The call to globalize and decolonize academia and to decenter European and North American political thought and philosophy within these fields is by now familiar at the academic and institutional level in North America and Europe. Within political theory, “comparative political theory” (CPT) is an established field. Though debates about whether it involves a particular method of comparison continue, they are less vigorous and contentious than even ten years ago. More people now work and study in the field of comparative political theory and far more edited volumes are available to those wishing to familiarize themselves with the field not just as it was presented twenty-five years ago by people like Fred Dallmayr and Roxanne Euben, but as it has been taken up, contested, and transformed.
Some have found CPT less useful because of its emphasis on comparison, which suggests the methods of comparative politics (isolating causal factors based on comparison) or comparison of discrete traditions (to answer presumably universal or general questions). Moreover, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean do not occupy a significant place in CPT, perhaps because they are covered by existing area studies and because they do not always lend themselves easily to comparison according to the more established categories and methods of CPT, as I have argued elsewhere. Recent monographs and edited volumes on CPT have addressed these gaps and silences. Some have also proposed and put into practice alternative methods of analysis such as creolization, juxtaposition, and decolonizing and globalizing dialectics, to name a few.
The textbook Globalizing Political Theory, co-edited by myself, Smita Rahman, and Shirin Deylami, shares with these alternative approaches an interest in local engagements with canonical or foreign texts and ideas and the focus on the situatedness of political theory. It asks us to consider the ways that these engagements transform not just the meaning of the ideas, but the way we think about theoretical production and canon formation. In what follows, I discuss how the textbook addresses some of the practical, logical, and epistemological challenges of teaching outside and beyond the Western canon and specifically Africana/Black thought.
In spite of the greater awareness and space to decolonize and globalize political theory, these calls are not actually easy to comply with at the level of undergraduate teaching even by the well-intentioned. There are multiple reasons for this, but here are two: First, many, if not most, of us are not equipped to teach texts produced in entirely different political, cultural, and geographical contexts. Second, our own approaches to teaching political thought from anywhere in the world may reinforce a canonical-centered approach to theory, presuming the authority and infallibility of important thinkers and their autonomous intellectual development and forgetting that their ideas were often forged in dialogue with other now lesser-known political theorists, who may have had greater perspective on the issues at hand, even if their work is now not as well known.
Even abstract thought is rooted and situated, either explicitly or implicitly. Teachers in the United States can rely on a whole set of assumptions and educational backgrounds when teaching texts in the canon of Western political thought, though this depends on their teaching institutions and student bodies. John Locke’s ideas represent a hegemonic ideology in the United States, but they coincide with the common sense of some students more than others. Indeed, in my anecdotal experience of teaching at a public university in a major city in the U.S., the ease with which his ideas go down is related to race, ethnicity, generation, and class. Even so, it is far more likely that students in the U.S. will have some knowledge of the norms, values, and institutions undergirding canonical political thought than they will of non-Western political thought, broadly defined.
On the one hand, often the background knowledge of many professors and that of their students means that explaining context is not as essential when teaching canonical texts. Indeed, it is sometimes necessary to remind students that the texts they are learning about are not simply descriptions of the way things are. For instance, returning to John Locke, individual rights are not the same as freedom for everyone, nor is freedom central to the good life for everyone. Contesting these assumptions is not just valuable for those disagreeing with these normative claims, but because it teaches students to be critical and self-aware about their own beliefs. One might say that this, too, is a value of liberalism, but here we have already exposed assumptions to evaluation. On the other hand, because so much is and/or can be assumed, often canonical thought does not actively call upon the reader to understand the context in which it was written, even if the context actually matters for understanding. In spite of the interventions of the Cambridge school and historical materialism, much canonical political thought is still taught in a vacuum, even just for practical reasons. Globalizing political theory diversifies what we understand as political theory but also changes how we think about theory. Indeed, it demands, in a way that the Cambridge school and historical materialism may not, that we situate and understand the local political problems and debates out of which political thought always emerges.
We chose the term “globalizing” for our textbook to emphasize the global nature of political theorizing. To globalize, then, is not to universalize, but to expand into multiple particularities, sometimes in conversation and sometimes not. To globalize is to consider theory from the perspective of local political problems whose theorizing produced novel conceptions of key themes such as colonialism and empire, gender and sexuality, religion and secularism, Marxism, socialism, and globalization, democracy and protest, and race, ethnicity, and Indigeneity.
To globalize political theory is to consider how theory travels and functions in local contexts, and to consider how even theorists may compromise or complicate their views when confronted with real and unwieldy world events such as war, global capitalism, colonialism, and the established parameters of political debate and possibility. Thus, while the textbook includes thinkers from all over the world, including Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean, we did not divide the textbook according to geographic regions. Organizing thinkers by regional or national traditions risks ignoring diasporic traditions, such as Black Political Thought, which has no particular geographical home. As we see in John Drabinski’s contribution to the textbook, Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe drew upon the work of Martinican Frantz Fanon to move beyond the pessimism of his own theory of necropolitics to the idea of building a new humanity, not on the basis of a colonizer-imposed self as lack, but on common struggle.
Focusing on national boundaries can actually discourage comparison by presuming national exceptionalism. Tom Meagher’s chapter on Egyptian Economist Samir Amin and Guyanese historian Walter Rodney, for instance, shows how in spite of disciplinary differences and the lack of direct conversation between the two, they produced a common critique of the Eurocentrism in both developmentalist and orthodox Marxist literature. Both, argues Meagher, “showed that the path forward for the Global South requires independence not just from global capitalism, but also from the theoretical assumptions these forces produced.” Similarly, Derefe Kimarley Chevannes’s chapter brings together Fanon and Claudia Jones, who were not in direct conversation though they were both from the Caribbean, to show how both “offer a rich template for the pursuit of human freedom through Black liberation.”
Indeed, national exceptionalism itself functions to silence internal voices and presumes a false and harmful national homogeneity. The chapter on Afro-Brazilian theorist Leília Gonzalez, by Fernanda Cardoso Fonseca, illustrates Gonzalez’s challenge to the dominant/white theorizations of (racial) democracy and feminism in Brazil and her centering of Black Brazilian women. Ananda Vilela and Marta Fernández lay out Abdias do Nascimento’s critique of Brazilian racial democracy (the idea that racial mixing in and of itself indicates racial equality) and its implication in the physical and cultural erasure of Black people in Brazil.
Organizing thinkers by regions can also mean focusing on only national canonical figures at the expense of less well-known thinkers who were often key contributors to local debates and to the development of the political thought of more canonical figures. As Jared Loggins’s chapter on W.E.B. Du Bois shows, his views on “the Negro problem” changed over time and were shaped in dialogue with another African-American (Caribbean-born) leader, Hubert Harrison, who challenged Du Bois to reconsider what Harrison believed to be his inconsistent position supporting Black involvement in WWI. What this enables readers to see, in Loggins’s words, is “conflict and tension as critical for the sharpening of political vision.”
Such complicated stories show how ideas we often read fully formed actually emerged in the context of debate and political struggle. Rather than beginning with purely abstract understandings of these terms, then, the thinkers covered in the textbook negotiated them in the context of pressing local political problems that required both action and compromise, both theory and practice, both an embrace of tradition and challenge to the status quo. As Tiffany Willoughby-Herard explains in her chapter, South Asian South African anti-apartheid activist Fatima Meer drew upon her father’s political activist experiences in her own efforts to form Black Asian feminist solidarities in South Africa. Tradition facilitated and inspired her activism.
In light of the situatedness of this political thought and practical difficulties of becoming knowledgeable about every region of the world and/or every specific debate with which the theorists engaged, our book provides biographies of thinkers and a description both of the historical context and the specific parameters and key interlocutors of the conversations of which they were a part, and also poses discussion questions that encourage students to think fruitfully about these connections. In other words, the chapters in the textbook situate these thinkers not simply geographically, but also within very specific debates defined by pressing political problems and existing approaches, literatures, and debates. Political theory, then, is not an answer to a timeless question but a theoretical approach to local political problems that potentially allows for political, economic, and intellectual transformation or a new theoretical terrain to navigate.
Viewing theory this way has significant pedagogical implications that go beyond either expanding the canon of Western Political thought or even local canons. It shows students that theory is not an elite solitary activity whose only practitioners can be those steeped in the classics, and living lives of privilege, far from daily life and pressing political problems. Students then are exposed to a wider range of thinkers across the globe and also learn and are empowered not just to read theory but to see it as practice of which they themselves are capable.
To decolonize then is also to democratize in the participatory sense of making everyone active participants in their learning, as Paolo Freire argued. This goal is of course a challenge and one that no one textbook, set of readings, or methodology can resolve once and for all. Rather, it involves the work of sharing and resisting authority (including our own) and recognizing authority as only temporary, even when dealing with the ideas of recognized political theorists or theoretical traditions. It thus demands a day-to-day pedagogical vigilance, ensuring that students learn the skills of interpretation and analysis so they can understand different arguments without treating them as gospel. Seeing how even well-known figures worked out their ideas in conversation with others and real-world events and how they made mistakes is one part of that process.
Katherine A. Gordy
Katherine A. Gordy is Professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University, where she teaches courses in political theory and Latin American Studies. Her specific interests are comparative political theory (Latin American and Caribbean political thought), critical theory, political economy, and theories of history and ideology. She is the author of Living Ideology in Cuba: Socialism in Principle and Practice (Michigan 2015) as well as of essays on ideology, imperialism, and Latin American political thought.
