Adom Getachew’s “Worldmaking after Empire”

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

This panel will bring prominent scholars of imperialism, postcolonial theory, and anticolonial thought around a discussion of Adom Getachew’s “Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination” (Princeton University Press, 2019). Getachew’s book challenges standard histories of decolonization, which present the end of colonialism as an inevitable transition from a world of empires to one of nations and, in doing so, obscure just how radical this change was. Drawing on the political thought of anticolonial intellectuals and statesmen such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, W.E.B Du Bois, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams, Michael Manley, and Julius Nyerere, this important new account of decolonization reveals the full extent of their unprecedented ambition to remake not only nations but the world. Getachew shows that African, African American, and Caribbean anticolonial nationalists were not solely or even primarily nation-builders. Responding to the experience of racialized sovereign inequality, dramatized by interwar Ethiopia and Liberia, Black Atlantic thinkers and politicians challenged international racial hierarchy and articulated alternative visions of worldmaking. Seeking to create an egalitarian postimperial world, they attempted to transcend legal, political, and economic hierarchies by securing a right to self-determination within the newly founded United Nations, constituting regional federations in Africa and the Caribbean, and creating the New International Economic Order. The discussants will chart out the book’s manifold interventions in the field of political theory of empire, critical international relations theory, and the history of anticolonial political thought and practice.

The panelists include Jeanne Morefield (“Covenants Without Swords”; “Empires Without Imperialism”); Robbie Shilliam (“The Black Pacific”; “Race and the Undeserving Poor”); Inés Valdez (“Toward Transnational Cosmopolitanism”); Robert Nichols (“Freedom and Democracy in an Imperial Context”); and Siba Grovogui (“Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy”; “Sovereigns, Quasi-Sovereigns, and Africans”).

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 1: Political Thought and Philosophy: Historical Approaches

Chair

• Jeanne Morefield University of Birmingham

Presenters

• Onur Ulas Ince Singapore Management University

• Robert Nichols University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

• Siba Grovogui Cornell University

• Robbie Shilliam Johns Hopkins University

• Ines Valdez Ohio State University

• Adom Getachew University of Chicago