This special issue brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to reflect on the decolonization of nation-states through acts of subversion, mimicry and criminality in the colonial and postcolonial world. Since the birth of nation-states, emerging in conjunction with the first wave of globalization and the height of European colonialism in the mid-nineteenth century, avant-gardists have problematized the role of the nation-state. With the split between Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin in the First International in 1872, anarchism's challenge to parliamentary politics and the nation-state rapidly spread across the colonial world. i For instance, during the 1870s, Jewish, Italian and Spanish labour migrants to Egypt brought with them discourses of radical social emancipation, merging with local labour movements and promoting internationalist activism that resisted the nationstate as an organizing principle. ii Meanwhile, in the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies of South America, railway and maritime workers confronted formations of state bureaucratization with autonomous union democracies, contributing to working class solidarities across ethnic and national divides at the end of the nineteenth century. iii In Europe's southern gateways to overseas colonies, other challenges to the state emerged in the shape of criminal underground organizations such as the Italian Camorra. Structured much like the Japanese Yakuza and Chinese Triads and organized around ethnic and national identities, such organizations simultaneously subvert and mimic the state, presenting problems for our understanding of legal regimes and their vested interests. iv Across South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, anti-colonial rebellions, labour strikes and boycotts during the interwar years contributed directly to the decades of formal decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s. v
This essay argues that criminality provides a critical magnifying lens to understand the network of subversive disconnections and disjunctures in postcolonial cities. By connecting the postcolonial city to the discourse on crime, it investigates the specific relations between exploitation, colonisation and the underworld. As crossroads of the different intersections of power determined by colonialism, decolonisation and globalisation (Rashmi Varma, The Postcolonial City and Its Subjects: London, Nairobi, Bombay, London, Routledge, 2011), postcolonial cities expose the many and varied entanglements between the informal economies in the Global North and South, between the legal and the unofficial. Starting with the assumption that colonialism is predicated upon the principles of Western modernity, this essay frames criminal organisations as forces acting in opposition to and in concurrence with the state. Whereas the discourses on criminality are conventionally employed to reinforce processes of 'Othering' and racialisation in fringe locations, they also have the potential to unveil the 'hidden truths' of Western urban modernity. To this end, this essay employs Christ Stopped at Eboli (Carlo Levi, London: Penguin, 1947), a novel that unveils the links between exploitation and illegality. The society portrayed in the text shows the manifestations of an 'unauthorised modernity' (Iain Chambers, Postcolonial Interruptions: Unauthorized Modernity, London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017); an alternative view of development that refashions the meaning of what is conventionally regarded as legal and accepted.
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