Disclosing New Political Forms: Symposium on Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019
Published date | 01 December 2020 |
Date | 01 December 2020 |
DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0090591720934412 |
Subject Matter | Symposium |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591720934412
Political Theory
2020, Vol. 48(6) 777 –795
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DOI: 10.1177/0090591720934412
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Symposium
Disclosing New Political
Forms: Symposium
on Adom Getachew,
Worldmaking after Empire:
The Rise and Fall of Self-
Determination, Princeton:
Princeton University
Press, 2019
Kevin Olson, Minkah Makalani, Sundhya Pahuja,
and Adom Getachew
Imagining Freedom in a Postcolonial World
Kevin Olson
Political Science, University of California, Irvine, CA
Worldmaking after Empire addresses a large gap in the literature of political
theory, exploring the vital, world-shaping role of the African postcolonial
nationalists of the mid-twentieth century. Adom Getachew argues that these
innovators were up to something very special: a nationalist-internationalist
project that could not be reduced to the old nationalisms of previous decades
nor to the liberal internationalism already in play at that time. Her book high-
lights the novel contributions of people who were both political actors and
deep thinkers in the project of postcoloniality, figures as varied as George
Padmore, C. L. R. James, Michael Manley, Julius Nyerere, Kwame Nkrumah,
and Eric Williams. Their distinctive contributions are expressed in visions of
nationalism that are creatively intertwined with pan-Africanism, socialist
internationalism, and novel institutional configurations such as the New
International Economic Order. By reconstructing these visions, Getachew
recovers a set of innovations that have received far too little attention while
providing a rich commentary on the features that make them unique.
934412PTXXXX10.1177/0090591720934412Political TheorySymposium
book-review2020
778 Political Theory 48(6)
Worldmaking after Empire is a beautifully poetic title that is layered with
meaning. It enfolds at least two senses of worldmaking. Most obvious is the
sense in which a generation of postcolonial thinkers envisioned new forms of
political order. These prominently included new internationalisms to buttress
and complete their nation-building projects, intertwining the national and the
international in novel ways. This is worldmaking in the sense of creating new
international orders through institutional and legal innovation. The second
sense of worldmaking is what phenomenologists might call world disclosure,
Welterschließung. It is the practice of forging new understandings of the
world in the broadest and most robust sense. Such worldmaking is deeply
cultural and ideational, a collaborative construction of meaning that produces
shared imaginaries and common horizons of thought and value.
Getachew’s insightful discussion focuses on the first sense—tracing the
development of innovative treaties, international institutions, and policy
measures designed to stabilize new postcolonial orders. This is an indispens-
able history, rendered in admirable complexity and detail. However, it seems
to me that some of the unique vision of these thinkers is lost by not also bring-
ing that other sense of worldmaking more fully into the picture. It would
describe the imaginaries of postcolonial life that animate and operate along-
side more specific institutional arrangements. My intuition is that an expanded
conception of worldmaking in the domain of the imaginary might greatly
enrich our understanding of worldmaking in the realm of international agree-
ments and treaties.
Such an approach points us down a parallel interpretive track, reading the
same archive in a different way. It aims to draw out the ineffable imaginaries
that add vitality, meaning, and force to postcolonial politics.1 This perspec-
tive would give us a more vivid sense of their worldmaking, revolutionary
character. It might explore the ideational and conceptual resources drawn on
to produce various visions of political collectivity by these hybrid, national-
ist-internationalist projects, for instance. It might suggest how various ideas
were drawn together into broader imaginaries of postcolonial life, or shed
light on the tensions and interconnections within such imaginaries. I believe
that this approach might yield unexpected results, more fully reconstructing
the conceptually and politically revolutionary visions that the midcentury
African nationalists were creating.
I am hoping that such an invitation would be welcome on Getachew’s part.
This mode of interpretation is not foreign to her work. It is very much in play,
for instance, in her previous writing on Haiti. There she probes the deep back-
ground of Haitians’ ideas about independence in the years leading up to the
formal declaration in 1804. This involves a careful parsing out of different
visions of freedom—agrarian autonomy, a federal commonwealth, national
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