The generous engagements by Mills, Mackinnon, and Donahue-Ochoa focus on disciplinary divisions of labor, methodological/historiographical questions, and substantive problems of injustice. I address the first two questions, laying the groundwork of the methodological perspective required for tackling the third. This methodological perspectival shift is required for the particular dialogue that my book establishes, one that, as Mills highlights, pairs a canonical philosopher with Du Bois—who was not formally a philosopher—and normatively remaps the question of cosmopolitanism. Mills notes that expanding “the cast of actors and the historical schedule of events” redraws imperial cartographies and re-periodizes imperial temporalities, illuminating the persistent Eurocentrism at the core of Kant and neo-Kantian cosmopolitanism and the alternative political actors and formations that counter it. Mackinnon also focuses on these moves to pose pointed questions about the role of contextual readings and anachronism in supporting my argument. She inquires in particular about how the present appears to Kantian scholars and myself and shapes the alternative interpretations of Kant we put forward. Addressing these points establishes a firmer footing to address Donahue-Ochoa's questions about the criteria for diagnosing injustice, the reasons that privileged and oppressed actors have to challenge unjust structures, and how their oppression affects the freedom of all.

Mills's engagement highlights the rareness of centering a dialogue between a “white mainstream” thinker like Kant and a subaltern, nonphilosopher interlocutor within philosophy. He notes that “the historical and current work of anti-imperialist political activists and theorists of color, if acknowledged at all, is segregated in a conceptual space quite remote from the white mainstream.” This problem is by no means restricted to philosophy and addressing it requires methodological innovations primarily introduced by women and theorists of color who have pioneered the grounding of political theory in subaltern politics and the juxtaposition of unexpected interlocutors in ways that enrich and renew the normative cartography available to political theorists. While this practice could be traced back to Du Bois's rereading of Marxism in Black Reconstruction, recent contributions by Shatema Threadcraft, Jane Gordon, and Juliet Hooker have revitalized this tradition.Footnote ¹ These works expand the substantive and methodological imagination beyond traditional approaches of analytical theory, historical political thought, and exegesis, developing new questions, dialogues, and archives for political theory to engage.

The juxtaposition of Kant and Du Bois in Transnational Cosmopolitanism brings into relief the provincial universalism of Kant and neo-Kantians and the richer correspondence between Du Bois's thinking and pressing contemporary problems. Such a dialogue, however, requires interpretation to operate in several registers: a detailed historical contextual reading, anachronistic appropriations and transfigurations of Kant's concepts via Du Boisian counter-readings, and contrasts between these readings and neo-Kantians’ own appropriations of Kant. Mackinnon is particularly perceptive about these maneuvers and inquires into two resulting tensions. First, she notes the coexistence of my defense of an anachronistic/disloyal use of Kant that places interpretive authority in the present and the highly contextual reading of Toward Perpetual Peace that opens the book. Second, MacKinnon asks why my account of the implications of grounding the interpretive authority in the present differs from neo-Kantians’ contemporary-inflected readings.

In my book historical contextual and anachronistic readings operate in close interrelation. While the rereading of Kant opens with a Skinnerian claim regarding the misreading of his intentions in crafting Perpetual Peace, correcting the misinterpretation requires going beyond the relatively narrow discursive focus of the Cambridge School to incorporate the social and political context of writing (24). This exposes Kant's concern with colonialism as predominantly associated with the harms of colonial conflict over Europeans’ prospects for peace and the cruel affect involved in colonial wars, which thwarts the moral education required for civilization (42–22, 48–49). This shows that Kant's cosmopolitanism is ill fitted for understanding today's unequal global sphere and implies that, if we are to borrow from him, we should do so with awareness that this entails anachronism and the creative repurposing of his principles. This back and forth (between contextual analysis and self-aware anachronism) requires making explicit a particular reading of the contemporary problem space that orients the anachronistic interpretation. This strategy contrasts with readings that privilege getting Kant exegetically “right” and allocate to such a reading normative authority to inform the present (17). If our goal is to theorize global injustice in the present, the appropriateness of interpretations depends not on exegetical loyalty to Kant, but on the ability of the interpretation to conceptualize structures of injustice and currents of resistance at play today.

Yet, as Mackinnon notes, neo-Kantians’ point of departure is a concern with the present (i.e., “two hundred years of hindsight”), which brings attention to the nonstraightforward interpretive work involved in reading the contemporary problem space. The neo-Kantian reading of complementarity—a potentially productive tool to theorize politics of interconnections between domestic, international, and cosmopolitan realms—is particularly illustrative of the lens implicit in their intervention. This lens systematically emphasizes unidirectional influences from “enlightened” Western publics toward other realms. Nothing in the Kantian notion of complementarity prevents a reading that illuminates anticolonial counterpublics—including Pan-African meetings, nonaligned states, and antiauthoritarian struggles during the Cold War—as sites of resistance and emancipation from the conditions sustained by Western-dominated international organizations. Yet this reading fails to appear, time and again, in neo-Kantians’ readings of the concept (74–78). This curtailed vision of global politics reveals a problem with the contemporary political imagination brought to the analysis of the global rather than with Kant's principle of complementarity. Even if embedded in a problematic developmental teleology, Kant's attention to the degeneration that colonial conflict brought to mores and political institutions was perhaps more critical of Europe's role in the world than contemporary accounts.Footnote ² Certainly, Kant was missing political accounts of resistance and contestation of his racialized and gendered developmentalism. These were taking place in Haiti as he wrote Perpetual Peace, and later in critical conversation with the League of Nations and the United Nations as projects that tinkered with Western colonialism, which retreated only as a consequence of anticolonial insurgency and the delegitimation of colonial rule, to be replaced by neocolonial Cold War counterinsurgency, and then neoliberalism.Footnote ³

That an acknowledgment of this anti-colonial trajectory is absent from the neo-Kantian tradition speaks both to the limited Kantian framework and the limited political imagination at play in homogenous academic spaces of the kind described by Mills in his work on ideal theory.Footnote ⁴ Mills's contribution to this exchange complements this account by noting that even when pursued, the study of subaltern philosophies may not upset these dynamics, because this work is kept segregated from canonical approaches. It is here that the genuine, rather than token, diversification of academic spaces is required to welcome subaltern subjects who more consistently experience the cognitive dissonance that has the potential to expand the canon, nuance the theorization of injustice, and offer more capacious accounts of emancipation. This reorientation of the contemporary political and philosophical imagination would fit the political aesthetics of Du Bois's transnational turn (95–101) by unsettling the places assigned to nonwhite thinkers’ corpora and claiming the centrality of problems and concepts long excluded from respectable political theory. This strategy, moreover, is richer than internal critiques of developmentalism that sometimes fail to make space for subaltern thinkers outside the tradition.Footnote ⁵ These are instances of performative misfires, because they offer a critical universality that prescribes a normativity of inclusion without reaching outside of the canon for the voices that they dictate we should listen to.

These methodological reflections set the stage to address Donahue-Ochoa's points, that is, how to diagnose injustice, how to understand the motivations (and obstacles) to challenging it, and what are the ramifications of oppression on the freedom of others. A transnational framework of politics permits the diagnosis of injustices that do not properly fit domestic and international realms, like slavery and global imperial resource extraction and their afterlives in global investment regimes and labor exploitation of nonwhite workers in the Global South and the globalized west. Absent this framework, global justice scholars too often direct their attention to domestic struggles of inclusion and democratization in which western enlightened publics attempt to “solve” global injustices in international fora. Yet, rather than offering a definitive account of what injustice is, my book proposes to trace the political craft of solidarity and transnational counterpublics as guides for the reconstruction of injustice. The political subjects involved in these activities and populating these sites uncover the affinities between themselves and groups in other places who also experience oppression, thus tracing the contours of injustice. The moments of “reaching out” that Du Bois encouraged among Black groups in the 1920s are diagnostic in a twofold sense: because they identify particular forms of domestic oppression as tied to racial hostility that exceeded the domestic and because they offer evidence of the artificial separation between the US and European imperial trajectories, which explains the reluctance of the US mainstream public to entertain transnational claims of solidarity (101–2). Thus, coalition making facilitates both the definition of injustice and the subjective de-identification with the nation and re-identification with subjects abroad similarly affected by (neo)imperial forces. Thus, the motivation to resist injustice among the oppressed emerges from coalitional practices that allow them to exit dominating intersubjective relations domestically and find freeing connections with other subjects. The joint tracing of the outlines of injustice, in turn, illuminates an alternative temporality that counters that of empire, reconstructs the politics of the underside of progress, and opens paths of transformation.

My book is agnostic about the motivations that the privileged may or may not find for challenging injustice, but subaltern coalition-making will certainly contribute to piercing the myth of the autonomous rise of western countries and their enviable liberal democratic institutions, disrupting the comfort provided by privilege. When western superiority is put in question by the exit of subaltern actors from their assigned roles and their decision to act otherwise, openings emerge for the privileged to reconsider their affective attachments to strength and possessions predicated on violence (96). Thus, the ethical view of self-definition and emancipation behind Du Bois's critique of the “tawdry and flamboyant ideals” of the United States and his mapping of the violence they implicate (145, 159) can be extended to the privileged. This group can either accept the exchange of their prosperity for the violent background conditions of possibility or build upon the sense of discomfort to join and support those in the struggle against these structures.