ArticleDecolonial Designs José Martı́,Hò̂ Chı́ Minh, .docx

Article
Decolonial Designs: José Martı́,
Hò̂ Chı́ Minh, and Global
Entanglements
Quỳnh N. Pha
˙
m1 and Marı́a José Méndez1
Abstract
Drawing on the writings of two prominent political thinkers and
activists, José Martı́ and Hò̂ Chı́
Minh, our article foregrounds the imaginative crossings,
ethical–political inspirations, and mutual
learning among the colonized. Although embedded in different
histories, both Martı́’s and Hò̂ ’s
writings evince an insurgent solidarity with others under
colonial enslavement. They evoke con-
ceptions of self-determination and relationality that are
strikingly global rather than national or
regional. Going beyond affinities of insurgency, we also
investigate critical moments of silence and
effacement in Martı́’s and Hò̂ ’s engagement with subaltern
groups. In weaving their anticolonial
visions together as well as examining their limitations, we seek
to sketch the contours of an
alternative, non-Eurocentric international relations.
Keywords
decolonization, solidarity, José Martı́, Hò̂ Chı́ Minh, global
political thought, subaltern politics

Global Crossings
In April 1976, affirming Cuba’s commitment to support the
armed struggle in Angola, Fidel Castro
observed: “In Africa, Cuban blood was shed alongside the
heroic fighters of Angola, that of the chil-
dren of Martí, Maceo and Agramonte, that of those who
inherited the international blood of Gómez
and el Che Guevara. Those who one day enslaved men and sent
them to America, never imagined that
one of those pueblos who received the slaves, would send their
combatants to fight for freedom in
Africa.”1 Postcolonial theorists of International Relations (IR)
have argued that the discipline of IR
has been predicated on a systematic amnesia of transatlantic
slavery and how it constitutively marked
the modern (post-Columbian) world along with the question of
race in global politics.2 Castro’s
remembrance of the transatlantic crossing of European slave
ships contrasts with such amnesia. But
more importantly for us, he pointed out what was unimaginable
for the former enslavers: cross-
oceanic solidarities among the once enslaved. While much of
postcolonial literature counters what
Edward Said calls the “consolidated visions” of empire by
reminding us of the hybridity and “inter-
twined histories” that mutually constitute the metropole and the
colony, in this article, we point to
1Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota,
Minneapolis, MN, USA
Corresponding Author:
Quỳnh N. Pha

˙
m, Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota,
Minneapolis, MN, USA.
Email: [email protected]
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political
2015, Vol. 40(2) 156-173
ª The Author(s) 2015
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entanglements different from those between the so-called
periphery and center.3 By focusing on the
lives and selected writings of two prominent political thinkers
and activists, José Martí and Hồ Chí
Minh, we call attention to the crossings among the colonized
themselves and the decolonial designs
they embody and fight for.4
First, we draw from Hồ’s and Martí’s thought to counter the
discipline’s silencing of political and
theoretical voices from the colony. If names such as Patrice
Lumumba, Sukarno, M. K. Gandhi, and
Mehdi Ben Barka are mentioned at all (and they scarcely are) in
IR, they are simply referred to as
local/national leaders with provincial significance. Rarely are
they regarded as theorists with pro-
found insights into the complexities of global politics and into

how slavery and colonialism funda-
mentally constituted the modern world in which we continue to
live today. Although widely read
around the world, only recently is Frantz Fanon being
recognized as an important theorist of IR.5
In addition, only a few scholars in the field have called
attention to other intellectuals from the world
of the global majority, whose political thought and practice
bears anticolonial significance, such as Sri
Aurobindo, Jawaharlal Nehru, Ali Shariati, Amílcar Cabral,
Agostinho Neto, Eduardo Mondlane, and
Samora Machel.6 If silences, according to Michel-Rolph
Trouillot, puncture the making of sources,
archives, narratives, and history,7 we dive into the writings by
Martí and Hồ not only to find alterna-
tive archives in unconventional sources but also to dwell on the
decolonizing narratives of the global
that they offer. For reasons of space, we refrain from discussing
at length Martí’s and Hồ’s incisive
critiques of European colonialism. Instead, we focus on the
alternative political and ethical relations
of the international, of self and others that they advocate and
embody.
Second, our article centers not on Martí and Hồ as individuals
but on their distinctly global con-
ceptions of struggles for self-determination and justice.
National commemoration often elevates both
leaders to the status of holy apostles for having dedicated their
lives to national independence. José
Martí (1853–1895) died in the Cuban War of Independence
against Spain in 1895 after a lifetime of
mobilizing for Cuban political and intellectual freedom from
Spain. Hồ Chí Minh (1890–1969) came
to be an indispensable force and spirit in the Vietnamese wars

of resistance against French colonialism
as well as US aggression. If appreciated beyond national
bounds, Martí becomes an iconic Latin
American revolutionary and Hồ is predominantly read as a
communist internationalist. Yet, departing
from both a strictly nationalist representation and a limited
understanding of their internationalism,
we argue that Martí’s and Hồ’s global visions exceed national,
continental, and narrowly demarcated
ideological borders. Their political activism in exile and in their
own countries, the liberation move-
ments they were in touch with, and the futures of freedom and
prosperity they envisioned for the sub-
jugated in their homelands and elsewhere manifested an
irrepressible solidarity with all those under
the yoke of colonial enslavement. This solidarity, as we analyze
later, is marked by endurance, insur-
gency, and mutual learning imbued with a deep attentiveness to
decolonial difference. Their commit-
ment to their peoples never circumscribed their cosmopolitan
affinities with other imagined
communities. On account of these worldwide affinities, Martí
and Hồ were not just thinkers and writ-
ers of international relations; they also forged and lived a
different kind of relations of the interna-
tional, which took roots in solidarity, hospitality, and bonding
through bondage.
Last but not least, by turning to anticolonial intellectuals, we
take the colonial plantation seriously
not just as a site of enslavement and exploitation but also as a
locus of global literacy. An antidote to
IR’s “relative incapacity to speak about [… ] the injuries done
to [the Third World] through conquest
and colonialism and the justice of its demands,”8 voices from
the plantation record cries of despair as

well as songs of faith, dances of joy, and stories of battle. In
Édouard Glissant’s poetic articulation,
“The cry of the Plantation transfigured into the speech of the
world.”9 Furthermore, the plantation is
not a closed space but, in Glissant’s conceptualization, an
échos-monde,10 a site of world echoes that
receives them and enables their reverberations from and to
elsewhere. One can hear in Martí’s and
Hồ’s struggle, language, and nation, echoes of multiple
struggles, languages, and collectivities. Nota-
bly, their voices do not merely testify to their victimhood.
Bondage is not reducible to
Pha
˙
m and Méndez 157
dehumanization. The bonds that hold the iron collars together
also engender bonds of alliances. Bond-
ing through bondage, as is clear in Martí’s and Hồ’s writings
and activism, fosters both the specificity
of different cultures and the imagination of a world of places
that resonate with each other. This is not
an unproblematic process free from politics. Their attempts to
forge links with subaltern others also
reveal critical moments of silence and effacement, which we
examine in detail later.
In bringing into conversation the global José Martí and Hồ Chí
Minh, which is of course only one
among many possible beginnings and paths among the enslaved,
this article sets out to remember the
crossings that we may not know are bequeathed to us.

Insurgent Solidarity
Ahora son nuestros amos; pero mañana ¡quién sabe!11
(Today they are our masters; but tomorrow, who knows?)
Scenes of Insurgency
Martí’s travels through various Latin American nations helped
to create bonds with peoples who
fought against colonial and postcolonial violence. He
encountered labor and antiauthoritarian strug-
gles, along with ethno-cultural complexities, which later
informed his critiques of the United States’
racism and exclusionary policies. For instance, while in Mexico,
he collaborated with Chihuahua
workers as one of their delegates to the First Labor Congress.12
Significantly, Martí’s work as a consul
for Uruguay, Paraguay, and Argentina, along with his
participation in the First International American
Conference held in Washington in 1890, alerted him to the
dangers of US-led Pan-Americanism13 and
inspired him to travel South in search of alliances that might
put a stop to this imperial ambition.
At the time, the Haitian Revolution had ignited a fire of
anxieties across the Atlantic World. Many
Cubans feared that the mobilization for Cuban independence
might lead to a “race war” or even a
black republic like Haiti. Despite such paranoia, Martí
journeyed several times to the Caribbean.
In one such journey, with the help of Puerto Rican revolutionary
leader Dr. Betancès, Martí visited
the Haitian intellectual and statesman Anténor Firmin in Cap
Haitien in 1893. Both Martí and Firmin
were preoccupied with US imperialism and dreamt of an

America free of foreign domination. Firmin
later recounted how their conversations “turned on the great
question of Cuban independence and the
possibility of a Caribbean Federation.” He remarked, “[a]part
from practical reservations, we abso-
lutely agreed on our principles. We felt for one another an
undeniable affinity.”14
These undeniable affinities as well as Martí’s dreams of Cuban
freedom and of an anti-imperial
Pan-Americanism sparked the vigor of his speeches, stories,
plays, poems, foreign correspondence,
and newspaper articles. Because existing scholarship already
highlights Martí’s visions of Cuba and
of the Americas, we focus instead on an overlooked, albeit
remarkable, story among his voluminous
writings: “A Journey through the Land of the Annamese.”15 He
included the story in La Edad de Oro
(The Golden Years), a Spanish-language journal that Martí
dedicated to the children of Latin America.
“Our children, we must raise as men [and women] of their
times, and as men [and women] of the
Americas,”16 he affirmed. Already, the horizon of time and
space disrupted the exclusionary histori-
cism of “first in Europe, then elsewhere.”17 Children in Cuba
would grow up to admire not just those
who fought for independence in their own country, but also
Simón Bolívar of Venezuela, Miguel
Hidalgo of Mexico, and José de San Martín of Argentina.18
Beyond their home continent, Martí also
invited the children to join him in an imaginative journey across
the ocean to what the Europeans
called the Far East. Although the outlooks in the Americas were
predominantly westward in his times,
Martí looked “East.” Despite relying on European archives to
envisage An Nam without having set

foot there, his traveling perspective proved to diverge
significantly from Orientalist accounts.19
158 Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 40(2)
Instead of encountering a land inhabited by unfamiliar others as
a “vast cultural and geographical
blankness” to inscribe one’s own desires, fears, and fantasies,20
Martí treated An Nam, to borrow Toni
Morrison’s words in a different context, as a place “already
idea-ed,” a “culture being its own subject,
initiating its own commentary.”21 Martí depicted a colorful
tapestry of Annamese traditions, and more
importantly, he vocalized the people’s determination to defend
themselves against foreign invasions:
[W]e simultaneously craft bronze and silk; and when the French
came to steal our Hanoi, our Hue, our
cities of wooden palaces, our ports full of bamboo houses and
reed boats, our warehouses of fish and rice,
even then, with these almond eyes, we have known to die, by
thousands upon thousands, to block their
path! Today they are our masters; but tomorrow, who knows?22
Far from being superiors who brought civilization to primitives,
the French were portrayed as nothing
more than merciless invaders: “[T]he French is from another
world, who knows more about wars and
modes of killing; and from town to town, with blood at the
waist, he has been stealing the country
away from the Annamese.”23 Coming from an occupied land
himself, Martí rejected Europe’s self-
congratulating narrative of mission civilisatrice. He voiced what
only the subjugated could avow:

“Today they are our masters; but tomorrow, who knows?”
Through this simple question, Martí under-
stood the Annamese’s endurance while simultaneously
undermining imperial prowess by pointing to
its fragile temporariness. Even at the height of the French
empire, despite its overwhelming arms and
cruelty, Martí alluded to its eventual demise. By leaving the
future of tomorrow open, he identified
with the colonized’s resilience and conveyed their fundamental
refusal to accept domination.
When critics of empire solely expose its crimes and/or analyze
its mechanisms of power, they
more often than not risk reproducing asymmetrical power
relations rather than subverting them.
In contrast, Martí questioned the very premise of imperial
power. From the perspective of colonized
peoples, he revealed not only the horrors of colonialism but also
its everyday instability: “tomor-
row, who knows?” The solidarity that Martí shared with the
Annamese was, we contend, specifi-
cally marked by insurgency. To sense the impermanence of
colonial domination and affirm an
independence to come, he must take for granted the dominated’s
sovereignty: The Annamese, like
Cubans, were a self-determined people, with or without
European recognition. We may recall that
Frantz Fanon avowed a similar truth more than half a century
later: “The Algerians already consider
themselves sovereign. It remains for France to recognize
her.”24 In kindred spirits, Hồ would pro-
nounce resolute dictums about the eventual defeat of both
France and the United States in the land
Martí had imaginatively journeyed to. He famously warned the
French in 1946, at the beginning of
what would be an eight-year war, “You will kill ten of us and

we will kill one of you, but you will be
the ones who grow tired.”25
Notably, in “Journey to the Land of the Annamese,” Martí
appreciated the natives’ resistance to
French rule not just in the battlefield but also in pagodas, where
they listened to “the saints of their
country, which are not the saints of the French,” and especially
in theaters, “where they [were] not told
things to laugh about, but the history of their generals and of
their kings: they listen, squatting, quietly,
to the history of the battles.”26 Elaborating on the vibrant space
of Annamese community theaters,
Martí gave us a glimpse of a street education that was
alternative to what Hồ called the “make-stupid”
policy (chính sách ngu dân) of the French, which only taught
“the [native] youth to scorn their own
root and race.”27
More than a place of refuge where there was no French, Martí
noted the Annamese went to their
theaters to “not extinguish the power of the heart.”28 The
examples of unyielding predecessors fueled
their determination to overthrow the present occupier: “In
Annam, the theater is not about what hap-
pens today, but about the history of the country; and the war
that the brave An-Yang won against the
Chinese Chau-Tu; and the combats fought by two women,
Cheng Tseh y Cheng Urh, who dressed as
warriors and rode horses, who were generals of the people of
Annam and drove the Chinese out of
Pha
˙
m and Méndez 159

their trenches.”29 Martí underscored the Annamese’s resilient
history of fighting off foreign domina-
tion long before the French came. The Annamese had
successfully defended their land against inva-
ders much more powerful than themselves before; they could
and would do it again.
Martí’s noteworthy reconstruction of the Annamese’s
insurrectionary theaters stands in contrast
with the dominant representation of the enslaved as abject
victims. In Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya
Hartman warns against the danger of focusing, narrowly and
routinely, on spectacular scenes of black
suffering. The hypervisibility of these shocking acts of torture
hides “the terror of the mundane and
the quotidian”30 under slavery as well as obscures the whip in
the liberal humanist form. Furthermore,
the ravaged body of the enslaved perversely serves as a display
of power while simultaneously invit-
ing an empathetic identification that obliterates the pain of the
other. Although often employed to
denounce the degrading treatment of the enslaved, the casual
and exclusive recitations of horrific
spectacles, we contend along with Hartman, neither unsettle the
power dynamics nor mitigate the
degradation. Represented solely as the bearer of abuse and
victim of domination, the enslaved is
reduced to incapacitation and powerlessness.
We argue that Martí staged not scenes of subjection, but scenes
of insurgency. Instead of viewing
the Annamese as merely a subject nation and race, as the
(tortured) site and scene of French power
alone, he recognized them as full political subjects. When

Europe produced itself as the only center of
the world and the Orient signified to the outsider little but
despotism and submissiveness, Martí
related to the Annamese as subjects of the world and as world-
making subjects. Cuban children
learned to connect with the Annamese as co-sufferers under
colonial yokes and equally as co-
fighters to be “free in the land and free in thought.”31 Instead
of being trapped in the Eurocentric map-
ping of the globe, they inhabited a different international
relations.
Although Martí empathized with the Annamese’s suffering
under French rule, he did not provide a
“testimony of the victim as victim,” which as James Baldwin
reminds us, “corroborates, simply, the
reality of the chains that bind him—confirms, and, as it were,
consoles the jailer.”32 Instead, his sol-
idarity was marked as much by insurgency as it was by a careful
attentiveness to decolonial differ-
ence. Martí honored the specific history and cultural form of the
Annamese resistance to their
colonial occupier, even if this might have been foreign to
himself. Rather than dismissing theater per-
formances as a mere diversion from the main task of armed
struggles, he took care to learn that for the
Annamese, their theaters were a vital source of social and
cultural sustenance, as well as a space of
collective memory and political rebellion in the making.
Even more strikingly, Martí recognized that the Annamese
community theaters posed a fatal limit
to French colonization. The French could neither eliminate nor
even comprehend them. One could
only listen to the music in these theaters if it touched one’s
heart:

… the musicians embellish each tone as it feels good to them,
inventing the accompaniment according to
what was being played, in such a way that it seems that the
music follows no rule, but if one listens well,
one sees that the rule is to let the free idea play, to really excite
the thoughts of drama, and put in the music
the joy, sorrow, poetry, or fury that sits in the heart; without
forgetting the tone of the old music, the entire
orchestra must know for there to be a guide in the disorder of
its invention, which is really much, because
he who does not know their tones hears no more than the
drumbeats and gabble.…33
Those who failed to appreciate the playful improvisation of
disorder could hear no music. They
were unable to discern the rich array of tones that kindled
different emotions and desires. The
whole mixture was just a lot of noise. This was precisely why,
Martí observed, the Annamese
theaters gave Europeans a headache and seemed odious to them
(“los teatros de Anam que a
un europeo le da dolor de cabeza, y le parece odiosa”). They
were deaf to the music, the play, the
history that it remembered, and the politics that it ignited.
Meanwhile, the Annamese left the thea-
ter with heated passion.
Again, Martí rejected imperial superiority and underlined
instead imperial illiteracy. He concluded
with the double registers in which the colonized spoke and the
utter inability of the colonizer to see

beyond the surface and hear more than noise: “If a Frenchman
asks them something along the way,
they respond in his language: ‘I don’t know.’And if a fellow
Annamese speaks of something in secret,
they say: ‘Who knows!’”34
Undeniable Affinities
From his early years in exile, Hồ’s writings (under various
aliases) evidenced an extensive range of
alliance making with the colonized around the globe, be it in the
form of journalistic articles, corre-
spondences, organizational reports, or speeches at international
fora. His documentation of colonial
oppression extended across different lands and occupying
regimes. From crippling corruption in An
Nam, Martinique, and Morocco,35 to travesties at colonial
courts in French West Africa,36 from rave-
nous hunts of natives for cannon fodder in colonial wars37 to
slave raids for plantations in French
Polynesian islands,38 Hồ’s accounts exposed both the
systematic nature and the varied manifestations
of what Aimé Césaire names “thingification.”39 Beyond a focus
on his own homeland in Indochina,
Hồ kept readers abreast of the oppression in other French
colonies in Africa as well as the British
control in China, India, and Sudan,40 the Belgian genocide in
Congo, the German extermination of
the Herero and Nama peoples,41 the lynchings of African
Americans, and the concentration of Native
Americans into reservations in the United States.42
An article Hồ wrote in L’Humanité called “L’Enfumé” (Smoked
Humans) deserves particular
mention. In the form of fiction, it was dedicated to an Algerian
murdered by a French military officer

and based on historical events. Written in 1922, the story was
projected to the future in 1998 when an
imagined “African Federative Republic” celebrated its fiftieth
anniversary of independence. A ninety-
year-old citizen of the Republic recollected what his generation
had to live through and die of under
French rule. In particular, he recounted the time when his
village fled to the jungle to escape colonial
persecution and took refuge in a cave. The French hunted them
down with guns and dogs and in the
end smoked alive 200 men, women, and children in the cave. In
the voice of the survivor, Hồ bore
witness to the cannibalistic scene: “The horrid burning smell
spread rapidly and became unbearable.
What was it? Nobody knew […] Panic! Run? Run where? It was
so horrifying! The sound of chatter-
ing teeth, the ear-piercing shrieks, the paroxysm of hiccups, the
sound of falling bodies, the mad cries
turned that smoked dark cave into an absolute inferno.”43
We find this tale remarkable on multiple counts. First, the
testimony to the muffled groans and
convulsions of death in the inferno is strikingly reminiscent of
Algerian writer Assia Djebar’s effort
to unearth archives about her charred ancestors to resurrect the
dead.44 The imaginative leap that Hồ
took to dwell in solidarity with Djebar’s predecessors, with the
colonized elsewhere, bears a note-
worthy resemblance to Martí’s. Second, Hồ committed to our
memory the violence of colonial wars:
the fumigation of entire tribes by “civilized” armies. The
memories of these conquests haunted us
when former US President George W. Bush pledged to hunt
down the attackers of September 11,
2001, in an unmistakable language, “We will smoke them out of
their holes.”45 Third, against the

boasted grandeur of colonial militaries, Hồ’s tale foresaw the
formal independence of colonies in the
mid-twentieth century. His global vision of self-determination
was pronounced when he envisaged
the futuristic republic not in An Nam or Indochina, where he
came from, but in Africa, in dedication
to an Algerian victim of French colonialism.46
In his larger corpus, Hồ’s solidarity with fellow colonized
peoples was unmistakably imprinted by
an insurgent desire to learn from unfolding revolutionary
movements worldwide. He took careful
notes of any activities that contributed to the cause of self-
determination of any colonized people,
including the Syria–Palestine Congress,47 Abd el-Krim’s
battles against the French,48 and anticolo-
nial associations such as Anushilan Samiti and Gandhi-led
noncooperation movement in India, to
Pha
˙
m and Méndez 161
name just a few.49 Hồ also documented extensively workers’
movements in Africa and Asia, includ-
ing the labor struggles of industrial and agricultural workers
across India and China,50 the widespread
strikes and their bloody suppression in major industrial centers
such as Osaka51 and Calcutta52 and in
port cities such as Guadeloupe, Bizerte, Hamman-Lif,53 and
Porto Novo.54 Instead of pitting prole-
tariat internationalism against nationalism as metropolitan
communists tended to do, Hồ espoused
both. Even when he worked with the Comintern, he clearly

articulated the need to “reconsider the
historical basis of Marxism” and supplement it with national
studies from the “East.”55
Furthermore, workers’ movements featured prominently in Hồ’s
writings but were not his exclu-
sive focus. Rather, he paid attention to radical initiatives from
marginalized groups on the whole. For
instance, in 1923, he wrote in support of the Levelers
Association of Japan (Suiheisha) and more
broadly the struggle for equality of the “eta” people, a
discriminated community in Japan, whose
oppression reminded him of the fate of the “sudra” caste in
India and black people in African coun-
tries.56 He also promoted gender equality, albeit within the
parameters of Communist Women’s Inter-
national.57 Most notably, Hồ was preoccupied with peasant
politics in the colonies. Reporting that 95
percent of natives in French colonies were peasants (nông dân)
at the Fifth Congress of the Commu-
nist International in 1924,58 he constantly called international
attention to their specific plights, which
were not shared by workers, especially those in the metropole.
Peasants were thrown off their land en
masse by different methods of expropriation for colonial
plantations, businesses, and settlement.59
When they were not cheated or forced out of their land, they
were exploited with choking taxes and
loans under the double yokes of landlords and capitalist
markets.60 Particularly concerned about how
to organize peasants effectively, Hồ recorded diverse
experiences to learn from, ranging from estab-
lishing peasant cooperatives and associations61 to strengthening
alliance between workers and pea-
sants,62 to mobilizing protests, armed uprisings,63 and guerilla

wars.64
As demonstrated earlier, Hồ’s writings offer a vast archive to
learn global politics differently. His
testimonies bore witness to interconnected forms of violence
and resistance that remain marginalized
in IR. They are marked by both a desire to teach and a fervor
for learning. More than merely assem-
bling facts, as Brent Hayes Edwards highlights, Hồ and his
colleagues grappled with teaching the
metropoles “what a colony really is”with diverse forms of
knowledge creation, ranging from piercing
critiques to satires to fables and fiction.65 Simultaneously, they
were hungry to learn from insurrec-
tionary movements around the world in all their heterogeneity.
In both cases, the generated knowl-
edge was not only vital in content and rich in form, it was
integral to life-or-death praxis. We
argue, therefore, that insurgency, coupled with attentiveness to
anticolonial differences, distinctly
characterizes the solidarity expressed in Hồ’s writings. Such
solidarity differs starkly from humanist
sympathy, which is often urged by displays of subjection and
presumes a universal humanity that
everyone shares by virtue of being human regardless of
historical difference. Hồ’s activism, like Mar-
tí’s, shows us that taking insurgency seriously calls for
attending to the specificity of the others’ strug-
gles, which are inextricably entangled with distinct histories,
conditions of domination and resistance,
forms of cultural and spiritual sustenance, and shapes of action
and creativity.
Far from being an abstract universalist or a mere Comintern
agent with a fixed program for rev-
olution, Hồ closely studied the singular situations of each

colonized people and their organized resis-
tance. Indeed, he relentlessly confronted the limited fraternity
of communist internationalism by
foregrounding the colonial situation in its diversity. He joined
the Comintern because it was the only
International that even counted colonized peoples as part of a
global community: “The First Interna-
tional only said, ‘The proletariat of the world unite’; The Third
International adds, ‘The proletariat and
oppressed peoples of the world unite’ … The Second
International helps imperialism subdue colo-
nized peoples (Governor-General Varenne [of French Indochina
between 1925 and 1928] is a member
of the Second International).”66 Even then, Hồ still carried the
burden of constantly reminding the
Comintern of “oppressed peoples of the world” other than
Europeans and other than the proletariat.
At the Fifth Congress of the Communist International in 1924,
he spoke against the prevalent
contempt in the metropoles for colonized peoples: “I come here
to continually draw the Comintern’s
attention to a truth: Colonies are still existing.”67 He indicted
European communist parties for their
indifference to colonial issues: “All that our parties have done
in this domain is equal to zero. In
French West Africa military conscription is carried out via
completely unbelievable methods of
compulsion, and our press says nothing about this. In Indochina
the colonial powers have become
slave-traders and sell the natives of Tonkin to planters in the
Pacific Islands; they have raised the

length of military service for indigenous people from two years
to four; they are handing over a
large portion of the colony to a consortium of sharks … and our
press maintains a stubborn
silence.”68
It is also crucial to note how vital mutual learning among the
colonized was to Hồ. Actively
involved in the Peasant International and the Eastern
Department, he dedicated all his energies to
make the Comintern as effective a medium as possible to
facilitate critical connections among colo-
nized peoples. He realized that their acute weakness lay in
“isolation … the lack of trust, of action
coordination, and of mutual endorsement.”69 To counter this,
Hồ fervently advocated for mutual
learning and support: “How helpful would it be for the
Annamese, if they could know how their
Indian brothers self-organize in their struggle against British
imperialism, or know how Japanese
workers unite against the yoke of capitalist exploitation, or
know the noble sacrifices the Egyptians
have committed in the fight for their freedom?”70 He pressed
for the institutional sponsorship to make
such learning embodied, intimate, and as extensive as possible:
“It would be very fruitful if the
Comintern could send Chinese comrades, for example, to
Indochina, Turkish comrades to India and
so on. However, in order to complete these missions, [these
comrades] must understand the entire
situation of Asia and have intimate relations among those from
different countries. Yet currently, there
is no such understanding and relations. Under these conditions,
there cannot be any interdependence
and unity.”71

Although Hồ spoke of Asia in his letter to the Eastern
Department, the alternative routes he drew
of global travel, knowledge, cooperation, and intimacy might
extend well beyond. His political acti-
vism attested to a globalism of marginalized peoples. As the
lawyer Max Clainville Bloncourt from
Guadeloupe, one of the cofounders of the Intercolonial Union
with Hồ, recollected, “I saw he was
dedicated to the struggle for the liberation of all colonial and
oppressed people—not only in Viet-
nam, but all over the Earth … Once, when he learned of the
barbarous French reprisals heaped on
people in Dahomey, he was deeply incensed and suffered as
greatly as though all this was happening
in Vietnam to his own people. He was a humanist and
internationalist in the full sense of the
word.”72
To end this section, we wish to refer to Adolfo Gilly’s
introduction to Fanon’s A Dying Colonial-
ism, wherein he affirms that Fanon’s writing “testifies not so
much to the death of colonialism as to the
life of the masses in this age of revolution.”73 The great value
of Fanon’s work, Gilly elaborates, “is in
underlining the importance of [the masses’] inner life, their
private discussions, their resistance, their
seemingly indirect actions. All this exists among all the peoples
of the world. It is on this deep level
that the future—which will later on seem to burst suddenly and
without warning into bloom—is being
prepared.”74 It is this very affirmation of life that we find
generative in Hồ’s and Martí’s decolonial
thought as well. Learning from them, we may catch a glimpse of
how their futures were—and ours
are—prepared.

Forging Bonds with Subaltern Groups
Unlearning one’s own privilege is a narcissistic undertaking.
I would now say, “learning to learn from below.”75
Pha
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m and Méndez 163
While we find much in Martí’s and Hồ’s thought that battles
against colonial hierarchies, we also
grapple with their complicity in maintaining hierarchical
relations with certain subaltern groups. The
latter was manifested particularly in their nationalist
pedagogies. If mutual learning constitutes their
solidarity with colonized peoples elsewhere, a structural
inclination to teach more than to “learn to
learn from below” often shapes their relations with intimate
others within their imagined commu-
nities. Caught in the modern project of nation-state building,
Martí’s and Hồ’s writings and activism
in relation to subaltern groups shuttle between their
decolonizing impulse and their nationalist desire.
Their bonds with these groups were forged, it can be said, in
both senses of the word. Within this
limited space, we try our best to investigate their alternative
visions as well as their silences with par-
ticular implications for issues of race and IR.
In their visions of an independent nation, both Martí and Hồ
embraced subaltern groups in ways
that unsettled the colonial imaginary. The civilization–
barbarism dichotomy was pervasive and more

explicit in their times than in ours. If “to be or not to be
savages”76 was the question for the liberal
Argentine Domingo Faustino Sarmiento who sought to model
Latin America after the West, Martí’s
Our America77 offered an important antidote. Here, as in his
denunciation of England’s desire to con-
quer Egypt under the banner of the civilizing mission,78 he
exposed the ways in which the dichotomy
justified imperial exploitation and obscured the colonial
relationship between creole elites and sub-
altern peoples. His egalitarian tendency distinguished him from
prominent figures of his times, who
adhered to the deterministic belief in “naturally inferior” races
and either equated miscegenation with
degeneration or advocated it to “neutralize, to a certain degree,
the terrible influence of […] millions
[of Negroes] that keep on multiplying.”79 Sarmiento, for
instance, considered indigenous and black
peoples no more than “objects” to shape or to exterminate.80
Martí’s humanism set him apart not only from the stark racism
of his contemporaries but also from
a nineteenth-century humanism that took Western reality to be
the basis of the common human con-
dition. The centrality Martí gave to the subaltern challenged
Europe’s exclusive construction of the
human and its theoretical sovereignty over all forms of inquiries
and representations. His call for
children to stop feeling embarrassed of their mother because she
wore an indigenous apron, his advice
to governors in “Indian” republics to learn “Indian” languages,
and his appeal to the universities to
give the Incas preference over the Greeks in their curriculum
were among the new ways of seeing
and knowing that he proposed for Our America. Martí’s
exaltation of the “indigenous elements” of

America did not invoke a nostalgic return to origins. He was
aware that although certain Western
values inadequately addressed Latin American realities, they
might have played an irreversible part
in constructing Latin American republics. Thus, his declaration:
“Let the world be grafted onto our
republics, but the trunk should be ours.”81
Martí’s thoughtful consideration of indigenous peoples took
many forms and was not circum-
scribed to their experience in Latin America. The violence of
conquest and the expropriation of indi-
genous peoples from their lands is a persistent theme in Martí’s
accounts. He found echoes of the
vicious burning of indigenous temples, homes, and
observatories by the Spanish82 in the inhuman
policies of the US reservation system, where the “Indian is
killed by a vile system that shuts off his
personality.”83 Structural injustice, not racial predisposition,
explained the desolate condition of
Indians in reservations. As with his imagined identification with
the Annamese, Martí’s writing about
Native Americans sowed seeds of insurrection that pointed to
the fragile temporality of empire. He
highlighted the inextinguishable fire of their resilience:
A sense of downcast fierceness, that never extinguishes entirely
in the enslaved races, the memory of
the lost homes, the counsel of old men who experienced freer
times in the native forests, the witnessing
of their own incarcerated, vilified, and idle bodies exploding
like intermittent waves whenever the rapa-
city or hardness of government agents cuts back on or refuses
Indians the benefits stipulated in the
treaties.…84

This fierceness, sustained by shared memories of freedom and
bondage, constitutes the ever-present
possibility of transformation in the lives of subaltern peoples.
Martí heavily criticized Latin American elites for not
recognizing black and indigenous peoples as
equal and legitimate constituents of the nation.85 As an antidote
to the systematic marginalization of
indigenous peoples, if not also a way to channel their downcast
fierceness,86 Martí proposed an edu-
cation that would awaken in them a political understanding of
their rights and their role in nation mak-
ing. This schooling would not teach the youth to “scorn their
own root and race” like French colonial
schools. It would instead conform to their needs and
achievements and teach them about the history of
their people.87 Martí also envisioned this type of education as a
medium through which formerly
enslaved black people could achieve social equality. Moreover,
such schooling would not accord with
the image of the nation as the beneficent father who brought the
gifts of civilization to his savage
children. In response to an article that, while praising his efforts
at “elevating” black Cubans, belittled
his independence initiative, Martí denied the paternalistic claim
of elevation: “The person of color in
Cuba is already a fully rational being that reads his book and
knows his waist measure; without any
need for the cultured manna to fall from the white sky.”88
Although Martí distanced himself from many of the racialized
conceptions of his and our times, he

was not immune to the epistemic violence of the slave society
he had been born into. He himself was
attentive to the fact that “an institution like slavery is very
difficult to uproot from tradition as from the
law” and that “what is erased from the written constitution
remains for some time latent in social rela-
tions.”89 This was manifest in his nation-building project,
which, in the face of Spanish colonial occu-
pation and possible annexation by the United States, sacrificed
difference for the sake of unity.
Differing from a prominent literature that primarily celebrates
Martí’s departure from the colonial
thinking of his times, we find it important to consider the
contradictions between Martí’s identifica-
tion with the “wretched of the earth” and his problematic
representation of subaltern peoples.90 For
instance, closing off some of the liberating possibilities
intimated inOur America, Martí showed anxi-
ety about the threats that indigenous ways of being posed to the
progress of the nation. Writing about
indigenous peoples in Mexico, he claimed that “ambition is to
them something unknown and useless;
indolence at work is a natural consequence of the indolence of
their spirit; a serious danger is the
result of this neglect […] He doesn’t have anything because he
doesn’t desire anything.”91 This state-
ment is reminiscent of a Lockean valorization of labor and
industry that should save nature from lying
waste. Measured against this standard of reason and
industriousness, indigenous peoples could only
be deemed dangerously indolent, useless, and ambitionless.92
For another instance, as progressive as
the schools that Martí envisioned were, they still aimed to
assimilate minoritized communities into the
imperative of productivity and development regardless of their

wishes: “At times the Indians resist,
but they will be educated. I love them, and because I do I will
educate them.”93
If on account of their “laziness,”Native Americans threatened
the nation’s progress, black Cubans’
claim to a racial identity became a danger to Martí’s campaign
for independence. Martí felt pressured
to allay the racial fears on which Spanish officials played to
convince his compatriots that a mobilized
Cuba might lead to a “race war,” and worse, a black republic
like Haiti. Apart from his idealism, he
abided by the notions of racial fraternity and raceless
nationality to appeal to groups as varied as pop-
ular class emigrés, professional and intellectual elites, and
socially radical as well as conservative gen-
erals of previous wars of independence.94 Repeatedly, he
reassured his audience, “the black Cuban
does not aspire to freedom … political justice, and
independence as a black man, but as a Cuban.”95
Whether enacted by the literal obliteration of references to race
or by the idealized projection of the
raceless patriotism of black insurgents, this silencing of race, as
Ada Ferrer points out, is an actively
perpetuated fantasy.96
Martí also resorted to a discourse of gratitude and forgiveness
that recalled the very paternalistic
image of “cultured manna falling from the white sky” he
objected to. He assuaged white insecurity
by ascribing to black Cubans not just a gratitude they
supposedly owed to the white
Pha
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m and Méndez 165
revolutionaries of the Ten Years’ War for abolishing slavery,97
but one that granted white Cubans
immunity regarding their “mistreatment” of black people: “Will
we fear the Negro—the noble
black man, our black brother—who for the sake of the Cubans
who died for him has granted eter-
nal pardon to the Cubans who are still mistreating him?”98 In
addition to glossing over the myriad
struggles of the enslaved that led to the final abolition of
slavery, this rhetoric failed to fathom the
profound racial inequality and antagonism that persisted in
Cuba and was manifest viciously in the
War of 1912, contrary to Martí’s naive assertion in 1893 that
“[t]here will never be a racial war in
Cuba.”99 By framing the racial problem in Cuba “not [as] a
political one, but a social one,”100
Martí de-historicized and depoliticized entrenched violence
against the formerly enslaved: “The
Negro who proclaims his race, even if it may be his mistaken
way of proclaiming the spiritual
identity of all races, is justifying and provoking the white
racists.”101 In promoting “mutual love
and forgiveness on the part of both races,”102 his rhetoric
equalized the positionalities of whites
and blacks, as if both groups were evenly accountable for the
racism rooted in slavery, and liber-
ally assumed that noble sentiments could procure political
equality and social harmony.103 Martí’s
ahistorical flattening of racial hierarchies in his demand that
“[n]egro racists and white racists must
share the blame”104 is reminiscent of today’s complaints about

so-called reverse discrimination
and of color-blind multiculturalism more generally. In
particular, his speeches run parallel to
Barack Obama’s packaging of “racial conflict as a
misunderstanding between social equals rather
than matters of exclusion and power.”105
Although Martí was far from ignorant of racialized violence as
a continuing legacy of slavery, his
disavowal of race in the independence project, epitomized by
his famous maxim, “There can be no
racial animosity because there are no races,”106 denied the
historical specificities of black subjectivity
and thereby rejected the indispensability of black political
activism in the collective fight for justice.
This disavowal was neither necessary nor inevitable in the
struggle for Cuban independence even
though it is often projected as such. One needs only to
remember the black and mulatto independence
activists whose ideal of patria was not divorceable from racial
justice.107 Furthermore, the most
exemplary contrast to Martí’s adherence to a colorless
Cubanidad was the “generic appellation of
Blacks”108 that Haitians inscribed in their Constitution after
their revolution.109 Unlike Martí’s, this
abolition of racial distinction reversed the racial ideologies
underlying post-slavery societies since, as
Siba Grovogui points out, “‘black’ became a symbol around
which to organize national solidarity and
public life.”110
If African- and Native Americans (in the continental sense) hold
an ambivalent place in Martí’s
thought, peasants111 figure in Hồ’s political writings on
revolution and the Vietnamese nation in con-
tradictory ways as well. As influential as Marxist–Leninist

thought was for him, Hồ did not absorb it
uncritically but translated, with great care and stakes, what
made the most sense in between the the-
ories that he read and the realities that he faced. He shared the
same orientation with Martí: “Manure
can be brought from elsewhere, but cultivation must be done
according to the soil.”112 Hồ’s preoccu-
pation with peasant politics from early on revealed his clear
departure from metropolitan communists
who had mainly, if not only, the (European) proletariat in mind
in their passionate invocation of the
world’s oppressed. At the First Congress of the Peasant
International, Hồ resorted to the following
analogy to explain to his European comrades the plights of
peasants in the colonies: “A Russian pea-
sant is like a person sitting imposingly in a sofa chair, while an
Annamese peasant is like a person tied
to a post, upside down with head on the ground.”113
Not only did Hồ grasp the specificities of the oppression that
peasants in the colonies faced, he
recognized them as indispensable political actors in bringing
about revolutionary changes. In
1953, amid the resistance war with France whose end was not
obviously near, he wrote, “The basis
of the national question is the peasant question, because
peasants are the absolute majority in the
nation. The basis of a democratic revolution is also the peasant
question, because peasants are the
largest revolutionary forces against feudalism and against
imperialism.”114 He reiterated many times

that without the support and participation of peasants in the
revolution, there would be no victory to
gain and no nation to build.115 Just as frequently and
emphatically, he reminded the party cadres
whose task was to mobilize villagers for the revolution that they
had to constantly learn from the pea-
sant masses (quần chúng nông dân). Rejecting the
condescending understanding of peasants as ignor-
ant and in need of enlightenment, Hồ affirmed the opposite:
they were very intelligent, experienced,
full of ideas and initiatives.116 He made clear that peasants
were not simply people to work closely
with and win over for one’s own agenda; they were teachers too
and the only ones who could and
should speak for themselves: “Any cadre who says ‘On behalf
of peasants, I …’ says wrong. You
as party members must serve peasants, lead peasants in the
national revolution, but you cannot stand
[in place of themselves] in their position.”117
There is, however, one role that peasants cannot be entrusted
with in Hồ’s political thought: lead-
ership. Despite emphasizing that they were the absolute
majority and the most essential revolutionary
forces, and despite knowing all too well that agriculture, rather
than industry, was predominant in
colonies such as Việt Nam, Hồ still assigned the leadership of
the revolution, as influential theorists
maintain, to the proletariat. In the materials used for political
education of party members, he wrote,
“regarding politics, ideology, organization and action, the
proletariat must play the leadership
role.”118 The “revolutionary characteristics” of the proletariat
included “determination, thoroughness,
collectivity, organization, and discipline.”119 Let us note that
these qualities are opposite to the com-

mon tropes of peasants as irresolute, isolated, unorganized,
spontaneous, and unruly. Although Hồ
countered many negative representations of peasants and placed
them at the center of the revolution,
he did not give up the insistence that they must be led by
others: “Cadres must learn about the masses
and learn from the masses in order to lead the masses.”120
Peasants, who were valued for their knowl-
edge, initiatives, and overwhelming power as a collective, still
figured in the nationalist vision some-
how as a lack. Although not racially classified, peasants
remained inferiorized with lasting
implications for a postindependence future.
Tensions pulsate both Martí’s and Hồ’s texts between their
efforts to build political communities
upon, rather than in spite of, their heterogeneity and the
tendency to tame, discipline, and filter this
heterogeneity in the name of unity and progress. These tensions
compel us to be vigilant of the hier-
archical thinking that continues to structure our relations with
and representations of subaltern others.
While both Martí and Hồ radically reached out to the global
marginalized and made noteworthy
efforts to forge bonds with subaltern groups, their nationalist
pedagogies, coupled with the belief
in modernity’s promise of progress, limited their decolonial
visions. This ambivalent desire to teach
intimate others in one’s constructed communities remains a
legacy for us to reckon with in the “post-
colonial” world.
“We Are All Haitians Here”: An Échos-monde?
During the final preparations for the expedition to gain Cuban
independence, Martí wrote in his diary

about an encounter with a Haitian peasant in Cap Haitien.
Wading across a stream, the strings of Mar-
tí’s cloak came undone when a peasant noticed him and leaped
down from his donkey to offer help.
The peasant exclaimed, “Oh compère! Don’t worry about it. Not
like that, not like that, friend. On the
road, boy helps boy. We are all Haitians here.”121 He bit the
strings, unfolded them, and after mending
them, he continued talking to Martí about his wife and three
kids and about how “good a man feels
when he meets friendly souls, when the stranger suddenly
appears so familiar that he stays in the soul
sturdy and deep like a root.”122
One could read Martí’s story of the encounter as a privileged
traveler’s romanticization of the
noble native/peasant. The traveler’s ease of feeling at home in a
foreign land is suspect. His emphasis
on the native’s hospitality might occlude the power dynamics
that structured their encounter racially,
economically, and otherwise. Would the Haitian peasant be
equally welcomed in Martí’s homeland?
Pha
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m and Méndez 167
Could he travel there in the first place? Yet it is worth noting
that even if the anecdote divulges a sheer
fantasy, it is a fantasy of camaraderie, not of possession and
control. Martí’s narration of the Haitian’s
response to his presence inspires us toward a reading that leans
on Glissant’s conceptualization of the
plantation as an échos-monde.

Invoking friendship, souls, and root, Martí’s account
accentuates the mutuality and depth of a
potential spiritual bond between people from different lands, an
interstitial intimacy that loosens the
foreign-national division. If the offer of hospitality generally
requires one to be the master of the
house or nation, to keep those hosted under control, and to
partake in territorial claims to an exclusive
identity,123 the hospitality that Martí brings to our attention
seems to open up other possibilities.
Those whom the peasant hosts in Haitian lands are not aliens,
temporary residents, or strangers, but
compadres and friends, even Haitians. When the peasant says to
Martí, “we are all Haitians here,” he
shifts the limits of our sense of space and relinquishes the
national narrative of fixed origins and bor-
ders, which in our times would render Martí a Cuban exile or
illegal immigrant. Martí is welcomed as
a Haitian, not for the purpose of national assimilation, but as
part of a sense of relations that are expe-
rienced by being both rooted and open, here and elsewhere. The
peasant’s Haiti is an échos-monde, a
singular site which does not predetermine individual and
collective states of being (the citizen/the
refugee/the immigrant). It receives and enables the resounding
echoes of an elsewhere. Through Mar-
tí’s anecdote, we might see a world where hospitality neither
leads to legal categories of ex/in-clusion
nor is deemed an offense (as, for instance, a “crime of
solidarity” 2005 French law criminalized cit-
izens who assisted undocumented immigrants)124; instead,
hospitable bonds inaugurate uncanny
entwinement that confuses our rigid boundaries of what and
who constitutes “community.”

For us, the Haitian peasant’s warm embrace of a compère and
the global entanglements that bound
Martí and Hồ to others’ decolonizing struggles, in different
albeit related ways, gesture to a set of
international relations that revolve around the multiple
crossings constitutive of our world. Neither
stemming from a single root nor relinquishing roots altogether,
their globalism, solidarity, and hospi-
tality to others’ lives and struggles lie in their openness to
receiving and reverberating echoes from
elsewhere. Reviving the échos-monde of intercolonial crossings,
our article is part of a larger enter-
prise that seeks to, as Charles Mills puts it, “resurrect the
suppressed time of the insurrectionary plan-
tation. Orthodox IR gives us a periodization of the governor’s
palace, the colonial house, the slave
owner’s mansion, when what we want to hear is a different
clock of the slave quarters, of the planta-
tion shacks, the longue durée of anti-colonial struggles.”125
Following the imaginative and political
journeys of José Martí and Hồ Chí Minh is only one modest
beginning among myriad others, we
would like to suggest, in our collective endeavor to co-
enunciate other desires and designs of the
global.
Acknowledgments
We thank Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo whose seminar on
Transatlantic Political Thought first sowed the seeds of
our collaborative work. An earlier version of this article was
presented at the International Studies Association’s
Annual Convention in Toronto in 2014. We thank everyone on
the panel and in the audience for their stimulating
engagement with our work. We owe special thanks to Charles
W. Mills for his tremendously encouraging dis-

cussant feedback. We would also like to express our gratitude to
Randolph Persaud, R.B.J. Walker, Himadeep
Muppidi, Narendran Kumarakulasingam, Raymond Duvall,
Nancy Luxon, Robbie Shilliam and Naeem Inaya-
tullah for their critical questions and comments on our various
drafts. We could not incorporate all of their sug-
gestions into the article, but they have been very helpful in
pushing our long-term thinking on decolonial
conversations and entanglements among colonized subjects.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and/or publica-
tion of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
1. All translations of quotes in this article from Spanish,
French, and Vietnamese into English are ours, unless
otherwise noted. This quote is available in Spanish, accessed
June 18, 2015, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/
discursos/1976/esp/f190476e.html, our emphasis.
2. See Sankaran Krishna, “Race, Amnesia, and the Education of
International Relations,” Alternatives 26 (2001):
401–24; Siba Grovogui, Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and

Africans: Race and Self-Determination in Inter-
national Law (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1996); Naeem Inayatullah and David Blaney,
International Relations and the Problem of Difference (New
York: Routledge, 2004).
3. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage
Books, 1993).
4. We borrow the idea of alternative global designs from Arturo
Escobar, “Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise,”
Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007): 179–210. See also Walter
Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs:
Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
5. See, for example, Randolph Persaud, “Fanon, Race, and
World Order,” in Innovation and Transformation in
International Studies, ed. Stephen Gill and James Mittelman
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1997), 170–83; Himadeep Muppidi, “Frantz Fanon,” in Critical
Theorists and International Relations, ed.
Jenny Edkins and Nick Vaughan-Williams (London, UK:
Routledge, 2009); Robbie Shilliam, “A Fanonian
Critique of Lebow’s Cultural Theory of International
Relations,” Millennium 38, no. 1 (2009): 117–36.
6. See relevant chapters in Branwen Gruffydd Jones, ed.,
Decolonizing International Relations (Plymouth,
UK: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006) and Robbie Shilliam, ed.,
International Relations and Non-western
Thought: Imperialism, Colonialism and Investigations of Global
Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2011).
7. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the
Production of History (Boston, MA: Beacon

Press, 1995), 26.
8. Inayatullah and Blaney, International Relations, 1.
9. Édouard Glissant, Poétique de la Relation (Paris, France:
Éditions Gallimard, 1990), 88.
10. Glissant, Poétique, 107.
11. See José Martí, “Un Paseo por la Tierra de Los Anamitas,”
in Obras Completas (vol. 18), ed. José Martí (La
Habana, Cuba: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1991), 462.
Henceforth, Martí’s completed work is abbre-
viated as OC.
12. See C. Neale Ronning, José Martí and the Emigré Colony in
Key West: Leadership and State Formation
(New York: Praeger, 1990).
13. Martí, OC, vol. 6, 47.
14. Joseph-Anténor Firmin, Lettres de Saint-Thomas: Études
Sociologiques, Historiques et Littéraires (Paris,
France: V. Giard & E. Briere, 1910), 115–16.
15. Việt Nam was called An Nam prior to formal independence
from France in 1945.
16. Martí, OC, vol. 20, 147. The original text has only
masculine pro/nouns.
17. See an influential critique of historicism in Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial
Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press), 6–11.
18. “Three Heroes,” a biographical account of these
independence leaders, inaugurated the July 1889 issue of
The Golden Years.
19. Martí’s writings in general are not free of Orientalist tropes,

but this story presents a crucial departure.
20. We refer here to Spurr’s insight, “The problem of the
colonizer is in some sense the problem of the writer: in
the face of what may appear as a vast cultural and geographical
blankness, colonization is a form of self-
inscription onto the lives of a people who are conceived of as an
extension of the landscape.” David Spurr,
The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism,
Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 7.
Pha
˙
m and Méndez 169
http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1976/esp/f190476e.html
http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1976/esp/f190476e.html
21. See Morrison’s review of a novel by Guinean writer Camara
Laye, whose portrait of Africa contrasts with
the dominant representation in the West, in Toni Morrison,
What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction,
ed. Carolyn Denard (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2008), 123, 128.
22. Martí, OC, vol. 18, 461–62, our emphasis.
23. Ibid., 463.
24. Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove
Weidenfeld, 1965), 28.
25. Quoted in Pierre Brocheux, Ho Chi Minh: A Biography
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007),
120. In his speeches, writings, and especially his will, Hồ also
reiterated the certainty of victory that would

belong to his people’s resistance struggle against the United
States.
26. Martí, OC, vol. 18, 464.
27. Hồ Chí Minh, Toàn Tập (vol. 1) (Hà Nội, Vietnam: National
Politics Publishing House, 2002), 399.
Henceforth, the completed work is abbreviated as HCM, TT.
28. Martí, OC, vol. 18, 467.
29. Ibid., 468.
30. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and
Self-making in Nineteenth-century America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 4.
31. Martí, OC, vol. 18, 460.
32. James Baldwin, Evidence of Things Not Seen (New York:
Henry Holt, 1985), 78.
33. Martí, OC, vol. 18, 468, our emphasis.
34. Ibid., 470.
35. HCM, TT, vol. 1, 130–32.
36. Ibid., 126–27.
37. HCM, TT, vol. 2, 23–34.
38. Ibid., 246–48.
39. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2001).
40. HCM, TT, vol. 2, 154–55, 134, 474–93.
41. Ibid., 337–40.
42. Ibid., vol. 1, 306–12 and vol. 2, 351.
43. Ibid., vol. 1, 87–90.
44. Assia Djebar, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade (Portsmouth,
NH: Heinemann, 1985), Part Two.
45. “President Urges Readiness and Patience,” The White
House, September 15, 2001, accessed June 18, 2015,
http://georgewbush-
whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010915-

4.html.
46. See a more extensive analysis of intercolonialism in
“L’Enfumé” and Hồ’s other writings in Brent Hayes
Edwards, “The Shadow of Shadows,” Positions 11, no. 1 (2003):
11–49.
47. HCM, TT, vol. 2, 115–20.
48. Ibid., 32.
49. Ibid., vol. 1, 40–45 and vol. 2, 321–23.
50. Ibid., vol. 1, 215–16 and vol. 2, 327–29, 333–36.
51. Ibid., vol. 1, 233–35.
52. Ibid., vol. 2, 327–29.
53. Ibid., 120.
54. Ibid., vol. 1, 169–71.
55. Ibid., 465.
56. Ibid., 217–19.
57. Ibid., 288–89, 447, 452.
58. Ibid., 283–89.
59. Ibid., 253–58, 283–89.
60. Ibid., vol. 2, 152–53, 176–81.
61. Ibid., 180, 182–202, 308–18.
http://georgewbush-
whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010915-
4.html
62. Ibid., 166–69.
63. Ibid., 330–32.
64. Ibid., 417–37.
65. See an excellent study of anti-imperialist historiography
among colonized intellectuals in Edwards, “The
Shadow of Shadows,” 2003.

66. HCM, TT, vol. 2, 286.
67. Ibid., vol. 1, 273.
68. The translated quote is reproduced from Sophie Quinn-
Judge, Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years 1919–1941
(London, UK: Hurst, 2003), 56. See also HCM, TT, vol. 1, 279.
69. HCM, TT, vol. 1, 263–64.
70. Ibid. Hồ’s desire for mutual learning reminds us of former
Indonesian President Sukarno’s address at the
Asia–Africa Conference in 1955: “Yes, we have so much in
common, and yet we know so little of each
other.” See Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Indonesia,
ed., Asia-Africa Speaks from Bandung
(Djakarta, Indonesia: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1955).
71. Ibid.
72. Quoted in Yevgeny Kobelev, Ho Chi Minh (Moscow,
Russia: Progress Publishers, 1989), 51.
73. See Gilly’s Introduction to Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 18.
74. Ibid., 15.
75. Gayatri Spivak, interviewed by Oscar Guardiola-Rivera,
Naked Punch, June 2006, accessed June 18, 2015,
http://www.nakedpunch.com/articles/21.
76. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilization and
Barbarism, trans. Kathleen Ross (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003), 35.
77. Martí, OC, vol. 6, 15–23.
78. Ibid., vol. 8, 442.
79. Martínez-Echazábal discusses howMartí’s egalitarian
advocacy contrasts with the racism of his various con-
temporaries. For example, José Anonio Saco (1797–1879), an
influential Cuban intellectual and political

figure, urged miscegenation to “neutralize, to a certain degree,
the terrible influence of the three million
Negroes surrounding us, millions that keep on multiplying, and
that may swallow us up in the not too distant
future, if we remain idle.” See Lourdes Martínez-Echazábal,
““Martí and Race”: A Re-evaluation,” in Re-
reading José Martí (1853–1895): One Hundred Years Later, ed.
Julio Rodríguez-Luis (Albany: State Uni-
versity of New York Press, 1999), 115–26. See also Fernando
Ortiz y Fernandez, “Cuba, Martí and the Race
Problem,” Phylon 3, no. 3 (1942): 253–76.
80. Thomas Ward, “From Sarmiento to Martí and Hostos:
Extricating the Nation from Coloniality,” European
Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 83 (October
2007): 83–104.
81. Martí, OC, vol. 6, 18.
82. Ibid., vol. 18, 371.
83. Ibid., vol. 10, 323.
84. Ibid., 323–24.
85. Retamar historicizes Martí’s exaltation of subaltern peoples
as an indispensable element of patria as
follows. In the 1890s, the creole revolutionary classes that had
fought the wars of independence during
Bolívar’s time were no longer in Latin America. Defeated in the
Cuban independence struggles fought
between 1868 and 1878, the Cuban agrarian bourgeoisie
withdrew its support from the struggle and
reconciled with the prospect of being ruled by Spain or the
United States. Martí’s anti-imperial struggle
consequently turned to small proprietors, tobacco farmers,
professionals, the incipient working class,
poor peasants, and the recently freed slaves for support. See
Roberto Fernández Retamar, “Martí in

His (Third) World,” Boundary 2 36 (March 2009): 61–94, 73.
86. Martí’s advocacy of social betterment for Native Americans
is revealing: “Either we help the Indian get
started or his weight will impede our march.” Quoted in Ortiz y
Fernandez, “Cuba, Martí and the Race Prob-
lem,” 266.
Pha
˙
m and Méndez 171
http://www.nakedpunch.com/articles/21
87. Martí, OC, vol. 10, 327.
88. Ibid., vol. 2, 108.
89. Ibid., vol. 3, 27.
90. For a critique of how Martí echoed racial policies in the
nineteenth century that aimed to acculturate those
inferiorized, see Jorge Camacho, Etnografía Política y Poder a
Finales del Siglo XIX: José Martí y la Cues-
tión Indígena (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2013), 16.
91. Martí, OC, vol. 6, 283.
92. For an excellent analysis of the conception of waste and
value in Locke’s theory and in liberalism more
broadly, see Vinay Gidwani, Capital, Interrupted: Agrarian
Development and the Politics of Work in India
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), chap. 1, 1–
31.
93. José Martí, Our America: Writings on Latin America and the

Struggle for Cuban Independence, ed. Philip
S. Foner (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), 145.
94. Lillian Guerra, The Myth of José Martí: Conflicting
Nationalism in Early Twentieth Century Cuba (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 25–26. Ada
Ferrer contextualizes the silence of race in
Cuban nationalism during the 1890s in relation to the increasing
presence and leadership of black and
mulatto insurgents in rebellions against Spain, which fueled
white Cubans’ fear of “black ascendancy” and
“race war,” aggravated by colonial manipulation. See Ada
Ferrer, “The Silence of Patriots: Race and
Nationalism in Martí’s Cuba,” in José Martí’s “Our America”:
From National to Hemispheric Cultural
Studies, ed. Jeffrey Belnap and Raúl Fernández (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1998), 232–36.
95. Quoted in Ferrer, “The Silence of Patriots,” 236.
96. Ferrer persuasively argues, “The silence was active: it was
an argument, a slogan, a fantasy.” Ferrer, “The
Silence of Patriots,” 231.
97. Martí, OC, vol. 5, 325–326.
98. Martí, Our America, 259.
99. Ibid., 314.
100. Ibid., 208.
101. Ibid., 312.
102. Ibid., 208.
103. See an insightful study of Martí’s problematic framing of
racial issues, which Fernando Ortiz repro-
duces in his speech “Cuba, Martí and the Race Problem,” in
Martínez-Echazábal, ““Martí and Race,””
115–26.

105. For an instructive analysis of post-racialism’s erasure of
race in the United States’ right-wing as well as
liberal discourses, see Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, “Twenty
Years of Critical Race Theory: Looking
Back to Move Forward,” Connecticut Law Review 43, no. 5
(July 2011): 1253–352.
107. For instance, mulatto journalist Juan Gualberto Gómez
(1854–1933), a plantation-born Afro-Cuban leader
in the war of independence against Spain, founded several
newspapers that promoted racial equality. Diver-
ging from Martí, with whom he had a long friendship and close
collaboration, he vocally tackled questions
of race, “I know well that some consider this problem [race] so
dreadful, that they consider imprudent any-
one who proclaims its existence, imagining with an
incomparable naiveté (candor) that the best way to
resolve certain questions is not to study or even to examine
them.” Quoted in Ferrer, “The Silence of Patri-
ots,” 237. Still, fellow Afro-Cubans severely criticized Gómez
for opposing the formation of a black polit-
ical party, especially in the first years of the independent
republic.
108. The Haitian Constitution proclaims, “[a]ll acception [sic]
of colour among the children of one and the same
family, of whom the chief magistrate is the father, being
necessarily to cease, the Haytians shall hence for-
ward be known only by the generic appellation of Blacks.”
Quoted in Siba Grovogui, “To the Orphaned,
Dispossessed, and Illegitimate Children: Human Rights beyond
Republican and Liberal Traditions,” Indi-

ana Journal of Global Legal Studies 18, no. 1 (Winter 2011):
57.
109. Brenda Plummer similarly notes, “Cubanidad sought to
displace blackness, but not whiteness. The con-
scious Haitian invention of noir as a political category sought to
make normative what the colonialists had
rendered monstrous.” See Brenda Plummer, “Firmin and Martí
at the Intersection of Pan-Americanism and
Pan-Africanism,” in José Martí’s “Our America”: From National
to Hemispheric Cultural Studies, ed.
Jeffrey Belnap and Raúl Fernández (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1998), 220.
110. See an illuminating analysis of the revolutionary
implications of the mandate that the inhabitants of
Haiti be generically called “black” in Grovogui, “To the
Orphaned,” 41–63.
111. We use “peasant” as an equivalent of “nông dân,” which
means agricultural people in Vietnamese.
112. Martí, OC, vol. 20, 147.
113. HCM, TT, vol. 1, 209.
114. Ibid., vol. 7, 15.
115. See, for example, Ibid., 146, 167, 179.
116. Ibid., 28–29, 62.
117. Ibid., 29.
118. Ibid., 212.
119. Ibid.
120. Ibid., 28.
121. Martí, OC, vol. 19, 100.
122. Ibid.

123. See Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of
Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2000).
124. Anne Sauvagnargues, “Le délit de solidarité, une atteinte à
la dignité,” Libération, November 19, 2009,
accessed June 18, 2015,
http://www.liberation.fr/societe/2009/11/19/le-delit-de-
solidarite-une-atteinte-
a-la-dignite_594440.
125. We are grateful for Charles Mills’ inspiring discussant
comments on our earlier draft presented at the
2014 International Studies Association.
Author Biographies
Quỳnh N. Phạm is a PhD candidate in the Department of
Political Science at the University of
Minnesota. Her publications include “Enduring Bonds: Politics
and Life outside Freedom as
Autonomy,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 38 (1) in
2013 and coauthored articles with
Himadeep Muppidi in Arlene B. Tickner and David L. Blaney,
eds., Claiming the International
(Routledge, 2013), Tarak Barkawi and Keith Stanski, eds.,
Orientalism and War (Columbia
University Press, 2012), and Naeem Inayatullah, ed.,
Autobiographical International Relations:
I, IR (Routledge, 2011).
María José Méndez is in the PhD program in Political Science at
the University of Minnesota. Her
research interests include postcolonial approaches to the
questions of indigeneity and sovereignty as

well as theorizations on contemporary global capitalism and the
resistance to its effects. Her disserta-
tion explores the politics of death and the political economy of
the drug wars in Latin America, with
particular attention to the multiple ways in which subaltern
groups contest and navigate the evolving
landscape of massacres and narco-capitalist accumulation.
Pha
˙
m and Méndez 173
solidarite-une-atteinte-a-la-dignite_594440
solidarite-une-atteinte-a-la-dignite_594440
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Another Realism: The Politics of Gandhian Nonviolence
Author(s): KARUNA MANTENA

Source: The American Political Science Review, Vol. 106, No.
2 (May 2012), pp. 455-470
Published by: American Political Science Association
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American Political Science Review Vol. 106, No. 2 May 2012
doi:10.1017/S000305541200010X
Another Realism: The Politics of Gandhian Nonviolence
KARUNA M ANTEN A Yale University

A Ithough Gandhi is often taken to be an exemplary moral
idealist in politics ; this article seeks to
/' demonstrate that Gandhian nonviolence is premised on a form
of political realism, specifically
У X a contextual , consequentialist, and moral-psychological
analysis of a political world understood
to be marked by inherent tendencies toward conflict ,
domination , and violence. By treating nonviolence
as the essential analog and correlative response to a realist
theory of politics, one can better register the
novelty of satyagraha (nonviolent action) as a practical
orientation in politics as opposed to a moral
proposition , ethical stance , or standard of judgment. Thè
singularity of satyagraha lays in its self-limiting
character as a form of political action that seeks to constrain
the negative consequences of politics while
working toward progressive social and political reform.
Gandhian nonviolence thereby points toward
a transformational realism that need not begin and end in
conservatism , moral equivocation , or pure
instrumentalism.
Political nected and conflict claims: realism are a typically
view taken of to politics includes be constitutive in two which
intercon- power and a Political nected claims: a view of politics
in which power and conflict are taken to be constitutive and a
suspicion of doctrines and theories that elide this fact as
carelessly idealist or Utopian. Realism is often equated
with a kind of Machiavellianism, a hard-nosed insis-
tence that norms of ordinary, individual, and/or legal
morality have to be relaxed or superseded in the face of
the contingency of political conflict or the intractabil-
ity of ideological struggle.1 Here, realism reaches its
denouement in the defense of power politics, reason

of state, or Realpolitik as the optimal way to navi-
gate the political world. However, alongside this more
grimly celebratory realism- itself a kind of idealization
of the efficacy of political power- lineages of other re-
alisms can be discerned in Thucydides, Hobbes, and
especially the eighteenth-century liberalism of Mon-
tesquieu, Hume, Madison, and Burke, thinkers who
likewise provide sober assessments of the passions,
vices, and enthusiasms that drive political conflict and
competition but aim to restrain and moderate rather
than extol them (Bourke 2007; 2009; Sabl 2002; 2011;
Shklar 1984; 1989; Whelan 2004; Williams 2005b). That
is, although both traditions of realism reject the search
for ideal political institutions in favor of a science of
Karuna Mantena is Associate Professor of Political Science,
Yale
University, Box 208301, New Haven, CT 06520
([email protected]
yale.edu).
I am grateful to Danielle Allen, Asli Bali, Richard Bourke,
Noah
Dauber, Faisal Devji, John Dunn, Bryan Garsten, Ramachandra
Guha, George Kateb, Melissa Lane, Rama Mantena, Samuel
Moyn,
Isaac Nakhimovsky, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, Corey Robin,
Melissa
Schwartzberg, David Scott, Marc Stears, Annie Stilz, and the
review-
ers and co-editors of this journal for their discerning comments
and
criticism. I would like to thank especially co-editor Kirstie
McClure
for her insight, guidance, and generosity.

politics that emphasizes the play of passions and in-
terests over ideal motivation, moral education, and
rational agreement, they do so for markedly differ-
ent reasons. For the tradition of moderating realism,
the potential incompatibility between idealist moral-
ism and practical politics concerns less the supposed
inefficacy of strict moral codes in politics- what might
be construed as the standard Machiavellian dilemma-
than the ways in which absolutist ethics, ideological
certitude, and Utopian schemes can threaten political
order and lead to unrestrained uses of power. This
moderating realism therefore works through a broadly
negative ethical horizon, orienting itself toward the
prevention of civil breakdown, violence, cruelty, and
domination over and against positive attempts to trans-
form or perfect citizens and polities. In its theoretical
understanding, practical orientation, and intended ef-
fects, Gandhi's politics- the politics of nonviolence-
converges with but also points beyond this tradition of
moderating realism.
A new call for realism has recently emerged in po-
litical theory, one that more loosely and eclectically
builds on earlier Machiavellian, Marxist, and liberal
realisms.2 It too raises the familiar charge of excessive
idealism and moralism, but directs it against the meth-
ods and aims of dominant strains of contemporary po-
litical philosophy, especially liberal theories of justice
(in the Rawlsian tradition) and, to a lesser extent, the
discourse ethics of Jürgen Habermas. Raymond Geuss
1 Although Machiavelli is the inevitable touchstone here, Lenin
and
Schmitt might also be seen as purveyors of this harder edged
political

realism. In the latter cases, as well as in the broader range of
Marxist
realisms, idealist moralism is criticized for being not only
ineffective
(e.g., the case of Utopian socialism) but also ideological and
itself a
justificatory discourse of and for power (i.e., the case of
liberalism),
to which a kind of revolutionary and radical Realpolitik is seen
as the
appropriate response (see Geuss 2008, 23-33; cf. Bolsinger
2001).
2 In twentieth-century political science, realism came to
prominence
as a field-defining approach to the study of international
relations,
one that privileged power and interest and, in the classic works
of
E. H. Carr (1946) and Hans Morgenthau (1948), emerged as a
cri-
tique of liberal, Utopian, and moralist approaches. Here, again,
we
might contrast Carr's realist critique of the naiveté (and
therefore
catastrophic inefficacy) of the liberal idealism of the interwar
years
to Morgenthau's realism, which recommended a rational theory
of
national interest to avoid the excesses of ideologically driven
foreign
policy. See Morgenthau's critique of U.S. action in Southeast
Asia
along these lines (1970). On the newer invocations of a realist
po-
litical theory, see Galston's overview (2010) in the special

issue of
European Journal of Political Theory devoted to the latest turn
to
political realism.
455
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The Politics of Gandhian Nonviolence May 2012
and Bernard Williams- two thinkers most closely iden-
tified with the call for a new political realism- have
objected to the ways in which contemporary political
philosophers treat political theory as a form of applied
moral philosophy, in which a distinctive kind of norma-
tive theorizing takes precedence over all other forms
of criticism, evaluation, and understanding. What they
ask for, instead, is a bottom-up approach, in which po-
litical theory would begin from an understanding of
the existing conditions and constraints of political life,
rather than a top-down method in which theoretical
resolutions to political conflict are sought prior to and
in abstraction from the work of politics (Geuss 2008;
Williams 2005a; 2005b).
For Williams, both contemporary utilitarians and
contractarians embody a form of political moralism,
in which the moral is given priority over the political.
In the case of utilitarianism, politics comes into play as
the means to secure antecedently established ethical
principles and values, whereas in social contract mod-

els morality is meant to provide pre-political, struc-
tural constraints on the legitimate exercise of power
(2005a, 1-2). In both cases, the sphere of political ac-
tivity seems inessential and external to the nature of
norms and their realization. Geuss's understanding and
worry about moralism are more broad-ranging; for him
the dominance of what he terms the "ethics-first" ap-
proach to politics and political theory may be part of a
wider cultural-ideological condition in which academic
moralism finds its real-world analogs in the reckless
absolutisms of a George Bush or Tony Blair (2008;
2010b). Ultimately, for Geuss, moralism stems from
and contributes to a serious confusion about the task of
political theory. When that task is primarily construed
in terms of norm generation and justification- that is,
in terms of a general ethical theory from which prin-
ciples of conduct or institutional norms are deduced-
this very orientation toward systematicky and univer-
sality necessarily works at a remove from the unsta-
ble, conflict-ridden, imperfect world of "real politics"
(2008). Neither Geuss nor Williams eschews norma-
tivity altogether in favor of a pure inductive political
science, but both seek to tie normativity more closely
to empirical and historical contexts, to real constraints
and real possibilities.3
In their concern about the unreality of political
philosophy, Geuss and Williams join a larger cho-
rus of critics who have likewise decried the ten-
dency of academic political theory- especially so-
called "high liberalism"- to ignore, misunderstand,
or actively evade politics (Honig 1993; Mouffe 1993;
Newey 2001; cf. Dunn 2000; Isaacs 1995; Shapiro 2005).
Yet there is a lingering reticence about what the turn to

realism actually entails. That is, realism's main contri-
butions seem negative, as perhaps a needed and blunt
corrective, but as yet very far from offering a genuinely
alternative mode of political theorizing. One important
source for this reticence lies in a recurring objection to
realism in both its classical and more recent formula-
tions. Critics worry that the rejection of normativity as
traditionally conceived- namely, the strict dichotomy
between is and ought that is characteristic of Kantian
and neo-Kantian thinking- undermines the possibility
of normatively driven criticism of existing political ar-
rangements and thereby signals a bias in favor of the
status quo (Freeman 2009; Honig and Stears 2011).
Moderating realisms are perhaps especially susceptible
to the charge of conservatism, given their traditional
emphasis on questions of political stability, order, and
moderation over and against, for example, justice and
revolution.4 The anxiety can equally stem from exactly
the kind of methodological correctives envisioned by
Geuss and Williams: The turn to anti-ideal, bottom-up,
or immanent theorizing is seen to tether political possi-
bilities too closely to the given coordinates of political
life and thereby tends toward a naturally conserva-
tive, even pessimistic, outlook. Worst still, if politics is
understood as determining, partly or wholly, its own
internal standards of evaluation, it opens the door to
harder edged realisms that dispense with the category
of morality altogether.
These are strong challenges and important worries,
but, as I show, they can be met or at least displaced
to make room for another realism, one that neither
forsakes an agenda of reform nor sacrifices ethics at
the altar of power politics. In this reconstruction of

realism, I enlist a seemingly unlikely candidate- M. K.
Gandhi. Gandhian nonviolence is often taken as an
exemplar of pure conviction politics. Indeed, among
both critics and defenders, there is a tendency to char-
acterize Gandhi as a moral idealist or absolutist,5 as
someone who rejected utilitarian/Machiavellian polit-
ical thinking in which ends justify means and, instead,
evoked strict ethical limits to legitimate political action.
3 As Honig and Stears (2011) have noted, Williams is much
less
suspicious of normative theory in general. But see especially
Menke 's
(2010) excellent elaboration of Geuss's critique of
"normativism," as
well as the overall character of his realism.
4 I use conservatism less in the sense of political attitudes on a
conventional right-left spectrum, but rather to mark a
philosoph-
ical orientation to the mechanisms of sociopolitical change.
Here,
conservatism refers to a skepticism toward transformative and
revo-
lutionary politics, the violence and upheaval they unleash, as
well as
their sustaining dispositions, ideologies, and ontologies. This
skepti-
cism can traverse the political spectrum; for instance, Hannah
Arendt
(1963) and Michael Oakeshott ([1962] 1991), despite divergent
politi-
cal affiliations, shared a critical-conservative stance toward
particular
forms of revolutionary politics. In addition, the contrast with

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