Decolonisation Versus “Balkanisation”: Radical and Diasporic Geographies of PAI (Parti Africain de l'Indépendance) in Paris

Abstract

This paper analyses the activities of PAI (Parti Africain de l'Indépendance) from 1957 to 1963 in Paris and more broadly in France, where PAI was one of the most radical groups fighting for decolonisation, initially taking the form of a transnational and diasporic federation. PAI opposed both the ‘balkanisation’ of colonial territories across national boundaries, and neo-colonialism understood as the persistence of capitalist exploitation. For these reasons, PAI was outlawed in Africa after the 1960 ‘independences’. Based on new archival sources that allow investigating imagined and material geographies of PAI, this paper argues for divorcing anticolonialism from nationalism and other particularisms that hindered decolonial projects, by analysing alternative geographical imaginations proposed by radical groups, which expose the performative roles that diasporic spaces can play. Although radical anticolonial voices were often not heard, they can nourish current debates on how nation-states and exclusionary models of ‘community’, remain instruments to perpetuate coloniality.