Introduction: Escaping the Nation? National Consciousness and the Horizons of Decolonization

This special issue emerges from the debates around the ideas of violence, liberation, and national consciousness. The catalyst that prompted us to interrogate both the necessity of the nation-state form within decolonization, and the need to excavate and illuminate what Gary Wilder (2015, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, xi) called “non-national orientations to decolonization” was provided by Frantz Fanon’s reflections on national consciousness. In Wretched of the Earth, Fanon (2004, The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 179) states that “[n]ational consciousness, which is not nationalism, is alone capable of giving us an international dimension.” The immediate and obvious question that took shape was: what exactly is national consciousness, and how is it different from nationalism? Taking Fanon’s prompt, the contributions to this special issue launch the following provocations: what anti-colonial imaginaries and projects existed that did not envisage the end of colonialism as the beginning of nationalism? How and to what extent do these anticolonial imaginaries and projects confront the postcolonial settlements of the contemporary global order? Last but not least, what are the limits/traps of attempts to escape the nation?