Anticolonialism without Nationalism: Cosmopolitan Imaginaries for a Deglobalizing World

Abstract

The renewed interest in anticolonial thought in the last decade has tended to overlook or underplay critiques of nationalism that formed an important strand within it. Indeed, the conflation of anticolonialism with nationalism remains dominant in studies of anticolonial thought as well as in social science research more generally. In parallel, debates about cosmopolitanism, particularly in the context of global justice, take the nation-state to be the most viable political unit and revolve around an assessment of its suitability compared to global institutions. Building on the argument that corporate globalization provided the conditions of possibility for dominant visions of cosmopolitanism in the twentieth century, the author proposes paying closer attention to the specificity and changes in corporate (de)globalization today in imagining new cosmopolitan horizons that go beyond the dichotomy of nation-state and global institutions. Attention to criticisms of nationalism in anticolonial thought can then suggest some productive avenues for cosmopolitan imaginaries in a deglobalizing world.