My research

My research connects the history of thinking about empire, especially during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to topics in contemporary political theory. I have been particularly interested in histories of Black, African and Caribbean anticolonial thought; the politics of space and scale in relation to empire; critical theories of race and racism; and ideas of global division and hierarchy. Methodologically, I draw on diverse textual archives including journalism, political writing, novels, poems, pamphlets and scholarship.

IAS Fellowship 

I propose to outline a comparative research agenda on African and Asian anticolonial political thought in the twentieth century. The central research question is: how did twentieth-century African and Asian anticolonial thinkers develop distinct but connected accounts of world order, racial hierarchy, self-determination and national liberation?

The context for this question is a growing body of scholarship that treats anticolonialism as a major tradition of modern political thought. Yet African and Asian anticolonial traditions are still too often studied separately, a division that obscures vital conceptual traffic between intellectuals and activists from each continent – whether in colonised territories, in newly independent postcolonial states, or as expatriates and visitors in Europe, the United States and the Soviet Union. Across these spaces, anticolonial thinkers from Africa and Asia engaged in acts of movement, translation and comparison in order to diagnose empire as a global structure of hierarchy and to imagine an alternative world order.

A key aim of the project is to expand the canon, methods and conceptual vocabulary of political theory by treating African and Asian anticolonialists as political theorists who generated original accounts of domination and emancipation under conditions of empire. My research collaborator at UvA is Dr Kevin D. Pham, Associate Professor of Political Theory.