Rethinking revolutionary times

Abstract

Massimiliano Tomba's Insurgent Universality is a stunning book. Conceptually, historically, and rhetorically innovative, it shows how popular challenges to conservative and liberal forms of state-centered politics outlive attempts to contain and repress them. Tomba's reading of revolutionary declarations and manifestos in France, Saint-Domingue, Russia, Mexico, and elsewhere recalls experimental democratic practices that can animate contemporary political thinking. After surveying some of Insurgent Universality's key contributions, I ask how Tomba's argument could be extended in relation to recent debates about the politics of memory and consider what possibilities its anti-statism forecloses. Finally, I explore what gets lost in formulations of modernity that do not come to terms with racialized forms of bondage and dispossession and invite Tomba to speculate about how radical theories of politics might navigate between romantic figurations of democratic excess, on one hand, and a tragic preoccupation with aftermaths, on the other.