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A new account of global justice that recovers anticolonial thought for resisting a neocolonial age
Politicians and activists today turn to the language of decolonization to call attention to such issues as cultural and linguistic decline, exploitative foreign investment, and global institutions dominated by superpowers. But does anticolonial thought really provide a model for reimagining world politics? The history of decolonization has not resulted in the liberating transformations that many envisioned. In Postcolonial Global Justice, Shuk Ying Chan proposes a new account of postcolonial global justice centered around the value of social equality. Drawing on the thought of Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, and Jawaharlal Nehru, Chan argues that a central theme in anticolonial thought is the rejection of hierarchy and the embrace of equality. These ideas from decolonization, she suggests, give us tools for critiquing contemporary global hierarchies and for rejecting postcolonial nationalism more concerned with policing its citizens than promoting their freedom and equality.
Following the wave of postcolonial state-founding in the twentieth century, many in the West saw decolonization as largely accomplished-and yet global politics continue to feature hierarchies that resemble colonial relations. Chan investigates these new and persistent colonial hierarchies across three areas of contemporary world politics: international investment, cultural imperialism, and global governance. Exploring the changes needed to move toward a new, more equal postcolonial world order, Chan offers a vision of global justice rooted in the unrealized egalitarian aspirations of anticolonial thinker-activists, prompting us to rethink what decolonization may mean today. Shuk Ying Chan is assistant professor of political theory at University College London. "Postcolonial Global Justice is a tour de force, reconnecting anticolonial thought to a global vision of justice and a search for a deeper universality. Theoretically powerful and historically innovative, the book brilliantly juxtaposes the intellectual horizons of major anticolonial thinkers. The result is elegiac, a tribute to an idealism we have lost."-Pratap Bhanu Mehta, author of The Burden of Democracy
"Drawing on subtle readings of some of the major anticolonial thinkers of the twentieth century, Postcolonial Global Justice demonstrates impressive historical range and theoretical sophistication. Shuk Ying Chan develops an innovative account of egalitarian cosmopolitanism that rejects the forms of hierarchy that underpinned imperial domination and that continue to shape our world today. This original and timely book is an important contribution to political theory."-Duncan Bell, author of Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America
"Shuk Ying Chan's Postcolonial Global Justice is an exciting and groundbreaking work. Chan is at the cutting edge of a very new turn in the scholarship on global justice, offering a systematic account that serves as both an independent guiding normative framework for theorists and activists today and a reconstruction of some of the key insights of anticolonial thought."-David Temin, author of Remapping Sovereignty: Decolonization and Self-Determination in North American Indigenous Political Thought
Politicians and activists today turn to the language of decolonization to call attention to such issues as cultural and linguistic decline, exploitative foreign investment, and global institutions dominated by superpowers. But does anticolonial thought really provide a model for reimagining world politics? The history of decolonization has not resulted in the liberating transformations that many envisioned. In Postcolonial Global Justice, Shuk Ying Chan proposes a new account of postcolonial global justice centered around the value of social equality. Drawing on the thought of Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, and Jawaharlal Nehru, Chan argues that a central theme in anticolonial thought is the rejection of hierarchy and the embrace of equality. These ideas from decolonization, she suggests, give us tools for critiquing contemporary global hierarchies and for rejecting postcolonial nationalism more concerned with policing its citizens than promoting their freedom and equality.
Following the wave of postcolonial state-founding in the twentieth century, many in the West saw decolonization as largely accomplished-and yet global politics continue to feature hierarchies that resemble colonial relations. Chan investigates these new and persistent colonial hierarchies across three areas of contemporary world politics: international investment, cultural imperialism, and global governance. Exploring the changes needed to move toward a new, more equal postcolonial world order, Chan offers a vision of global justice rooted in the unrealized egalitarian aspirations of anticolonial thinker-activists, prompting us to rethink what decolonization may mean today. Shuk Ying Chan is assistant professor of political theory at University College London. "Postcolonial Global Justice is a tour de force, reconnecting anticolonial thought to a global vision of justice and a search for a deeper universality. Theoretically powerful and historically innovative, the book brilliantly juxtaposes the intellectual horizons of major anticolonial thinkers. The result is elegiac, a tribute to an idealism we have lost."-Pratap Bhanu Mehta, author of The Burden of Democracy
"Drawing on subtle readings of some of the major anticolonial thinkers of the twentieth century, Postcolonial Global Justice demonstrates impressive historical range and theoretical sophistication. Shuk Ying Chan develops an innovative account of egalitarian cosmopolitanism that rejects the forms of hierarchy that underpinned imperial domination and that continue to shape our world today. This original and timely book is an important contribution to political theory."-Duncan Bell, author of Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America
"Shuk Ying Chan's Postcolonial Global Justice is an exciting and groundbreaking work. Chan is at the cutting edge of a very new turn in the scholarship on global justice, offering a systematic account that serves as both an independent guiding normative framework for theorists and activists today and a reconstruction of some of the key insights of anticolonial thought."-David Temin, author of Remapping Sovereignty: Decolonization and Self-Determination in North American Indigenous Political Thought