Civilization and Culture in Anticolonial and Comparative Political Theory

Abstract

This chapter interrogates the political practices and forces that constitute anticolonial thought and comparative political theory. Both anticolonial and comparative political theorists are curators or collectors of culture and civilization. However, their political projects often point in distinct, if not opposed, directions. This chapter aims to map the different conditions under which each group collects, the different strategies by which they curate, the subject positions these conditions and strategies produce, and, most important, the effects of their appropriations. It does so by way of four contrapuntal pairings: Aurobindo Ghose with Fred Dallmayr, Mohandas Gandhi with Farah Godrej, Frantz Fanon with Leigh Jenco, and Amilcar Cabral with Roxanne Euben. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the need to take seriously a politics of incommensurability as a political practice, one attuned to the constraints that enable subjectivity oriented toward minimizing (usually historically sedimented) forms of domination.

The View from the Future: Aurobindo Ghose’s Anticolonial Darwinism

“…In so doing, I engage a growing scholarship on anticolonial political theory examining the reconstitution of "foundational questions of modern politics" in colonial contexts (Kapila 2021, 5). While scholars in history and literary studies have for decades engaged their nuances, political theorists have only recently begun to broach disciplinary and conceptual matters raised by and through anticolonial thought (Elam 2017;Getachew 2016;Getachew and Mantena 2021;Idris 2022;Iqtidar 2022;Klausen 2020;Manjapra 2020;Pham 2020;Sultan 2022;Temin 2022;Wilder 2015). J. Daniel Elam suggests that beyond the struggle for national independence, anticolonialism comprises a "philosophical movement and critical analytic" (Elam 2017) widening and unsettling our political imaginary.…”

“… 23 On Ghose’s “borrowing” from the West while retaining India’s “fixed and permanent spirit,” see Klausen (2020, 661), Varma (1976, 207–9), and Verma (1990, 65). …”