ABSTRACT
This study concerns legal decolonization specifically, but also resistance more generally. As argued in the above text, resistance is of course never in and of itself, never pure, nor authentic (Bhabha 1994a; See also Cooper 1996: 6-12). Rather, resistance is inescapably shaped by the multiple, often-heterogeneous conditions of its possibility, including circuits of capital, technology, and given institutional infrastructures. In the world-historical space and time of the post-war UNGA, then, what are the conditions of possibility for anti-colonialist resistance? In the nineteenth century, the politics of kinship imparted to the term “colonial” a number of positive connotations, which in various ways became embedded in and disseminated through emerging fields such as the biological sciences and ethnology, specific institutions such as colonial medicine and colonial development projects, as well as elaborate colonial bureaucracies (See, for example, Pedler 1975; Thompson and Aldoff 1975; Mengara 2001b; Conklin 1999). As discussed in Chapter One, this politics deployed especially the binary of the rational/irrational, which also manifested as the paternal/childlike and the masculine/feminine, in order to construct transnational hierarchies of space, identity and international community. In the twentieth century,
however, two sets of developments served to disturb these conditions of possibility, helping to open up new space in which to (re)negotiate colonialist kinship and its hierarchies. First, from the mid-1800s and on, anticolonialists advanced new theories of democracy and self-determination as part of a building global movement which sought to contend with older, colonialist meanings of the “colonial,” and by the mid-1900s, this movement had succeeded in de-legitimizing the “western imperial project (Parrott 1997; Winant 2001).” Second, with the emergence of the purportedly universal UN after WWII, these anti-colonialist efforts were incorporated into the institutions of global knowledge production in a particular manner. That is, the UN incorporated on a formally equal basis newly independent, “postcolonial,” anti-colonialist states, with elite, mostly male leaders representing (elite blocks within) these states within its apparatus. In the UNGA, then, these “postcolonial” states provided the central locus of anticolonialist resistance and social change, pushing for legal decolonization against the reactionary politics of colonialist sympathizers. In this process, how did this anti-colonialist resistance challenge the politics of kinship, its construction of the “colonial,” and its rational/irrational and other hierarchies? Critically, how did the conditions of possibility for this resistance, particularly its articulation by elite men representing “sovereign,” if sui generis,1 nation-states determine its shape? In this chapter, I argue that in the post-war moment in the UNGA, while colonialist speakers continued to legitimate their positions with the politics of kinship and particularly its distinct deployment of the rational, anti-colonialist speakers responded with recourse to the moral.
