In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The "Little Traditions" of Black Worldmaking
  • Robbie Shilliam (bio)

I approach Adom Getachew's book Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination as an intervention into political theory. To my mind, the book provides [End Page 606] three provocations to that field. First, Getachew's argument effectively challenges an implicit division of intellectual labor in the Western academy wherein black intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Eric Williams might be engaged with forensically in intellectual history1 but are less commonly incorporated into the canons of political theory. Second, the argument models how black political "actors" such as Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, and Michael Manley should be engaged with in the same way that "authors" are—that is, as intellectuals. Third, the argument demonstrates that said black intellectuals have oftentimes preempted major shifts in theoretical conventions, such as the move from methodologically national to global normative thought. This is why Getachew presents her protagonists as "worldmakers" and not simply "nation builders."

Making these three challenges and reconstructing a theoretically acute narrative of twentieth-century Pan-Africanism, Getachew helps recast the sources and materials by which political theory interrogates the prospect of global justice.2 Specifically, she argues that paying attention "to the specificity of political projects that emerged out of the legacy of imperialism . . . provides a postcolonial approach to contemporary cosmopolitanism."3 In this regard, Getachew's intervention is field shaping and especially helpful to those of us who pursue political theory in the field of international relations (IR). I engage with Getachew's book from this position. And I want to orient her argument in a direction that she herself implicitly tacks toward. The question: to what degree should the conventional conceptual frameworks of political theory carry the weight of Getachew's challenge?

The overarching concept by which Getachew frames her narrative is taken from the grammar of republican theory, namely, "nondomination."4 There are solid reasons for this choice, least of all the way in which the associated dyad of self-government and hierarchy can be scaled up into a dyad of anticolonial self-determination and imperial hierarchy. Nonetheless, I note the fact that Getachew has to scale up an existing conceptual framework of political theory in order to parse and make sense of the intellectual traditions associated with Pan-Africanism. But are there no conceptual universes that already render the scale and reach that black worldmaking necessitates?

Getachew's book challenges the racialized demarcations of political theory's canon and so poses the question of who can be considered authorial and which substantive issues might theoretical debates be entangled with. So, it seems logical to me to push her challenge into the very conceptual universes that we work in, with, and through. In what follows, I present a narrative that is supportive of Getachew's, albeit one that branches in and branches out of the braided streams of Pan-Africanism that she follows. The particular narrative I tell is shaped by what Jamaican writer Erna Brodber calls a "little tradition" of the black poor,5 vernacularly known as the "sufferers."6 This tradition—Ethiopianism—has few "authors" in the formal academic sense and even those authors do not carry the weight of the tradition. Moreover, Ethiopianism appears as far more attuned to theological rather than theoretical debate insofar as its commitments express an intellectualism that is avowedly spiritual. Regardless, Ethiopianism evinces a conceptual universe that seeks to repair worlds from the legacies of empire and colonialism. My aim here is not to present Ethiopianism as the answer to any theoretical debate in Pan-Africanism or with regard to global justice per se. Rather, I want to present the challenge provided by Ethiopianism as an analytical one: its worldmaking requires no scaling up.

My departure point is February 2016, when Donald Trump, candidate in the Republican Party's presidential primary, retweets a Benito Mussolini quote from a spoof account. The incident compounds anxiety about Trump's potentially fascist—and not only racist—political platform. In 2018 Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton's famous secretary of state, publishes a book in response to Trump's rise to power titled Fascism...

pdf

Share