Creolising the State?

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Jane Anna Gordon Lecturer, University of Connecticut, USA jane.gordon@uconn.edu

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Abstract

While the Euromodern model of the nation-state has been the subject of unremitting, exhaustive and merited political criticism, this article advances an anti-anti-statism. Oriented by warnings of theorists who have advanced plurinational states, creolising the nation, separating states from nations and abolishing the state, I turn to Fanon's insistence that states be re-envisioned beyond Cold War alternatives and narrowing nationalisms; Cabral's modelling of political unity on an effective football team; and Gyekye's suggestion of deliberately forging meta-national states. I argue that we need the institutional rejection of states reliant on racialised enslavement and colonialism as the exclusive custodians of bestowing and withholding political recognition. We must also premise rightful belonging not only on historical group identities but on how these are expressed in records of political activities demonstrating commitment to the cultivation and extension of national consciousness or the meta-state as the basis of political legitimacy.

In Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement (2020), I offered a brief defence of the state in what I preliminarily termed an anti-anti-statism. I formulated it this way to acknowledge that, given the active complicity of states in the production of statelessness and conditions that foster contemporary enslavement, it is not hard to recognise the appeal of anarchistic approaches amongst some of the most politically committed. As was true in the first quarter of the twentieth century, contemporary states appear as primarily predatory and kleptocratic, either unable or unwilling to counteract the precariousness created by current political economic developments and their violently xenophobic expressions.

Still, I argued, as indispensable as these insights are, they must be mobilised to formulate a viable anti-anti-statism. After all, conceiving global responses to developments that have made vulnerability highly lucrative must involve governments and political institutions. What is more, in most versions anti-statism rests on a logical circularity in which political institutions that are not liked are synonymous with states while responsive, legitimate ones are called something else. Rather than letting the exploitative instantiations of the state or instances of state capture monopolise and exhaust the term, the state must also include the deeply imperfect New Deal government of Franklin D. Roosevelt and experiments in Caribbean socialism that produced, amongst other outcomes, the free medical training offered by the Cuban healthcare system. Surely ‘states’ include neo-fascist varieties, political institutions that expand human freedom, and everything in between. If so, the question is not whether we are for or against states but about the kinds of political institutions we need and how they are constructed. As Alix Olson and Alex Zamalin write: ‘If democracy is intended to be enacted by the people, then the state itself is ours to reimagine and those desires are to be collectively acted upon’ (2024: 151).

This observation informs a second pragmatic one. We cannot cede existing states to those with no aversions to most of the globe living in unsustainable conditions of unfreedom. This refusal is not achieved only through interacting with states through established channels. It also entails engaging in activities that make it politically dangerous for such bodies not to respond and that gives leverage to allies on the inside who already accept a conception of sovereignty as realised across porous borders. Crucial to such an approach is A. Naomi Paik's observation that the activism of the rightless proceeds from understanding that the state ‘is not a singular entity but an intricate, multidimensional assemblage of forces.’ The resulting ‘cacophony marshals immense force, and yet, the work of these many moving parts is inevitably incongruous, sometimes even in direct conflict with itself’. These internal contradictions create spaces through which the rightless ‘can contest the state's seemingly overwhelming authority’ (Paik 2016: 13).

In their 1987 essay, ‘The Madman and the Migrant’, Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff explained the distinction in the Tswana language between work and labour. While the connotations of both were not frozen in time, the former, godira, was associated with making, doing and causing to happen, as when one might cultivate, cook, create family or perform a ritual. It involved working for oneself and active self-constitution through a creative process undertaken in and through relations with others. Its value lay in producing and extending the self in ever-thickening ties of interdependence that enabled one to be made and remade as a social being. This was a ‘process rather than an event’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1987: 197).

The opposite activity, bereka, was one through which meaningful relations of life were overshadowed as the labourer was alienated from fellowship with kith and kin. Their personal viability was eclipsed through an invasion of malign forces, culminating, at worst, in social death. Wage labour introduced by white colonists was understood through this lens, as depleting rather than enhancing the self by denying workers’ control over products in which they invested themselves and through separating them from the world of meaningful relationships (Comaroff and Comaroff 1987: 200). Without control over their personal time or space, they were also made external to and actively decontextualised from the dynamic life of their communities.1

When many activists speak of political institutions, as opposed to the state, they suggest that these different conceptions of organising political relations and power map neatly onto the distinction between godira, on the one hand, and bereka, on the other. Political institutions, at least at their inception or when enjoying maximal legitimacy, are described as making, doing and causing to happen. They extend the self through processes that enable us to emerge as social beings in and through relationships with others. By contrast, states, it is said, alienate our relationships with kith and kin through malign forces that reduce our control over the expression of our productive energies. They facilitate extraction through undermining our individual and collective capacities to determine the shape of our present and future.

While not entirely wrong, the neatness of this distinction is misleading. Both political institutions and states can enjoy and lack fuller or more fractured legitimacy. After all, states are a form of political institution. There were states before Euromodern ones and, if we manage not to desecrate the only Earth on which we human beings can live, there will be ones afterwards. Just because the most familiar examples of Euromodern states have been mobilised as instruments of all varieties of extractivism and dispossession does not mean they cannot be fundamentally remade.

In what follows, I succinctly outline cautions offered by progressive political theorists that a tenable account of the state must address. I then turn to the kernels of state-making possibilities suggested by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral and Kwame Gyekye. Through them, I emphasise a distinct, two-fold approach to the question of political recognition as central to this tradition. First, there must be an institutional rejection of states reliant on racialised enslavement and colonialism as the exclusive custodians of bestowing and withholding political recognition. Second, rightful belonging must be premised not only on historical group identities but also on how these are expressed in records of political activities demonstrating commitment to the cultivation and extension of national consciousness or the meta-state as the basis of political legitimacy. I close by explaining what I mean by creolising and with Alicia Garza's (2020) insight into the forms of security sought by citizens through states. While this article is informed by the voluminous empirical research relevant to these questions, its primary aim is to contribute to the collective endeavour of clarifying the kinds of twenty-first-century political institutions we might seek with the hope that such meditations can guide the challenging work of actively constructing them.

Cautionary Insights

The Euromodern model of the nation-state has been subject to unremitting, exhaustive and merited political criticisms by anti-colonial intellectuals and activists. Many stress the intimate relationships amongst capitalism, patriarchy, coloniality and the top-down project of the nation-state (Walsh 2023: 185). For non-liberal thinkers, the nation-state has been widely understood as a unified, sole, coercive structure of authority aligned with claims to territorial sovereignty. It is supposed to be the culmination of a national society dominated by the interests of its national bourgeoisie (Öcalan 2017). Its basis is in an erroneous aspiration that a sovereign state will or should be inhabited by a single group and its monolithic and singular philosophical, linguistic, religious, institutional and ideological roots. It demands a sort of unity and allegiance that ruptures communal and plural structures that it endeavours, without total success, to erase, eliminate and supersede (Walsh 2023: 187, 189).

In response, scholars, including Catherine Walsh (2011, 2023), have advanced many different potential ways forward while flagging the respective empirical and theoretical limitations of each. For instance, amongst others, there is the project of plurinational states. In a more limited version evident in the former Soviet Union, formally decolonised India, Belgium, Canada, Finland, Malaysia, Nigeria, New Zealand and South Africa, this model recognises the co-existence of two or more ethnically distinct nations or historical communities within a state. If usually a response to demands of people historically excluded from the national project, the plurination often does not dismantle racist or colonial structures or increase meaningful equality amongst constituent nations (Walsh 2023: 191). A top-down proposition, it is the ‘state that decides the extent of its modifications’ (Walsh 2023, 193), the state alone that may grant consequential forms of political recognition (Coulthard 2014).

Against this, Walsh juxtaposes how bottom-up plurinationalisms endeavoured to re-found the states of Bolivia and Ecuador during the Constitutional Assembly processes of 2007–2008. In Aníbal Quijano's account, ‘populations that were victims of non-national and non-democratic states’ sought ‘not more nationalism and more state’ but ‘an “other”’ democratised, decolonised state’ (quoted in Walsh 2023: 190). These entities would not be the sole or central marker, controller and determiner of collective life. The state itself was thereby intentionally limited by empowered civilisations, offsetting centralising forces with centrifugal ones, opposed fundamentally to the aim of absolute consensus (drawn fromSchavelzon quoted in Walsh 2023: 190).

However, after thirteen years of governance by Evo Morales in Bolivia and ten years of Rafael Correa in Ecuador (see Bernal 2017 for a similar assessment), Walsh was resolutely disappointed by how progressive governments of both plurinational states advanced a heavily extractive state corporatisation that plurinationalism could neither slow nor stop. Walsh's resulting conclusion was that state government ‘[could] not be the primary motor of social transformation’ (2023: 226) and that plurinationalisation can neither be legislated from the top nor funded by extraction and dispossession. Instead, for Walsh plurinationalism is important to the extent that it creates cracks in ‘coloniality's permanence,’ space to ‘build . . . existences otherwise’ (2023: 229).

A shared interest in ‘existences otherwise’ informs Kris Sealey's 2020 call for creolising the nation. Assuming, like Walsh, that, for now, the nation-state form (if not unchanged or uniform) is here to stay, she considers how it could allow and express plural and open-ended self-formations. Not considering models of legislative justice or economic policies for communal well-being, her focus is whether those ‘bureaucratic operations of national life’ (2020: 9) could be grounded ontologically in ways that counter national culture as static, nativist, protectionist or xenophobic, generating an anti-racist nationalism and phenomenology of permeability. Sealey's creolising would frame nation-building as ongoing and ever-responsive, drawn from everyday practices through which mainstream structures and systems of domination are sabotaged from below.

Primarily attentive to poetic, imaginative and spiritual resources for fashioning private sensibilities and personal proclivities, Sealey explicitly employs Edouard Glissant's theoretical resources against his own assessment of their potential mobilisation to undergird a nation. For him, the nation (or nations) was inevitably antipathetic to his existentially open ontology. Still, in a spirit much like what we will see in the work of Jacqueline Stevens (2010), this is a theoretical invitation to imagine political possibilities differently. For this reader, it is difficult to envisage such orientations as widely shared and sustained without political conditions to make them both compelling and tenable. If Sealey pins hopes for safeguarding against what I have called decreolising in Glissant's ‘spirits of opacity’ and ‘errantry’ (Gordon 2014), I agree with Fanon's insistence that counteracting tendencies towards homogenising narrow nationalisms demands concrete mechanisms. As described in the next section, these would be institutions of attentive sub-national engagement, simultaneously reaching beneath and beyond the parameters of the territorial state to enact alternatives to existing bases for political recognition.

Knowing that it would seem similarly unthinkable,2 Stevens (2010) advances a radical separation of states from nations, reminding readers that state-supported enslavement lasted for thousands of years with many thinking it would never lose its moral standing. She contends that intergenerational, group-based differences – the stuff of national identities and nation-based citizenship – enable indifference to the suffering of others, the basis for policies that protect home markets at the expense of foreigners. Evidence of this political numbing abounds, whether in thousands of people dying crossing the US–Mexico border or drowning when travelling from the African continent to Southern or Eastern Europe.

Stevens emphasises that there are no individual solutions to these challenges. One cannot simply choose to live in a world without nation-states.3 Still, for Stevens nation-states are most dangerous when they produce rules for membership from myths of heredity and religion to rationalise contingent political differences as primordial ones to which citizens become psychically attached. Since this occurs even in states that disavow models of the ethno-nation, she therefore rejects what she knows is the tempting theoretical possibility of nationality co-existing with an egalitarian territorial birthright citizenship. Being lured by this possibility – endemic to an illiberal liberalism – helps obscure the insurmountable tension between domestic and international inclusion and exclusion sustained by maintaining both ideals of ancestral nations based on kinship and equal citizenship regardless of heredity.4

While I applaud Stevens’ invitation to think in radical ways drawn from the example of abolition, the central difficulty of her claim lies in the ambiguity that she acknowledges regarding historical conceptions of the nation. As the nation is the unit of political legibility of the long twentieth century, almost all political groups claimed to be such. Such invocations in the United States alone included (not exhaustively) Black Americans inspired by Marcus Garvey to refer to themselves as a nation within the US state, Indigenous peoples insisting that an occupying state recognise their national borders, and varieties of white nationalism.5 In the case of the former two, if centring a relation between people and territory, they mobilised national terms that remain the basis for exploitation for progressive aims.

Lastly, there are those who insist that since the state form cannot be salvaged, it should be abolished. Though few scholars advance such a view in relationship to ‘contemporary super-states’, some versions of this position are rooted in an anarchist confidence in the inventiveness and judgement of people free to exercise their creative and moral capacities.6 For others, amongst them James C. Scott (2012), their anarchism is more reluctant.7 As Scott reflected (2012, xiii), ‘if the state is [not] everywhere and always the enemy of freedom’, every successful revolution he studied created a more dominating state than the one it overthrew – better able to extract resources from and exercise more control over those it was to serve.8 The late, long-time movement activist and theorist, Grace Lee Boggs (2012), once a Marxist-Leninist, reached similar conclusions, even if she did not explicitly call them anarchist. After 1968, for her it was silly to expect that radical transformations could come solely, or even primarily, from state leaders who to attain and stay in office relied on corporate sponsorship tied to fossil fuels and big oil (and now finance and intellectual property). Instead, decentralised communities needed to continue to solve shared local problems together, practising prefigurative politics of living as if in the world they sought. Lee Boggs did not linger, as did Scott, with uncertainty over whether ‘the reach of the state over the past several centuries [had] sapped the independent, self-organizing power [and capacity] of individuals and small communities . . . for . . . mutuality and cooperation that have historically created order without the state’ (2012: xxi, xxii).9

Afro-Caribbean and African Resources

Knowing many reasons to approach the state with profound caution, in both Afro-Caribbean and African theory born with abolitionist and anti-imperial state-building efforts one finds kernels of different possibilities. Evident in them is what Samir Amin (1990) referred to as delinking from hegemonic approaches to globalisation in which political recognition is premised upon demonstrated acceptance of the governing conceptions of ‘development’ which define progress in terms that serve Europe, the Euro-Americas and maybe Japan, offering the rest a subordinate integration. For Raya Dunayevskaya (1991), as well for C. L. R. James (1993) and Fanon (1963), anti-colonial nationalist struggles formed an indispensable moment in a larger, dialectical forging of a progressive globalism. Via these struggles, collective entities dispersed and subordinated by colonial powers developed their independent character through fighting for self-determination. It was relations forged in and amongst these similarly situated emergent nations that alone could generate a bottom-up internationalism reflective of the non-elite members of the constituent parts.10

Preceding these reflections were those in the 1805 Constitution of the abolitionist Empire of Hayti, authored by Jean-Jacques Dessalines. It began with a refusal of erasure (Bernal 2017). It did so by naming the new polity for the Indigenous nation dispossessed by the same European colonial powers that instituted racialised enslavement. Abolishing this slavery forever also entailed eliminating any hereditary titles, beyond those earned through service undertaken to promote Hayti's liberty and independence. Everyone was to be equal before the law, and property, which could not include human beings, was sacred, except in cases of emigration to and naturalisation in foreign countries or when the previous owner was condemned to corporal punishment or other sentences for disgraceful actions. While those worthy of being Haitian had to be good fathers, sons, husbands and soldiers, neither fathers nor mothers could disinherit their children, and every citizen had to possess a ‘mechanical art’.

While no white man could come to Hayti and acquire the title of master or proprietor, white women, their mixed-race children and former mercenary Germans and Poles who fought for Hayti's military success could be naturalised. All citizens of Hayti would henceforth be referred to as ‘Blacks of the Empire’, consolidated in a racial assertion of reconciliation that roundly rejected prior disempowering racial distinctions. This bold abolitionist state-making again centred active remembering as an indispensable resource to a citizenship built on demonstrated records of service to advance Black liberty. Black here named an enacted political orientation to the Indigenous past (both Indigenous American and African), to political and personal kin and to freely given political labour.

In Jean Casimir's (2020) account, recently translated into English, the Haitian Revolution destroyed a slave system through creating a national community rooted in the enslaved's own vision of the world. Recuperating power to make their own decisions, the 90 per cent of Haitians descended from bossales learnt to manipulate and sabotage the dominating system rather than accepting its premises as their own. As such, they were very different from the ‘truly colonised’ mixed-race Black urban creole oligarchs who saw rural areas of Hayti as filled with backward masses in need of civilisation, Christianisation and modernisation, and the forms of imperial political recognition that accompanied them.

For Casimir (2020), the insistence by these urban creole oligarchs on Haitian citizenship as Black was an effort to stand up to the anti-Black racism and legal enslavement while also camouflaging differences between themselves and propertied free Blacks, on the one hand, and the majority, on the other. Put differently, the racial pride of urban creole oligarchs did not extend to inter-ethnic relations within the country. While they were proudly Black, they were Africanphobic. They dreamt (or fantasised, really) of using Western educational tools to render the creolised local African-majority culture invisible.

Still Hayti was born into a world that considered its existence inconceivable. It coupled the idea of empire, which had been fundamentally associated with genocide and enslavement, with an orienting commitment to remembering dispossession to foster abolition. Anyone who had risked their life for Hayti's independence from European colonialism and anyone fleeing enslavement could be one of Hayti's Black citizens. In seeking to constitute unprecedented relations amongst territory, political membership, land (in its naming) and labour (in its constitutive abolitionism), this conception of citizenship simultaneously rejected and enacted an alternative to existing forms of political recognition.

Jumping forward significantly to the 1960s, we turn simultaneously to Fanon and Cabral. For the former, states, as human institutions, could be re-envisioned beyond the Cold War alternatives modelled by the Soviet Union, on one hand, and the United States, on the other (Fanon 1963). Just as Hayti could forge an abolitionist empire, a twentieth-century state could be premised on countering the existing options by delinking to generate geopolitical spaces others could join. But for both Fanon and Cabral, any semblance of potential state legitimacy demanded deliberately counteracting narrow nationalisms. For both, the political institution that would supplant the French and Portuguese colonial states would inevitably be heterogeneous, extending or retracting meaningfully to include everyone present and implicated. The primary challenges were two-fold: how first to prioritise nurturing and continuing to foster political relations amongst disparate, often opposed parties to generate dynamic unities and how to exercise sufficient creativity to nimbly meet existing and emergent needs, including for a viable political economy with opportunities distributed along principled new lines, so that failures to do so did not translate into unnegotiable ethno-geographic divides.

Cabral (1979) explicitly challenges static conceptions of unity focussed solely on masses measured by their numbers, emphasising what Lee Boggs (2012) would call ‘critical connections’.11 Describing dynamic unity or a unity in motion, Cabral (1979) offered the example of a football team, comprised of eleven individual people, each with a specific role and temperament, often with different prior educational paths, faiths and political orientations. But when it came to playing, they acted together against the opponent. A meaningful team was not made by their uniforms or team name but by the means and ends of their shared pursuit.

In Cape Verde and Guinea, the Portuguese had taken the destiny of Indigenous people into Portuguese hands, halting local distinctive histories by attaching people living there as if a wagon to the train of Portugal's economic, social and cultural aims. If there had been constant resistance to this colonial force even after military defeat, it was primarily passive.

Now turning to the creation of unity, Cabral (1979) envisions it as synonymous with anti-colonial strength sufficient to actively recentre history. Much like Fanon, Cabral maps all the relevant, local divides that required mediation. In urban centres alone, there were salaried workers, who were senior and middle staff, dock workers, mechanics and drivers, all different from sex workers, beggars and thieves. Then, there were Indigenous Africans in rural areas who had never seen a white person. While their organisation was horizontal, marked by basic economic equality with each family functioning as an autonomous unit with a council of elders that settled conflicts amongst them, other rural groups were very hierarchical and unequal. And amongst those who lived on the land, there were landowners, tenant farmers and sharecroppers.

The purpose of Cabral's (1979) detailed snapshot of the political landscape is to caution readers against thinking one could rush the building of unity. He regularly stresses that social revolution is not an exportable (or importable) commodity. But crucial to retrieving political power at this time was creatively centring these political relations. One did so through shared political labour of making collective decisions – which inevitably included making one's own mistakes – with a full, reiterated view of the difficulties. To eliminate foreign domination exercised both by foreigners and by those within one's own ranks, one had to actively struggle against one's own collective weaknesses. Amongst these were the very people who considered themselves a primary strength: the Indigenous African petty bourgeoisie who, not to betray the revolution, for Cabral, had to commit class suicide by relinquishing excess wealth and modes of enrichment that immiserated the local working classes.

For Fanon (1963), the idea that effective states should offer mechanisms for bypassing the cultivating of political relations was fundamentally mistaken. To capture what governing aimed at eradicating colonialism entailed, Fanon distinguished (oh so) presciently between nationalism, on the one hand, and national consciousness, on the other. As with Hayti and Cabral, core to the latter was being bound by political activity, or sacrifice undertaken at great individual and collective risk (Bose 2019) to confront oppressive structures. The challenge of a no-longer-colonial politics was to sustain the mode of political belonging that emerged from such struggle – a political culture of solidarity – in the face of pressures of those who would seize the mantle of nationalism and collapse it into an exclusive chauvinism.

Unlike narrow nationalisms, national consciousness emerges as those with a shared commitment to challenge sources of their alienation and unfreedom do so together. It was such a record that made German and Polish mercenaries into Black citizens of Hayti. In those moments, the referents that orient particular and divisive self-understandings are put in flux in ways that make their inter-relationship malleable. National consciousness draws on this politically produced fluidity, reiterating that the aim of decolonisation was not just replacing the beneficiaries of unequal relations with a small set of locals who would become exclusive custodians of old forms of political recognition, but introducing a new way of ordering political life fundamentally informed by insights into what was wrong with colonisation. Its aim was to treat the fate of the nation as measured by the fate of all its people. As Bryan Stevenson (2017) would say in the US context, one must judge political health not by the quality of life of the most affluent and enfranchised but by that of the poorest and most structurally vulnerable.

As with Cabral, national consciousness treated developing local know-how needed to run one's country oneself as indispensable. Still, prioritising all of whom and that which was local was not a parochialism. Since imperial capitalism was global, effective political alternatives to it had to be as well. As such, there was no rigid divide between national and transnational consciousness. Indeed, for genuine globalisms to germinate they had to grow from the localisms of which they were comprised, lest their own internationalism become top-down and coercive in ways that Dunayevskaya (1991) and James (1993) also feared.

For Cabral and Fanon, independent African states were essential components in delinking to create new world orders. As Walsh had hoped with plurinationalism, state-making here sought to facilitate creatively ongoing centrifugal and centripetal movements of information- and resource-sharing both within and amongst nations. This did not mean introducing administrative mechanisms to circumvent ongoing political struggle but envisioning structures to facilitate continued shared problem-solving in which political identities informed by ethnicity, region and occupation were ingredients of insights to be nurtured together in and as political labour. Crucial for Fanon (1963) and Cabral (1979) was decentralising political organisation so that colonial metropolitan core–periphery dynamics were not reintroduced and solidified internally. Unattended, such inequalities of priority and attention would easily replicate colonial dynamics.

Lastly, and much more recently, is Gyekye's (1997) suggestion of deliberately forging meta-national states, an endeavour that he frames as inspired by reflections on African political situations, especially that in Ghana. When building a house, Gyekye observes, stones, sand, wood and cement are combined to produce a unity that is also a new thing. No longer simply stone, sand, wood or a composite thereof, it is a house. While there are important differences, since the materials of a potential meta-national state are embodied, situated people with histories, nation-building can be guided by elements of this analogy.12

Orienting Gyekye is a particular approach. Specifically, nationhood must be demonstrably experienced as worthwhile. To achieve this end, in a spirit like that of Cabral and Fanon, the meta-nation must weld together the diverse nations that compose it through a transformative process that produces cohesion. All who comprise that unity must experience political well-being through it. For this to emerge, Gyekye argues, ethnicity must be understood as a potential obstacle. Many living in multinational states treat ethnicity as a tool mobilised to secure goods for their own.13 But for Gyekye, so exploiting ethnicity turns it into a political disvalue, a source of disintegration. The same is true of many uses of language(s). Relying on these existing forms of political belonging as a basis for state recognition would sediment them, interfering with the deliberate creation of a compelling meta-state.

Gyekye (1997) is resolute: political power that is not satisfactorily shared will inevitably endanger national integration, allegiance and legitimacy. As with Cabral's football team, social mobility could nurture cross-cutting allegiance through binding individuals of different ethnicities by social and professional commitments and interests. But political mechanisms are also indispensable. Like Fanon, Gyekye advances a decentralised system that promotes sensitivities to the needs of localities through engendering ongoing, broad centrifugal and centripetal participation.

For Gyekye, meta-nationality is therefore a move towards an individuation (distinct from narrow individualism) through a turn from a reified ethnicism which he, like Stevens (2010), sees as blunting moral attitudes towards members of other groups. The shape of such transformations demands a very different understanding of culture, one that returns to the word's etymology. Culture describes the activities of cultivating plants in a process that gives them the care and attention they need to grow. For Gyekye, a meta-national state should similarly ‘open itself up for appreciation and identification by all [its] citizens’ and all must be able to contribute to its development and evolution (1997, 107). If such a process is, by definition, never finished, Gyekye is clear and unapologetic that not every aspect of the converging traditions of citizens are worthy of respect, accommodation and a place in the new national culture. Some elements, those that citizens would together determine, will have to be abandoned, as one would extract weeds threatening to strangle new shoots.

Here, as with newly independent postcolonial Caribbean states that embraced the language of creolisation, to which I will turn next, there is a sense that legitimate states must be deliberately fashioned by drawing selectively from existing historical and cultural resources. This political work, which centres building and sustaining social connective tissue over the development of administrative mechanisms that recognise citizens on the basis of already existing identities that it thereby ossifies, is never completed. Any corners that are cut will inevitably introduce real problems. State structures aim to facilitate centripetal and centrifugal movement to destabilise the notion of the state as primarily aimed at creating and prioritising the stasis of a community comprised of fixed component parts.

Conclusion

Creolisation emerged as a concept to describe forms of mixture – of people, faiths, foods, ideas, languages, landscapes – in the colonies primarily of the Americas, but also beyond them. In ways that were often simply adaptive, how people reproduced, grew and prepared food, spoke to one another, and interacted with the more-than-human world combined in ways that were radically transformative. This was noteworthy because the ingredients in relations of influence were unprecedented: these were not people who had interacted at all previously, let alone been engaged in the protracted wars of invasion and resistance, kidnapping, enslavement, and revolt that birthed the Euromodern world. In addition, efforts to rationalise the rightfulness of domination by the violent interests of Christian, white and European narratives of civilisation, order, political legitimacy and full-fledged reason suggested unilateral relations of origin and influence that were contradicted by the creolised facts on the ground. As such, descriptive creolisation offered a lens to perceive a more accurate narrative of what actually emerged out of the violently dispossessing worlds of plantation settler colonies. Such a lens was indispensable because rationalising ideologies did not only shape laws, policies and social norms, but also how people conducted enquiry, their very ability to perceive the world around them with accuracy.14

At the same time, as Paget Henry (2000) importantly observes, as does Robert Chaudenson with Salikoko S. Mufwene (2001) with special focus on the linguistic domain, the extent of creolising was uneven in different aspects of life. It was far more evident in music, food and dance than in formal intellectual and political spheres. In these sites of continued authority, power and reason, the influence of European and Euro-descended people remained exclusive and monopolising.

In a way that was strikingly different from the political obsession with original, sanitised foundings in the United States (Bernal 2017), in the independence movements of the Anglo- and Francophone Caribbean, there was a deliberate celebration of creolisation as naming what was distinctively non-European and non-Euro-Caribbean. Rather than a territory that mapped clearly onto a people and language with supposedly deep, singular, homogeneous national roots, Caribbean national identity celebrated a multination of people who became unified and local. Such discourse emphasised the process of emergence, even if in stylised and highly imperfect form, over an original unsullied core that had to be defended from dilution or bastardisation.

Such formulations, both as statements of ideals and accounts of empirical reality, had their limitations. They were, as is true of all concepts, interpreted and refracted through local political vocabularies and meaningful associations. In island political cultures that remained dominated by colour hierarchies, creolisation appeared only to reinforce the greater value of mixture evident in lighter skin or those mixed with non-Africans. In Latin America especially, creoles (and mestizos) became a new dominating class that claimed legitimacy as products of a creolising/indigenising process. However, framing themselves as that process's culmination, they hijacked its continuation. As such, even as they celebrated mixing as improving their nation's people, they in fact engaged in active decreolising. In prescribing a particular result of creolisation or pattern of racial mixture as bases for political and social recognition, they in fact created obstacles to its open-ended, multifaceted and unpredictable continuation.

Cabral, Fanon and Gyekye had no reason to call their vision a creolising one. Still, the political disposition and mechanisms they outline seem like highly effective ways not of prescribing creolisation but of staving off decreolising tendencies that they had good reason to fear. Indeed, they suggest that signs of decreolising – whether reifying ethnicity to obtain necessary resources for only some or empowering new mediators between the metropole and local urban centres without any attention to internal peripheries – immediately promise political failure.15 They rightly affirm that not to attend to the state is gravely dangerous. It is to leave what remains the single most consequential organ of political life to those devoid of concern with decimating the planet and its peoples. In other words, when we ask whose state, our answers cannot let the most impoverished and corrupt instantiations exhaust our answers.

If nation-states are rightfully credited with severing and alienating relations of non-bourgeois citizens to land, labour, kith and kin, could they be oriented instead by aiming to extend the selves of citizens in and through ever-thickening ties of interdependency, increasing our meaningful individual and collective control over our productive energies? What new understandings and practices of recognition might follow? If Euromodern models of state have been endemic to the creation of statelessness and dispossession, can experiences of space and time unleashed by new technologies, global pandemics, ongoing struggle and creolising thinking look Sankofically to insights outlined here to embrace novel ways of conceiving of the state's ultimate purpose?16

Even more minimalist and conservative visions of state-making as the pursuit of order and security suggest very different requirements when considered through the reflections of Garza (2020). For instance, when advancing concrete alternatives to turning to the current criminal justice system in the United States, Garza describes how most people understand a sense of safety. For her, people feel secure when they interact regularly with institutions that make good on their promises – whether of opportunity-opening education or of facilitating health and reliable relationships of care – and that are marked by accountability.

As she affirms, such living, responsive institutions cannot be forged without tirelessly cultivating political relations sustained by sensitivity to local priorities and how they are articulated in relationship to one another, guided by a horizon of collective flourishing. As also articulated by Cabral, Fanon and Walsh, keeping these centrifugal and centripetal forces in motion is ongoing struggle. In it, we counteract decreolising tendencies that would bypass identifying meaningfully unifying aims drawn from distinct modes of contribution and service – as in abolitionist Hayiti and anti-colonial Algeria – to human liberation as the basis of political honours. In it, we encounter modes of recognition that are at once a rejection and an offering.

Notes

1

While the language here appears to resonate with the vocabulary of Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition (1958), there are essential differences. Most notably, unlike Arendt's triad of labour, work and action, godira is explained through kinds of activities that span these three distinct categories. Crucial is not if the activity centres on the maintenance of biological life, the fabricated human world or the domain of politics but whether, in each instance, the process is tied to those of becoming or what Arendt would likely term ‘power’.

2

I am here deliberately invoking Michel-Rolph Trouillot's (1995) account of Haiti's revolution as unthinkable.

3

Presumably, this remains true for Stevens, even if/when one inhabits autonomous territories.

4

For some political theorists, notably Jeanne Morefield (2005), liberalism is endemically illiberal. Both domestically and internationally, it consistently combines a commitment to universal equality with support for hierarchies and empire. Its aims and values have only ever been introduced through conditions that systematically violate its progressive principles. For others, amongst them Rogers Smith (1997), liberalism is not inherently illiberal but liberal political cultures have always co-existed with other ones. Illiberalism then emerges because along with liberal commitments in the United States are those in dogged pursuit of retaining ascriptive hierarchies of ethnicity, gender, race or religion. If the presence of liberal values enables us to identify these other strands as lamentable deviations, they can only be uprooted through political means and mechanisms. Stephens does not adjudicate between these two positions. For her, the urgent challenge is to think beyond citizenship regimes that rely on belonging by birth or harmful intergenerational, kinship rules of membership. These are as evident in the United States and England as in ‘preliterate communities and premodern states of antiquity’ that did not embrace liberal ideals. As she reiterates: ‘In every single country in the world, citizenship is determined primarily by birth, either to one's parents or from being born in a particular country’ (2017: 28).

5

One could, for instance, include the ‘Gay Nation’.

6

This term is Martha Ackelsberg's in a private correspondence from 15 April 2024.

7

Many thanks to Cyrus (Ernie) Zirakzadeh for framing how Scott's political career and academic work on grassroots resistance to the state shaped his later anarchism that was atypical of 1960s Left intellectuals in the United States. Zirakzadeh explained that Scott was to the political right of the scholars who entered graduate school in the early 1960s and experienced as formative the Pentagon Papers, the bombing of Cambodia, the draft, the toppling of the Chilean government by the CIA, and the late 1960s urban uprisings in the United States. Unlike Scott, these later ‘New Left’ scholars were genuinely interested in anarchist writers, workers’ councils, neighbourhood-level participatory democracy and the Black Panthers. Scott, who favoured small-scale capitalism, worried about socialist experiments, formal governing bodies and trans-local property redistribution. He shared this distrust of radical politics in and beyond the United States with US liberals who came of age between 1950 and the death of John F. Kennedy.

8

As an example, Scott mentioned the federalised National Guard escorting Black children to school through menacing crowds of angry whites in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. He insisted that states ‘play[ing] an emancipatory goal’ was the direct result of the establishment of democratic citizenship and popular suffrage: ‘[O]f the roughly five-thousand-year history of states, only in the last two centuries ha[d] the possibility [even] arisen that states might occasionally enlarge the realm of human freedom’ (2012: xiv). When they did, it was in response to ‘massive extra-institutional disruption from below [threatening] the whole political edifice’ (2012: xiv). Scott importantly added that ‘the state is [not] the only institution that endangers freedom. To assert so would be to ignore a long and deep history of pre-state slavery, property in women, warfare, and bondage’ (2012: xiv).

9

Scott emphasised ‘the mass extinction’ of vernacular political forms and practices – some of which ‘need hardly be mourned’ (2012: 55) – over the past two centuries through the emergence of the ‘political module of the nation-state’ as hegemonic (2012: 53). If ‘emulation’ propagated ‘the module’, he wrote, ‘its staying power depends on the fact that such institutions are the universal gears that integrate a political unit into established international systems’ (2012: 54).

10

For detailed discussion of this argument, see Dunayevskaya (1991: 52–59).

11

I am appreciative of Lily Luo reminding me (March 2023) of this essential argument in Lee Boggs in the context of this argument.

12

For many political theorists, this formulation will echo those of Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who frame political community as artificial in the sense that it is unnaturally fabricated through human effort.

13

For detailed discussion of the many discrete and overlapping ways that ethnicity is mobilised in contemporary politico-economic life, see Meiu and colleagues (2020). The contributors to this volume underscore how necessary and challenging Gyekye's recommendations would be to enact.

14

Central to what such analysis of creolised forms of life revealed were the contradictions of two theses about African-descended people. The first is that the historic and ongoing trauma of the Middle Passage and racialised enslavement stripped African people of any African ways of knowing and being, producing human personifications of the concept of bare life. In addition to the obvious point that such a formulation is an impossible oxymoron, the profoundly African nature of Caribbean life, until the more recent hegemony of US culture, belies the governing assumptions. The second is a similarly distorted view that African and African-descended people remained encased in African ‘retentions’, impermeable to the changed conditions in which they lived. Part of what creolisation was helpful in offering was a human way of understanding the life-worlds that were forged in the inhuman situation of racialised plantation slavery.

15

Similarly, as deserves fuller attention, decreolising also describes relying on the heteronormative nuclear family as the default foundational unit of state and state-making rather than exploring the full range of ways that people can and do organise relations of intimacy and care. I thank Elena Gambino for raising this vital challenge (April 2023). The beginnings of my response are rooted in insights in the work of Kim Tallbear (2018) and Martha Ackelsberg and Judith Plaskow (2004).

16

The Sankofa bird's feet face forward while its head reaches back to retrieve a seed or an egg; an unrealised possibility. The word is from the Twi language and is an adinkra symbol that often appears in Akan art and in Africana projects that emphasise the need to reflect on the past to build viable presents and futures.

References

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    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Amin, S. 1990. Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

  • Arendt, H. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  • Bernal, A. M. 2017. Beyond Origins: Rethinking Founding in a Time of Constitutional Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press.

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  • Cabral, A. 1979. Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings. Trans. M. Wolfers. New York: Monthly Review Press.

  • Casimir, J. 2020. The Haitians: A Decolonial History. Trans. L. Du Bois. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

  • Chaudenson, R. 2001. Creolization of Language and Culture. Rev. in collaboration with S. S. Mufwene and trans. S. Pargman, S. S. Mufwene, S. Billings and M. AuCoin. London: Routledge.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Comaroff, J., and J. L. Comaroff. 1987. ‘The Madman and the Migrant: Work and Labor in the Historical Consciousness of a South African People’, American Ethnologist 14 (2): 191209. doi:.

    • Crossref
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  • Coulthard, G. S. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

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  • Henry, P. 2000. Caliban's Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy. New York: Routledge.

  • James, C.L.R. 1993. American Civilization. Oxford: Blackwell.

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  • Meiu, G. P., J. Comaroff and J. L. Comaroff. 2020. Ethnicity, Commodity, In/Corporation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

  • Morefield, J. 2005. Covenants without Swords: Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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  • Paik, N. 2016. Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in US Prison Camps since World War II. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

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  • Scott, J. C. 2012. Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Sealey, K. 2020. Creolizing the Nation. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

  • Smith, R. M. 1997. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in US History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

  • Stevens, J. 2010. States without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals. New York: Columbia University Press.

  • Stevenson, B. 2017. ‘Just Mercy: Race and the Criminal Justice System’. Paper presented to Stanford University Alumni, Stanford, CA, 27 June.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Tallbear, Kim. 2018. ‘Making Love and Relations beyond Settler Sex and Family’. In A. E. Clarke and D. Haraway (eds), Making Kin Not Population. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 145166.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Trouillot, M.-R. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon.

  • Walsh, C. E. 2011. ‘Afro and Indigenous Life-Visions in/and Politics: Decolonial Perspectives in Bolivia and Ecuador’, Bolivian Studies Journal/Revista de Estudios Bolivianos 18: 4969. doi:.

    • Crossref
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    • Export Citation
  • Walsh, C. E. 2023. Rising Up, Living On: Re-Existences, Sowings, and Decolonial Cracks. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Contributor Notes

Jane Anna Gordon teaches at the University of Connecticut. She is most recently author of Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement (Routledge, 2020) and Creolizing Political Theory (Fordham University Press, 2014) and co-editor of Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) and The Politics of Richard Wright (University Press of Kentucky, 2019). President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA) from 2014 to 2017, Gordon continues to direct the CPA Summer School and to co-edit the organisation's two book series, Creolizing the Canon and Global Critical Caribbean Studies. With Lewis Gordon, she is Executive Editor of the open access journal Philosophy and Global Affairs. E-mail: jane.gordon@uconn.edu; ORCID: 0000-0002-6352-1255

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Theoria

A Journal of Social and Political Theory

  • Ackelsberg, M., and J. Plaskow. 2004. ‘Why We're Not Getting Married’, Common Dreams News Center, 1 June. https://scholarworks.smith.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1015&context=swg_facpubs.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Amin, S. 1990. Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

  • Arendt, H. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  • Bernal, A. M. 2017. Beyond Origins: Rethinking Founding in a Time of Constitutional Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press.

  • Bose, A. 2019. ‘Frantz Fanon and the Politicization of the Third World as a Collective Subject’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 21 (5): 671689. doi:.

    • Crossref
    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Cabral, A. 1979. Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings. Trans. M. Wolfers. New York: Monthly Review Press.

  • Casimir, J. 2020. The Haitians: A Decolonial History. Trans. L. Du Bois. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

  • Chaudenson, R. 2001. Creolization of Language and Culture. Rev. in collaboration with S. S. Mufwene and trans. S. Pargman, S. S. Mufwene, S. Billings and M. AuCoin. London: Routledge.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Comaroff, J., and J. L. Comaroff. 1987. ‘The Madman and the Migrant: Work and Labor in the Historical Consciousness of a South African People’, American Ethnologist 14 (2): 191209. doi:.

    • Crossref
    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Coulthard, G. S. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

  • Dessalines, Emperor Jacques I. 1805. The 1805 Constitution of Haiti: Second Constitution of Haiti (Hayti). Promulgated by Emperor Jacques I (Dessalines). New York Evening Post, 15 July. http://faculty.webster.edu/corbetre/haiti/history/earlyhaiti/1805-const.htm.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Dunayevskaya, R. 1991. Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution, 2nd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Fanon, F. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. C. Farrington. New York: Grove Press.

  • Garza, A. 2020. The Purpose of Power. New York: One World.

  • Gordon, J. A. 2020. Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement. New York: Routledge.

  • Gordon, J. A. 2014. Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon. New York: Fordham University Press.

  • Gyekye, K. 1997. Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience. New York: Oxford University Press.

  • Henry, P. 2000. Caliban's Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy. New York: Routledge.

  • James, C.L.R. 1993. American Civilization. Oxford: Blackwell.

  • Lee Boggs, Grace, with Scott Kurashige. 2012. The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Meiu, G. P., J. Comaroff and J. L. Comaroff. 2020. Ethnicity, Commodity, In/Corporation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

  • Morefield, J. 2005. Covenants without Swords: Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

  • Öcalan, A. 2017. Democratic Confederalism. London: Pluto Press. http://www.ocalan-books.com/#/book/democratic-confederalism.

  • Olson, A., and A. Zamalin. 2024. The Ends of Resistance: Making and Unmaking Democracy. New York: Columbia University Press.

  • Paik, N. 2016. Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in US Prison Camps since World War II. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Scott, J. C. 2012. Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Sealey, K. 2020. Creolizing the Nation. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

  • Smith, R. M. 1997. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in US History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

  • Stevens, J. 2010. States without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals. New York: Columbia University Press.

  • Stevenson, B. 2017. ‘Just Mercy: Race and the Criminal Justice System’. Paper presented to Stanford University Alumni, Stanford, CA, 27 June.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Tallbear, Kim. 2018. ‘Making Love and Relations beyond Settler Sex and Family’. In A. E. Clarke and D. Haraway (eds), Making Kin Not Population. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 145166.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Trouillot, M.-R. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon.

  • Walsh, C. E. 2011. ‘Afro and Indigenous Life-Visions in/and Politics: Decolonial Perspectives in Bolivia and Ecuador’, Bolivian Studies Journal/Revista de Estudios Bolivianos 18: 4969. doi:.

    • Crossref
    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Walsh, C. E. 2023. Rising Up, Living On: Re-Existences, Sowings, and Decolonial Cracks. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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