I am grateful for this opportunity to be in conversation with Michael Hanchard, whose work has helped usher in a transnational and comparative approach to the study of race in political science. In his review of Worldmaking after Empire, Hanchard raises three questions that each push on the boundaries of the study and ask me to consider how the figures and projects at its center are situated in broader circuits of anticolonial politics and black internationalism. First he asks whether the failures of pan-African and pan-Caribbean federations are distinctive or symptomatic of the broad limits of decolonization in the Third World, which were tied to “enormous pressures exerted by Western powers and institutions.” Second, Hanchard wonders what is the relationship between black internationalist politics of this period and pan-Asian and Afro-Asian networks organized at the Colombo (1954) and Bandung (1955) conferences. Finally, Hanchard worries that the Anglophone focus of this study reinforces the linguistic hegemony of English and French in studies of black internationalism and thereby marginalizes important Hispanic and Lusophone thinkers.

I understand the projects of black anticolonial worldmaking I have covered to be both exemplary of broader Third World politics and a distinctive strand of its wider commitments. On the one hand, the emergence of a right to self-determination in the United Nations and the 1970s NIEO movement depended on the broader networks of Afro-Asian solidarity and the nonaligned movement. On the other hand, distinctive to Black Atlantic approaches to these projects was an emphasis on race and racialized hierarchy in critiques of international inequality. Figures like Nnamdi Azikiwe, W. E. B Du Bois, Michael Manley, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, George Padmore, and Eric Williams located the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery as the founding moment of the modern imperial world and its persistent structures of unequal integration. This was not just a historical claim, but shaped analysis of their political predicaments. For instance, in arguing that empire was a form of enslavement, Du Bois, Nkrumah, and Padmore invoked more than a metaphor of unfreedom and instead drew structural connections between the conditions of colonial labor and chattel slavery.

That black anticolonial critics were embedded in a broader Third World intellectual and political context also means that failures of projects in the Black Atlantic shared features with the decline of Third Worldism more broadly. Hanchard is right that the geopolitical dominance of Western institutions and especially the growing hegemony of the United States contributed in significant ways to defeating the more radical projects of the Third World. At the same time, I think it is important that we also account for the internal contradictions and tensions that mired these projects from within. A central premise of Worldmaking after Empire is that we ought to think of domestic and international politics as entangled sites rather than as siloed domains. It was this entanglement that prompted an anticolonial account of self-determination, which combined nation-building and worldmaking. The fall of self-determination is also to be found at this nexus between the internal crises of nation-building and the global forces that helped engender and also capitalized on these crises.

A wider history of self-determination’s rise and fall even within the Black Atlantic will require broadening the field of inquiry to include political actors outside of the Anglosphere. The singular focus on English-speaking anticolonial nationalists unwittingly reproduces the hegemony of the British Empire and the United States. It also forecloses an examination of the multiplicity of political positions and range of debates taken up in the age of decolonization. Yet, sticking within the confines of the Anglosphere demonstrates how anticolonial nationalists appropriated and reinvented the “colonial inheritances” of British rule (Stuart Hall and Bill Schwarz, Familiar Stranger: A Life between Two Islands, 2017). This approach of considering how nationalists took up and radically transformed imperial ideologies and institutions can be a template for the necessary linguistic and geographic expansion of black internationalist scholarship that Hanchard recommends. Ultimately it was this capacity to imagine an egalitarian world from within the hierarchical structures of empire that made anticolonial worldmaking possible.