Narrate to Unite: Anton de Kom on Solidarity and Anticolonial Politics of History

• In Event: Time, Narrative, and Anticolonial Political Thought

Abstract

While solidarity is commonly understood as a project of transcending difference, this paper argues that solidarity between different social groups can and should exist without erasures, displacements, or distortions of the differences between those who are in solidarity with one another. Heeding critics who worry about analogizing incommensurable experiences, and who seek to resist unchallenged class, gender, and other hierarchies within social movements, this paper aims to avoid the pitfalls of grounding solidarity in an ostensibly shared identity, interest, or ideology. Instead, this paper grounds solidarity in narrative. Unlike prepolitical foundations of solidarity, narratives must be constructed, and context affects whether narratives can compel an audience to act in concert. Narrative thus positions solidarity in the world of political action, and historical narrative in particular can foreground past struggles that testify to the capacity of given individuals and groups to resist, thereby positioning those individuals and groups as privileged partners in the struggle to come. This form of solidarity is drawn from the work of the understudied Afro-Surinamese activist, organizer, writer, and poet Anton de Kom (1898—1945). In his anticolonial text We Slaves of Suriname (1934), De Kom offered a historical narrative that critiqued the self-understanding of the colonized, while making a reconstructive effort at forging a nation and attributing a history of resistance to each subordinate group in colonial Suriname. This latter effort gestured toward a form of solidarity without a prepolitical foundation, which contributes to present-day academic and activist debates about the possibility and means of building solidarity across, through, or in spite of difference.

Author

• Mayaki Kimba