Adom Getachew
Biographic Data
| ID | 1147258 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Adom Getachew |
| GIVEN NAMES | Adom |
| FAMILY NAME | Getachew |
| SIGNATURE | GETACHEW A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Chicago |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4279-1694 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 244 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The West Indian Sources of Orlando Patterson’s Sociology - David Scott and Orlando Patterson, The Paradox of Freedom
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
International Interdependence beyond the Family of Nations
This afterword takes up Susan Marks’ argument to take seriously the metaphorical uses of the idea of the family in international law and to renew the terms by which we understand global interconnection. Drawing on anti-colonial and post-colonial perspectives, the article seeks to reimagine concepts associated with the family such as dependence, care and inheritance. It does so by foregoing the familial emphasis on monogenesis and emphasizing the …
Forum on Barbara D. Savage’s Merze Tate
Merze Tate (1905–1996) was a prolific academic who taught in the fields of diplomatic history and International Relations (IR) at Howard University in Washington D.C. After training as a teacher, Tate acquired graduate degrees from Oxford (1935) and Harvard (1941) and became one of the few African American female professors of her generation. She published widely, not only on disarmament, but also on IR as a field and discipline, and the history …
The Aesthetic Cold War
African American political thought reimagined
This review essay surveys the contributions of the new edited volume African American Political Thought: A Collected History. The thinker-based approach to the study of African American political thought advanced in the volume highlights the ways in which thinkers reformulate the central political questions of the intellectual tradition and constitute the canon through the citation and invocation of earlier figures. It also draws attention to the…
Three Approaches to the Study of Race and International Relations
Notes1 Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015)2 Sankaran Krishna, “Race, Amnesia, and the Education of International Relations,” Alternatives 26, no. 4 (2001): 401-2.3 Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics. Robbie Shilliam interviewed these, and other scholars who sustained postcolonial and other critical perspectives in IR, two …
The Present as History
Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) was written from the perspective that the history of Africa is necessary to understand the continent's present and to envision its transformation in the future. This essay tracks Rodney's positioning of the historian in the conjunction of past, present, and future through the registers of diagnostician and participant in political mobilization. The author argues that Rodney's analogy of the …
W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the most significant American political thinkers of the twentieth century. This volume collects 24 of his essays and speeches on international themes, spanning the years 1900-1956. These key texts reveal Du Bois's distinctive approach to the problem of empire and demonstrate his continued importance in our current global context. The volume charts the development of Du Bois's anti-imperial thought, drawing attention to…
From the Boundaries of the People to their Enactment
Theorizing the history of women's international thinking at the ‘end of international theory’
Throughout the 20 th century, women were leading intellectuals on International Relations (IR). They thought, wrote, and taught on this subject in numerous political, professional, intimate, and intellectual contexts. They wrote some of the earliest and most powerful theoretical statements of what would later become core approaches to contemporary international theory. Yet, historical women, those working before the late 20 th century, are almost…
Book Symposium
Theorizing the Democratic Crowd: From the Who to the How of Popular Assembly From the Boundaries of the People to their Enactment: A New Terrain for Democratic Theory Popular Sovereignty, Aesthetics, and Emancipation Beyond the Age of Democratic Revolution
Imagining Global Futures
Engaged History
When George Floyd’s murder, in May 2020, sparked the largest racial justice protests in the United States since the civil rights movement, protestors from Monrovia to Seoul, from Rio de Janeiro to Sydney, took to the street in a remarkable sign of the global resonance of Black Lives Matter. In almost each site of protest, the global call for racial justice inspired not only solidarity with African Americans, but also an occasion to challenge loca…
Monument Gallery
These capsule case studies of contestations over monuments illuminate the global iconoclasm that has marked our recent past and attend to the many registers and settings in which publics are challenging seemingly settled historical narratives. They take readers to monumental public campaigns in South Africa, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Belgium, and the United States. Each capsule includes an image, a short description and suggestions for further …
The New Black Internationalism
The New Black Internationalism Adom Getachew (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution The Fifth Pan-African Congress, held in Manchester, UK, in October 1945 (John Deakin/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) [End Page 92] As the civil rights movement picked up speed a few years into the Cold War, the elder scholar W.E.B. Du Bois worried about the price of the ticket. Writing in a Pittsburgh Courier pamphlet in 1950, he cautioned his …
Revisiting the problem of revolution
Anticolonialism and the Decolonization of Political Theory
This essay surveys some recent attempts to decolonize political theory and engage with non-Western political thinkers and traditions, especially anticolonialism. The authors' concern is that these engagements remain too centered on Western political thought as the object of critique and analysis. Through a reading of Gandhi and Fanon, the authors argue that anticolonialism, while engaged in a critique of the West, also had a positive or reconstru…
Kwame Nkrumah and the Quest for Independence
Forum Introduction
FrenchSpanish; CastilianIntroductionForum sur The World Imagined de Hendrik SpruytCe Forum porte sur l'ouvrage de Hendrik Spruyt The World Imagined (Presses universitaires de Cambridge, 2020), qui a remporté le prix du meilleur livre de l'année de la section Théorie de l'Association des études internationales (ISA).IntroducciónForo sobre The World Imagined, de Hendrik SpruytForo sobre el libro de Hendrik Spruyt The World Imagined (Cambridge: CUP,…
The State's Imperial Shadows
This essay seeks to consider Anna Stilz's Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration in light of settler and nonsettler colonialism and their contemporary legacies. In particular, it examines the intergenerational claims of Indigenous communities and the extraterritorial claims of colonial and neocolonial subjects. The broad aim of this effort is to consider how centering the imperial roots of our contemporary nation-state system transf…
A "Common Spectacle" of the Race
The questions of what makes a people a people and how they are endowed with political power are central to political founding. Through the Universal Negro Improvement Association's first annual convention, this essay reconstructs the central role of aesthetic practices to the constitution of a new people. The convention's spectacular performances were a vehicle through which participants came to understand themselves as constituting the Universal…
Response to Forum on Worldmaking after Empire
The Counterrevolutionary Moment
This chapter examines the institutionalization of empire as unequal integration in the League of Nations. Recasting the Wilsonian moment as a counterrevolutionary episode, it argues that Woodrow Wilson and Jan Smuts excised the revolutionary implications of the Bolshevik right to self-determination and repurposed the principle to preserve racial hierarchy in the new international organization. In this appropriation, Wilson and Smuts effectively r…
A Political Theory of Decolonization
This chapter sketches a political theory of decolonization that rethinks how anticolonial nationalism posed the problem of empire to expand our sense of its aims and trajectories. Drawing on recent histories of international law as well as the political thought of Black Atlantic worldmakers, it reconceives empire as processes of unequal international integration that took an increasingly racialized form in the late nineteenth and early twentieth …
Revisiting the Federalists in the Black Atlantic
This chapter recovers the largely forgotten projects of regional federation in the West Indies and Africa that anticolonial nationalists pursued alongside their reinvention of self-determination. In returning to the centrality of the federal imaginary to anticolonial nationalists, the chapter demonstrates that alternatives to the nation-state persisted at the height of decolonization. For federalists like Kwame Nkrumah and Eric Williams, freedom …
Worldmaking after Empire
Universalism After the Post-colonial Turn
This essay explores the possibilities and limits of decentering Europe by examining the Haitian Revolution and contemporary invocations of its legacy among political theorists and historians. Recent accounts of the Haitian Revolution have celebrated its universalism as a realization of French revolutionary ideals. As I argue in the essay, this interpretation undermines the Haitian Revolution’s specificity as the first and only successful revoluti…
Worldmaking after Empire
Decolonization revolutionized the international order during the twentieth century. Yet standard histories that present the end of colonialism as an inevitable transition from a world of empires to one of nations—a world in which self-determination was synonymous with nation-building—obscure just how radical this change was. Drawing on the political thought of anticolonial intellectuals and statesmen such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, W. E. B Du Bois, Georg…
The limits of sovereignty as responsibility
A "Common Spectacle" of the Race
The questions of what makes a people a people and how they are endowed with political power are central to political founding. Through the Universal Negro Improvement Association's first annual convention, this essay reconstructs the central role of aesthetic practices to the constitution of a new people. The convention's spectacular performances were a vehicle through which participants came to understand themselves as constituting the Universal…
Kwame Nkrumah and the Quest for Independence
Depending on whether you looked from the North Atlantic or the Black Atlantic, the year 1957 appeared to signal two different political futures. On March 6, Ghana finally secured its independence from Great Britain after a decade-long nationalist struggle. At the independence celebrations, Kwame Nkrumah, the leader of the Covention People's Party and the new prime minister, declared that Ghanaian independence marked the birth of a new African "re…
The State's Imperial Shadows
This essay seeks to consider Anna Stilz's Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration in light of settler and nonsettler colonialism and their contemporary legacies. In particular, it examines the intergenerational claims of Indigenous communities and the extraterritorial claims of colonial and neocolonial subjects. The broad aim of this effort is to consider how centering the imperial roots of our contemporary nation-state system transf…
The Present as History
Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) was written from the perspective that the history of Africa is necessary to understand the continent's present and to envision its transformation in the future. This essay tracks Rodney's positioning of the historian in the conjunction of past, present, and future through the registers of diagnostician and participant in political mobilization. The author argues that Rodney's analogy of the …
Theorizing the history of women's international thinking at the ‘end of international theory’
Throughout the 20 th century, women were leading intellectuals on International Relations (IR). They thought, wrote, and taught on this subject in numerous political, professional, intimate, and intellectual contexts. They wrote some of the earliest and most powerful theoretical statements of what would later become core approaches to contemporary international theory. Yet, historical women, those working before the late 20 th century, are almost…
Universalism After the Post-colonial Turn
This essay explores the possibilities and limits of decentering Europe by examining the Haitian Revolution and contemporary invocations of its legacy among political theorists and historians. Recent accounts of the Haitian Revolution have celebrated its universalism as a realization of French revolutionary ideals. As I argue in the essay, this interpretation undermines the Haitian Revolution’s specificity as the first and only successful revoluti…
Portrait of the Worker as a Black Woman
Responsibility Beyond Ethics
The Counterrevolutionary Moment
This chapter examines the institutionalization of empire as unequal integration in the League of Nations. Recasting the Wilsonian moment as a counterrevolutionary episode, it argues that Woodrow Wilson and Jan Smuts excised the revolutionary implications of the Bolshevik right to self-determination and repurposed the principle to preserve racial hierarchy in the new international organization. In this appropriation, Wilson and Smuts effectively r…
A Political Theory of Decolonization
This chapter sketches a political theory of decolonization that rethinks how anticolonial nationalism posed the problem of empire to expand our sense of its aims and trajectories. Drawing on recent histories of international law as well as the political thought of Black Atlantic worldmakers, it reconceives empire as processes of unequal international integration that took an increasingly racialized form in the late nineteenth and early twentieth …
Revisiting the Federalists in the Black Atlantic
This chapter recovers the largely forgotten projects of regional federation in the West Indies and Africa that anticolonial nationalists pursued alongside their reinvention of self-determination. In returning to the centrality of the federal imaginary to anticolonial nationalists, the chapter demonstrates that alternatives to the nation-state persisted at the height of decolonization. For federalists like Kwame Nkrumah and Eric Williams, freedom …
Worldmaking after Empire
The Welfare World of the New International Economic Order
This chapter analyzes the ways that anticolonial nationalists responded to an intensified postcolonial predicament with their most ambitious project of worldmaking—the New International Economic Order (NIEO). The NIEO constituted a welfare world that sought to enhance the bargaining power of postcolonial states, democratize decision-making, and achieve international redistribution. At the center of this welfare world was a radical recasting of so…
Epilogue
This epilogue charts the fall of self-determination and illustrates that the collapse of anticolonial worldmaking continues to structure our contemporary moment. Picking up in the immediate aftermath of the NIEO, it locates self-determination's fall in two developments—the increasingly critical orientation of Western intellectuals and politicians toward the right to self-determination as well as the diminution of international institutions like t…
From Principle to Right
This chapter turns to the United Nations, where anticolonial nationalists staged their reinvention of self-determination, transforming a secondary principle included in the UN Charter into a human right. Through the political thought of Nnamdi Azikiwe, W. E. B. Du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah, and George Padmore, the chapter illustrates that this reinvention drew on a distinctive account of empire as enslavement. The emergence of a right to self-determina…
The Problem of Liberal Empire Reconsidered
This review essay situates Christopher Taylor’s Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism (2018) in the context of the two-decade-long debate about the emergence of a liberal imperialism during the nineteenth century. Through an examination of the political economy of emancipation in the British West Indies, Taylor recasts the problem of liberal imperialism by decentering its justificatory discourses in the metropole to…
Response to Michael Hanchard’s review of Worldmaking after Empire
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Kwame Nkrumah and the Quest for Independence
Depending on whether you looked from the North Atlantic or the Black Atlantic, the year 1957 appeared to signal two different political futures. On March 6, Ghana finally secured its independence from Great Britain after a decade-long nationalist struggle. At the independence celebrations, Kwame Nkrumah, the leader of the Covention People's Party and the new prime minister, declared that Ghanaian independence marked the birth of a new African "re…
Worldmaking after Empire
Decolonization revolutionized the international order during the twentieth century. Yet standard histories that present the end of colonialism as an inevitable transition from a world of empires to one of nations—a world in which self-determination was synonymous with nation-building—obscure just how radical this change was. Drawing on the political thought of anticolonial intellectuals and statesmen such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, W. E. B Du Bois, Georg…
Worldmaking after Empire
The limits of sovereignty as responsibility
Response to Forum on Worldmaking after Empire
The New Black Internationalism
The New Black Internationalism Adom Getachew (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution The Fifth Pan-African Congress, held in Manchester, UK, in October 1945 (John Deakin/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) [End Page 92] As the civil rights movement picked up speed a few years into the Cold War, the elder scholar W.E.B. Du Bois worried about the price of the ticket. Writing in a Pittsburgh Courier pamphlet in 1950, he cautioned his …
Revisiting the problem of revolution
Anticolonialism and the Decolonization of Political Theory
This essay surveys some recent attempts to decolonize political theory and engage with non-Western political thinkers and traditions, especially anticolonialism. The authors' concern is that these engagements remain too centered on Western political thought as the object of critique and analysis. Through a reading of Gandhi and Fanon, the authors argue that anticolonialism, while engaged in a critique of the West, also had a positive or reconstru…
Kwame Nkrumah and the Quest for Independence
Forum Introduction
FrenchSpanish; CastilianIntroductionForum sur The World Imagined de Hendrik SpruytCe Forum porte sur l'ouvrage de Hendrik Spruyt The World Imagined (Presses universitaires de Cambridge, 2020), qui a remporté le prix du meilleur livre de l'année de la section Théorie de l'Association des études internationales (ISA).IntroducciónForo sobre The World Imagined, de Hendrik SpruytForo sobre el libro de Hendrik Spruyt The World Imagined (Cambridge: CUP,…
The State's Imperial Shadows
This essay seeks to consider Anna Stilz's Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration in light of settler and nonsettler colonialism and their contemporary legacies. In particular, it examines the intergenerational claims of Indigenous communities and the extraterritorial claims of colonial and neocolonial subjects. The broad aim of this effort is to consider how centering the imperial roots of our contemporary nation-state system transf…
A "Common Spectacle" of the Race
The questions of what makes a people a people and how they are endowed with political power are central to political founding. Through the Universal Negro Improvement Association's first annual convention, this essay reconstructs the central role of aesthetic practices to the constitution of a new people. The convention's spectacular performances were a vehicle through which participants came to understand themselves as constituting the Universal…
W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the most significant American political thinkers of the twentieth century. This volume collects 24 of his essays and speeches on international themes, spanning the years 1900-1956. These key texts reveal Du Bois's distinctive approach to the problem of empire and demonstrate his continued importance in our current global context. The volume charts the development of Du Bois's anti-imperial thought, drawing attention to…
Political science (27 works) · Law (25 works) · Politics (22 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Law (13 works) · Empire (12 works) · History (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics (8 works) · Art (7 works)