ABSTRACT
If in the UNGA, anti-colonialists’ anti-kinship critique was fashioned by elite representatives of “postcolonial” nation-states, representing peoples indelibly marked by colonial-era administrative categories of space, time and the social (Anderson 1991), how did these conditions of possibility impact the formation and deployment of the anti-colonialist exegesis? Even more, how was the anti-colonialist critique shaped by Asia-Africa’s formation within the context of declining European power, various new and informal methods of colonial rule, and numerous struggles between the two rising superpowers? Was the anti-kinship, anti-colonialist argument that eventually emerged in the UNGA consistent for every “perpetrator?” For every dependent territory? What was its scope? How did it orient to dependent territories not under the purview of the UN, as in the case of the satellites of the USSR? Beyond the Communist bloc, how did it orient to territories for whom, though formally independent, autonomy, independence and self-representation were still compromised? In this chapter, I combine a close examination of GA debates on specific territories with secondary sources on these territories to offer some thoughts on these questions. I argue that though launching an important intervention into colonialist kinship politics, the anti-kinship critique was uneven, partial, and at times thoroughly plastic, shaped by the particular priorities and limitations of newly independent, “postcolonial” nation-states located within a broader constellation of identities and interests.
