Mishra & Ali
could not relate the African American experience to the history of Asia
and Africa—and how this failure made him invest too much faith in
Barack Obama, a dutiful sentinel of the U.S. imperium.
Of course, self-congratulatory white histories—Plato to NATO
via the Reformation, Renaissance, and Enlightenment—are not very
persuasive today, and long-suppressed realities have erupted to the
surface. We are beginning to understand what anti-imperialists such
as Du Bois and Gandhi saw so clearly: white supremacy is the malign
force of modern history. With old-style racist imperialism no longer an
option, those fearful of the loss of white power look to brute authority
figures. These ugly facts tell us that a system so parasitic on violence
and dispossession, so prone to generating cruel inequality and inflict-
ing injustice, should not be saved. We need a fresh vision of political
and economic possibilities—one that is not derived from the history of
capitalist expansion and imperialism.
wa: At the same time that identities are consolidating once again around
religion, ethnicity, and nationality, we are also seeing an erasure and
reconfiguration of bodies, borders, and boundaries. The sins and ghosts of
many Western nations are ending up at the doorstep of Europe, testing
the limits of its alleged liberalism. Will Europe be able to reconcile its
history of racism, colonialism, and Islamophobia with its refugee crisis?
pm: We have to examine more closely just when and how Europe
became an exemplar of liberal democracy—an idea that derives from
Europe’s wholly exceptional postwar period, when it recovered from a
long stint in pure hell. We have all heard of the genocide committed
by Germans. But ethnic cleansing was at the foundation of many of
Europe’s contemporary nation-states. Even during les Trente Glorieuses
(the thirty “glorious” years between 1945 and 1975), Europe was hardly