Welcome to "Discourse on Anticolonialism"!

By Peter Morgan and Tanroop Sandhu

Discourse on Anticolonialism is a Substack associated with the London History of Anticolonial Political Thought Project. We intend for this page to host writings from a variety of scholars, activists, artists, and thinkers from around the globe. We want the pieces hosted here to be as wide-ranging as the expertise of the writers; we welcome submissions on anti-imperial history, theory, politics, and culture. Taking its name from the Martinquean poet Aimé Césaire’s scathing indictment of colonialism, Discourse on Colonialism, this site will explore the breadth and depth of the creative thought and activism produced in resistance to empire.

Shahzia Sikander, “Turb-in-Motion”, 2005. Source: MOMA

In the past two decades, intellectual historians and historians of political thought in the anglophone academy have joined in the ongoing ‘global turn’ of historical scholarship. We have tried to think more globally, and pondered what that can mean for intellectual history. More attention has been paid to how ideas have circulated across the globe, and to how thinkers have considered the very concept of the ‘global’. Inevitably, this global turn has been entangled with the themes of empire. Since the 1990s, especially, scholars have debated the relationships between thinkers and ideologies, and the processes, structures, and legacies of imperialism and colonialism.

Both the global turn and a critical interest in empire have helped to expose and contest some of the major weaknesses of the intellectual history in the English-speaking world, including its tendency to parochialism and methodological nationalism. These intellectual movements together represent a laudable attempt to globalise intellectual history. New analyses of the way thought spreads, is vernacularized, ‘emplaced’, and transformed have challenged assumptions of derivativeness and the centrality of European culture. There is a vast swathe of original thinking from the Global South - both past and present. The struggle against colonialism, in particular, was a productive endeavour for theorising new social forms, implementing novel modes of political mobilisation, and political thought more broadly.

Yet while an increasing volume of literature reflects the ‘transnational’ or ‘global’ turn in intellectual history, academic institutions have not always done so. The History of Anticolonial Political Thought Project rectifies that. The Project hosts a regular seminar series, History of Anticolonial Thought, on topics ranging from Kashmir and Balochistan, to Palestine and Vietnam. We also organise an annual workshop on these themes. Discourse on Anticolonialism will continue and widen this work.

In these ways, we try to ensure that the turn to a more global intellectual history, attuned to the historical importance of empire, does not only create space for the study of familiar, ‘Western’ thinkers from new angles, but also for the study of thinkers from outside the West who have hitherto been largely neglected by anglophone historians of political thought. After all, it is from these parts of the world and their liberation movements that some of the most creative and significant political thought has been produced.