After the deluge: new universalism and postcolonial difference
| Author | Mustapha Kamal Pasha |
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0047117820946812 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117820946812
International Relations
2020, Vol. 34(3) 354 –373
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117820946812
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After the deluge:
new universalism and
postcolonial difference
Mustapha Kamal Pasha
Aberystwyth University
Abstract
This article probes the promises and anomalies of a new universalism proposed by Dipesh
Chakrabarty as an apparent retort to the challenge of the Anthropocene. Revising established
understandings of temporality and human agency imagined within modernity, the new universalism
depicts a radically different horizon shaped by interconnections produced by the subsumption
of human history into natural history. A key element of Chakrabarty’s new universalism is his
dramatic repudiation of the reputed postcolonial claim of difference which hurriedly dissolves the
afterlife and persistence of coloniality on a global scale in favour of a yet-to-be-forged planetary
consciousness. Chakrabarty’s new universalism raises profound questions for rethinking
International Relations (IR). However, without due cognisance of sedimented difference,
Chakrabarty ends up reciting the secular-liberal story of one-world universalism. It is argued here
that a differentiated universalism organised around the notion of human finitude can simultaneously
attend to postcolonial concerns and the challenge of the Anthropocene.
Keywords
Anthropocene, new universalism, postcoloniality
Introduction
Distributed unevenly across varied disciplinary zones of societal and political inquiry,
awareness of the unprecedented challenge of the Anthropocene now appears to be quite
widespread.1 Though sluggish in its initial journey to the shores of International Relations
(IR), the deluge symbolised in the Anthropocene has swiftly materialised as one of the
more active scholarly currents in the discipline’s heartland. Within this growing body of
scholarship in IR, some have sought to imagine a ‘Planet Politics’ with a programmatic
Corresponding author:
Mustapha Kamal Pasha, Aberystwyth University, Penglais, Ceredigion, Aberystwyth SY23 2AX, UK.
Email: mkp4@aber.ac.uk
946812IRE0010.1177/0047117820946812International RelationsPasha
research-article2020
Article
Pasha 355
manifesto identifying new modalities of thinking and action.2 For others, a more fruitful
pathway lies in a ‘Posthuman IR’ that annuls the arbitrary divide between humanity and
nature,3 a sentiment dovetailing prior reflections on the death of the subject, or the false
division between subject and object.4 Once the myth of human exceptionalism that finds
its fullest expression in the Enlightenment is rejected5 in Anthropocene time6 a new struc-
ture of interconnections becomes available.7 The immediate burden of the Anthropocene
for IR, however, lies in its flagrant transgression of Westphalian framing and its attendant
political form, the nation-state. The liberal sovereign subject of modernity writing IR
equally confronts ontological extinction. An emergent sentiment in the ‘turn’ towards the
Anthropocene, therefore, is not simply one of a paradigm shift, but the death of IR itself.8
The recent intimations of leading postcolonial scholar, Dipesh Chakrabarty, on cli-
mate change raise profound ontological and epistemological questions that parallel sev-
eral themes raised by critical IR voices on the Anthropocene: the growing irrelevance of
established human-centred notions of temporality, political space and subjectivity; the
need to rethink post-Enlightenment ideas of progress, human agency and responsibility;
and the meaning of a human community itself, no longer autonomous from nature and
the nonhuman. Received mappings of interconnections within disciplinary IR appear out
of step with the challenge of the Anthropocene. Chakrabarty’s reflections on climate
change and the Anthropocene capture the essential dilemma for wading through the
Anthropocene: the simultaneous elevation of the ‘anthropos’ in whose name a new era is
consecrated, but whose marginality in the cosmos is now also unmistakable.
Although the subject of considerable debate, scrutiny and contestation across the
Humanities, Chakrabarty’s deep reflections on the Anthropocene remain perched some-
what awkwardly on the margins of IR. His recent writings are widely cited, especially his
2009 article in Critical Inquiry, which has acquired the status of a classic,9 but their
gestalt effect on IR is rarely probed in any serious manner. In particular, Chakrabarty’s
repudiation of postcolonial sensitivity in favour of a new universalism has rarely received
the attention that it deserves. To contribute to this special issue’s interest in how to think
interconnections, human and non-human, this article seeks to move Chakrabarty’s con-
siderations on the Anthropocene from the periphery of the discipline to a terrain of
greater legibility. A key aspect of Chakrabarty’s intimations on a new universalism,
unlike his previous interventions, relates not to an exposure of the Eurocentric make-up
of worlding, but his flight from postcolonial difference. It is against the background as a
thinker of difference10 that his reincarnation as a proponent of species-universalism
acquires heightened symbolic importance. Against the background of Chakrabarty’s
deservedly much-celebrated postcolonial revolt against (European) universalism, the
turn away from difference is quite striking. The issue raised by Chakrabarty’s intellectual
recreation, however, is not merely one of shifting temporal scales or transference from
the global to the planetary, but the virtual dissolution of the political project of difference
which sees the world principally as a hierarchical order shaped by colonial modernity.
Once (re)folded into the Universalist logic of planetary thinking, cognisance of colonial-
ity, in both its past and present forms, faces swift annihilation. With the survival of the
planet itself now at stake, claims of particularity must concede ground to a loftier, uni-
versal, purpose. The particular, meanwhile, must take a back seat to allow universal
humanity to forge a new disposition towards nature and the cosmos.
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