Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Decolonization I 31
especially when we add the dimension of spatiality at the
global scale-and there we have imperial geopolitics. But
as is still true today, the counterpart of a globalization of
power systems is a globalization of anti systemic resistance.
The question of orientation to modernity underlies
both the anarchist and anticolonial discourses. This question
fuels the perennial debate on the nature of anarchism,
the genealogy of its intellectual tradition, and its relationship
to other radicalisms on both the Left and Right.
It also refracts the spectrum of intellectual and political
differences within Indian anticolonialism.
If the processes of colonization correlate to those of
modernization, then does anticolonialism have to be antimodern?
No, and this largely has to do with sloppy language
use. Modernity, modernization, and modernism are
all words too often used in confusing, contradictory ways.
There are the material processes associated with modernization,
a project never fully realized and never proceeding
evenly without frictions and obstructions; there are
also shifts in perception and consciousness that make up
our experience of these new conditions-of which multiple
effects and affects, interpretations and evaluations,
are possible-all of which are modern, but not all modernist.
Modernism reveals a third level, which is a conscious
aesthetic, philosophical, political, epistemological stance
manifested in art, literature, architecture, and so on. But
the description of modernity as an existential condition
consists of the full package of contradictions and contradictory
vectors on all these levels, a complex agglomeration
of causes, effects, and responses to them.