As the Cold War intensified in the late 1940s, the British Empire was threatened by nationalist insurrection in the colonies and by US–Soviet competition for global supremacy. Over the next three decades, the loss of over fifty overseas possessions problematized the country’s dominant narrative of national identity, much of it centered on the wealth and power accumulated by empire. The complex cultural responses to decolonization were typified in literature. On the one hand, diasporic authors from the Global South developed a powerful strand of anti-imperial commentary, illustrated by the work of Sam Selvon, Beryl Gilroy, Andrew Salkey, Attia Hosain, and Grace Nichols. On the other hand, several generations of (largely) white, middle-class English writers stuck to the imperial attitudes of the past, condemning indigenous revolt in the colonies (Evelyn Waugh, Paul Scott, Olivia Manning, P. H. Newby) and objecting to immigration into the metropolis (John Braine, Anthony Burgess, Margot Bennett). While postimperial fiction existed, most famously in novels by George Orwell, Doris Lessing, and Colin MacInnes, postcolonial commentary would have a much greater impact on literary treatments of empire and identity in the twenty-first century.

Many critics today rightly call for “decolonizing” utopia given its undeniable deployment in imperialist as well as liberatory projects. It is more historically accurate to view Thomas More’s Utopia, however, as a site of struggle, especially given the contradiction of considering a society without any conception of private property to be “colonialist” at all. At the very least, we should acknowledge Utopia’s negative form, and the problems that its so-called colonialism is attempting to address before too hastily denouncing utopia as inherently colonialist. Utopia, I argue, is always a site of struggle, a reminder of the difficulty of imagining liberation in a “wrong” world. Early receptions of Utopia in England reveal that it was not embraced by advocates of colonial and propertarian projects; not only was it viewed as an impediment to the unfolding of such agendas while the primitive accumulation of capital was underway, but, revealingly, the values and lifeways of More’s Utopians were often associated with the very peoples being colonized and enslaved, not their colonizers. Failing to understand utopia dialectically, then, not only gives rise to presentist misunderstandings of the past, but problematically limits how it can best be understood to work today.

Chapter 4 adds another intellectual dimension and genealogy to Nkrumah’s political-economic philosophy by arguing that he was aware of Lenin’s state capitalist ideas and that the Ghanaian economy existed and functioned within this state capitalist, mixed economic framework. Moreover, this chapter examines how people within and outside Ghana understood the duality of Ghana’s socialist and capitalist economy – its socialist state capitalist project – and its applicability to Ghana’s conditions and the postcolonial world. It demonstrates that the Ghanaian political economy under Nkrumah combining socialist and capitalist development paths was not a contradictory Marxian policy but was embedded within Black Marxist understandings of Lenin’s state capitalist ideas. In so doing, Socialist De-Colony merges the nonoverlapping intellectual and geographic spaces of Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic” and Cedric Robinson’s “Black Marxism” with Maxim Matusevich’s “Africa and the Iron Curtain.” It shows how the cultural and intellectual interchange of ideas between and amongst Black thinkers moved beyond the Atlantic circuit and were simultaneously heavily mediated and impacted by ideas from the East.

The epilogue returns to the major themes discussed throughout the book. In addition, it examines the contemporaneous nature of Ghana–Russian relations, particularly through the lens of anti-Black violence and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2021. It also looks at the continued contestation between Ghanaians abroad and the embassy in Russia and Ghanaians’ use of protest domestically to seek better rights and economic benefits. The epilogue demonstrates that while Nkrumah and the explicit debates and discourses on socialism that consumed Ghana in the 1960s have almost vanished, that their ghosts continue to shape Ghanaian society.

Chapter 2 interrogates the development schemes between Ghana and the Soviet Union – notably the Cotton Textile Factory and the Soviet Geological Survey Team. These engagements were supposed to embody Ghana’s new postcolonial socialist modernity and highlight the benefits, opportunities, and possibilities of Soviet partnership. It demonstrates how pro-Soviet and Eastern bloc stories in the Ghanaian press were not simply intended to offer hagiographic praise or to support Nkrumah’s commitment to geopolitical nonalignment. Instead, they were part of a concentrated movement to dismantle and deconstruct the myth of Western scientific and cultural superiority and anti-Soviet bias, which were introduced and reinforced by Western colonial education and rule. In addition, Chapter 2 focuses on the relationships, expertise, livelihoods, and contestations of the technicians, bureaucrats, and local Ghanaian actors who were essential to overseeing the actual success of Ghana-Soviet relations in tangible ways for the Ghanaian people. It demonstrates how everyday Ghanaians employed Ghana–Soviet spaces to demand rights and protections against ethnic-discrimination and favoritism, and to make citizenship claims.

As postcolonialism turned its attention to African literature, culture, and intellectual history, a number of very productive alliances between postcolonial theory and theories of globalization, subaltern studies, decoloniality, and transnational cultural studies emerged, but the relationship to poststructuralism has always been an ambivalent one. Taking Sunday Anozie’s debt to structuralism as a point of departure, the shift from structuralist to poststructuralist readings – with specific reference to Homi Bhabha, Jacques Derrida, and Achille Mbembe – is seen as indicative of a general move from a relatively static model of analysis to a more dynamic one. Using the case studies of Sony Lab’ou Tansi and Abdelkebir Khatibi, the chapter argues that the theoretical richness and dynamism of poststructuralism, as evidenced by the proliferation of its tropes and strategic gestures, demonstrates clearly its value and potential for contemporary African contexts.

Chapter 6 examines the lives, intellectual discourses, and working conditions of those who were supposed to build socialism in postindependent Africa. Workers embraced and subverted the socialist visions the state and its leftist supporters imagined. Despite the state and leftist intellectuals championing themselves as a worker’s party and embodying workers’ rights, laws were passed to handicap workers’ ability to unionize and strike outside of state channels. Despite these measures, workers used their voices, feet, and letters to highlight the contradictions and the limitations of a postcolonial, socialist African government that both championed workers’ rights and sought to put the means of production into their hands. The workers used ingenious techniques to resist and negotiate the power of the state and capital. Workers understood that their positions were tenuous and that true liberation was only possible in coordination and conjunction with each other. Black liberation was not a solo affair. For workers, they believed that their liberation was linked up with the survival and success of Black labor worldwide. Events and time would prove them right. The chapter complements histories highlighting African workers’ centrality – through their letters and feet – in articulating the contradictions and aspirations of postcolonial African states and socialism.

The ten years between Joseph Stalin’s death and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy brought both dangerous crises and fitful steps toward an easing of superpower tensions. While this chapter describes the confrontations in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Berlin, Cuba, and elsewhere, it also emphasizes four breakthroughs toward coexistence and cooperation: the Geneva summit of 1955; the agreement on cultural exchanges in 1958; Nikita Khrushchev’s tour of the United States in 1959; and the conclusion of a partial test ban treaty in 1963. Such progress was delayed and complicated both by domestic political dynamics and by international rivalries in an era of accelerating decolonization and the fraying of the Sino-Soviet alliance. Yet perhaps most remarkable was how far top political leaders, journalists, scientists, musicians, dancers, and others were able to go to transcend ideological tensions and negative stereotypes through dialogue, negotiation, travel, and cultural exchange.

Chapter 1 examines the fragility and unenviability of Black independence. It shows how Black Marxists and anticolonial figures navigated and negotiated Soviet and communist linkages from the 1940s to the 1960s against attempts by white Western imperial and colonial powers to weaponize the term “communism” to suffocate anticolonial movements and suspend Black independence. Once independent, the chapter shows that the Ghanaian government’s wariness of hastily establishing relations with the Soviet government arose not only from Western pressure but from genuine fears of swapping one set of white colonizers for another. The chapter then questions the totalizing analytical purchase of using the Cold War paradigm to understand the relationship between Black African nations and white empires – whether capitalist or communist – during the 20th century. It posits that a framework highly attentive to race and racism in international relations and diplomatic history must also be employed to understand the diplomatic actions of African states during this period. By so doing, Chapter 1 follows other pioneering works to argue that Ghanaians and the early African states had agency and dictated the paces and contours of their relationship with the USSR and other white imperial states.

The fluidity of the continuum between colonization and sovereignty is particularly evident in the case of small islands generally and Pacific Island states specifically. Colonialism arrived late to much of the Pacific and was thus short-lived compared to other regions. Imperial powers also struggled to extend control beyond their administrative capitals. Yet newly independent states remain enmeshed in relations of dependence with metropolitan countries via Official Development Assistance and forms of “non-sovereignty” or “free association” with states such as the United States, UK, France, and New Zealand. These alternative forms of sovereignty reflect a century-long process of experimentation with political forms for island communities and demonstrate historical legacies and the ambiguity of sovereignty itself. To substantiate this claim, this chapter traces the history of the ways island communities in the North Pacific have been governed over more than a century.

Chapter 5 excavates the debates leftist and socialist thinkers in Ghana had about the brand of socialism they were building and its relationship to religion, morality, Black freedom, and precolonial African history. The chapter argues that debates surrounding how to define and historicize socialism in the African context were not simply intellectual exercises and disputes over labeling rights but central to reclaiming Africans and African history within global history. It was a deliberate critique of white supremacist paradigms that situated ideas, histories, and societies emanating from Africa as operating outside the continuum and space of human history. By rethinking and (re)historicizing histories of exploitation and violence in Africa, socialists in Ghana were simultaneously decolonizing and rescuing socialism from itself. The chapter demonstrates that socialism then was more than a fashionable lexicon or moniker to curry favor with certain geopolitical groups. Instead, it also offered a tangible way, a theoretical analytic, for Africans to revisit, debate, and offer a critical appraisal of African historiography and societies and Africa’s place in world history. Not only were the socialist theorists in Ghana domesticating socialism, they were remaking it globally. They were Marxist-Socialist worldmakers.

Grounded by close attention to literary renderings of Algeria’s national epic, this chapter examines the historical entanglement of novelistic and nationalist projects in the wake of the decolonizing movements that founded independent nation-states across the African continent in the mid twentieth century. It begins by reconsidering Frantz Fanon’s diagnostic phenomenology of postcolonial nationalisms across and beyond the continent, articulated in two essays concerning national consciousness in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), alongside the novelistic experimentation of Kateb Yacine. To further explore some implications of Fanon’s claim that revolution is above all an aesthetic project, the chapter unfolds by surveying texts by Assia Djebar, Yamina Mechakra, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Mahmoudan Hawad to elucidate the ways in which African writers have theorized, anticipated, eluded, and unsettled both nationalist narrative imperatives and Eurocentric interpretive protocols concerning this paradigmatic literary form of modernity.

This Epilogue documents the colonial coal regime’s struggle for survival during the twilight of French colonialism in Indochina. It also examines the closure and decolonization of large-scale coal mining enterprises and discusses the legacy of coal mining in postcolonial Vietnam.

Irregular war, like war, remains an enduring feature of security studies both as they relate to internal state security and sovereignty as well as to international relations. Irregular war may not always appear to hold political purposes; many today seem driven by religious ideology, but the institution of theocratic governance has a politics of its own. Thus, like regular war, irregular war is subordinate to a political purpose. Whether they occur on the periphery of regular wars or perform roles to keep state competition from escalating into conflict, irregular wars are often intricately tied to their regular counterparts. While two broad theories of counterinsurgency both claim to have prescriptions for winning an irregular fight, one – the good governance approach – is plagued by problems of implementation at the governmental level, and the other – coercion – entails unreasonable brutality against both insurgent and population, often unbefitting a liberal counterinsurgent force.

The chapter explores the declaration of contraception as a human right within the United Nations, focusing on key events such as the International Conference on Human Rights in Tehran in 1968. The involvement of transnationally operating NGOs such as the International Planned Parenthood Federation and the Population Council is highlighted. The narrative showcases the shift toward population control as a human right, despite opposition from such entities as the Catholic Church. The chapter delves into the resolutions and debates at the Tehran conference, emphasizing differing perspectives on population control as a human rights issue. It particularly highlights contributions from the opposing blocs in the Cold War and the Communist critique against what Soviet states understood as the fusion of human rights and Neo-Malthusianism. The chapter concludes by discussing a significant transition toward justifying population control programs in terms of human rights rather than just economic necessity, arguing that the fusion of human rights with population control in the 1960s marks a significant turning point in the global discourse on demographic policies and individual rights.