foundation of nation in settler civil society and, in the aftermaths of Partition and the 1949 Durban Riots, sought to reconceptualize the subject of anticolonial nationalism by privileging the question of difference. Articulated most fully in the writings of a group of Natal intellectuals centered on ANC president Albert Luthuli, this position upheld the central agency of Africans in their own liberation—and the broadly African character of postapartheid national culture—while rejecting a racial or majoritarian basis for a future political community. Drawing on precolonial practices of social inclusion and a Christian critique of materialism, these thinkers argued that a common set of values would provide the foundation for the liberation struggle and a historically dynamic nation-building project. Their conception was self-consciously idealist in a philosophical sense. The most powerful force binding the nation was the idea of the nation itself. Unlike the categories of race or civilization, idealism could incorporate the also-colonized other without postulating the existence of a national majority or threatening assimilation: it provided a basis of unity that did not presuppose homogeneity within the realm of the social.
The idealist critique of philosophical and economic materialism represented a major strand within twentieth-century thought.25 As Michael Adas argues, the profound crisis generated by the First World War challenged a central precept of colonial ideology: that the technoscientific strength of Europe embodied its civilizational superiority over the colonized world.26 In the wake of the horrors of industrialized warfare, an increasing number of European and colonized intellectuals rejected the identification of moral progress with material power. According to Adas, the resulting debate over the future of European civilization, and its putative basis in secular progress, was the first truly global intellectual conversation.27 Eventually, this exchange would encompass thinkers as diverse as the philosopher Henri Bergson, the Nobel Prize–winning poet Rabindranath Tagore, the Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain, the Muslim-Indian thinker Mohammed Iqbal, and the theorists of negritude, Paulette Nardal, Aimé Césaire, and Léopold Senghor. Pankaj Mishra explains: “Often drawing upon philosophical and spiritual traditions in Islam, Hinduism and Confucianism they developed a refined suspicion of the ‘brave new world’ of science and reason, insisting on the non-rational, non-utilitarian aspects of human existence.”28 While many proponents of idealism opposed foreign rule, they nevertheless understood the crime of colonialism in philosophical rather than political terms. They believed that the West’s overreliance on technology and its one-sided emphasis on an abstract form of rationality denied the very things that give human life value: the moral and spiritual dimensions of being. This critique displaced European nationalism’s fixation on primordial or substantive attributes—a homogenous culture or a unified political economy, a racial identity or a shared territory—and instead emphasized the collective project of building new societies founded on shared ideals and an expanded vision of humanity. To quote the philosopher Achille Mbembe, the struggle against colonialism created the space in which to articulate a “volunté active de communauté,” an active will to share in community.29
AFRO-ASIAN SOLIDARITY AND ETHICAL NATIONALISM
In recent scholarship, Afro-Asian solidarity—symbolized most powerfully by the 1955 Bandung Conference—has elicited two conflicting interpretations. Among one group of scholars, the “Bandung moment” represented the most powerful expression of the anticolonial will-to-community, the highpoint of the revolutionary movement to build societies free of empire and racism. Recovering the radical aspirations of Bandung (often against the actual policies pursued by postcolonial elites), Vijay Prashad argues that the Third World was not a place, but a political project that sought to reimagine the international order against the bipolar system of the Cold War. Although this project ultimately collapsed through a combination of external sabotage and its own internal contradictions (including structures of class and neotraditional patriarchy), it nevertheless pointed to unrealized trajectories of liberation and new forms of political subjectivity.30 By shifting the focus from high diplomacy to grassroots activism and imaginations of Afro-Asianism, other scholars underscore the internationalist character of anticolonial politics. Not only did nationalist movements incorporate diasporic communities and transnational practices of solidarity, they reimagined self-determination and liberation by envisioning decolonization as a global revolutionary process.31 In a significant body of writings, the novelist Amitov Ghosh connects the expansive ethos of Afro-Asian solidarity with deeper histories of cosmopolitanism, exchange, and travel throughout the Indian Ocean. With their limited resources, Ghosh argues, resistance movements strove to articulate a universalism based on older conversations between entangled and intimately connected worlds: “Those of us who grew up in that period will recall how powerfully we were animated by an emotion that is rarely named: this is xenophilia, the love of the other, the affinity for strangers.”32 Employing a strategy of “nostalgic futurism,” Ghosh and others read the unrealized visions of Bandung as an archive and resource for creating a postnationalist politics in the era of neoliberal empire.33
In contrast, historians of southern and eastern Africa generally express skepticism regarding the reach of Afro-Asianism while raising questions about the ways that anticolonial nationalism presupposed a majoritarian political subject that racialized postcolonial citizenship.34 In a trenchant discussion of mid-century Tanzania, James Brennan argues that the country’s Indian community functioned as the primary other for the development of a dominant, racialized African nationalism. However inclusive its official rhetoric, the Tanganyika African Union (TANU) embraced and reinforced popular discourses of racial purity—grounded in patrilineal modes of reckoning descent—by defining nation in terms of Swahili civilization and common (African) economic suffering.35 Though individuals of South Asian descent participated in anticolonial struggles such as Kenya’s Mau Mau uprising, such solidarity coexisted with—and in certain ways drew its strength in opposition to—a forbidding backdrop of colonial segregation, ideas of Indian racial and civilizational superiority, and equally racialized African resentments.36 In her wide-ranging Africa in the Indian Imagination, Antoinette Burton describes the ways in which heroic narratives of Afro-Asianism inscribe “brown” over “black” while lionizing the masculine subject of anticolonial nationalism.37 These accounts resonate with an important critique of solidarity—as both concept and practice—that warns about the ways that progressive alliances serve to disavow white (and other kinds of) privilege while disciplining more radical black political aspirations in the name of unity and respectability.38
Rather than celebrating or critiquing the project of Afro-Asian unity, Internal Frontiers describes how an important group of intellectuals attempted to overcome the limitations of solidarity by reconceiving the nation in ethical terms. Because nationalism was a narrative of the African people’s participation within (a particular conception of) history, later historiographical debates were anticipated within the antiapartheid movement as disputes over basic principles. A breakthrough occurred in the process of organizing the 1952 Defiance Campaign against unjust laws. Following this first mobilization of Africans and Indians together in nonviolent civil disobedience, Luthuli and other ANC leaders linked the possibility of Black-Indian solidarity to a reformulation of the African nation-building project. The foundation of this compact was Indian recognition of the ANC’s leadership. If Indians (and later others) endorsed the African liberation struggle through personal risk and genuine material sacrifice, the ANC would welcome these communities as distinct communities within a broad project of African nationalism. This act of welcoming, which was deeply resonant with the importance of hospitality in precolonial African cultures, represented the inclusive moment of the ANC’s idea of an “inclusive African nationalism.”
Unlike liberal conceptions of solidarity or multiracialism, this alliance did not presuppose the equivalency of its members.39 Rather, reciprocity was both asymmetrical and particularized: African acceptance of the other’s claim to indigeneity presupposed Indians’ prior recognition of the country’s fundamentally African character. In two important senses, this reimagining of solidarity articulated the nation as an ethical relationship between distinct yet entangled communities.40 In the first instance, this relationship was ethical because the form of reciprocity
