Towards a Decolonial U-Turn: Lamine Senghor and the League Against Imperialism in Interwar Europe

The Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs’ Comparative Politics/International Relations Series presents Oumar Ba. This project proposes a critique of the decolonial turn and seeks to (re)center the ontological grounding of decolonization not only as a political process, but as praxis of materiality and national liberation. The paper foregrounds the archives of anticolonial struggle for liberation. Doing so, I revisit one pivotal episode at the junction between communism and the anticolonial movement in interwar Europe: Lamine Senghor and the 1927 Brussels congress of the League against Imperialism. Ultimately, the article contends that decolonization, as theorized and articulated by African voices, in the 20th century, highlights the material grounding of anticolonial theory and praxis, a generative (archival) site built around solidarism, humanism, and universalism.