Mapping Afro-Caribbean Political Thought

Drawing on Paget Henry’s field-defining Caliban’s Reason and Lewis R. Gordon’s Introduction to Africana Philosophy, this chapter maps the historical terrain of Caribbean political thought written primarily in English and in French. Beginning with explicitly antislavery writings, it then turns to the range of intellectual efforts to forge an independent, no longer colonial, Caribbean future. It concludes by emphasizing the irony of Caribbean political writings teeming with philosophical insights in a tradition that has not until very recently explicitly cultivated philosophical endeavor and by arguing that, in exemplifying a creolizing orientation, Caribbean thought shares an affinity with some, but not all, models of comparative political theorizing.

History, the Hindu Right, and Subversion of Brahmanical-Hindu Political Thought

How can scholars critically engage premodern Indic traditions without falling prey to Hindu conservatism or Brahmanical-Hindu apologism? This question is pressing for Indic political theory and contemporary Indian democracy because of ethnically exclusivist, Hindu nationalist movements that have emerged in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This chapter argues that a positive answer to the question must begin by taking seriously the tremendous pluralism in India’s political and philosophical history, which requires systematically engaging with premodern source material and uncovering the internal pluralism within a longer and larger Brahmanical-Hindu tradition of political thought. The author explains how it is both possible and politically necessary to internally subvert Brahmanical-Hindu political thought, which can help diffuse essentialist and exclusivist arguments coming from the Hindu right. Locating such plurality and engaging in internal subversion can help challenge historical justifications for Indian nationalism and contribute to decolonization, thus contesting the Hindu right on its own conceptual and genealogical turf. To advance this argument, the author provides a critical reinterpretation of the infamous “Puruṣa Sūkta,” which is often viewed as the locus classicus of the modern caste system, providing a novel interpretation that challenges caste hierarchy and supplies new resources for democratic thought and practice in India.

The “Legitimacy of Chinese Philosophy” Debate and the Global Extension of Disciplinary Knowledge

This chapter argues that the ongoing debate about the “legitimacy of Chinese philosophy” (Zhongguo zhexue hefaxing) raises issues relevant to the globalization of knowledge. On its surface, the debate concerns whether Chinese thought can be meaningfully understood as “philosophy”; more generally, it asks how, in the very process of enabling their translation into presumably more “modern” languages of intellectual expression, the terms of a specific academic discipline shape and constrain the development of particular forms of knowledge. The debate reveals the power inequalities that underlie attempts to include culturally marginalized bodies of thought within established disciplines and suggests the range of alternatives that are silenced or forgotten when this “inclusion” takes place. Even contemporary invocations of “Chinese philosophy” are often unable to comprehend the stakes of the debate for many of its Chinese participants, who link the debate to enduring questions about the capacity of indigenous Chinese academic terms to compete successfully with Euro-American ones. These debates may illuminate questions currently motivating comparative political theory.

Toward a Tradition of Ghanaian Political Philosophy

This chapter discusses the contributions of Kwame Nkrumah, Kwasi Wiredu, William. E. Abraham, and Kwame Gyekye to the corpus of African philosophy. It elaborates their normative perspectives on three themes: the relevance of tradition to modernity, the appropriate form of democracy as means of legitimating political power in Africa, and the relative status of person and community; it also reflects on the significance of these themes in postcolonial African social and political philosophical discourse. The chapter then points out points of convergence and divergence among these individuals and how they relate with Western philosophical perspectives and argues that their work configures a coherent discourse that justifies joining them in a tradition of Ghanaian political philosophy.

Comparison, Connectivity, and Disconnection

This introduction surveys works of comparative political theory, defined here as a discursive space from which to deparochialize the Eurocentric nature of political theory, to advance substantive research in and from global bodies of thought, and to hear from cognate fields. Its methods of comparison focus not on the literal juxtaposition of two discrete objects, but rather on the transformations that occur through engagement with the unfamiliar; and its aims for inclusion are not tokenistic appropriations of marginalized thinkers, but theorizations of global asymmetries of knowledge and power. The chapter argues that the contributions of comparative political theory are connective and disruptive as much as cumulative. As such, it explains how the entries and organization of this handbook can be used to build conversations, challenge paradigms, and trace thematic preoccupations across divergent contexts of time, place, and experience.

“Inter-Asia as Method” and Radical Politics

This chapter examines two recent attempts at reclaiming inter-Asia regionalism to resist the hegemonic forces of nationalism and global imperialism: Chen Kuan-hsing’s Asia as method and Prasenjit Duara’s circulatory histories. These authors challenge us to see Asian interdependency—namely between East, South, and Southeast Asia— as an imaginary resource for locating alternative political frameworks outside Euro-American precedents in a multi-polar world. They show how practices of Asian religious, philosophical and cultural traditions via regimens of bodily and ethical activity render capacities for radical self-transformation and collective resistance that transcend narrow oppositional frameworks of radical politics. By turning tradition from a conservative into a revolutionary category, they challenge critical norms by presenting a different embodiment of radical politics. The chapter discusses these trends in light of existing decolonial paradigms and offers examples of how activists in Malaysia equally work within local cultural and linguistic traditions, including Islam, to expand possibilities for ethno-religious conviviality and social justice. Keywords

Civilization and Culture in Anticolonial and Comparative Political Theory

This chapter interrogates the political practices and forces that constitute anticolonial thought and comparative political theory. Both anticolonial and comparative political theorists are curators or collectors of culture and civilization. However, their political projects often point in distinct, if not opposed, directions. This chapter aims to map the different conditions under which each group collects, the different strategies by which they curate, the subject positions these conditions and strategies produce, and, most important, the effects of their appropriations. It does so by way of four contrapuntal pairings: Aurobindo Ghose with Fred Dallmayr, Mohandas Gandhi with Farah Godrej, Frantz Fanon with Leigh Jenco, and Amilcar Cabral with Roxanne Euben. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the need to take seriously a politics of incommensurability as a political practice, one attuned to the constraints that enable subjectivity oriented toward minimizing (usually historically sedimented) forms of domination.

Searching for “Tolerance” in Islamic Thought

This chapter argues that the search for liberal tolerance within Islamic thought will inevitably be a tautological, somewhat barren exercise, given the specific, historical origins of the liberal conception of tolerance. Moreover, through a comparison of the political ideas of two important Islamic thinkers of the twentieth century, Abul Aʻla Maududi (1903–1979), an influential Islamist thinker, and Javed Ahmed Ghamidi (1951–), a prominent contemporary public intellectual, the chapter argues for the value of thinking explicitly about the relationship between the state as an institution, and the political role of difference, rather than of revealing attitudes toward minorities or thinking of tolerance as a virtue.

The Concept of Rights in Modern Japan

This chapter aims to investigate the acceptance of “rights” in nineteenth-century Japan by examining divergent interpretations of political concepts between the West, especially Europe, and East Asia. After the arrival of US warships in 1853, facing the imminent threat of Western power, Japanese scholars and statesmen raised fundamental normative issues concerning the legal and moral concepts shaping the Western world—essentially posing the question, “What is Western civilization?” They grappled both theoretically and practically with Western political thought, employing the vocabulary and concepts provided by their own East Asian legal, moral, and political traditions, such as Confucianism, in a variety of ways. Given the differences between Western and Asian legal traditions, especially, the idea of “rights” was one of the hardest to accept. This chapter examines how some key Japanese intellectuals and politicians, including Nishi Amane, Nakae Chomin, and Fukuzawa Yukichi, confronted the complex plurality of rights in jurisprudence and discourse of European thinkers such as Simon Vissering, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and John Stuart Mill and how they used it to reconsider specifically the legal culture of East Asia. In the course of this intellectual struggle with an alien culture, these Japanese thinkers sought to liberate European political theory from a closed historical identity and imbue it with new meaning in a new context. This is a history of comparative political theory concerned with the cross-cultural phenomenon of the nineteenth-century encounter of non-Western intellectuals with the ideal and the reality of “the West.”

A Postcolonial Critique of Comparative Political Theory

This chapter develops a postcolonial critique of comparative political theory by engaging with its theoretical and methodological reflections on its enterprise, including how it anticipates and refutes the postcolonial critique that this chapter offers. While efforts to deparochialize political theory are welcome, the means by which this laudable aim is pursued in comparative political theory undermines the end that is sought. If the idea that there is an activity or practice called “political theory” that has been cultivated for centuries, even millennia, in “the West” is an unhelpful and misleading fiction, to extend it to include the non-West is doubly so. It is to impose a modern, Western category on thinkers, texts, and modes of writing and reflecting that it does not fit and that distorts our understanding of such traditions.