Worldmaking after Empire

Audre Lorde’s Anti-Imperial Consciousness

“…The end goal was "a domination-free and egalitarian international order." 24 Lorde's portrait of Grenadian self-determination does not-strictly speaking-match Getachew's conceptualization of anticolonial worldmaking, for Lorde focuses most of her attention on Grenadian national development. Yet Lorde's portrait of Grenadian self-determination is still in a deep sense one of worldmaking, for it centers on the "world-making activity"-the free and equal cooperation that enlarges the setting for freedom's exercise-that Getachew's subjects thought internationalist institutionalism would enable.…”

Doing Nonideal Theory About Gender in Global Contexts

“…Given the way our political context seems to recognize only violations of the so-called first-generation rights to freedom from unfair persecution, to property, and so on as morally urgent, endorsing human rights can also mean implicitly making a claim that deprivations like lack of medical care and safe working conditions are of only secondary international moral concern. Endorsing human rights practice wholesale might also mean suggesting that the claims of individuals against states are more morally urgent than the claims of individuals or peoples against an unjust global order (see Gettachew 2019). It might also mean thinking that the force of transnational advocacy ought to emphasize "cultural"practices rather than the global order, a position I explicitly criticize in Decolonizing Universalism.…”

Toward an Individualist Postcolonial Cosmopolitanism

“…Getachew cautions against interpreting the failures of anticolonial nationalism as evidence of nationalism's 'generic' faults or 'congenital defects'. 43 She warns that doing so risks (1) obscuring the degree to which anticolonial nationalists were committed to remaking the world order, (2) overlooking the specific political and historical contexts that shaped the trajectory of anticolonial nationalism, and (3) falsely presenting anticolonial nationalism as a defective version of ideal-typical European nationalism. 44 But the analysis I have sketched above does not commit these errors.…”