Why is anti imperialism good

Instead, she contends, anticolonial worldmaking took a distinctive intellectual trajectory based on histories and experiences of trans-Atlantic enslavement, imperialism, and capitalist exploitation endemic in the international order. For example, Getachew argues that positioning anticolonial nationalism as a project extending from Western notions of liberal inclusion into the Westphalian order misrecognizes the aims of leaders like Kwame Nkrumah and Eric Williams. As such, their vision of self-determination rejected inclusion into extant international society and required the existing order to be refashioned into one that was democratic, developmental, and redistributive.

Here, the achievement of national independence was the first step in a broader project of anti-imperial and anti-racist worldmaking. In explicating imperialism as the structuring feature of the international order, and anti-imperialism as the primary means by which anticolonial nationalists sought to make the world anew, Worldmaking After Empire offers a framework to examine racial capitalism and superexploitation.

In effect, these discourses preserved relations of racial capitalism in the colonies, which included forced labor for development projects, the conscription of unpaid labor by private corporations like Firestone, compulsory cultivation in the service of metropolitan trade, and the extraction of taxes by chiefs and colonial administrators to push peasants and farmers into the wage economy The Black Radical Congress , echoing earlier positions offered by Black communists such as Otto Huiswoud , Harry Haywood , Claudia Jones , and William Patterson , described superexploitation as the subjection of African descendants to corporate imperialism, land dispossession, depressed and unequal wages, and the denial of basic rights like unionization and collective bargaining.

Racialized people , they argued, experienced a form of oppression over and above that of the white working class. Stated differently, anti-Blackness gave superexploitation its intensified character. In excavating the imbrication of imperialism, racial capitalism, and superexploitation, Worldmaking After Empire illuminates that an anti-imperial world requires not only political freedom, but also economic redistribution, the democratization of wealth, and working-class liberation.

In its sophisticated examination of imperialism and anti-imperialism, Worldmaking After Empire not only expands our understanding of knowledge production and political economy, but also opens up several areas of elaboration. One question that invites further exploration is, what does a worldmaking project look like when anticolonial nationalist women like Shirley Graham Du Bois , Amy Ashwood Garvey , and Vicki Garvin , who did not have state power but were respected comrades of postcolonial leaders, are at the center?

Another line of inquiry might focus on collective and collaborative anti-imperial politics, including trade union mobilization and transnational grassroots organizing. Subscriber sign in You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Username Please enter your Username. Password Please enter your Password.

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Keywords Anti-imperialism Wilsonianism Congress peace movement civil rights. You do not currently have access to this article Login Please login to access the full content. Subscribe Access to the full content requires a subscription. Oxford University Press. Sign in to annotate. Delete Cancel Save.