ABSTRACT
The postcolonialist suspicion of nationalism is an obvious point of convergence with anarchism. Anarchism of all stripes shares the attraction to travellers and exiles who have escaped from the map- and mind-space of state and capital, of racial regimes, labour regimes, gender regimes, any regimes, to live outside their laws, with all outlaws as equals. The meaning of anarchism might be encapsulated as opposition to the existence of all subalternity; opposition to any unequal power relation, which means hierarchy, whether maintained by coercion or hegemony. Jason Adams too takes the alterglobalization movement as his reference point for the emergence of the mode of thinking and practising anarchism. Anarchism has different reasons for rejecting nationalism. Distinguishing society from state in the way creates space within the liberated or decolonizing zone for ‘the recalcitrant elements, characters, and actions invoked and energized by anti-colonial nationalism’ that can never be contained within the postcolonial state’s ‘generic closure’.
