ABSTRACT
This chapter argues for recouping the prehistory of postcolonial theory in the emancipatory Third Worldist internationalisms that preceded its articulation in Euro-American academia. Appealing to the longue durée of the postcolonial is vital for lending conceptual bearings to comparatism’s turn towards the Global South with an emphasis on social justice. The chapter demonstrates this argument through the writings about the Afro-Asian movement by the Egyptian writer Edwar al-Kharrat (1926–2015). The texts, it is posited, bring into play divergent internationalisms, including the Trotskyism of al-Kharrat’s early years, and modulate the shifts of “commitment” by conjoining the economic with other overdeterminations in a manner that speaks to our times.
