Introduction
| Published date | 01 July 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14748851221109757 |
| Date | 01 July 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Symposium on Tomba's Insurgent Universality |
Introduction
Murad Idris
University of Michigan, USA
Abstract
Massimiliano Tomba’sInsurgent Universality locates an “alternative legacy of modernity”in
how revolutionary movements across three centuries and four continents interpreted
and claimed different pasts, concepts, and alternatives for themselves. These move-
ments, from the Communards to the Zapatistas to the Russian Revolutionaries, engaged
in democratic experiments in self-government, radical equality, and collective posses-
sion. In this forum, Tomba’s interlocutors offer reflections and questions about the pos-
ition of the critical historian, universality, and colonialism. Tomba’s response explains the
stakes of his project with two further examples of his historiographic practice.
Keywords
historiography, critical theory, modernity, insurgent, universality
Insurgent Universality is a book with discipline-transforming intent. Massimiliano
Tomba reinterprets a series of revolutionary events spanning three centuries and stretch-
ing across four continents to uncover “an alternative legacy of modernity.”He locates this
alternative legacy in how revolutionary movements interpreted and claimed different
pasts, concepts, and alternatives for themselves. From the Communards to the
Zapatistas to the Russian Revolutionaries, Tomba writes, “what they practice recombines
historical times by extracting from the past futures that have been blocked and which are
alternatives to the present”(14). When activists cite a project or revolutionary effort from
a seemingly different time or place, they bring that past and that other place into their own
present and location. They reinvent both the significance of that past event by recovering
its seemingly anachronistic concepts or authorities and the significance of their own
project. They point toward a different configuration of political life and an alternative tra-
jectory of modernity.
Corresponding author:
Murad Idris, Political Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.
Email: midris@umich.edu
Symposium on Tomba’sInsurgent Universality
European Journal of Political Theory
2023, Vol. 22(3) 487–489
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/14748851221109757
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