Egyptian sculptor Mahmoud Mukhtar oversees the making of the famous Nahdat Misr statue. The statue was first displayed in 1920 Paris after Mukhtar was inspired by the 1919 Egyptian revolution against the British. It was eventually displayed in Cairo… — Egyptian sculptor Mahmoud Mukhtar oversees the making of the famous Nahdat Misr statue. The statue was first displayed in 1920 Paris after Mukhtar was inspired by the 1919 Egyptian revolution against the British. It was eventually displayed in Cairo after Egyptian nationalist leader Saad Zaghlul saw it in Paris during the Anglo-Egyptian negotiations for independence and asked that it be replicated on a grander scale in Cairo. It was officially inaugurated in 1921.

Histories of ‘worldmaking’ in the political sphere often point to 1955, the year when leaders of the recently decolonizing states gathered in the Indonesian town of Bandung to discuss the potential of a new order after Empire based on the principle of self-determination. So foundational was this moment that it later became known as the ‘Bandung Moment’ (Lee, 2010). For Adom Getachew, this moment was constituted by efforts to forge and create a new world; in her view, “anticolonial worldmaking offered a number of strategies to mitigate, circumvent, and undo the hierarchies that facilitated domination.”

But understood as more than a political undertaking and beyond the ‘Bandung Moment’, both the periodization and scope of ‘worldmaking’ can be extended to include intellectual, artistic, spiritual, and--at its most fundamental--cosmological reimagining of the world, both in the face of and after Empire. Yoav Di Capua’s (2018) study of Arab existentialism in 1960s and 1970s, for example, invites us to look at decolonization “not only in terms of physical liberation,” but rather as “a transnational business [that] developed global ethics of liberation and a clear expectation for true emancipation.” Recent philosophical contributions to ‘worldmaking’, for instance by Federico Campagna, have emphasised the urgency and possibility--then and now--to reinvent the world in moments of radical transformation, when worlds once familiar cease to exist and the potential for creating new ones arises. Employing this expanded notion of worldmaking can help us reimagine moments of collective worldmaking that predated decolonization during the late imperial period.

Taking its cue from recent work by Getachew, Di Capua, Campagna and others, Borderlines seeks contributions that shed light on the many ways in which actors engaged in decolonization attempted to create “another world” (Lee, 2010) after—or against and in the face of—Empire.

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For those interested please send 400 word pitches to journalborderlines@gmail.com with the subject: Worldmaking

Pitches should not exceed 400 words. We accept essays, translations, academic book reviews, interviews, and are open for other formats that adequately address the topic. For examples, please consult the borderlines website and archive. Contributions should not exceed 3000 words.

Call for Pitches: Another Worldmaking? Art, Culture and Thought