Imagining Worlds beyond the Nation-State

Overcoming the legacies of colonialism and enduring Eurocentrism and racism remain urgent problems in contemporary postcolonial thought, criticism, and practice. Can these challenges be met in ways that resolve the apparent contradictions between the particular—in the form of nationalism—and the universal, in the sense of a radical, global, antiracist project? The desire to recover histories of anticolonialism that might answer this question lies at the heart of Adom Getachew's impressive and thought-provoking recent book, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination.

Focusing on a group of anglophone, pan-African Black Atlantic intellectuals—comprising, for Getachew's purposes, W. E. B. Du Bois, George Padmore, Michael Manley, and Eric Williams, as well as Nnamdi Azikiwe, Kwame Nkrumah, and Julius Nyerere—Worldmaking explores how these writers, activists, and political leaders were not only engaged in schemes of national independence, but sought a broader transformation of relations between states and peoples. In short, Getachew argues that these worldmaking schemes for national liberation were part of, not contrary to, the search for emancipation at the global level.

In addressing the relationship between national and international worldmaking political projects, Getachew seeks to move beyond recent debates between protagonists positing an inevitability thesis about the triumph of the nation-state after 1945, on the one hand, and on the other those insisting on the possibilities of alternative pathways. Frederick Cooper has been a long-standing, leading advocate of a kind of antiteleological view that seeks to recover the contingency and complexity of debates about alternatives to the nation-state, specifically forms of federal union between the core and periphery of empires, and regional federations of decolonizing, ex-colonial states.¹ In recent exchanges, Samuel Moyn has argued that the postwar "federal moment"² of the 1950s was all well and good, but that historians should focus on why, in the end, the nation-state won out.³ Richard Drayton puts this more forcefully in his "realist" interpretation, in which he claims that "federalism was almost from its beginning a lie."⁴ Getachew's intervention leans toward the openness of Cooper's approach, but it also suggests that these debates may be overly binary, failing to capture the scale, ambition, and subtlety of her pan-Africanist worldmakers, whose projects for independence and sovereignty were predicated on a remaking of global power relations and the racial norms that sustained them.

The foundational argument of the book is that anticolonial worldmaking in the anglophone Black Atlantic took a particular trajectory around the problem of race, which distinguished it from other broader political formations of Afro-Asian solidarity. Taking 1492 as a point of departure, Getachew shows how conquest, dispossession, genocide, and slavery marked the "history of European imperialism as itself a world-constituting force that violently inaugurated an unprecedented era of globality."⁵ The abolition of this racialized hierarchy was central to the thinking and political objectives of the pan-Africanists that form the central players in Getachew's narrative. This leads Getachew to a second key observation, that "the history of modern international society was structured by unequal integration rather than merely the exclusion of non-European peoples," which results in the striking conclusion that the idea of a "universal international society" is of "anti-imperial rather than European provenance" (99, my emphasis).

Confronting the racialized nature of the international order and the immanence of unequal integration meant defying the limitations of independence as nominal sovereign membership of a new international order, the terms of which were still set by the "Great Powers" of the global North. In this respect, post-World War I Wilsonianism should not be seen as simply truncated or hampered by external forces (diplomatic negotiations, fears of instability, revolution potentially unleashed) but repurposed to support this system of unequal integration. It thereby "preserved a structure of racial hierarchy within the league" (40).

The period of UN-framed decolonization after 1945 was both an opening and foreclosing of possibilities. The journey from a self-determination circumscribed by the UN charter's overarching aim of achieving "peaceful and friendly relations among nations" (71) to the 1960 UN...