The goal of this panel is to reconsider the role that universalisms have played within colonial and postcolonial histories. In doing so, the panel revisits postcolonial theory’s suspicion of universalisms like rationality and freedom, as well as on the unifying social categories, like the 'human,' that these rely on. As scholars such as Dipesh Chakrabarty and Lisa Lowe among others have shown, the liberal worldview that contains the best known iterations of these ideas arose in the time of colonialism, often crafted in opposition to the colonized people that Fanon called “the wretched of the earth.’ This panel asks: what does this familiar story - often used as a basis for denying the complex critical role of universalisms and universalizing frameworks in postcolonial studies - overlook? How do we conceive of radical liberation struggles and anti-imperialist solidarity within the colonized and postcolonial world as a product of diverse universalisms from Europe but also from within non-European traditions?

In asking these questions, this panel takes on board postcolonial critiques of the hegemonic role that universalisms have played within colonial and capitalist systems. However, we also seek to take seriously the fact that universalisms -Enlightenment and non-European - were often central to the way that anticolonial thinkers conceived of their own projects of individual and national liberation. Each of the three panelists takes up this concern in different ways.

Daniel Sacilotto will consider the ways in which postcolonial studies and critical theory has too often ceded the category of universalisms wholesale to the colonialist legacies of the Enlightenment. Instead, Sacilotto’s presentation, The Legacy of Amauta: Indigenismo, Universalism, and Alternative Modernity in Latin America, will turn to Peruvian indigenista literature, which united native universalisms with the socialist universalisms of the Enlightenment towards a decolonial project of liberation. Sacilotto’s talk will explore how José Carlos Mariátegui's journal, Amauta, posited a universalist philosophy through a collaborative effort between revolutionary artists, scientists, and intellectuals, thereby conceiving of a global future beyond capitalist modernity. The journal’s “active universalist philosophy” adapted dialectical materialism to Latin American social reality, thus achieving a transcultural synthesis between the native pre-Colombian traditions of Latin America and Western modernization.

Sacilotto looks at syncretic philosophical discourses of universalisms in the national context of Peru. Jini Kim Watson’s talk builds on this analysis of liberating universalisms by shifting from a national to a transnational context, and from universalisms as philosophical discourses to universalism as practice and framework for anticolonial struggle. Watson’s talk, Inter-Asian Solidarity, Decolonization and the Global Cold War, approaches the global Cold War as an event that dialectically produces a universalist project of anti-imperialist south-south solidarities between Vietnam and South Korea. She will outline the contours of this anti-imperialist politics by drawing on Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Che Guevara’s “Create Two, Three, Many Vietnams” (1966), and the South Korean novel, Hwang Sŏk-yŏng's, The Shadow of Arms (1985-88). Together, these texts explore the possibilities of postcolonial solidarity as universalist praxis based on shared colonial histories and projected non-imperial futures.

If the first two talks look at universalisms as philosophical discourses and practices that sustain liberation struggles, the final talk, Theorizing Totality in the South, will focus on universalism as a critical tool through which to understand and move beyond hierarchical regimes.

Bartels-Swindells will juxtapose two different kinds of universalism to make his argument. He will examine the apartheid segregationist, Jan Smuts’ term, holism, as an example of the universalizing programs of imperial ambition derided by postcolonial critics. He will then turn to anti-apartheid thinker Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness philosophy, which uses Lukacs’ notion of totality to understand how disparate aspects of apartheid society functioned together to oppress subjects systematically. In Biko, 'totality' functions as a critical toolkit through which to illuminate how systems of oppression work. The comparison of Biko and Smuts thus distinguishes a critical diagnostic and liberatory universalism (Biko) from a universal concept put to totalitarian ends (Smuts), thus providing much needed nuance to discussions of universalism.

Together, these papers unsettle oppositions between the universal and particular, showing that universalisms arise from particular contexts all over the world. On this basis, they also unsettle the idea that universalisms are always European and rooted in the Enlightenment. They show that universalisms are philosophies, practices, and critical tools of decolonization and anti-imperialism in non-European contexts, illuminating what a global politics of solidarity may look like beyond global colonial-capitalism.

Each of the three papers will be 15-18 minutes long, leaving at least fifteen minutes of unstructured discussion time.