Postcolonial Paradoxes, Ambiguities of Self-determination and Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking after Empire
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829820939618 |
| Date | 01 June 2020 |
| Published date | 01 June 2020 |
| Author | Jenna Marshall |
| Subject Matter | Book Forum |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829820939618
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2020, Vol. 48(3) 340 –350
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829820939618
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1. Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-determination.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 13.
2. Public Good or Private Wealth? Universal Health, Education and Other Public Services
Reduce the Gap Between Rich and Poor, and Between Women and Men. Fairer Taxation of
the Wealthiest Can Help Pay for Them, 21 January 2019. Available at: https://www.oxfam.
org/en/research/public-good-or-private-wealth. Last accessed April 26, 2020.
Postcolonial Paradoxes,
Ambiguities of Self-
determination and Adom
Getachew’s Worldmaking after
Empire
Jenna Marshall
University of Kassel, Germany
Keywords
empire, postcolonialism, self-determination
Introduction
In Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination, Adom Getachew
writes ‘the task of building a world after empire remains as much ours as it was theirs’.1
Getachew signals the ethical stakes at play within the current neoliberal globalisation
conjuncture: rising global inequality, deepening social antagonisms, and market logic
with impunity in the face of the climate emergency. Anticolonial worldmakers, she
insists, stood to radically reorder the world not on realist realpolitik or even liberal insti-
tutional internationalism but rather on anticolonial principles of non-domination and
egalitarianism. Such positions warrant greater interrogation, which Getachew achieves,
as the meteoric rise of the global 1 percent continues unabated at the expense of growing
precarity of the proverbial ‘99’. For the global South, Oxfam disclosed in their 2019
report that 26 individuals’ assets were equivalent to those of 3.8 billion people, who
make up the poorest half of the planet’s population.2 Unequal wealth and income
Corresponding author:
Jenna Marshall, University of Kassel, Nora-Platiel-Straße, 1, Kassel, Hessen 34127, Germany.
Email: jenna.marshall@uni-kassel.de
939618MIL0010.1177/0305829820939618Millennium – Journal of International StudiesMarshall
research-article2020
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