This chapter takes as its starting point Mulk Raj Anand’s literary interest in what he describes as “earthiness”, and argues that it is neither a simplistic yardstick of social realism, nor simply a derivation of Anglo-American modernism, but something in between, something different, and perhaps something more. In common with many of the other chapters in this volume, I make the case that Mulk Raj Anand was neither a modernist nor a realist, and that for a more satisfactory evaluation of Anand-the-novelist, we need to follow an entirely different literary tradition. Focusing on the dirtiness and squalor that is present in much of Anand’s writing, I argue that Anand deploys this trope to make the novel into neither a realist depiction of the world, nor a disaffected, alienated exercise in aestheticism, but as a vehicle to explore what it might mean to be modern, what it might mean to be anti-colonialist and what it might mean to be nationalist.

As represented by the title, this chapter unpacks how the British colonial administration left indelible legacies on the Nigerian state and how those legacies killed the sociopolitical fabric of the region before the institution of colonial rule. Through the concept of regionalism, which the chapter understands as “the systemic division of governmental control where a central or federal government holds clearly defined authority and power,” the colonial administration hamstrung Nigeria’s political and economic growth by creating ethnic mistrust and conflict, the marginalization of minorities and agitation among ethnicities after the development of ethnic nationalism. Self-serving interests of colonialists aimed to partition the country along arbitrary lines, disregarding the complex web of pre-existing linguistic and ethnic communities for ease of administration. The effects of these colonialist policies fueled the ethnopolitical and social conflict (and other marginalization of minority groups only possible after the creation of a state) within Nigeria, thus stymieing the development of Nigeria’s internal and independent sociopolitical structures.

In Chapter 4, the third case study investigates how martyrdom discourse was deployed by Sikhs during World War I. It begins with an analysis of the social and cultural situation at the turn of the twentieth century in Punjab, from where the majority of Sikh sepoys hailed, and the resulting relationships with the imperialist British Raj. After examining the socioeconomic conditions that led Sikhs to enlist in the British Indian Army, I discuss how a military mindset constructed a particular idea of Sikh character. The chapter proceeds with an analysis of Sikh traditions of martyrdom and the way the British Empire was colored as a prophesized entity, and therefore actions in its service construed as a sacred duty. Simultaneously, I describe the antagonism felt for the British Empire by emigrant Sikh communities especially in North America, creating a bifurcation of perspectives reflected in approval or dismissal of the self-sacrifice of Sikh soldiers and the creation of anticolonial martyr forms. The chapter concludes with an examination of how the failed promises of the British government following the war marginalized those Sikh martyrs who fell in their ranks during World War I.

Ngô explores the variegated roles that imperialism played as a tool to inspire forms of Black politics. Imperialism helped to define a method for how the queer writers of New York challenged the construction of identity categories that shaped the social order. Through a study of orientalist objects, characters, and the shaping of a queer black politics, Ngô examines touchstone works by the eras most important writers, including Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, Nella Larsen, Richard Bruce Nugent, Jean Toomer, and Claude McKay, the essay uncovers a range of methods and politics behind queer black creative arts. While some authors used imperial logic to create a queer Black aesthetic and expose the meanings assigned to race, gender difference, and nonnormative sexualities, others were inspired by anitcolonial movements to push back on the state, challenging law, policing, and incarceration.

This chapter examines how Bengali authors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries use the mosquito to experiment with scale in fiction and poetry. Authors such as Rabindranāth Tagore, Trailokyanāth Mukhopadhyay, Annadāshankar Ray, and Tārāshankar Bandyopadhyāy question both Western medical perception and Western concepts of literary realism by stressing how malaria and mosquitoes escape neat categorizations of meaning. Furthermore, the mosquito in works of poetry and fantasy also shows the interconnection of medical, political, and environmental issues. This chapter uses postcolonial criticism, medical history, and methods drawn from the Health Humanities in order to engage the poetics and politics of Bengali literary interpretations of malaria. By so doing, it stresses the importance of non-Western perspectives to the study of literature and medicine, suggesting that scholarship engage the multiple medical value systems as well as literary traditions that reinterpret and subvert Western tenets of scientific thought.

The overwhelming majority of the United Nations’ 193 member states were once colonies of Western empires. Most of these colonies gained independence during the era of decolonization that followed the Second World War. Despite their numbers and their nationalist struggles, these colonies-cum-countries have not attracted much attention in the standard works on nationalism. As the editors of this volume observe, those works are largely Eurocentric in their orientation. They generally portray the rise of nationalism in colonial dependencies as supplemental to, and largely derivative of, nationalism in the Western world.1 Even Benedict Anderson, a specialist on Southeast Asia who was deeply knowledgeable about nationalist movements in the colonial world, characterized these movements in his hugely influential Imagined Communities as conforming to a modular design that originated with American and European nationalism and nations.2

Agnes Smedley was an American writer, journalist, activist, and spy who traveled North America, Europe, and Asia in pursuit of her anti-imperialist and communist agendas. She came to anticolonial transnationalism through her personal and often intimate ties to India’s diasporic revolutionaries in the US (1912–1919) and Germany (1920–1929), as well as Chinese communists and Soviet spies in Shanghai (1929–1937). The chapter traces Smedley’s global crossings as a prism for exploring the power of intimacy in the making (and unmaking) of transnational solidarities, while also considering the gendered experiences of revolutionary women like her who were critical to shaping transnational anticolonialism. The chapter argues that Smedley’s most revolutionary acts were often intimate and private ones, including interracial marriage and romantic ties to leading luminaries of transnational anticolonialism during the interwar period.

In his path-breaking 1954 monograph, Nations nègres et culture, the Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop denounced Western histories for providing false justification for European imperialism and perpetuating notions of the inferiority of Black peoples. Diop called instead for histories that revalorized the African past and demonstrated Black contributions to world history. By contextualizing Diop’s historiographical interventions in terms of his anticolonial politics and the work of other anticolonial and anti-racist thinkers, this chapter shows how, in the decades immediately following the Second World War, the terrain of history was a key battleground of anti-racist and anticolonial activism. The multiple sites in which anticolonial and anti-racist histories were developed – from museums like the Musée de l’Homme through journals such as Présence Africaine, and organizational initiatives funded by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) initiatives – are central to this story.

This chapter reflects upon the role of petitions in the history of transnational anticolonialism at the United Nations. Even though the UN circumscribed the right to petition in 1948 by excluding it from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, anticolonial nationalists used petitions to oppose the return of colonial rule, condemn human rights abuses, and demand self-determination. The independence movement in Somaliland and the other former Italian colonies in Africa sent petitions to the Trusteeship Council, which in turn were supported by anticolonial UN delegations from the global South. Although Italy returned as the administering authority when the Trust Territory of Somaliland was formed, this collective effort led to the defeat of the Bevin–Sforza Plan and contributed to increasing international support for decolonization.

Mexico City in the mid-1920s was a crucial gathering point for Latin American anti-imperialists. This chapter retraces the emergence of a common agenda among Communists, radical Mexican peasant movements, and exiled dissidents from across the region, focusing on the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas (LADLA) and its publication, El Libertador. While it drew on the region’s deep anti-imperialist traditions, the convergence that took place in the wake of Mexico’s 1910–1920 Revolution was decisively shaped by transnational connections with the Communist International, which served as a conduit to anticolonial movements across the world. In the second half of the 1920s, LADLA and El Libertador not only animated movements for regional solidarity – notably against the US occupations of Nicaragua and Haiti – they also showcased a newly global anticolonial sensibility, drawing parallels between Latin America’s situation and those of peoples subject to direct or indirect colonial rule in Africa, India, and China.

This chapter contests the prevailing interpretation of the post-Mabo turn as a decisive new era in Australian cultural history. While the Mabo High Court decision of 1992 was an important milestone in struggles for Indigenous land rights, the insistence on this date as a literary periodization neglects the continuities in settler culture that still structure settler fiction in Australia. Alternatively, recent First Nations fiction suggests possibilities within and outside dominant paradigms of legality.

First Nations Australian literature has often been the object of incomprehension and derogation by settler critics – something a deeper perspective of “presencing” can overcome. This chapter takes a decolonial perspective and highlights the self-assertion of First Nations writers against invidious characterization, such as that received by the poetic work of Oodgeroo Noonuccal in the 1960s. It demonstrates how nonIndigenous readers can approach texts by First Nations authors not as “tourists” but as “invited guests.”

David Galula’s (1964) Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice likely shaped current American counterinsurgency doctrine more than any other historical text. A French national of North African birth, he wrote his core works in English, for American military readers. While sharing many strategies and tactics with Anglophone theorists from the period, his manual adopted a strikingly unified process narrative for the step-by-step defeat of insurgency. His work was informed by decolonization in East Asia and North Africa as well as a deep anticommunism. More than anything else—and largely to the exclusion of past French doctrine—he was informed by reading Mao and by field observation of Maoist guerrillas in China. Galula’s strategy was to run Maoist guerrilla warfare backward. In adopting this process story, he tacitly internalized the logic of Mao’s politics as such. He produced an apparently hyper-coherent doctrine that was in practice divided against itself in multiple ways. This account acquired enormous influence, intermittently shaping Anglo-American counterinsurgency for decades.

Ellison’s reflections on his stay in Rome betray the awareness of living in a “barely controlled chaos” (CE 29), even in “exile” (Bellow Papers). Notably, Ellison was reluctant to associate himself with the community of black expatriates in Europe and with any conversation on black world cultures, a category connected to the anticolonial movements and the cultural politics of the Communist Internationale. This chapter looks at the tension between the private dimension of living abroad and the writer’s comments on current international events, to foreground an understanding of cultural identity much closer to what soon afterward will be termed African Diasporic cultures.

The introductory chapter traces Surrealism’s critical legacy across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From its initial emergence out of Dada in 1924, Surrealism became a defining critical and creative concept, and not only for the avant-garde movement penned in its name. It inspired a range of critical enterprises and creative practices, including: Walter Benjamin’s anthropological investigation of the everyday material world; the politics and aesthetics of a number of anticolonial enterprises; James Clifford’s investigations of the ethnographic ambitions of dissident surrealism; the political events of May ’68; the October group’s recalibration of Greenberg’s aesthetic formalism; and, more recently, Surrealism’s influence on new materialism, thing theory, animal/human studies, affect theory, and a plethora of contemporary participatory art movements. Described by Maurice Blanchot as “a brilliant obsession,” Surrealism continues to exert a profound rethinking of the relationship between art, politics, and everyday experience.

This chapter offers a portrait of the younger Ho Chi Minh, including his family background in Vietnam prior to him setting out on a series of sea journeys that would lead to France. Settling in Paris at the end of World War I, he soon gained local and even international attention by petitioning for Vietnamese autonomy at the Versailles Peace Conference. Through the prism of French police reports, in this chapter we see Ho Chi Minh, now calling himself Nguyen Ai Quoc, immersed in study and networking with a view to exposing the worst excesses of colonialism. He was beginning to distance himself from the Eurocentric preoccupation of French communists, and was persuaded by Lenin's own framing of the colonial and national question. In his early adulthood he published his own newsletter and organized other colonials before making a dramatic exit in the direction of Moscow. There he undertook studious preparation under Communist International auspices ready to launch his revolutionary career, from the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou (Canton) as it turned out.