The Other Side of Internationalism

Abstract

This chapter represents an attempt to fruitfully combine two recent historiographical currents that have so far mostly existed in isolation from one another. For one, there have been increasing attempts over the last decade by historians of Asia and Africa as well as of colonial and imperial history to break free from the spatial fixation on the postcolonial nation-states that emerged as the result of the wave of decolonization from the 1940s to the 1970s.¹ Building on an agenda that was first articulated in Benedict Anderson’s Under Three Flags,² historians like Maia Ramnath, Manu Goswami and Kris Manjapra³ have recently posited a ‘transnational turn’ in the study of colonialism and imperialism, and advocated an intense engagement with the diasporic and cosmopolitan dimension of anti-colonial nationalisms. In like vein, literary scholars such as Leela Gandhi have reminded us of the existence of ‘affective communities’, that is, alliances between anti-colonial activists on the one hand and European and American critics of imperialism (and, occasionally, ‘Western civilization’ in its entirety) on the other.⁴