Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination

Award-winning author and academic Adom Getachew will be discussing her book Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination at an event hosted by the Seminar in Contemporary Marxist Theory.

Worldmaking After Empire (Princeton 2019) challenges conventional views of decolonisation as a transition from a world of empires to a world of nation states. This narrative, she shows, obscures the efforts of anti-colonial movements and thinkers to build a new international order beyond the imperial and racialized hierarchies of the present.

Getachew brilliantly traces these efforts throughout the history of decolonisation, the short-lived political union of the West-Indian Federation and the plans for a New-International Economic Order. Tracing the works of anticolonial militants and intellectuals across the Black Atlantic – from Nnamdi Azikiwe and W.E.B DuBois to Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams and Julius Nyerere – she shows how debates on neo-imperialism, dependency and sovereignty were at the heart of anticolonial efforts at ‘worldmaking.’

Crucially, these efforts both managed to shape the post-war international order, and ended up being shaped by it.

Adom will be discussing the book with Humeira Iqtidar (KCL), Ingrid Kvangraven (York) and Sara Marzagoza (KCL) at an event 24 March, from 16.00.

Register here in advance for this meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYrf-ioqTssHdOG9UzJXsxY4HqbYma-LhYH

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PANEL

Adom Getachew is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago.

Worldmaking After Empire is the winner of the Frantz Fanon Prize (Caribbean Philosophical Association); the African Studies Association’s Best Book Prize; the First Book Award, Foundations of Political Theory Section of the American Political Science Association; the co-winner of the W.E.B. Du Bois Distinguished Book Award, National Conference of Black Political Scientists; the co-winner of the J. David Greenstone Book Prize, Politics & History Section of the American Political Science Association; and the winner of the ISA Theory Best Book, Theory Section of the International Studies Association.

Humeira Iqtidar is a Reader in Politics at King’s College London. Her research builds on postcolonial and decolonial theories to engage with historically marginalized traditions of thought, specifically modern Islamic thought. She is the author of “Is Tolerance Liberal?” Political Theory, and “Jizya against nationalism: Abul A'la Maududi's attempt at decolonizing political theory” forthcoming in Journal of Politics.

Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven is a Lecturer at the University of York’s Department of Politics. Her research interests include the role of finance in development, the political economy of development, and critically assessing the economics field. She recently published on financial subordination in Africa, the role of randomized control trials in development economics, and a re-framing of dependency theory as a research programme.

Sara Marzagora is a Lecturer in Comparative Literature at King's College London. She is an intellectual historian of Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa, and currently completing a book manuscript on Ethiopian political thought in the first half of the twentieth century.