Description
Recently, the concept of ‘worldmaking’ has opened fruitful avenues of research on anticolonial political thinkers in the twentieth century, recovering their “enunciations of universality” in and beyond national liberation movements (Bell 2013; Getachew 2019). This paper asks: who gets to make and take worlds through a feminist reconceptualization of worldmaking. Empirically, the paper presents a historically grounded account of the international political ideas generated by a cohort of elite Indian women political thinkers in late British India. Drawing on archival material on anticolonial women’s activism, I argue that ‘worldmaking’ allows us to i) rupture the ‘nation’ as the (sole) analytical dividing line; ii) move beyond colony-metropole dyads, iii) centre lateral transnational solidarities; and iv) allow for transgressive readings of colonial archives. Drawing on postcolonial feminist political theory and IR, the paper proposes a feminist reading of the paradoxical nature of worldmaking to account for how anticolonial women thinkers navigated the politics of difference (the ‘paradoxes’ of simultaneously being a woman/Indian/Asian/human) that became constitutive of their productive political claim-making. Through this, the paper distils two payoffs of the ‘paradoxes of worldmaking’ theoretical framing. First, it allows us to capture the multiplicity and heterogeneity of elite Indian women’s political agency rather than viewing them as ‘oppressed’ or as ‘passive victims’ in historical international relations. Second, and more broadly, it points to how marginalised political leaders make legible claims to international political belonging when their claims to knowledge are rendered absent or read from single-point identity markers.
