Priyamvada Gopal is Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence; The Indian English Novel: Nation, History and Narration and Insurgent Empire – Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent. She was shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize in 2020 for Insurgent Empire – Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent.
Insurgent Empire interrogated the familiar claim that criticism of the British Empire was anachronistic by tracking some dissident strands on the question of colonialism in Britain through the latter half of the nineteenth century into the twentieth. It aimed also to think about the quite varied definitions of freedom that constituted the content of anticolonial struggles. In outlining the agency of the colonised in resisting the incursions of imperialism and the influence this resistance had on British dissidents, the book hoped to enable present-day descendants of the colonised, Britain’s Black and Asian denizens, to find a way to reposition themselves as contributors to the making of Britain and not simply as beneficiaries of historical white benevolence who must learn to ‘integrate’ with an unchanging British ‘norm’. Equally, young white Britons could draw on a history that was largely lost to them, one in which British dissidents and working-class Britons were inspired by anticolonial resistance and sought to actively create solidarities and links with the subjects of British rule in various corners of the Empire.
It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Insurgent Empire has been a part of recent discussions of decolonisation, a term that is at once a flashpoint in concocted ‘culture wars’ in Britain today and the necessary subject of serious research. Decolonisation – the horizon of anticolonialism – is also an intrinsically shared global and transcultural project – of relevance across boundaries while interrogating those boundaries. Often treated as either a matter of diversified curricula or felled statues, decolonisation actually enjoins us all to think about our relationship to history very fundamentally, to explore the precise nature of our entanglement, as peoples and as communities, with empire and colonialism. Rather than a necessarily divisive process (although it is always a demanding one), decolonisation requires, precisely, ‘understanding’ – historical and cultural – in a global frame. This includes self-understanding where individuals and communities think about their own historical relationship to the world-shaping legacies and afterlife of empire.
At a historical moment when ‘freedom’ is used in an incantatory fashion by billionaires buying up social media platforms and by groups resistant to public health measures, or to justify the spread of violent hate speech, it is worth asking if the annals of anticolonialism might offer us more substantial and nuanced visions of a properly decolonised ‘freedom’.
My students and I often discuss Jamaica Kincaid’s extended polemic, A Small Place, precisely such a reckoning with colonialism: ferocious in its criticism of the coloniser and his advantaged descendants but also a call for all parties with links to that history to assess the ways in which it has shaped them and their present. Although the book is deeply critical of the white supremacy that was one of the most consequential historical legacies of colonialism, it also requires the descendants of the enslaved and the colonised to reflect on their own relationship to history, to ask ‘why they are the way they are, why they do the things they do, why they live the way they live’ and in doing so, to develop a different and ‘more demanding relationship’ with the world. Today, as many postcolonial societies struggle not just with deep inequality but also intensifying authoritarianism and lethal ethnonationalism, they must examine not only those historical forces in their midst that abetted colonial subjugation but also contemporary tendencies to act much as the coloniser once did. An assessment of ‘their’ colonialism must go hand-in-hand with an unflinching scrutiny of ‘our’ own tyrannies. While formerly colonial societies have to reckon with the ways in which they continue to benefit from the spoils of enslavement and colonisation, ‘decolonisation’ should not become an excuse for postcolonial states to enact their own forms of oppression. Religious majoritarianism in an independent nation in the name of decolonisation is no better than white superiority as the basis for colonisation.
Nowhere in the world has decolonisation come to fruition: instead, it is often found in an ‘arrested’ condition, a process that was initiated but then diverted, hijacked, or morphed into something else entirely. That is a reality that our discussions of decolonisation have to take account of. Yet, for a great many people, decolonisation still remains nothing short of a vision of radical social emancipation and economic justice, either inspiring or threatening as such. At a historical moment when ‘freedom’ is used in an incantatory fashion by billionaires buying up social media platforms and by groups resistant to public health measures, or to justify the spread of violent hate speech, it is worth asking if the annals of anticolonialism might offer us more substantial and nuanced visions of a properly decolonised ‘freedom’. Anticolonialism put a range of issues on the table that were not reducible to national sovereignty, important as that concept was for self-determination in the face of colonial rule. These include land use, economic redistribution, the meaning of human rights, the undoing of race thinking and racism, ecological and resource protections, the expansion of knowledge bases and traditions of inquiry, the meanings of ‘development’, and justice for minoritised groups.
Decolonisation really invites us to think hard about what work, imaginative and material, it will take to arrive at a global order with very different priorities from those of the racial-colonial-capitalist ones which still shape human lives nearly everywhere today.
Our considerations of ‘decolonisation’ today must go beyond the fabricated polarities of so-called ‘culture wars’ in Western polities as well as the mythologies frequently generated by nationalism and nation states, including postcolonial nation states. Decolonisation really invites us to think hard about what work, imaginative and material, it will take to arrive at a global order with very different priorities from those of the racial-colonial-capitalist ones which still shape human lives nearly everywhere today. Putting dissident emancipatory traditions across contexts into dialogue is vital in generating such visions. Distinctive voices have risen out of anticolonial struggles to speak eloquently and variously of what a decolonised society and world might look like, what work it will take to get there, and what pitfalls lie in wait along the way. Insurgent Empire amplified some of those voices and ideas but there is much more work to be done building an archive of anticolonialism and decolonisation that we can draw on in thinking about decolonisation today on a global scale.