Corey’s Reviews > Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants > Status Update
Corey
is 50% done
Sharma critiques the concept of necolonialism because it merely serves as an alibi for the failed project of national liberation. She argues that neocolonialism frames the problem as not having *enough* national sovereignty when nation-states are actually structurally incapable of anything resembling decolonization. It also frames "foreigners" as the problem, thus reifying racist nationalisms.
— Oct 27, 2021 07:37PM
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Corey
is 95% done
The scope of this book is similar to that of Harsha Walia's (Border & Rule would pair well with this): no continent goes untouched. I think Sharma does something that I don't often see in socialist texts, which is assign agency to the Global South rather than viewing it from purely a subordinate perspective. I'll definitely be revisiting this, and it's certainly made me reconsider and question my own politics.
— Oct 28, 2021 12:30AM
Corey
is 90% done
In this final chapter, Sharma calls for a planetary commons and a decolonial movement "seeking neither territory nor sovereignty but land and the ability to enjoy a livelihood on it without exclusion." A world without borders, nations, and states is crucial to realizing the end of capitalism and racism.
— Oct 28, 2021 12:21AM
Corey
is 80% done
I can certainly see chapter 8 being controversial. Sharma discusses nationalisms from above and from below, detailing the political landscape in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. She firmly rejects all forms of nationalism, including movements for Indigenous national sovereignty in settler colonies (hence the potentially controversial aspect), because they are undergirded by autochthony.
— Oct 27, 2021 11:47PM
Corey
is 20% done
These first two chapters describe the creation of Natives and Migrants — and thus the foundations of our contemporary bordering regime — through the interwoven processes of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. Immigration controls "came on the heels of the end of African slavery and the search for new state technologies for labor discipline." These controls were always racialized, including in Latin America.
— Oct 26, 2021 11:28PM
Corey
is 5% done
So apparently she plans on problematizing the concept of neocolonialism? Huh, I'll be interested in seeing that take.
But the introduction alone was really thought-provoking. Interested in seeing how she discusses Indigenous nationalism.
— Oct 21, 2021 12:29AM
But the introduction alone was really thought-provoking. Interested in seeing how she discusses Indigenous nationalism.
As an example, she provides the person who coined the term: Kwame Nkrumah. In Ghana, Nkrumah "outlawed labor strikes, passed the Preventive Detention Act that gave the state enormous powers to arrest and detain people for up to five years without charge, and established the powerful and brutal National Security Service." And through developmental infrastructural projects, Nkrumah "flooded an enormous area where approximately 80,000 people lived, most of them subsistence farmers," destroyed 700 villages, and displaced and dispossessed tens of thousands of people. Similarly, there were major cuts to government expenditures (e.g., housing and social services) under Nkrumah in an attempt to fund his Seven Year Plan.
Thus, Sharma explains that the "postcolonial melancholia" that enveloped national liberation states in which national liberation may have felt similar to (or worse) than imperialism was not a result of neocolonialism, but instead the *containment* of decolonial demands by postcolonialism through the ascendancy of nation-state rule. Far from ending the colonial practices of expropriation and exploitation and oppression, national liberation only represented their re-constitution and acceleration through the further globalization of capitalism.
Interestingly, she also shows how the United States — in an attempt to establish its political economic hegemony in the post WWII period — actually advocated for national liberation of colonized countries to erode imperial rule and therefore allow for the penetration of capital into newly-formed nation-states. Obviously, this isn't to say that the United States was some sort of anticolonial champion, but rather that it recognized how ending imperial rule and establishing home rule would create a global landscape and terrain optimal for the mobility of capital.