The Anticolonial Imagination

IPCS School
March-April 2026

Course Description

This approaches anticolonial thought as social theory to trace its varied radical practices of world-making. Many mid-twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers received advanced degrees in the social sciences before their turn to political activism: B.R. Ambedkar, Frantz Fanon, W.E.B. Du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, among others. Understanding this overlooked historical fact is necessary for accounting for the forms of anticolonial thought that emerge by the 1940s and 1950s. To decolonise the world requires us to reimagine human interdependence. Anticolonial thinkers in the mid-twentieth century understood this to be their task, especially after their nations had gained independence. To reinvent human relationships and political collectivities beyond the nation-state, thinkers drew on their colonial academic training. By revising and igniting a radical sociological imagination, thinkers were able to articulate new utopian communities in the wake of empire. What can we learn from these intellectual commitments and its varied political genealogies?

By foregrounding the intellectual formation of post-independence thinkers from around the decolonizing world, the class reveals how the anticolonial sociological imagination is an aesthetic and political imagination. The ‘decolonial wave’ that swept over the Global South in the mid-twentieth century left newly independent nations beached on the shores of a dreary Cold War world. For these newly independent countries, national independence was a far cry from decolonization. For some it fulfilled the absolute bare minimum of anticolonialism’s demands. For others national independence was dangerously antithetical to bringing about a world beyond colonialism. Although anticolonialism was no stranger to nationalism, not even its most exclusionary thinkers imagined the ‘nation’ emerging as the only awardee and guarantor of ‘independence’. After World War II, the nation ranked among the bleakest forms of human collectivities. As Frantz Fanon dismally predicted, ‘the apotheosis of independence becomes the curse of independence’.

A properly ‘hesitant’ sociology, in WEB Du Bois’s prescriptive formulation, would understand the political implications of this creative power. As mid-century anticolonial thinkers sought to understand the existing societies that limited the possibilities of decolonization, they also reveled in the decolonial project of imagining and inventing new societies altogether.

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Course Texts

Week 1: 06 March
introductions

Week 2: 17 March
WEB Du Bois, ‘Sociology Hesitant’
Amilcar Cabral, ‘The Weapon of Theory’
Max Weber, Economy and Society

Week 3: 24 March
BR Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste
Steve Biko, ‘What is Black Consciousness?’
Kwame Nkrumah, Consciencism
William James, ‘Does Consciousness Exist?’
John Dewey, Democracy and Education

Week 4: 31 March
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Maska
Ali Shariati, Sociology of Islam
Henri Corbin, Mundus imaginalis

Week 5: 07 April
Claudia Jones, ‘An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Women’
Lorraine Hansberry, Les Blancs
Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa

Week 6: 14 April
Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mt Kenya
Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific