Description
The last decade or so has seen the sustained archival recovery and analysis of the Indian social and political thinker and activist, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay’s thought in global and imperial contexts. This paper extends this work by situating Kamaladevi’s transboundary civil society activism and writings, both within wider worlds of mid 20th C third-world women thinkers and intellectual currents of anti-imperial and anti-racist activism, thus framing my reading of such entangled practices of knowledge production as both relational and collaborative as a challenge to the ‘great men’ tradition of international political theory canons. I specifically focus on aspects of Kamaladevi’s internationalist thought: such as her views on race and imperialism as mutually imbricated and her invocations of global justice in the name of shared ‘humanity’. By doing so, this paper contributes to ongoing critical historiographies of empire, and postcolonial and non-Eurocentric women’s intellectual thinking to stress the importance of lived experience shaped by race, class, and gender as crucially constituting international intellectual knowledge production. Finally, through the case of Kamaladevi’s international thought, I critically examine and conclude with some reflections on the possibilities and limits of recovering historical ‘anticolonial’ women’s international thought.
