Anti Colonial Nationalism
Anti-colonial nationalism refers to the political movements and ideologies aimed at resisting and overthrowing colonial rule and asserting national independence. It encompasses a range of strategies and tactics, including armed resistance, civil disobedience, and diplomatic efforts. Anti-colonial nationalism often seeks to reclaim indigenous culture, language, and identity, and to establish self-governing institutions.
6 Key excerpts on "Anti Colonial Nationalism"
eBook - ePub- Stefan Berger, Eric Storm, Stefan Berger, Eric Storm(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...9 Postcolonialism and the history of anti-colonial nationalism Sanjay Seth Introduction Postcolonialism is the name sometimes given to a set of analytical tools, questions and more generally a style of thought that places colonialism at the centre of its concerns. Since this interdisciplinary theory is relatively new, and not as well known as some of the other approaches surveyed in this volume, I will begin with a brief account of postcolonialism. 1 This chapter will then focus upon Subaltern Studies, a historiographical project on India n history that has been a very important current in postcolonial theorizing, especially when it comes to analyses of nationalism. Postcolonialism is in one important respect a misleading term, for the ‘post’ does not indicate a periodization according to which colonialism now lies behind us and is only of historical interest. The ‘post’ in postcolonialism in fact aggressively makes the opposite claim: that colonialism was central to the shaping of the entire period after it, and – like the Industrial Revolution, the spread of capitalism and the Enlightenment – it has shaped the economy, politics, culture and intellectual life of the modern world. It transformed not only the colonized but also the colonizer, not only by providing the loot, raw materials and markets that fuelled the Industrial Revolution but also by shaping the very sense of self of both colonizer and colonized, of West and East, as well as by structuring the categories through which the world came to be known and understood. The grosser forms of political domination and economic exploitation characterizing colonialism have been the subject of enquiry for a long time, and hardly need a new term and approach...
eBook - ePubLeadership in Colonial Africa
Disruption of Traditional Frameworks and Patterns
- B. Jallow, B. Jallow(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...This assumption is mistaken. Just as colonialism was more than simply the denial of the right to self-government, so too was anticolonialism more than a struggle for popular liberation. The alienations and dispossessions that colonial rule inflicted on colonized subjects cannot solely be measured in political or even collective terms. Quite apart from the denial of the right to collective political self-determination, colonial states were implicated in the violation of individual liberties. There are well-documented incidents of colonial “punitive expeditions” resulting in the massacre of indigenous people, arbitrary arrests and imprisonments, forced labor policies, restrictions on expression and movement, torture and killings, all underpinned by institutionalized racism. 44 One recent study has shown how Africans in UN Trust Territories of Cameroon petitioned the United Nations in the 1950s, invoking human rights not only for collective liberation but also for the protection of individual rights canonized in international law. They sent lists of the names of persons who the French and British administrators had deported, arrested, and killed, appealing to the international community to protect specific individuals. 45 Anticolonial movements were, therefore, not limited to struggles for political and collective self-determination. They were also concerned with individual rights. Azikiwe’s nationalist activism shows that anticolonial struggles for self-determination were connected in many ways to the post–Second World War universal human rights movement. Colonized people all over the world drew on an emergent international human rights language in their ideological struggles against imperial powers and their demands for independence. Anticolonialism did not develop in isolation of the universal human rights discourse. Rather, it was integral to the development of the postwar universal human rights ideology...
eBook - ePubFanon
The Postcolonial Imagination
- Nigel C. Gibson(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Polity(Publisher)
...Certainly the nation-state in its geographical articulation was a European invention; but by the 1950s nationalism had much to do with the immediate promise that the chains of foreign rule would be shattered. Additionally, the sway of European intellectual authority continued virtually unchallenged partly because the critique of its authority lay within the Manichean thought that characterized European rule in Africa. To present an authentic African political form as the answer was a reaction to Manichean thinking but remained within its intellectual contours. Instead, there was a myriad of polities, some democratic and some not, and some more compromised with colonialism than others. It was necessary to see how variegated indigenous democratic forms provided a basis – while not being sufficient on their own – for nationalism to be successful. In short, Fanon’s dialectic of anticolonialism is grounded in the local, but in order to defeat colonialism it moves of necessity to a centrally planned movement. This is where many nationalist movements stop. For Fanon this centralizing movement is further challenged by a return to the source, toward local decentralization enriched by the foregoing movement. Let us consider this move in more detail. Fanon’s Theory of Nationalism: Two Types of Nationalism or Three? Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. (Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth) It has often been argued that Fanon draws a distinction between two kinds of nationalist ideology in the context of anticolonialism. There was, on the one hand, a nationalism that wanted to take power but remain virtually subordinate to external powers; and, on the other, a nationalism that wanted a genuine independence represented by such groups as the FLN...
eBook - ePubRecentering Africa in International Relations
Beyond Lack, Peripherality, and Failure
- Marta Iñiguez de Heredia, Zubairu Wai, Marta Iñiguez de Heredia, Zubairu Wai(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...Scholars of the West seem more intent on analyzing, explaining, and prescribing solutions for the failures of postcolonial African states than on reexamining the history of international relations as a history of colonial violence. While they do so, it will not be possible for them to grasp the historical and theoretical meaning and significance of anticolonial struggle and its articulation and vision of an alternative temp orality of world politics. Analyzed within the dominant temporality, anti-colonialism is destined only ever to be understood as a failure or, at best, as a brief but unrealistic moment of utopian hope remembered today only with nostalgia. Instead, Agathangelou and Killian argue, we need to ‘think of world politics as political moments of living and active theoretical forms of life’ (Agathangelou and Killian 2016b: 6). The struggles against colonialism constituted a set of connected political moments of living and struggle, of active theoretical forms which together amounted to a major dynamic of transformation in and against the international relations and world order of the twentieth century. It is necessary to understand the temporality of anti-colonialism on its own terms in order to grasp the profound challenge these struggles represented, both as modes of international relations and as visions of possibilities of world order, as well as the character of the international relations and world order they struggled against. The time of anti-colonialism was far more than an alternative, non-Western, local temporality (cf Hutchings 2008, pp. 160–166). It was an alternative vision and practice of world temporality, in and for the world, never just for the colonized...
eBook - ePubThe Postcolonial Subject
Claiming Politics/Governing Others in Late Modernity
- Vivienne Jabri(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The first returns to the postcolonial subject and the claim to politics, or the right to politics. In the context of this chapter the claim made is exactly in relation to international politics. Historically, as will be shown, this claim is made through nationally defined struggle against colonial occupation, the form of struggle, as we saw in the last chapter, that comes to constitute political community. While there is a tendency with some postcolonial theorists to argue that the anti-colonial struggle, and specifically its representation in national liberation struggles, was confined to the elites and did not involve the subaltern, as I have argued so far, and in keeping with Said’s understanding of the postcolonial subject, the struggle for independence was and continues to be a prerequisite for the founding of political community, heterogeneously defined though such community was ideologically, and in class terms. The first section is hence devoted to the postcolonial subject’s claim to the modern international and the form of articulation suggestive of such a claim. The postcolonial state is often represented in the literature as having failed the promise of independence. This is not surprising, if we look to the vast expanse of the postcolonial world where the complicity of states in the repression of their own populations, the levels of poverty and inequality as compared to the former colonial powers, the availability of vast resources alongside the extremes of violence and deprivation, the kleptomania of leaders sustained by external interests, of other states and global capital...
- Mark Langan(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...For centuries they have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual existence. Look at them today swaying between atomic and spiritual disintegration. (1961 : 251) For Fanon, therefore, neo-colonialism might be avoided—or overcome—through processes of ideational liberation. This would inoculate elites, in particular, from collaboration with external elements who sought to maintain African polities in economic and political subordination. Furthermore, a number of other prominent critics of African relations with erstwhile colonial powers allied themselves to an analytical focus on neo-colonialism. Julius Nyerere and Sekou Touré (then Presidents of Tanzania and Guinea, respectively) concurred with their fellow African socialist, Nkrumah, that foreign powers would continue to seek economic—and thus political—control over African countries. Nyerere—as late as 1978, towards the end of his presidency—argued that neo-colonialism had not yet been thwarted: ‘sooner or later, and for as long as necessary, Africa will fight against neo-colonialism as it had fought against colonialism. And eventually it will win’ (1978 : 11–12). 8 Touré, meanwhile, emphasised the need for a cultural awakening in Africa—echoing Fanon on the evils of colonialism upon African self-confidence. He additionally pointed to the role of foreign corporations in denuding African sovereignty even after de jure independence had been obtained: The direct colonial exploitation of former days is being succeeded by international monopolies, and this has a tendency to remain permanent. Paradoxically, it is the underdeveloped nations, exporting raw materials and crude products, which contribute an important share of the costs and social improvements from which workers in the fully developed countries benefit. (1962 : 148) Touré (1962) emphasised, moreover, that European powers might embroil African countries in trade and aid arrangements that would retard genuine development...
