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This chapter reconstructs an anti-imperial popular sovereignty. Via Martin Luther King, Jr.’s essay “Beyond Vietnam,” I theorize how peoples are lured to partake in imperial projects that benefit global oligarchies. In response, King proposes a geopolitics of popular sovereignty that calls peoples to position themselves historically vis-à-vis other peoples who are the targets of aggression. This requires the people to differentiate their own popular will from oligarchic projects of outward domination and to withdraw demands for well-being that depend on the exploitation of others and the crushing of revolutionary movements. This tradition of popular sovereignty urges worldliness and historical awareness among western peoples and extends anti-oligarchic discourses of peoplehood to criticize unholy western alliances with elites in the developing world. I juxtapose this account with Frantz Fanon’s writings on postcolonial democracy, national consciousness, and transnationalism, which criticize postcolonial oligarchies that remain wedded to empire and demand a parallel recognition. This reading yields a renewed language of popular sovereignty that identifies potential radical affinities between differently located collectives struggling against global capitalist accumulation violently enabled by dominant states.
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