Worldmaking after empire: The rise and fall of self-determination

Abstract

According to the standard narrative of decolonization, international society expanded to include postcolonial states, and sovereign equality was extended to them. This inclusion narrative prepares the ground for stories of failed states that could not successfully operate on an independent basis and, consequently, provides justification for foreign intervention in postcolonial territories. Nation-building in postcolonial states is thus painted as a naïve project. Taking inspiration from Partha Chatterjee, Adom Getachew rejects the notion that anticolonial nationalism was merely 'an imitation doomed to failure' (p. 27). Instead, she immerses herself in the distinct intellectual formations that attended a multiplicity of postcolonial projects. As Worldmaking after Empire convincingly displays, the struggle for selfdetermination took shape as a project not merely of nation-building but of worldmaking, in which postcolonial state sovereignty is ultimately not achievable without a parallel reconstruction of international society.Getachew theorizes empire as 'a form of domination that exceeded the bilateral relations of colonizer and colonized' (p. 2) and as 'processes of unequal international integration' (p. 9) that forestalls meaningful self-determination for postcolonial states and peoples. Unequal integration is the formal institutionalization of (racialized) hierarchy in international bodies and a 'constitutive practice of international law' (p. 18). Thus membership for postcolonial states in the early League of Nations and the United Nations was predicated on their acceptance of 'trusteeship' and recognition as inferior in development and capabilities (pp. 44-45). This new logic of empire in the twentieth century mirrored the secondclass citizenship assigned to African Americans in the United States and gave Black Atlantic intellectuals reason to see decolonization not as the globalization of the nation-state but of Jim Crow (p. 21). Moreover, under the guise of 'equity' a new imperialism was exercised through economic practices that ironically insisted on preserving equality through the openness of markets while producing unequal