48 min
Adom Getachew - Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination Conversations : Globalization and Law
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- Society & Culture
Our guest for this episode is Adom Getachew, author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton UP, 2019). The book relates the little-known histories of Anglophone African and Black Caribbean postcolonial movements. Her core claim in the book is that the goal of these African and Caribbean anti-colonial movements was not to recreate their societies in the image of their colonial oppressors' - or, in academic legalese, to 'universalise Westphalian sovereignty'. Instead of ‘nation-building’, their project was one of ‘world-making’ organised around the principle of 'non-domination': they sought not just to bring freedom and self-determination for the peoples of Africa and the Caribbean, but also to create regional and international institutions that would protect and preserve that freedom. To this end, Adom charts the rise and fall of these movements, their attempts to set up regional federations in Africa and the Caribbean to extricate themselves from dependence upon Western markets, and – when those attempts failed – to create a New International Economic Order (NIEO) enveloping the entire world.
The book has garnered a truly vast number of awards: the Frantz Fanon Prize of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, the Best Book Prize of the African Studies Association, the First Book Award by the Foundations of Political Theory Section of the American Political Science Association, the Best Book by the Theory Section of the International Studies Association, to name just a few.
Adom is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago. Besides this, she is a board member of the Pozen Center for Human Rights, a fellow at the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, and a faculty affiliate at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture. Professor Getachew obtained a joint PhD in Political Science and African-American Studies from Yale University.
Joining me as an interviewer is André Nunes Chaïb, an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law, Maastricht University.
Our guest for this episode is Adom Getachew, author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton UP, 2019). The book relates the little-known histories of Anglophone African and Black Caribbean postcolonial movements. Her core claim in the book is that the goal of these African and Caribbean anti-colonial movements was not to recreate their societies in the image of their colonial oppressors' - or, in academic legalese, to 'universalise Westphalian sovereignty'. Instead of ‘nation-building’, their project was one of ‘world-making’ organised around the principle of 'non-domination': they sought not just to bring freedom and self-determination for the peoples of Africa and the Caribbean, but also to create regional and international institutions that would protect and preserve that freedom. To this end, Adom charts the rise and fall of these movements, their attempts to set up regional federations in Africa and the Caribbean to extricate themselves from dependence upon Western markets, and – when those attempts failed – to create a New International Economic Order (NIEO) enveloping the entire world.
The book has garnered a truly vast number of awards: the Frantz Fanon Prize of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, the Best Book Prize of the African Studies Association, the First Book Award by the Foundations of Political Theory Section of the American Political Science Association, the Best Book by the Theory Section of the International Studies Association, to name just a few.
Adom is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago. Besides this, she is a board member of the Pozen Center for Human Rights, a fellow at the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, and a faculty affiliate at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture. Professor Getachew obtained a joint PhD in Political Science and African-American Studies from Yale University.
Joining me as an interviewer is André Nunes Chaïb, an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law, Maastricht University.
48 min