Introduction: anticolonial for whom?

by
pedro daher 

The bottom line is we’re in a conflict, and I think we have to start talking about it that way (...) Just today, Brazil, the largest country in the Western Hemisphere south of us, cut a trade deal with China. They’re going to, from now on, do trade in their own currencies, get right around the dollar. They’re creating a secondary economy in the world totally independent of the United States. We won’t have to talk about sanctions in five years, because there’ll be so many countries transacting in currencies other than the dollar that we won’t have the ability to sanction them. – Marco Rubio, 2023

This name change is not just about renaming [from Department of Defense to Department of War]. It’s about restoring. Words matter. (...) it’s restoring the warrior ethos (...) restoring intentionality to the use of force (...) We are gonna go on offense, not just on defense. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct. – Pete Hegseth, 2025

The Global South continues to face severe structural economic deficiencies that weaken its economic sovereignty and put it at the mercy of a neocolonial international trade, finance, and investment architecture (...) This can be illustrated with one simple statistic. The global economic architecture annually extracts two trillion dollars of net financial flows from the Global South to the Global North. – Fadhel Kaboub, 2026

When fundamental structures haven’t changed it seems vital to return to some lessons from those that lived, and continue to live through, the (modern) colonial world, and to learn and relearn instead of pretending to espouse something new since the new has not come.

In front of the global condition of the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is difficult not to return to Aimé Césaire’s 1955 excoriation about the not-distant-past and the ongoing-present, an assessment that has hardly changed more than 70 years after its publication:

And now I ask: what else has bourgeois Europe done? It has undermined civilizations, destroyed countries, ruined nationalities, extirpated “the root of diversity.” No more dikes, no more bulwarks. The hour of the barbarian is at hand. The modern barbarian. The American hour. Violence, excess, waste, mercantilism, bluff, gregariousness, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder (...) American high finance considers that the time has come to raid every colony in the world. So, dear friends, here you have to be careful! (23)

One important question-thread amongst different practices and reflections from the brief selection of essays this introduction considers is around the problem of desire. That is, which (colonial) desire does one tackle first: the immediate neighbors, the neighboring, or the occupying distant neighbors? Is it (im)possible to choose? One’s own desire must certainly be a priority. Building is always more difficult than tearing down, and the urge to tackle everything at once to respond to the centuries of violence in order to end the latter’s supremacy screams for patience and specificity, yells for the gravity of what is happening now everywhere, and calls for the dismantling of all things we have come to know as the determinants of all manners of violations/violence. In the midst of renewed open imperial aggression, genocide, murder, and plunder throughout the globe – although “renewed” is an understatement – the anticolonial question continues to prove itself atemporal. And it will be so at least up until when the chains that linked the building of the modern world are melted and new global relations–in all possible senses and tenses of what relations are and could be–are established. Twelve years after Aimé Césaire’s excoriation Martin Luther King repeated the hour:

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask – and rightly so – what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government. (Beyond Vietnam)

In many ways, the anticolonial question is simple. There is an imperial core, a colonial core, that has not yet left the world (even if juridically colonies are almost a state of the past) and there is a periphery. Not to mention that the return of sovereign land to the indigenous nations the world over is far from being accomplished. Gurminder K. Bhambra’s emphasizes the distinction between “empires of incorporation and empires of extraction”, the latter defined by subjection to being ruled but remaining outside a “common order of rule”, civilizational difference through “scientific racism or religious superiority”, and total extraction from the colonies to the metropolis. Bhambra illuminates the continuation of an imperial-capitalist logic of dispossession, of plunder, of death, that fundamentally marks the globe regardless of what legal regimes may or may not establish when it comes to colonialism:

The political economy of colonialism is what has become global. This is perhaps most evident in that it has established a global system of private property organized through processes of dispossession, extraction, and appropriation. Decolonization in this context would require greater transformation than simple arguments for political self-determination. It would require a reconfiguration of the private property relations that have been central to colonization (...) The forms of domination within the empires of Europe were economic and political and were not overcome in the simple transition to political independence. There are economic legacies associated with the processes of ‘empires of extraction’ that still need to be addressed. (202-3)

Thus, in many ways, the only achievement one can hope for is through the struggle for stable global-regional conditions so that the countries of now can deal with their own internal contradictions without the permanent state of sanctioned poverty, threat of invasion, and reality of never-ending bombing campaigns.

In 1958, Claudia Jones alerted that the imperial arrangement will not allow for the development of other sovereign states on their own, and will always create strife to maintain their political economic programs in place. In 1973, Leila Khaled articulated the almost impossible conditions for freedom and justice given the concerted efforts of the triplets of (British) colonialism, (American) imperialism, and (internal) reactionarism. In 1982, Lélia González emphasized in painstaking detail the relation between external capital, internal dominant classes, and racial violence in Brazil. In 2025, Francisco Rodríguez, Silvio Rendón, Mark Weisbrot found that unilateral sanctions are associated with the killing of around 38 million people between 1971-2021, mostly children and the elderly. Commenting on the study, Jason Hickel, Dylan Sullivan, and Omer Tayyab write:

The power of Western sanctions hinges on their control over the world’s reserve currencies (the US dollar and the Euro), their control over international payment systems (SWIFT), and their monopoly over essential technologies (eg satellites, cloud computation, software). If countries in the Global South wish to chart a more independent path towards a multipolar world, they will need to take steps to limit their dependence in these respects and thus insulate themselves from backlash. (...) These steps are necessary for countries that wish to achieve sovereign development, but they are also a moral imperative. We cannot accept a world where half a million people are killed each year to prop up Western hegemony. An international order that relies on this kind of violence must be dismantled and replaced.

Given that the world is run by hegemony and the latter’s pliability into pretending to promote concrete autonomy and independence, the question of economic, juridic, and political sovereignty remains elusive and distant.

Staying with the nation-state briefly, it is difficult not to take its formation as the only established route for some form of long-term project of emancipation in the early 21st century alongside its countless, and necessary, contradictions in its process (for international and internal sovereignty). And yet, given that within global structures of domination peoples from the now commonly referred to as the South must also organize against their own neighbors for everyone’s own sovereignty, the space for mutual struggle seems shut. Perhaps this particular difficulty of the anticolonial effort is best summarized by Nawal El Saadawi:

Women who accuse me of being pro-Western are liars, or have never read my work. The most important characteristic of my work is that I don’t separate off the neocolonial machine – international politics – from the family and the personal lives of my characters. (...) Even some of the leftist groups in Egypt accuse me of being pro-Western, but that is because I criticize their silence about gender when considering class. Meanwhile, the Right calls me a communist because I link class and patriarchy! And the religious fanatics call me an atheist because I’m critical of religious hypocrisy and because I say we need a real Islam, a real religion - and that’s justice. I didn’t learn this sense of justice from the West, I learned it from my illiterate grandmother, a peasant who never read the Koran. When I was a girl she told me that God is justice. You don’t need the West in order to understand justice. (Hitchcock 174)

Perhaps the speculated multipolar world is being born, hegemonic civilization is dying, and some semblance of the justice Saadawi describes will be possible. And perhaps this multipolarity will bring shifts. Because it most certainly will bring repetitions.

What will replace modern civilization, if that is possible given that military spending is planned to be significantly increased by all major Western powers and their allies, cannot be foreseen. Between international (war) geopolitics, internal strife, and the allures of the social-capitalist structurally fabricated reality, there always seems to exist an impossibility for any coherent mode of anticolonial present to be had. Maybe the era of the “neoliberal subject” is too strong for overcoming the “psychotic violence” that marks the crisis of feminicides in Latin America more specifically and global war more broadly, as Horácio Legrás articulates in two different texts. By looking at the requirement of “hypermodern societies” for subjects to live under demands of “mandatory enjoyment” and how in these very same societies “the avenues to the Other [tend to become] blocked”, Legrás helps one to see that that my (ours, perhaps) relationship to the Other is becoming progressively impossible under (neoliberal) desire – unless the call to the other is answered to my enjoyment, arguably no Other at all – leading to a generalized state of “psychotic violence [being] the predominant type of violence in the world today”:

While most, if not all, social formations of the past were predicated on the containment of the drive, the significance of “the discourse of the capitalist” lies in the way it disrupts this traditional function. Neoliberalism inaugurates a form of governance that offers no guidance on how to live with others; instead, it focuses solely on the imperative to enjoy oneself (...) From the position of truth, the master signifier guarantees satisfaction—a satisfaction which, if not obtained, is attributed to subjective deficit rather than to structural limitation (...); In its uttermost generality, psychotic violence is a violence without other: an act performed as if the other didn’t exist—actually performed in the utter indistinction between reality and the as if. By “other,” I mean simultaneously these others who are present before me in an everyday sense (what Freud called the Nebenmensch: fellow human beings) as well as the binding system of habits and cultural and political beliefs that allow human beings to build a common world—what Lacan termed the big Other. (“Lacan and neoliberalism 2.0”; Cultural Antagonism and the Crisis of Reality 135)

Perhaps what matters most for the gear of the human and its never-ending violences and violations is its illusion derived from its lack, as Lacan suggests, once the mirror stage is completed.

Framing and introducing her long and intricate discussion on the relation between resistance as political vocabulary which attempts to signal and advance towards freedom and resistance as “repetition, blockage, blind obeisance to crushing internal constraint” (33), Jaqueline Rose, when reading correspondences between Freud and Arnold Zweig, summarizes the latter’s wish, desire, hope, prediction, need: “psychoanalysis, or fascism” (31). Maybe, then, the lust of the mind for power (desire itself) is the only enemy that matters. To end these disparate notes, perhaps then the only way back is to keep insisting on project and horizon. In the face of imperial violence and its never-satisfied, neverending colonial desire, Fred Hampton’s formulations continue to be a central node to articulate the way to go beyond the anti and its multiples, to go beyond resistance, to offer a horizon of a globe and its possibilities. That is, once the real is “no longer a question of violence or non-violence (...) [but] it’s a question of resistance to fascism or non-existence within fascism” (“It’s a Class Struggle, Goddamn it!”), the aspiration becomes abolition of power and abolition of war, the dismantling of the system that creates the need for resistance itself: free breakfasts and free health clinics. The end of resistance for life to be possible must be the one and only goal:

(...) resistir é importante, mas nenhum modo de vida é preservado tendo que resistir a vida inteira. É necessário desenvolver um projeto político que acabe com as ameaças permanentes de expropriação e destruição (...) derrotar a dinâmica da renda da terra, da expropriação permanente, da economia primária exportadora, o papel subordinado do Brasil na divisão internacional do trabalho sendo abastecedor do mercado mundial. Porque senão os povos indígenas, os povos quilombolas, as comunidades pesqueiras, marisqueiras, geraizeiras, sem-terra, povos tradicionais de todo tipo, eles nunca vão ter paz (...) nenhum problema com aqueles e aquelas que reivindicam leituras teóricas que estão muito mais afiliadas à experiência local, a pensar uma reflexão teórica, uma subjetividade, um ethos cultural a partir da experiência local do próprio território [pois essas populações estão na linha de frente dessas lutas]. A questão central é: isso não destrói o latifúndio (...) Isso não destrói a lógica da mineração. (Jones Manoel)

No peace is possible while domination runs human life. And the final chapter of domination only has a chance of appearing if the colonial economy and its political and philosophical foundations no longer rule our existence.

The issue

It is into this set of conditions that the fifth issue of the Living Commons Collective Magazine takes up such questions thinking through different genres. Between poetry and short story, illustrations, paintings, and collages, academic and experimental essays, it brings to the fore the many different dimensions through which contemporary colonial logics manifest. Anticolonial Futures opens with the second part of tofer Perkins poetry collection “The Divide Merging 2o/2o” (the first four poems of the collection are available in The Road to Wisdom: manifesting the sacred towards justice, the third issue of the magazine) and Isabel Ibáñez de la Calle’s “Bailar contra el mandato: masculinidad, migración y subcultura cholombiana en Ya no estoy aquí”. Between them, the reader is asked to visit the shapes language (as speech, as law, as tool, as body) creates, its functioning through pre-meanings and concepts with their attempt at overtaking the real for themselves, and what could happen – in effect, does already happen – when individuals and groups resist and differ concurrently. The issue then moves to Ícaro Carvalho’s poem “very much” and Mateus Sanches Duarte, Gabriel Martins da Silva & João Pedro Saddi Cabral Menezes “Distributions of the Dream: Ailton Krenak and Glauber Rocha, an untimely Approximation” article. Both works invite the reader to think, image, and imagine land, continents, and dreams of sovereignty in front of the neverending visions of civilizational hegemony. If Duarte, da Silva, and Menezes articulate how “atomiz[ing] the colonial past” is impossible given its “insistent actuality” in the “structures in the present” since the problems they explore relate to the “past, present, and future” of the life of “economic reason”, Carvalho puts the poem’s narrator in the position of choosing between the dream-nightmare of the reason that embraces one, and the reason that one embraces.

The midway point of Anticolonial Futures is Nully’s “Drawing The Line”. A set of four illustrations concerning the ICE raids of early 2026 more specifically and immigration issues more broadly, Nully centers the core of empire in artworks that bring with it centuries of reverberations of colonial legacies – from the conquering of land, displacement of populations, from schools, to bus stops, and the patrolling of speech and appearance, to the direct and indirect wars brought to us by Western hegemony, the siege knows no bounds.

The second half moves to Susie Estrada’s “An American Haunting” and S. T. Nova’s “liberation of self” which find both authors exploring subjectivity through personal experimental writings which address personhood within and amongst broader social structures conditioned by gender, immigration, and labor dynamics. Between Estrada’s telling of “a story all my own and yet not mine at all” and Nova’s tackling of internal and external otherness in attempts to undertake the long-term project of unsettling and overcoming the bridge between one’s own life that is also shared with countless not-truly-others, these pieces move towards self-understanding and liberation for self as necessarily social-collective practices and actions. Alex Voisine’s “The Fugitive Tense: Audre Lorde and Assata Shakur in Abiayala” and Maya Ochoa’s two poems, “the gulf of you and me” and “perra”, return the reader to the issue of the experiences of the multiple tenses that coexist throughout “la piel de la tierra”, as Neruda named it. Voisine explores the privilege of today’s north-americans who immigrate to countries south of their border to live comfortable lives and the illusion that proper correct language can cause any type of meaningful social, political, material change, while highlighting the tenses of future of (geo)political possibility that can only come about if the conditions of life are changed for all throughout the entire continent, and Ochoa is direct in naming the oppression: “soy un perrito faldero / un operario del sistema que le inyecta sangre a tu cuerpo”.

Finally, the closing pieces come from Jackson Hunt’s most recent collection “Parts of some whole” and Glaydah Namukasa’s short story “Maxine’s Foraging Debut” which invite readers to reflect on global issues that are simultaneously, and fundamentally, interconnected whilst also being singular to place, geography, and history. Hunt’s bringing together of the multitude of times, tenses, and materials that form and mold the ongoing struggle over reality as a bricolage of personal memory, shared history, ruptures and continuity delves into Namukasa’s Maxine and her dealings with storytelling and truth through the risks of collective certainty and the boundless capacity of collective action and learning. I end this introduction by leaving the reader with Maxine’s words, here meant as an invitation: “Something is wrong, sisters. Why won’t anyone listen? (...) Maybe this is all connected. Let’s work together to alert the hive (...) I need your help, sisters. I need you to help me convince the sisterhood that the human and his machine are here to harm us. I need you to help me convince the sisterhood that we must move. Soon. Very very soon”.

Works Cited

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QUOTE AS:
Pedro Daher. Introduction: anticolonial for whom? The Living Commons Collective Magazine. N.5, July 2026. p. 1-13