Revolutionary Junctures and the Time of Decolonization

• In Event: Passive Revolution in the Postcolony

Abstract

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the discourse of development was articulated in a civilizational register. Anti-colonial and national liberation movements across Asia and Africa questioned the political nature of this register as a ruse for deferring claims to self-determination. However, the nationalisms animating such movements also reworked the civilizational register. By disenfranchising some, such a register secured the political-ideological bounds of new nation-states while legitimizing the majoritarian bases of their popular sovereignty. Moreover, by displacing civilizational imperialities with national societies in the progression of developing to developed countries, new discourses on economic development did little to challenge this earlier content, even as the form in which it was articulated opened possibilities of international reordering and redistribution (Duara, 2004; Gotachew, 2019). Accentuating structural inequalities and political crises in the postcolonial world today have reanimated critical questions – was the revolutionary juncture of mid-twentieth century decolonization transformative at all? If so, how and in what aspects of political life? In this paper, I examine the case of one such revolutionary juncture – the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971 – to argue that several transformative aspects of decolonization were apparent within the shifts in development discourse. Specifically, I examine three – a) the critique of racialized understandings of ‘development’ inherent within the civilizational register; b) an emphasis on global analogies and connections in lieu of a ‘clash of civilizations’ perspective (also, paradoxically, internal to this discursive register); and c) an emergent language of genuine democratic recognition, including claims of redistribution ‘from below.’ The paper draws on the archived correspondences of Ford Foundation functionaries and their interlocutors during Bangladesh’s liberation war in 1971. A critical reading of these archives illuminate how skepticism and ambivalence towards the liberation movement’s tactics, claims, and intellectual basis gave way to crucial shifts and renegotiations at a revolutionary juncture.

Author

• Mushahid Hussain, Trinity College