Between World War II and independence, roughly 1945 to 1960, anticolonial activists successfully elucidated a link between the spread of Europhone education and freedom from colonial rule. This chapter frames African decolonization as also a Black Atlantic emancipation to reveal why educational aspirations were so central to mid twentieth-century anticolonial imaginings.

The Introduction opens with a (personal) precursor to the writing of the book. It discusses the methodological, normative, and theoretical basis of the book. It offers an overview of the argument and the chapters, and outlines sources employed in the research.

This chapter examines the progressive Arabic literary roots of Mizrahi fiction with a focus on its founding genre, the literature of the transit camps (sifrut hama’abara). I trace the participation of writers such as Shimon Ballas and Sami Michael in the Palestinian and Arab Jewish communist periodicals al-Jadid and al-Ittihad in the 1950s. This repressed cultural history reveals that the magazine’s popular literary campaign first launched the transit camp stories in Arabic. The chapter then looks at the elision of these Arabic sources by literary critics who framed Mizrahi literature as a Hebrew and Israeli literary development. By putting the foundational Mizrahi and transit camp novel, Shimon Ballas’s Ha-ma’abara (The Transit Camp), into conversation with the author’s Arabic works, I challenge the scope and coloniality of the Hebrew criticism. In the novel, Ballas continued to engage with themes of social and economic justice, his focus in the 1950s. While the novel broke with institutional communism of that decade, it proposed other working-class community-organizing models based on mutual aid. The power of community is presented as a product of intensive collective care and an anticolonial spirit, clearly inspired by the popular writing of al-Jadid. The chapter proposes freeing Mizrahi literatures from the Israeli national silo and placing them in renewed conversation with both Arabic literatures and Global left cultures.

This chapter explores the place of empire and imperialism in the British literature of the Popular Front period (1934–40). During this period, left-aligned writers responded to the Communist International’s call for broad antifascist alliances built on national cultural traditions with an outpouring of works of fiction, poetry, and drama, as well as critical reevaluations of literary history. These contributions are characterized by an evocation of “the people” as a diverse, progressive, antifascist subject, but one always national in character and therefore fraught with ambiguities and contradictions. The chapter considers the ways that writers based in Britain negotiated the connections between antifascism, anticolonialism, and anti-imperialism in this late interwar moment. It focuses first on the literary milieu around the influential journal Left Review, and second on the interlinked work of Ralph Fox, Mulk Raj Anand, and Sajjad Zaheer. In concludes by suggesting that the Spanish Civil War provided the occasion for some leftist writers from Scotland and Wales to imagine the continuities between working-class history, anticolonialism, and antifascism in their work.

Are there objective criteria that we can use to discern if an act of violence constitutes terrorism, or is such labeling always a subjective and political decision? Wherein lies the boundary between domestic versus international terrori and is that a meaningful distinction to make? How do individuals get radicalized, and how do they reach the point of committing violent acts? In this chapter, we tackle these questions (and others) and the issue of terrorism in international security. There are no easy, agreed upon answers to most of them, and terrorism continues to be a highly contested and politically charged concept, while constituting a very real and pressing security threat in many countries around the world. But that is even more reason to look closely at the controversies surrounding its definition, its historical evolution and patterns, and its contemporary manifestations in the twenty-first century as well as approaches to countering terrorism and attempts at international cooperation.

This chapter introduces the main themes of the volume, Anticolonialism and Social Thought. It provides a brief overview of the history of anticolonialism and argues that anticolonialism in history generates social thought and social theory.

This chapter examines a group of anticolonial and anti-imperialist intellectuals of different political persuasions thinking on Palestinian anticolonial national liberation at key moments in Palestinian history. It argues that central to these thinkers in their analysis of Palestine is a collapse in distinction between 1948- and 1967-occupied Palestine in Zionist settler-colonial ambitions in Palestine; the umbilical relationship between Zionism and US–Euro imperialism; as well as the centrality of Arab ruling classes to Zionist hegemony in Palestine.

The twentieth-century quest for individual freedom was pursued not merely in Europe proper but also at its boundaries. This had much to do, in the first instance, with a desire for liberation from metropolitan societies that many identified with an excess of constraints and conventions. It also reflected a strong sense of European superiority over both Americans and colonized peoples. But, as the century wore on, uncertainties arose from the growing power of the United States and the increasing criticism and various reforms to which colonial rule was subject. American popular culture appealed to youth across the continent, to the dismay of many adults, while colonized subjects increasingly claimed the status of free individuals, both in overseas colonies and as immigrants to Europe. This chapter discusses whether there was autonomy or conformism in America, at a time when its supposed freedoms were so attractive to many Europeans though they appalled others; how colonial self-reliance was loudly claimed and staunchly defended against indigenous demands and more liberal forms of European rule; and, finally, what colonized subjects’ perspectives were on the individual freedom they were denied but were seeking as part of their efforts to become decolonized.

This chapter takes as its starting point Mulk Raj Anand’s literary interest in what he describes as “earthiness”, and argues that it is neither a simplistic yardstick of social realism, nor simply a derivation of Anglo-American modernism, but something in between, something different, and perhaps something more. In common with many of the other chapters in this volume, I make the case that Mulk Raj Anand was neither a modernist nor a realist, and that for a more satisfactory evaluation of Anand-the-novelist, we need to follow an entirely different literary tradition. Focusing on the dirtiness and squalor that is present in much of Anand’s writing, I argue that Anand deploys this trope to make the novel into neither a realist depiction of the world, nor a disaffected, alienated exercise in aestheticism, but as a vehicle to explore what it might mean to be modern, what it might mean to be anti-colonialist and what it might mean to be nationalist.

As represented by the title, this chapter unpacks how the British colonial administration left indelible legacies on the Nigerian state and how those legacies killed the sociopolitical fabric of the region before the institution of colonial rule. Through the concept of regionalism, which the chapter understands as “the systemic division of governmental control where a central or federal government holds clearly defined authority and power,” the colonial administration hamstrung Nigeria’s political and economic growth by creating ethnic mistrust and conflict, the marginalization of minorities and agitation among ethnicities after the development of ethnic nationalism. Self-serving interests of colonialists aimed to partition the country along arbitrary lines, disregarding the complex web of pre-existing linguistic and ethnic communities for ease of administration. The effects of these colonialist policies fueled the ethnopolitical and social conflict (and other marginalization of minority groups only possible after the creation of a state) within Nigeria, thus stymieing the development of Nigeria’s internal and independent sociopolitical structures.

In Chapter 4, the third case study investigates how martyrdom discourse was deployed by Sikhs during World War I. It begins with an analysis of the social and cultural situation at the turn of the twentieth century in Punjab, from where the majority of Sikh sepoys hailed, and the resulting relationships with the imperialist British Raj. After examining the socioeconomic conditions that led Sikhs to enlist in the British Indian Army, I discuss how a military mindset constructed a particular idea of Sikh character. The chapter proceeds with an analysis of Sikh traditions of martyrdom and the way the British Empire was colored as a prophesized entity, and therefore actions in its service construed as a sacred duty. Simultaneously, I describe the antagonism felt for the British Empire by emigrant Sikh communities especially in North America, creating a bifurcation of perspectives reflected in approval or dismissal of the self-sacrifice of Sikh soldiers and the creation of anticolonial martyr forms. The chapter concludes with an examination of how the failed promises of the British government following the war marginalized those Sikh martyrs who fell in their ranks during World War I.