Shuk Ying Chan’s Postcolonial Global Justice constitutes an eagerly anticipated intervention into vibrant discussions on anticolonial political thought, and a much-needed addition to the literature on global justice. The book looks set to become essential reading within syllabi in both fields of scholarship.
The primary intervention of the book is clearly articulated: bringing normative analytic theorizing—often the province of philosophy departments—together with anticolonial political thought, largely pursued by historically oriented political theorists. In short, the book argues that the project of decolonization was an incomplete venture toward building a new world based upon postcolonial global justice, conceptualized around the theme of social equality. The core of social (and relational) equality anchors Chan’s theory of postcolonial global justice—itself an interesting move, given that decolonization has more typically been narrated as a cluster of struggles for liberation or freedom, rather than as a vision of equality. After the introduction, the first chapter establishes the book’s interpretive foundations by connecting decolonization with egalitarianism (chapter 1). Chan then builds her account of postcolonial global justice by pairing each of four prominent anticolonial political thinkers with a core issue within the politics of decolonization: Frantz Fanon on social equality (chapter 2); Kwame Nkrumah on international economic hierarchies and, most specifically, investment regimes (chapter 3); Aimé Césaire on cultural trade and its attendant issues of esteem (chapter 4); and Jawaharlal Nehru on global democracy and transnational solidarity (chapter 5). The book’s concluding chapter then gestures toward future projects on the ethics of resistance that follow from her analysis.
The figures Chan presents have, over the past decades, become canonical names within the anticolonial theory corpus, so Postcolonial Global Justice is not primarily concerned with introducing fresh faces or expanding the canon. Instead, Chan excavates the moral and political thought of these figures in order to answer pressing contemporary questions. Organizing her program around thinker-issue dyads shows off Chan’s range, as the book covers a wide spectrum of issues and moves seamlessly across multiple literatures. One of the striking achievements of Postcolonial Global Justice is its demonstration that anticolonial political thought, as a broad tradition, provides resources for addressing a range of issues, spanning from an international regime of unequal recognition to the moral psychology of resistance. One need not follow every intricacy within each sub-argument to find the overall exercise generative, as the book provides a broad atlas of anticolonial political thought and then extends its interventions into the hitherto unfamiliar terrain of global justice. In this respect, Chan joins the collective effort of reconstructing a tradition of anticolonial political thought and showing how its scope and depth of application can match those of alternative (and overlapping) traditions like Marxism.
Chan identifies the key tensions between the two traditions she straddles—anticolonial political thought and normative analytic philosophy—but “does not pretend to fully resolve” them (p. 12). The ambitious task of bridging such divergent traditions is unlikely to fully satisfy all readers, but her discussion of these tensions is bold and grapples directly with the divergent intuitions undergirding moral philosophy and political critique; individualism and collectivism; and universalism and particularism (pp. 13–16). Her subsequent chapters, however, demonstrate the subtleties and adeptness with which she traverses questions of power, social ontology, and scale.
Another tension that appears across the book is the divergence between historical recovery and normative prescription. Chan navigates this contradiction through her method of “historically inflected normative theorizing, which treats specific historical actors as interlocutors in developing normative principles for the present” (p. 9). What lies beneath such a move is a historical wager: that the high tide of anticolonial activity within which her actors were situated bears sufficient and significant structural similarities to a present that Chan describes as “neocolonial” (p. 7). Such an account is what enables Chan to argue that mid-twentieth-century anticolonial political thought yields an account of global justice for our present, to deliver a political theory at once historically sensitive and presently relevant. This move is successful across the several areas that Chan explores, including issues of global inequality and unequal recognition stemming from cultural exchange, which may be even more intensified today than they were when her actors wrote. As Chan moves between mid-twentieth-century political thought and contemporary institutions like the World Trade Organization, she effectively demonstrates the deep implications of anticolonial thought for the contemporary global situation by underscoring the overlapping domains of hierarchy and domination inherited from the colonial order. Most importantly, she generates specific and robustly argued normative proposals, for example, for investor obligations to be tied to redressing social inequality, and not merely focused on investor rights (p. 115).
One question that arises, however, is how postcolonial global justice might further engage with one of the key themes within the repertoire of anti- and postcolonial thought: namely, reflections on time, transition, and historicity, especially with relation to the nation-state. Such an encounter may reveal interesting avenues that unsettle any tendencies toward eliding the differences between the past and the present conjuncture. This is symptomatic in the chapter on Nehru. Drawing overwhelmingly on Nehru’s pre-independence texts—an explicitly stated choice (p. 160)—Chan reconstructs Nehru’s vision of a global democracy based upon relations of “cosmopolitan solidarity” (p. 159). Nehru’s global democracy is presented as both a normative end and as a guide for political practice, as it “indirectly considers the question of how substantive changes to the international order defended throughout the book might be pursued through political contestation” (p. 161).
Yet we might ask what is occluded when Nehru’s post-independence writings and speeches are deemphasized. Chan’s reading does not address how Nehru struggled with the contradictions and impurities of having to govern an institution that simultaneously institutes social hierarchy and is also the vehicle for its dismantling. But Nehru’s later writings offer an opportunity to recover a political vision forged within the historical pressure brought about by transformations in anticolonial practice. By developing an account of anticolonial political thought that deemphasizes the nation-state (p. 19), one wonders to what extent Chan’s image may be developed from a past vision of the future that is no longer feasible today, or at least not in straightforward form. In this respect, Postcolonial Global Justice gestures toward yet another challenge that is revealed but not fully resolved: what happens to the demands of global justice when anticolonial principles become entangled with the postcolonial state? In crucial ways, the contemporary condition more closely resembles this historical moment than it does the context of pre-independence Nehru. It is here that Chan’s historical wager faces a sterner test.
By providing the material to raise such questions, Postcolonial Global Justice is a milestone in the scholarship on both anti- and postcolonial political theory, and a much-needed corrective to the scholarship on global justice. How these questions about equality, justice, and democracy in the neocolonial moment might perhaps be answered would involve developing an account of political action informed too by anticolonial theory and praxis—precisely the direction Chan hints at in her concluding chapter. Chan’s second book, then, is as eagerly anticipated as her first.
