Worlding decolonisation: Rediscovering federalist and pluralist geographies of more-than-national liberation

This paper argues for rethinking the shortcomings of historical decolonisation, commonly opposed to more ambitious decolonial goals. By addressing significant cases of European radical ‘allies’ of anticolonial movements in the years of African and Caribbean independences, this work proposes new geographies of decolonisation based on the study of transnational and multilingual circuits of committed intellectuals who proposed socialistic and/or federalistic solutions for decolonisation well beyond national independence. The paper is based on the huge archives of two French intellectuals, Jean Suret-Canale and Daniel Guérin, who represented very different tendencies in the anticolonial Leftist circuits that gathered in Paris. The core of the dying French colonial empire, Paris was also a global hub for refugees and diasporic anticolonial/antiracist activists in the 1950s and 1960s. I make the case for reconsidering ideas that were not listened in difficult historical contexts (namely the Algerian War and the Cold War) but can still inspire current conversations. Drawing on the heterogeneous non-state and federalist proposals of French-speaking radicals, including authors such as Albert Camus and Cheikh Anta Diop, I stress the need of rediscovering non-nationalistic and non-communitarian ideas of decolonisation which allow de-essentialising identities and considering pluralistic ‘worlds’ as inspirations for inclusive views of decolonisation.