Popular Politics and the Legacies of Empire

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

The centuries-long process of Western political and commercial expansion, and correlative responses to this process within the non-West—from the settlement of the New World in the early modern period to the rise of anti-imperial movements from the 18th century onwards—fundamentally changed how popular politics were understood across the globe. On one hand, European colonialism led to the universalization of modern forms of political mobilization, rooted in constitutionalism and citizens’ rights. On the other hand, non-Western thinkers reworked these forms in response to the experience of colonial modernity, drawing on European political thought as well as other intellectual traditions, and formulating hybridized notions of peoplehood, activism, constituent power, and insurgent politics. Yet the European-non-European colonial encounter tends to be peripheral to most treatments of populism in political theory. This panel will explore the role of colonialism in shaping conceptions of popular politics across Western and non-Western thought. How did colonialism inform the emergence of modern discourses about “the power of the people”? What perspectives on global populist movements can we gain by analyzing them against the background of colonial and imperial legacies? In exploring these questions, the panel will build on new scholarship in empire and political thought, comparative political theory, postcolonial studies, and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL).

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Chair

• Jeanne Morefield University of Birmingham

Discussant

• Burke Hendrix University of Oregon

Individual Presentations

• The Haitian Revolution, Popular Sovereignty, and the Postcolonial State - Angelica Maria Bernal, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Samantha Davis

• Talented Officials: Popular Dimensions of Anti-Colonial Imperialism - Alex Haskins, University of Chicago

• Reckoning with Settler Memory: Care, Refusal, and Indigenous Resistance - Vicki Hsueh, Western Washington University

• The Political Theory of Indian Village Communism - Tejas Parasher, University of Cambridge