Empire, Popular Sovereignty, and the Problem of Self-and-Other-Determination

Abstract

This article develops W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of democratic despotism to illustrate the entanglement of popular sovereignty and empire through an excessive form of western self-determination and theorizes how features of this formation remain today. Democratic despotism implies that, in western democracies at the turn of the twentieth century, popular sovereignty was an impulse to partake of the wealth and resources obtained by empire. Western democracies issued a claim to determine themselves (democratically) and others (despotically), in what I call “self-and-other-determination.” I frame the question of imperial democracy within the literature on empire and racial capitalism and the writings of Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Saidiya Hartman to conceptualize how racial affective attachments allow citizens past and present to restrict democratic concern to a limited community, whose wealth relies on the imperial exploitation of racialized others. I discuss the absence of these questions in the literature on self-determination and reflect on the implications of my framework for the contemporary rise of right-wing populism.

“Unusual returns”: Transnational whiteness and the dividends of empire

“…Inés Valdez similarly reinterprets Du Bois's notion of “democratic despotism” as a form of “self‐and‐other‐determination” where the wealth and luxury enabling shared democratic rule within the imperial metropole depends upon autocratic rule and exploitation in the colonies. In this account, Valdez agrees with Myers that the compensatory dimensions associated with the wages of whiteness pertain to “the domestic [sic] dynamics of appropriation of psychological and economic resources” (Valdez, Forthcoming, 13). In constructing such a rigid distinction, however, Valdez elides key features of the “democratic bargain” (Valdez, Forthcoming, 7) that turn white workers into beneficiaries of imperialism: not just the affective benefits derived from partaking in imperial projects but also the delimitation of democratic practices and desires that are contracted away.…”

Toward a Narrow Cosmopolitanism: Kant’s Anthropology, Racialized Character and the Construction of Europe

“…To address the latter problem, it is necessary to theorize how racism secures domination, how racist exclusion and economic domination are entangled and how our core political concepts both contain and disavow these facts. While my work pursues this project through the framework of racial capitalism (Valdez 2021, forthcoming), the challenge remains for Kantians to radically modify their tradition to remain relevant interlocutors in the global struggle against racial injustice.…”

What is a black radical Kantianism without Du Bois? On method, principle, and abolition democracy

“…23 23 For an instructive outline of democratic deliberation that scrutinizes the ideological entrenchment of the interests of capital, rather than that of labor (see Valdez, 2023; Ypi, 2020). …”