Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

30 I Ramnath
modernization in India and elsewhere was experienced
through the medium of colonization. The Latin American
subalternists, inspired by but diverging from the South
Asian Subaltern Studies Collective, actually theorize
coloniality as the other face of modernity.'
Despite their close interrelation, however, colonization
and modernization are not interch;mgeable terms. What
distinguished the process of colonization from any other instance
of coercive modernization, legitimating and masking
it, was the dimension of racism in all of its iterations (including
Orien talism), whether as a religious and culm ral myth,
or a scientific and biological one. This is also what makes
antiracism such an important component of mobilizations in
solidarity with anticolonial movements.
The key to manifesting an anarchist anticolonialism
(a point shared with third world feminism as well as
what Chela Sandoval calls the methodology of the oppressed,
among other analogous terms) lies in the intersecrionality
of those dimensions." This is exactly where
twentieth-century antisystemic movements in decolonizing
regions-the "tricontinnra!" of AsiJ., Afric;" and LaLin
America-had critiques to offer their counterparts in the
Western, northern, and! or colonizing world: isolating class
struggle in practice and rhetoric did not sufficiently address
the fundamental global structures of imperialism, nor the
realities of racism and colonization.
Meanwhile, systemic analysis allowed fo r the relating
of Left internationalism to national liberation struggles
and other transnational anticolonialisms. The power grid
of race both reinforces and complicates that of capitalism,