-State 1648–2148

Amine

2023

Political Theory

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This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries.

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Popular sovereignty and anti-colonialism

Cited by 22 publications

References 10 publications

Introduction

Introduction

Between the Many and the One: Anticolonial Federalism and Popular Sovereignty

The Nation-State 1648–2148

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