Author Meets Critics: Massimiliano Tomba's Insurgent Universality

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

I am proposing an “Author Meets Critics” panel around Max Tomba’s new book, Insurgent Universality: An Alternative Legacy of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2019). This is a wide-ranging work of political theory that should provoke conversations among scholars of democratic theory, history of political thought, critical theory, and universalism and decolonization. From its method of conceptual history and practices to the three democratic moments it curates, the book challenges a number of mainstays in contemporary political theory.

Insurgent Universality advocates for a tradition of political universality as an alternative to the juridical universalism of the Declaration. For Tomba, insurgent universality isn’t based on the idea that we all share some common humanity but, rather, on the democratic excess by which people disrupt and reject an existing political and economic order. Going beyond the constitutional armor of the representative state, it brings into play a plurality of powers to which citizens have access, not through the funnel of national citizenship but in daily political practice. Tomba looks to recent history to see various experiments in cooperative and insurgent democracy: the Zapatistas in Mexico, the Paris Commune, the 1917 peasant revolts during the Russian Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution. He argues that these movements belong to the common legacy of insurgent universality, which is characterized by alternative trajectories of modernity that have been repressed, hindered, and forgotten. Insurgent Universality analyzes the manifestos and declarations that came out of these experiments considering them as collective works of an alternative canon of political theory that challenges the great names of the Western pantheon of political thought and builds bridges between European and non-European political and social experiments.

The panel brings together scholars with expertise in multiple fields and archives for a critical conversation surrounding how Insurgent Universality conceptualizes democracy, its approach, and the alternative legacies it invokes. The panel is also well-placed to consider the book’s arguments in relation to scholarship on democratic theory, feminist theory, Black political thought, American political thought, indigenous political thought, and comparative political thought. The panel consists of Lawrie Balfour (UVa), Rob Nichols (Minnesota), Kevin Olson (UC Irvine), Linda Zerilli (Chicago), and Max Tomba (UCSC). Jason Frank (Cornell) will serve as chair.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Chair

• Jason Frank Cornell University

Presenters

• Lawrie Balfour University of Virginia

• Robert Nichols University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

• Kevin Olson University of California, Irvine

• Linda M.G. Zerilli University of Chicago

• Murad Idris University of Michigan

• Massimiliano Tomba University of California