Disha Karnad Jani

Third World Historical articulates a research agenda for a project suggestively housed as a special section in the pages of CSSAAME (42.2).The editor’s community webpage on Borderlines features experimental writings that enact the project’s attention to questions of form. Here, the intention is to engage in a collaborative project that is its own form of archive building, a portal that speaks to the wider themes of the Third World Historical. The essays in Borderlines highlight the visceral and the relational as distinct from abstract concepts of revolution as complete breaks. The words in these pieces are never failure, or defeat but stories of complicity, compromise, and fragmentation. By emphasizing relationality, movement, and complicity we aim to think concretely about moving between a world overwhelmed by structural forces that preclude action and an imagined world filled with boundless agents detached from history, an equally self-defeating proposition.

“The people are not quite dirt not quite map made sovereign, the people are something that happens—a third event”

“Third,” Zaina Alsous

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The French section of the League Against Imperialism published many pamphlets, newspapers, and journals in the 1920s and 1930s. A short-lived yet incredibly active organization, the LAI was founded in 1927, and was tasked by the Communist International to coordinate communist and anti-colonial movements around the world. National sections ran with varying degrees of autonomy, and the French section in particular was one part of a vibrant network of international political life. In order to illuminate the necessary simultaneity of working-class and anti-colonial struggle in France and around the world, activists produced articles, tables, charts, images—and printed them for dissemination to subscribers and the general public at demonstrations and political gatherings. This is by no means a feature unique to the LAI’s organizing; countless archives are full of the popular publications of hundreds of organizations, each one permitting a mere glance at the print culture of the period. I am working through the materials produced by the LAI’s members and the governments they opposed, in order to arrive at an intellectual history of anti-imperialist revolution-in-motion, always anticipated and never achieved. My goal is to capture a concept such as sovereignty, or revolution, or freedom in situ among the quotidian tasks of organization, political education, mass politics, reading, writing, and speaking. This involves a good deal of print, correspondence, photography, and numbers. Sometimes there is art. Occasionally, there is horror.

The photographs in anti-colonial periodicals work to depict the realities of the present. In their newspapers and magazines, LAI activists sought to show the scale of demonstrations in France and abroad, and through simple juxtaposition to compare the suffering of Arab women forced to scavenge and the starving unemployed of Europe.

But the rare drawings that appear in these publications, signed with a single pseudonym or initials I can barely make out—these images work to splice a moment of otherworldliness into what turned out to be an interminable present. The otherworldly may be monstrous, and thus beyond words, and so how lucky we are to have the image.

[The following images are from the May 1932 issue of Contre L’Imperialisme, the journal of the French section of the League Against Imperialism, F/DELTA/RES/273 at La Contemporaine, University of Nanterre]  

A rich literature exists on renderings of the monstrous in colonial lives, through rumor, metaphor, and image. The monster-adversary appears in Contre L’Imperialisme as political education, varied and jumbled up with the detritus of its kill. Each of these monsters sustains itself by taking. In the first drawing, we do not see what caused the carnage heaped at the child’s feet, but we see the aftermath. In the second, a figure in military garb leers over a drunken man, a French “law for the suppression of the press” posted above. In the third, a Chinese communist upends a rickshaw, and out tumbles the sumptuously dressed passenger. In the last, countless hands stretch up towards the smoky spoils of modern industry, held out of reach by a top-hatted and snooty man. These images punctuated a periodical that was intended for mass distribution, interrupting the depiction of struggle in prose and photograph. Much of this work involved tracing the outlines of the enemy, to render in no uncertain terms how capital and empire worked their way into the lives of every person on the planet.

The writing in periodicals such as Contre l’Imperialisme was dedicated to reporting contemporary instances of colonial oppression and brutality around the world, from Vietnam to Algeria to Palestine. Features on demonstrations in Paris and the surrounding banlieues coupled with profiles of prominent activists rounded out the issues, with reprinted poems and plays towards the end of the issue, and the occasional book review. The task of these publications was to represent the working whirring of capitalism-as-imperialism and imperialism-as-capitalism, stitching together through unbounded examples Lenin’s observation that “imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism.” To make the case that the white French worker was bound in bloody time-space to everyone else who suffered, and to reject the choice between imperial France and the looming fascist threat—that was the rhetorical and immediate work that such an object was meant to do.

The horrors of the last five hundred years have been grotesque, and show no sign of letting up. Possible worlds, the pearls wrought from the grit of revolution—these must be cut out of the belly of a beast. Fitting then, that the monster is never far from even the most hefty and technical treatments of the social relations that animate these centuries. Marx’s famous metaphor, for instance, describes capital as “dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour.” The inflection point of revolutionary change can be thought of, then, as the moment in which the monstrous is overcome, and the sublime takes form to replace it. The sublime thereafter of revolutionary futures has also been rich terrain for Marxist and postcolonial scholarship, concerned as we have been for decades with picking apart the incomplete, romantic, and disemboweled possibilities that existed inside the epistemes of world-historical moments and their protagonists. 

The “heterogeneity of anti-colonial legacies” sits astride the world-historical problems of capitalism and colonialism. For many scholars of anti-colonial movements, particularly of those movements that preceded the formation of a nation-state, the archives of (attempted) revolution sit in the imperial metropole. When those movements are not only recognized by, but bound up in struggle with the imperial state, their protagonists often map the terrain of revolutionary possibility among migrants, exiles, students, and travelers in London, Paris, Berlin, New York—in short, depositing the residues of their movements in the same nodes of power from which the academy’s institutional moneys and access continue to swirl. For the writers and artists who produced texts such as Contre l’imperialisme, depicting strife and struggle was one step in the long task of “awakening” the working class, and binding together precisely the “heterogeneity” that, on the face of it, would splinter after the Second World War into formal decolonization in the colonies and the welfare state’s mid-century interregnum in Europe and the settler states. The “contre” of it all, repeated here in collage, thrums throughout the work of the LAI, just as it does in the very category of the “anti-colonial.” So what is it they (we) are up against?

In her 1982 essay “Report from the Bahamas,” June Jordan wonders at the implied and assumed affinities she is meant to have with the woman cleaning her hotel room while she is on holiday. “When we get the monsters off our backs,” she remarks, “all of us may want to run in very different directions.” In its articulation in the twentieth century, the revolutionary subject has necessarily strained against the bounds of the political vessels they were given by their predecessors in the eighteenth and nineteenth—the set of possible “directions,” as it were. But the constitution, the nation-state, the federation, the world government, the soviet, the commune, the family, the economy—they hang about the revolutionary subject, suspended in orbit, waiting to be turned over and used again. For the many revolutionary organizations of the 1920s and 1930s—and arguably for every organization with revolutionary aspirations since—the task of depicting the monster-adversary, as well as closely documenting instances of struggle, was intimately tied to the task of making a radical break with the ordinary world entirely thinkable. Running in very different directions has not turned out to be the task that immediately follows throwing off the monsters once and for all (hasn’t happened yet). Running in this case looks rather like a working-through of theory and social transformation, punctuated with the prosaic tasks of making sovereignty stick. To square the circle of a universal problem with innumerable particularities—this is the work of anti-colonial revolution, when taken as a world-historical task. Our own problem, it seems, is that despite all that was to come, the enemy would remain whole and unbothered: a skilled shape-shifter.

Disha Karnad Jani received her Ph.D from the Department of History at Princeton University in April 2022. Her dissertation is an intellectual history of the League Against Imperialism (1927-1937), and her research interests include global intellectual histories of mass movements, political economy, and state-making.