Preface

In recent years, there has been a noticeable drift, within certain intellectual circles and practices, in the direction of thinking again about universalism and its cognates: universality, the universal, and so on. What exactly is motivating this new ferment of discussion is not very clear—whether it signals nothing more than a new occasion of North Atlantic intellectual discontent or reflects something deeper, more pervasive, a new impasse, and thus a new problem-space that has in effect both rendered the old bourgeois or European Enlightenment universalism exhausted or void and posed for us a new question and therefore a new challenge, is hard to conclusively say. My inclination is to harbor the provisional thought that perhaps something of the latter is at stake: a new conjunctural demand on the universal, universality, universalism. From the point of view of my concerns with the colonial and its long aftermaths in the ineradicable contemporary predicaments of the postcolonial states (surely one of the classic scenes of the problematic of universalism), there is a provocation to turn/return, reflexively, to the language game of universalism—not to revive the old terms and promises so much as to ask where we are in relation to new questions we might ask and new claims we might make.1One way to approach the question of the contemporary demand on universalism is to remind ourselves of a famous conjuncture of crisis and possibility when the Martinican poet and Marxist Aimé Césaire felt obliged to clarify his position in the course of his letter to Maurice Thorez offering his resignation from the French Communist Party. Recognizing that he would almost certainly be accused of a hidebound provincialism (from the standpoint of Thorez’s normative White European universalism), Césaire was driven to write preemptively: “Provincialism? Not at all. I am not burying myself in a narrow particularism. But neither do I want to lose myself in an emaciated universalism. There are two ways to lose oneself: walled segregation in the particular or dilution in the ‘universal.’”2 The letter is dated 24 October 1956. Notably, the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists had just taken place the month before at the Sorbonne. Césaire was one of its principal architects. Addressing Thorez, he insisted on the justification for embracing the specificity of his Black Antillean experience while speaking in the universal idiom of Marxism’s critique of capitalism. (In exactly the same moment, George Padmore was insisting on the same posture in Pan-Africanism or Communism.3) Césaire politely declined the offer of Thorez’s false choice and embraced instead the generative paradox of a universalism routed in and through our native (not nativist) demand to be who we are. This, as I have suggested elsewhere, is precisely the demand eloquently articulated by Ato Sekyi-Otu in his pathbreaking book, Left Universalism: Africacentric Essays.4In Césaire’s moral-political gesture there is an important lesson for us to learn in our own contemporary postcolonial conjuncture, which is, in a sense, also characterized by an impasse—and an opportunity. One way of describing this impasse is to say that it turns on the effective foreclosure of the old languages of anti-imperialist and socialist thinking and practice, the old languages and infrastructures of internationalist solidarity and exchange (that sustained the Bandung project, Nonaligned Movement, Pan-Africanism, and so on), the old senses of common causes and the common grounds on which we once staked a common claim to an anticapitalist and socialist future. We recognize the loss. We sense the need. Our challenge is to reopen the demand for a universality immanent with the features of our particularity, an analytic that discloses the common grounds of our malaise and an ethics of solidarity fully cognizant of our distinctive paths.In August this year (2024), I had the great honor and inestimable pleasure of participating in an occasion titled “Other Universals: Theorizing from Postcolonial Locations on Politics and Aesthetics.” The gathering, which took place in Johannesburg, was organized by friends who have created a remarkable consortium of scholars from the global South calling itself, with paradoxical intent, Other Universals. They include Suren Pillay, Victoria Collis-Buthelezi, Ruchi Chaturvedi, Aaron Kamugisha, Chika Mba, and Yonas Ashine. These are young intellectuals who are not only immensely gifted in their own right, in their own individual writings, but have also created a collaborative project of compelling intellectual and moral-political value. I cannot do justice to it here. But suffice it to say, the Other Universals project is first and foremost an intervention into the global structure of knowledge production, circulation, and valuation that aims to unsettle and subvert the inheritance of European universalism. Especially relevant to the collective are those disciplines and practices of the humanities and humanistic social sciences because it is in these most of all that a picture of our humanity—its pasts and its prospects—is actively constructed and defended and criticized. In their view, it is not only that the resource gap between universities in the global North and the global South is vast and growing (a banal truth in itself) but also that the knowledge that these respective arenas of scholarly life are presumed to produce is considerably, irreconcilably different in kind and status. In an old and familiar asymmetrical pattern that has scarcely diminished in its effects with the age of postcolonial sovereignty, the humanistic knowledge produced in the global South is perceived as epistemically derivative, as lacking conceptual novelty and theoretical purchase. In the global world today, Europe (or Euro-America) remains the source of theory-value. The global South has an abundance of creative narrative but a paucity of reflexive theory. In a real way, we have still not learned how to “decolonize our minds”—as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o long ago urged that we do.5It is not surprising that for the Other Universals collective (as was the case for Césaire) Marxism is an area of special, even urgent, concern. The story of Marxism in the making of anticolonial and postcolonial politics is an enormously complicated one. This is partly because the story is not identical to that in the global North, where the mythology of the Industrial Revolution produced a purified image of disembodied labor confronting abstract capital. In the global South, by contrast, both capital and labor are always-already vividly fractured along multiple conflicting dimensions of identity and interest simultaneously. Moreover, in the global South, Marxism has scarcely ever appeared without Leninism. Lenin’s theory of imperialism, and his strategic reflections on revolution and the capture of state power, have always been as pertinent (often more so) than Marx’s copious pages on the structure of the capitalist system. Notably, then, holding open discursive space for rethinking Marxisms from the global South is itself embedded in a wider project of rethinking critique. For the Other Universals collective, critique is not simply an effect of reason. Questioning critique entails questioning its demands, its histories, its targets, its idioms, its strategies, its traditions, and its modes of attunement—it entails recognizing the ways in which critique has never been separated from embodied communities of identity and inheritance and therefore embodied powers of inclusion and exclusion.In this respect, one fundamental insight of the Other Universals collective is the necessity of building platforms for accommodating concrete communities of discussion and exchange among thinkers working from various locations in the global South (the African continent, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and South Asia) and also a pedagogical framework to enable graduate students from various locations in the global South to engage each other. Indeed, the most instructive sessions at the August gathering in Johannesburg were those with these graduate students, which were characterized by a certain familiar generational irreverence for the assigned “readings” as students brought to the seminar table their more immediate cultural-political concerns. Soon enough the specificities of the texts were lost. But something else was gained—namely, the ethos of intellectual dialogue, the rationale for argument, the common purpose of disagreement over worlds that are in peril. It is this difficult practical cross-generational dialogue among embodied subjects of diverse intellectual traditions that seems to me necessary to cultivate and advance because it is only in these exchanges over concrete histories of futures past that we can explore together the dimensions of our divergent universalities.A few years ago, Massimiliano Tomba published an unusual book, Insurgent Universality: An Alternative Legacy of Modernity, in which he sought to not only alter our common sense regarding the making of the modern world and its hegemonic ideology of universalism but also to suggest a contrasting account of our present in the name of a counteruniversalism, a political universalism—or rather, an insurgent universality.6 Part of Tomba’s project entails decolonizing our understanding of time, including the time of modern European history. He asks, provocatively: “What conception of time is appropriate to our present and the duties of politics today”? Tomba wants not only to decenter the privileged narrative of the philosophy of history that normalizes a linear experience of progress but also to imagine a pluralized, recursive, recombinatory temporality, a “topological time,” that flows heterogeneously and multiversally such that “‘archaic’ forms” are experienced not as merely belonging to the past but rather as potentially coexisting and overlapping with contemporary forms irreducible to any predefined historicity.7 In so doing, he emphasizes the co-presence of trajectories of pasts-presents-futures that are not “synchronized” by the dominant rhythms of temporality defined by capitalism or the nation-state.This is a stimulating intervention. The book deserves our studied attention because whether or not in the end you agree with every formulation, you cannot not be provoked by its intemperate ambition to unplug the circuits of the old assumptions about politics, the old matrices of historical time, and the old orders of colonizing power.Johannesburg—New YorkAugust–September 2024