Tracing the world-making power of self-determination builds solidarity in the face of environmental injustice, global hierarchy, and exploitation.

Getachew’s (2019: 2) book holds that while decolonization is seen as a moment of ‘nation-building [. . .] and the formation of nation-states’, instead, we ought to see anticolonial nationalism itself as an exercise in ‘worldmaking’. In other words, Getachew recasts anticolonial nationalism itself as a transnational process, seeking an equitable remaking of the world to overcome the injustices of colonialism and neo-colonialism. Getachew’s (2019: 5) book thus signals a gestalt shift in the way that she envisages anticolonial nationalism not as ‘marking the collapse of internationalism and the closure of alternative conceptions of a world after empire’, but instead as a direct, transnational confrontation to ‘the legacies of imperial hierarchy with a demand for the radical reconstitution of the international order’.

Through focusing explicitly on Nnamdi Azikiwe, W.E.B. Du Bois, Michael Manley, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, George Padmore, and Eric Williams, Getachew focuses on three forms of anticolonial worldmaking. Firstly, Getachew explores the anticolonial demand for the right to selfdetermination. Central to Getachew’s (2019: 75) argument is that anticolonial nationalists did not simply ‘take up’ the West’s discourse of self-determination and use it to secure their own independence, but – similarly to how Gopal (2019) looks at anticolonial iterations of liberty, freedom, and justice – through an ‘anticolonial appropriation’ such nationalists radically reconceptualised the meaning of self-determination. Thus, as it was first articulated by the League of Nations, self-determination involved ‘the consent of the governed and consultation with subject people’; however, this definition still allowed for colonialism given that ‘racially backwards people’ were said to not yet be capable of self-governance (Getachew, 2019: 42). Years after the League of Nations, the United Nations (UN) Charter of 1945 again evoked ‘human rights and equality of nations [. . .] as founding principles of a new world order’ despite the continuity of colonial rule (Getachew, 2019: 71). By contrast, anticolonial radicals – through forming organisations and conferences such as the League against Imperialism, and the Pan-African Congresses – directly highlighted the hypocrisy of the Westernized definition of self-determination. For instance, Nkrumah and Padmore organised the fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, 1945, where the epistemic roots were planted for self-determination to be reconceptualised as a universalist issue of human rights. Through showing how colonialism itself was a violation of human rights, the work of anticolonial nationalists radically shifted the discourse of selfdetermination such that by 1960, when Nkrumah spoke to the UN as the president of Ghana, he was able to use the principle of self-determination to show how colonialism was directly against the UN’s principles, thus leading to the Article 1514 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Peoples and Countries.

Secondly, Getachew looks at anticolonial nationalist worldmaking through focusing on the formation of regional federations. As Getachew (2019: 113) shows, to such anticolonial nationalists, sovereignty granted through the right to self-determination was ‘meaningless in the context of international hierarchy and economic dependence’. This relates to Nkrumah’s critique of neo-imperialism, described as ‘the disjuncture between formal independence and de facto dependence’ (Getachew, 2019: 108), whereby nation states have ‘nominal freedom’ yet remain economically dependent on the Global North and thus vulnerable to political domination through financial control. In response to this neo-imperialism, radicals like Nkrumah and Eric Williams saw federations – such as the Union of African States or the West Indian Federation – as providing the potential for economic trade and development that did not require foreign intervention and reliance on the Global North. This is why, for instance, upon Ghana becoming a republic in 1960, Nkrumah’s nationalism also involved successfully advocating for a clause in the constitution that conferred on the parliament ‘the power to provide for the surrender of the whole or any part of the sovereignty of Ghana’ once a Union of African States was formed (Getachew, 2019: 107): national independence was thus connected to an embracing of anticolonial internationalism.

Connected to such building of federations, which ultimately failed, Getachew explores the final form of anticolonial nationalist worldmaking: the demand for a New International Economic Order (NIEO). Getachew thus shows how ‘second wave’ anticolonial nationalists, such as Michael Manley and Julius Nyerere, developed Nkrumah’s critique of neo-imperialism to show how formerly colonized nations were still vulnerable and exploited in an unequal global political economy – if not by other nations, then by private corporations. This meant that not only were the newly independent nations unequally integrated into the world economic system, but that their efforts of state building were also much more susceptible to the fluctuations of the international markets and private, corporate interests. Thus emerged the demands for a New International Economic Order (NIEO). The Declaration for the Establishment of an NIEO, put to the UN in 1974, challenged the way that the UN’s General Assembly – where each member has one vote – has the power to issue legally binding international economic policy. Anticolonial nationalists, such as Nyerere, pointed out that such formal, legislative equality that was granted to formerly colonized nations was not translated into a substantive equality – as Getachew (2019: 93) summaries: ‘to say that Jamaica or Tanzania and the United States were equal members of the international order obfuscated the outsized economic dominance that the United States exercised and could deploy to compel dependent states’. Thus, Nyerere argued that an NIEO was needed such that newly independent states could have the freedom to pursue their own economic programmes, including the ability to nationalize industries under private control. To such nationalists, this NIEO was in fact a necessary prerequisite to achieve the UN’s founding principle for international order: that of sovereign equality. In other words, anticolonial radicals used the principle of national sovereignty, and economic control over one’s own nation, again as a process through which we could achieve an anti-imperial world order.

At the heart of Getachew’s (2019: 2) book, therefore, is the principle that ‘decolonization was a project of reordering the world that sought to create a domination free and egalitarian international order’. Anticolonial nationalism, read through this lens, despite evoking principles of self-determination and national sovereignty, was always concerned with the grander transnational project of remaking the world in an equitable fashion.

Stretching the sociology of race across time and space

While my review of these three books’ arguments is fairly brief, I hope it is already apparent that despite making discrete arguments and contributions, they each share some fundamental similarities. Throughout the books, we see recurrent figures mentioned – from Du Bois, Padmore and Nkrumah, through to Gandhi, Churchill, and Woodrow Wilson – as well as analysis of key institutions and conferences – from the Gadar Party, based on the West Coast of the United States campaigning for Indian anti-colonialism, through to the League against Imperialism and the Pan-African Congresses. I want to now develop this review by focusing on three particular ways that these three books’ transnational and historical scopes push forward the sociology of race.

Racism at home, imperialism abroad

Firstly, each of these three books makes the point that there is an inherent connection between racism ‘at home’ in the West, with Western practices of colonialism, imperialism, and neo-colonialism ‘abroad’. Desai’s (2020) discussion, for instance, interrogates how Du Bois saw racialised capitalism as the binding factor between the United States’ exploitation of Black Americans with the British empire’s colonial apparatus, and how ‘whiteness’ offered a symbolic space of purity – a material and psychological wage – that impeded the white workers across the West to endorse an anti-imperialism. In his critique of racial capitalism, therefore, Du Bois argues that ‘the English working classes are exploiting India [. . .] and the working classes of America are subjugating Santo Domingo and Haiti [. . .] He is a co-worker in the miserable modern subjugation of over half the world’ (quoted in Desai 2020: 144). Similarly, Gopal (2019: 284) questions: ‘How could the problem of race in the context of global imperialism be addressed in its specificity and as it intersected with the question of class and the exploitation of labour?’ In exploring this question through the lens of dissent against the British empire, Gopal (2019: 441) presents the work of anticolonial Marxists – such as C. L.R James, Padmore, and Eric Williams – each of whom stressed that ‘if empire was to be left behind, then the buccaneering capitalism that it had propagated would also need to be replaced with a more radically egalitarian system’. In advocating for a new ‘radically egalitarian’ alternative to global capitalism, these radicals sought to not just free those newly independent nations from the Global North’s economic control, but also those ‘postcolonial citizens’ exploited in the metropoles itself. Lastly, Getachew (2019: 20–21) discusses the notion of a ‘global Jim Crow’, highlighting how rather than being an idiosyncrasy of the US South, ‘the color line was an international phenomenon of which segregation and racial domination in the United States were only a domestic iteration’.

Indeed, it may seem almost too obvious of a point to make that racism is connected to the processes of colonialism and neo-colonialism. After all, ‘the concept of race was thus the glue that stuck the colonial world order together, as it became common-sense knowledge that there was a global racial hierarchy which permitted the colonization of the “lesser” races by the dominant white Europeans’ (Meghji, 2020a: 4). Nevertheless, if we look at dominant approaches in the sociology of race, then such transnational connections tend to be elided. Instead, much sociology of race tends to be characterised by a methodological nationalism in which it becomes sociologically viable – and advisable – to study racism within the confines of particular, discrete nation states (Meghji, Forthcoming). However, such methodological nationalism is not analytically useful for our current predicaments. It is the same social system that exploits the labour of children in China to make electronic goods, that exploits the (disproportionately Black and Brown) zero-hour contracted truck driver who delivers this product to its eventual owner in the West; it is the same imperialised-racialised principle that Islam is opposed to modernity that justifies the state surveillance of Muslims under the Patriot Act in the United States and the Prevent counter-terrorism programme in Britain, that justifies Western military intervention in the Middle East under the guise of civilizing the backwards world. While neither Getachew, Desai, or Gopal’s books are explicitly about the links between racism and imperialism, they each highlight that there is a radical tradition of thought which has always analysed these two processes in tandem with one another. The fact that this tradition already exists pushes me to my next point, as I argue that the sociology of race needs to adopt a more historical approach.

Looking backwards to move forwards

While each of the three reviewed books use historical methods, each of them also reflects on our present conjunctures. Getachew (2019: 181) points out that the ‘worldmakers of decolonization’ offer an intellectual tradition through which to think about contemporary transnational movements such as ‘the Movement for Black Lives, the Caribbean demand for reparations for slavery and genocide, and South African calls for a social and economic decolonization’. Similarly, Gopal (2019: 448) argues the dispelling the myth of British colonial benevolence, and centering anticolonial agency, allows us to both move beyond the idea that Britain is a global superpower that has the legitimacy to intervene across the globe, as well as allowing ‘Britons to lay claim to a different, more challenging history [. . .] which can draw on multiple historical and cultural resources’. Lastly, Desai (2020) argues that his book highlights historical themes that still shape the present day, such as the United States’ claim of being the champion of liberalism and democracy while it still routinely kills many of its citizens (and those around the world).

In short, therefore, each of the three authors stress the necessity of having a historical sensibility to comprehend current situations and social processes. At the very same time as they are developing such temporal linkages, however, we are seeing increased attempts within the sociology of race to bifurcate the study of racism away from its historical roots in colonialism (and consequently, its contemporary basis in neo-colonialism). If we take critical race theory, for instance, Bonilla-Silva (2015: 74) even goes as far as to say that this paradigm ought to move beyond ‘the sins [of the] past (e.g., slavery, colonization, and genocide)’ in studying the ‘contemporary foundation’ of racism. Of course, Bonilla-Silva has apt reasons for his methodological scope – by reducing racism to being a consequence of past events, we lose sight of how racism continues because it still benefits people in the present day, who consequently maintain an interest in reproducing it. Nevertheless, we have to question whether being captured in a methodological ‘presentism’, which explicitly attempts to bifurcate the study of the present from its past, is analytically viable when it comes to the processes of racialisation and racism.

Very often, for instance, what we immediately think of as a social process specific to our present racialised social structure in fact has a much longer history informed by the logics of coloniality. For instance, consider the case of the militarisation of the police in the United States – a key issue in contemporary racism. As Go (2020) shows, such militarisation of the United States’ police started in the early 20th century primarily as a means of punitively surveying and controlling the racially subdominant. However, the tactics used by this police – such as the creation of mobile squads and intelligence divisions – derived from the United States’ military practices in their colonies (Go, 2020). In this regard, Go creates a temporal link between a contemporary issue of police militarisation with its historical origins, and also a transnational link between ‘racism at home’ with the US’ ‘imperialism abroad’ in a way that transcends bifurcated understandings of racialized processes.

Without necessarily having it as their primary focus, therefore, Getachew, Gopal, and Desai each show the possibilities for social analysis that can be opened up if we retain a historical focus when looking at contemporary society. Through appreciating the historical linkages with contemporary racism, we become better placed to connect with the various intellectual paradigms which dedicated themselves to dismantling this system in the fight for social justice. It is this theme of social justice that we now turn to.

Towards anti-racist, anti-colonial solidarities

A recurrent theme runs through each of the reviewed books: the importance of forging transnational solidarities. Gopal (2019) shows how anticolonial radicals in Britain centred solidarity – in the sense of multicultural, transnational, crossorganisational coalitions – in their struggles against the British empire, meaning that thinkers in the metropoles, such as Frederic Harrison and Arthur Ballard, came to argue that the British ruling class’ fascism in the colonies, in the name of capital accumulation, could be connected with their exploitation of white British workers. Similarly, Desai’s (2020: 45) concept of ‘transnational refraction’ was built around the premise that anti-imperialists thought about colonialism and racism through the sense of shared struggle and solidarity, citing, for instance Saint Nihal Singh’s argument that there was a fundamental ‘link between the Asian migrant laborer [in the United States], the African American subject, and the colonized Indian, each connected the other by the sheer fact of being on the wrong side of the color line’. Desai (2020: 199) even concludes his book with the assertion that such transnational refraction is a prerequisite for solidarity, when he comments that: ‘solidarity emerges only out of a wilful act of seeing through the eyes of another, whose life we can only understand in glimpses’. Lastly, Getachew (2019: 145) too notes that anticolonial nationalists ‘fashioned Third World solidarity as a form of international class politics, and demanded redistribution on the basis that postcolonial states had in fact produced the wealth the West enjoyed’.

Each of these authors focuses on transnational, multicultural, multiorganisational forms of solidarity not because it is historically interesting, but because history has shown us that these forms of solidarity are successful and necessary in the struggles for social justice. I make this point not because the sociology of race is wilfully ignoring the importance of such solidarity, but because the issues of racism facing us in the contemporary and future world need to replicate these forms of solidarity fostered by the anticolonial radicals recounted in these three books. When we think of the climate crisis, for instance, a solidarity needs to be forged between the poor workers across the West (many of whom areracialised as Black and Brown) who are disproportionately exposed to air pollution, with the environmental destruction faced by indigenous people across Latin America, Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand in the name of capital accumulation, who also in turn need to form a solidarity with those in South Asia facing starvation due to droughts, who in turn need to form solidarities with those in the Caribbean, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe, where cyclones and hurricanes have been creating humanitarian crises. When we think of Islamophobia, we need to form a solidarity between those campaigning against the punitive surveillance of, and state violence towards, Muslims in the West, with those campaigning against the Uyghur detention camps in China, and the Hindutva violence towards Muslims in Kashmir. When it comes to race and racism, we are always talking about transnational, historically, epistemically, and spatially connected social processes, and – as Getachew rightfully highlights – ‘worldmaking’ processes of inequality require equally global solidarities and projects of resistance.