The Multiple Lives of Internal Colonialism

Abstract

This paper takes as its centerpoint the critical category of “internal colonialism,” an important concept in both social movements and in sociology across different contexts. We trace a world‐historical genealogy of the concept, focusing on North America (the United States), Latin America (Mexico and Bolivia), and South Asia (India), evaluating its epistemic‐political values for critical theory, social research, and a politics of liberation today. While many scholars consider the concept passé, we argue, following scholars such as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, that internal colonialism is a key analytical framework that continues to be relevant. We emphasize three points. First, against internal colonialism formulations that characterize it as a US theory of race grounded upon debates of the 1960s–70s, we note its internationalist and transnational dimensions, and locate its significance in both framing struggles for self‐determination and in critiques of the modern territorial state (national and/or imperial) and uneven development. Second, we locate internal colonialism as a category that can be brought into conversation with settler‐colonial studies, the “decolonial turn,” and racial capitalism—an encouraging trend we already observe in recent literature. Third, we recenter internal colonialism's significance in formulating a historically grounded, anti‐capitalist, antiauthoritarian framework that eschews a liberal politics of multiculturalism and a neat Global North/South divide, calling instead for a transcalar methodology.