Moving Past Models

This essay makes the case for moving away from a genre of writing about revolutions that elevates particular ones to the status of models and exemplars, which then become the touchstone of all subsequent revolutionary processes. This way of looking at emancipatory movements risks excising some from the domain of revolutionary practice for not fitting a model, and relegating others to the status of belated and derivative ones that repeat the stages of the earlier model. Instead, the author suggests moving past models to pay attention to the practices of translation that revolutionaries engage in and that inform their intellectual and political traditions. Sidelining the conceptual universe of models and centering translation enables a reckoning with difference and the emergence of newness. It is also crucial for rethinking a politics of solidarity across difference in, and for, our present.