Anti-Colonial Solidarity: Analytical Clarification through Historical Reconstruction

ended

The overall objective of my research programme is to develop an account of anti-colonial solidarity grounded in the global history of political thought, and to work out anti-colonial solidarity’s contribution to contemporary political theory. I take my cue from the recent emphasis on the practical dimensions of solidarity in analytic political theory. On this account, solidarity is best understood as a particular mode of action, through which agents attempt collectively to redress the effects of injustice or to contest the structures that produce and sustain it. But my project is motivated by the following hypothesis: that the history of anti-colonial solidarity is best able to clarify solidarity’s practical and global dimensions. The first theories of solidarity were primarily concerned with nation building in modern France. But against and alongside these classical accounts, the central figures of my research project developed alternative models of solidarity in anti-colonial movements explicitly oriented transnationally and globally. Cuban revolutionary José Martí, Haitian statesman Anténor Firmin, and American Pan-Africanist W.E.B. Du Bois used solidarity to link local struggles against colonial domination around the world. By investigating these anti-colonial writers, and their understanding of the relation between local, transnational, and global political struggles, my research: (i) contributes to and expands on recent developments in analytic political theory by identifying anti-colonial solidarity as a distinct type of solidarity. In doing so, I (ii) develop a new perspective on solidarity that exceeds the ‘top-down’ models of cosmopolitanism that have long dominated political theory. I also (iii) excavate a crucial but neglected chapter in the global history of this contested political value.