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French colonial presence. Some were unequivocally anti-colonial. Most were not. But all argued for greater rights, freedoms and privileges. They did so by identifying Muslim national communities that pre-existed colonial rule and that were disadvantaged by it. This common thread makes the generic appellation ‘nationalist’ appropriate to otherwise disparate organisations
seen as a pioneer equally of modern Scottish Nationalism, of British socialism and of Scots anti-colonialism. Not ‘only’ a politician, he was also a writer of some repute, and a traveller of infinite resource, whose interests and engagements embraced the whole British-imperial world and far beyond. Very few people – arguably, nobody in Britain up to that time – assailed the
Vietnamese anti-colonialism v 2 v Vietnamese anti-colonialism and the Personalist critique of capitalism and liberal democracy Personalism: Between capitalism and communism The stateless conception of communism espoused by the leaders of the early Republic was partly derived from the philosophy of Personalism, developed by the French philosopher, Emmanuel Mounier. This philosophy, which is commonly treated in a cursory manner in the historical scholarship on the war, was widely dismissed by US officials as “muddleheaded” and “vague,”1 a “mish-mash of ideas
order. Eurocentrism has taught us to see the potential end of an era in every relative change in Western power. Thinking about the role of humanitarianism today requires that we don’t reproduce or unwittingly celebrate Western-led order by mourning the end of a history that never actually existed. Given past and present non-Western experiences of liberal order, we might ask: what’s there to mourn? My personal experiences of research and knowledge production regarding humanitarianism have reinforced in me an anti-colonial ethos – an intellectual
This excerpt from James Baldwin: Living in Fire details a key juncture in Baldwin’s life, 1957–59, when he was transformed by a visit to the South to write about the civil rights movement while grappling with the meaning of the Algerian Revolution. The excerpt shows Baldwin understanding black and Arab liberation struggles as simultaneous and parallel moments in the rise of Third World, anti-colonial and anti-racist U.S. politics. It also shows Baldwin’s emotional and psychological vulnerability to repressive state violence experienced by black and Arab citizens in the U.S., France, and Algiers.
Debates on the relevance of repatriation of indigenous human remains are water under the bridge today. Yet, a genuine will for dialogue to work through colonial violence is found lacking in the European public sphere. Looking at local remembrance of the Majimaji War (1905–7) in the south of Tanzania and a German–Tanzanian theatre production, it seems that the spectre of colonial headhunting stands at the heart of claims for repatriation and acknowledgement of this anti-colonial movement. The missing head of Ngoni leader Songea Mbano haunts the future of German–Tanzanian relations in heritage and culture. By staging the act of post-mortem dismemberment and foregrounding the perspective of descendants, the theatre production Maji Maji Flava offers an honest proposal for dealing with stories of sheer colonial violence in transnational memory.
crisis was framed very much in terms of (anti-)colonialism. Irish missionaries, in particular, liked to frame what was happening to the Biafrans as akin to what the Irish had experienced in the British Empire. The spectre of famine was particularly significant in this respect. The phrase ‘The Great Hunger’ – which had been popularised as the title of Cecil Woodham-Smith’s hugely successful 1962 book – was used repeatedly by Irish missionaries and NGOs in relation to Biafra
power imbalances in our world. As humanitarians face an important trust deficit, humanitarian advocacy needs to be re-cast as more solidarist. This is more so at a time when risk and insecurity is personalised and resilience humanitarianism is ascendant ( Duffield, 2019 ). To put this solidarist advocacy into practice, the anti-colonial solidarity model, outlined by Alex de Waal, offers important insights, although it will have to be adapted to our times. This model was
-generating process) ( Piguet, 2018 ). The anti-colonial struggle for independence in the 1950s to the conflict between 1962 and 1965 generated internal mass displacement and large numbers of refugees who fled to neighbouring countries ( Kibreab, 2014 ). The country’s historical transformation and the unceasing conflict and violence have redefined the lives of about 1.4 million IDPs and the 2.25 million refugees and asylum seekers who had moved from South Sudan by
This book excavates forgotten histories of solidarity which were vital to radical political imaginaries during the ‘long sixties’. It decentres the conventional Western focus of this critical historical moment by foregrounding transnational solidarity with, and across, anticolonial and anti-imperialist liberation struggles. It traces the ways in which solidarity was conceived, imagined and enacted in the border-crossings – of nation, race and class identifications – of grassroots activists.
Exiled revolutionaries in Uruguay, postcolonial migrants in Britain, and Greek communist refugees in East Germany campaigned for their respective causes from afar while identifying and linking up with liberation struggles in Vietnam and the Gulf and with civil rights movements elsewhere. Meanwhile, Arab migrants in France, Pakistani volunteers and Iraqi artists found a myriad of ways to express solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Neglected archives also reveal Tricontinental Cuban-based genealogies of artistic militancy, as well as stories of anticolonial activist networks and meetings in North America, Italy, the Netherlands and Sudan, forging connections with those freedom fighters attempting to overthrow Portuguese colonial rule in Africa. These entwined routes of the 1960s chart a complex map of transnational political recognition and radical interconnections.
Bringing together original research with contributions from veteran activists and artists, this interdisciplinary volume explores how transnational solidarity was expressed in and carried through the itineraries of migrants and revolutionaries, film and print cultures, art and sport, political campaigns and armed struggle. It presents a novel perspective on radical politics of the global sixties which remains crucial to understanding anti-racist solidarity today.