Universalism After the Post-colonial Turn

Abstract

This essay explores the possibilities and limits of decentering Europe by examining the Haitian Revolution and contemporary invocations of its legacy among political theorists and historians. Recent accounts of the Haitian Revolution have celebrated its universalism as a realization of French revolutionary ideals. As I argue in the essay, this interpretation undermines the Haitian Revolution’s specificity as the first and only successful revolution against colonial slavery. I offer an alternative interpretation that begins from the specificity of colonial slavery and explores how Haitian revolutionaries inaugurated another universalism linked to individual and collective autonomy. Haitian revolutionaries offered a radical account of black citizenship and envisioned a world order in which both slavery and colonial rule would be transcended. This reinterpretation of the Haitian Revolution offers an alternative approach to what it might mean to decenter Europe—one that begins from the specific political problems subaltern actors encountered and illustrates how ideals are remade in diverse contexts.

Dialogue, Dasein, and Destiny: Heidegger’s Challenge to Dialogical Comparative Political Theory

“…It is accordingly little surprise that the discipline has moved away from the dialogical model in recent years, focusing less on constructing a transcultural or universalist "third" or hybrid space through dialogue, than on fostering attentiveness to the particularities of marginalized groups and traditions, and the ways in which their contributions problematize Eurocentric debates in political theory (see Chang, 2021;Dahl, 2020;Getachew, 2016;Simon 2017).12 Yet, I suspect that this project, insofar as it seeks to challenge the assumptions of Eurocentric political theory, ultimately remains a dialogic one -albeit one that attempts to further shift the terms of dialogue from Anglo-European centers of power. This would support the Hölderlinian contention, constituting an epistemic bedrock of the hermeneutic tradition from Heidegger onwards, that human life is inherently dialogical,13 which in turn provides reason not to abandon either the project of intercultural dialogue or the embedded approach altogether, despite their problems.…”

Conjugated Universalism

“…Some political theorists even argue that subaltern anticolonial actors in the global South were actually the true harbingers of universal Enlightenment ideals like freedom and liberty (Buck‐Morss 2009; Nesbitt 2008). Other political theorists and historians, however, maintain that anticolonial actors actually promoted “alternative universalisms” (Getachew 2016, 837) beyond Enlightenment ideals (A. Raza 2020b; Goswami 2012). From jihadism (Li 2020) to a progressive “Muslim International” (Daulatzai and Rana 2018) and Arab communism (Bardawil 2020), 9 political anthropologists have recently explored a range of such alternative universalist projects as they interact with ethnographic conjunctures—what Anna L. Tsing (2005, 8) called “engaged universals.”…”

Darwin in India: Anticolonial Evolutionism at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century

“…Treating developmentalism from the other side of the colonial divide, I argue, illuminates its protean nature and its transfiguration into the grammar of anticolonial politics. Second, I aim to contribute to scholarship on the political theory of anticolonialism attending to the specificities of colonial problematics and treating anticolonial thought as neither replicating European ideals nor merely critiquing them, but as conceptual interventions in their own right—as “political innovations and articulation[s] of alternative universalisms” not reducible to western normative languages (Getachew 2016, 839; see also Getachew 2019; Idris 2022; Kohn and McBride 2011; Getachew and Mantena 2021; Kapila 2021; Wilder 2015). Darwinism and evolutionism, I contend, grounded not only critiques of Eurocentrist chauvinisms, but also the (re)constructive ambitions of Indian nationalists.…”