Agitation

Moving away from postcolonial thought's accounts of internationalist failure in the 1990s, this essay asks, how might anticolonial thought agitate in the present? Agitation, from the Latin agito, denotes a physical, mental, or emotional disturbance that forces something out of its natural state of inertia into motion. As a political concept, agitation animates a range of scenes that generate collective action, from early sporting theatres to religious rites, peasant uprisings, slave revolts, and workers' strikes.

Agitation's polysemy has made it a potent concept in anticolonial thought. It serves as the connective tissue that links political agency and the problem of self-representation to somatic capacities for movement that scale from a tense muscle to a political rally or collective cry. The imperative to agitate runs through the anti-imperial campaigns of the early twentieth century and the anticolonial internationalist solidarities that drove subsequent phases of decolonization, tethering political action to affective, corporeal, and collective movement. From speech acts like the slogan to street theatre, film, radio, or posters, agitation links language and a set of political concepts to affective and sensuous knowledge and action.

Agitation always concerns affect, but the relationship it constructs between embodiment and political movements has shifted over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By tracing these forms of agitation from early twentieth century anti-imperialism through decolonization, I want to discover a tension in them between the emotional and corporeal dimensions of political action in anticolonial thought. This account of agitation not only renders legible how the Cold War shaped anticolonial politics during the twentieth century, but also how its resurgent geopolitical frameworks continue to animate the rise of the new right on a global scale and impede contemporary anticolonial aesthetic and political imaginations.

Moving In-Step

For anticolonial movements and thinkers, the beginning of the century was characterized by a tense nerve, a poised muscle. Agitprop posters, manifestoes, street theatre, and early film and radio figured flexed bodies, progressive and punchy speech acts, and immersive montages and broadcasts. Following nineteenth-century popular uprisings, early twentieth-century anticolonial thought began to stage debates about the colonized's capacity for self-representation and the role of the intellectual class in that process of agitation. The intellectual was constructed as an agitator and positioned at the intersection of racialized, gendered, and class politics in ways that were hotly contested in early anticolonial thought, particularly at the beginning of the twentieth century—in work by Lenin, W.E.B. DuBois, Mao, and M.N. Roy.

Marxist-Leninist conceptions of agitation underwrite a lineage of twentieth century anticolonial thought, and class consciousness lies at the center of these debates. In What is to be Done? (1902)Lenin addresses Marx's concern in Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) about the transformation of the class-in-itself to the class-for-itself by citing the Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov, who distinguishes between propaganda that enlightens a few and agitation that rouses the masses. That distinction was crucial for Marxist-Leninism, which required an intellectual vanguard to raise the consciousness of the masses and make various forms of literature and art central to the political agitational process. In that context, Lenin argues that political exposure, generated by the transformative effects of the party newspaper, is essential for the training of the masses in revolutionary activity.  As Jonathan Flatley clarifies, Lenin mobilizes a "communist Stimmung" — a form ofattunement or being-in-the-world — through which "readers will not only understand, but will feel . . . [and] . . . that feeling will bring with it an irresistible desire to act as well as a knowledge of how to act, what to do. And this knowledge arises from the feeling, without reflection or theorization, as if it were already there, a kind of 'unknown thought.'"1

Political agitation as Lenin understands it includes emotional feeling but extends also to desire and corporeal capacity for collective action. It comes from exposures [oblichenii] of abominations [gnusnostei], a phrase that carries a religious tone in its philologic residue. With this description of agitation, Lenin emphasizes how affective shifts can generate somatic knowledge—what Flatley calls "unknown thought". The self-consciousness of the collective thus comes into being through this corporeal and emotional capacity of attunement that manifests particularly in the protest and strike as movements of being-in-step with others. This active and embodied sense of agitation was echoed across the Comintern as foundational to anti-imperial organizing from China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and India to the US and Brazil.2 For example, in "Talks and Yan'an" (1943) Mao argues that workers' literature has the unique capacity to "shift arses."3 Similarly, "The Manifesto of the All-Indian Progressive Writer's Association" (1936) defines progressive literature as that which can arouse a critical spirit to "help us to act, to organize ourselves, to transform."4 Aesthetically, this mode of agitation as being-in-step echoes the marching of the mass parades of the era.

Feeling In-Step

Following the Algerian war of independence (1954-1962), the Vietnam war (1955-1975), and the Hungarian revolution (1956)—a second wave of anticolonial internationalist networks formed, foregrounding a shift in agitation from a corporeal sense of being-in-step to an emotional sense of feeling in-step. This age of anticolonial internationalisms produced socialist anticolonial art and thought that represented transformative affects in improvisational and multilingual scenes of collective feeling, psycho-affective transformation, and collective solidarity.5 They were often staged through forms of cultural and diplomatic exchange at congresses, festivals, and other mass events. Notable scenes included the Bandung conference (1955), the International Congresses of Black Writers and Artists (Paris 1956, Rome 1959) the Afro-Asian Writers Congresses (Tashkent 1958, Cairo 1962, Beirut 1967, New Delhi 1970, Almaty 1973, Luanda 1979), and the Tricontinental (Havana, 1966) to name a few. Such congresses and mass-events were covered by the increasingly transnational mass media that emerged coincidentally with them, giving delegates access to multilingual simultaneous translation over headsets, the filming and photography of events, as well as the promotion of particular aesthetic mediums such as poetry, film, and (socialist, magical, speculative) realist literatures at various festivals. These scenes emphasized emotion as a powerful agito driving anticolonial internationalism.

The Cold War fueled material support for Soviet, US-backed, and non-aligned mass-events and exchanges. It also orchestrated crucial anticolonial political networks including Soviet alliances with Arab states like Syria and Egypt, and financial and arms support for the Palestinian Liberation Organization following the Six-Day-War in 1967. Soviet organizations drew on their own colonial legacy in the former Russian imperial "East" as they also promoted Muslim and Turkic artists, writers, and thinkers as mediators in the Global South. In their capacity as social influencers and ambassadors of culture, those mediators were charged with building 'friendly' relations within the Soviet Union as a friendship of nations [druzhba narodov] and extending those relations across the decolonizing world.6

Central to this moment of anticolonial agitation was a transnational socialist humanist project that emphasized the power of affect. Socialist humanism highlighted a vision of the political activity of emotions as socially and culturally determined, connecting the individual corporeal body to the collective social body through the medium of socialist realist world literature. In 1975, Kazakh-Kyrgyz writer and politician Chingiz Aitmatov, an important mediator within Soviet Afro-Asian networks, wrote that an anticolonial socialist world literature could activate "seemingly imperceptible stirrings of the heart."7 Echoing this emphasis on affect, in the 1966 inaugural issue of the Marxist-Leninist Moroccan journal Souffles-Anfas [Breath], journalist, poet, and novelist Abdellatif Laâbi writes: "The priority is to arrive at a correspondence between written language [langue] and the poet's inner world, his intimate, emotive language [langage]."8 While literary discourse during the Cold War period centered on the ideological battle over realist and modernist aesthetics, anticolonial art drew contoured portraits of material and social life to capture rich histories of social relations while foregrounding humanist labors to conjure plausible futures. Socialist anticolonial literature and art was hailed for its representation of working people, human experience, and the dramatization of the revolutionary struggle. The aesthetic and geopolitical emphasis on affective agitation within these scenes made feeling a central dynamic of internationalist solidarity. 

However, as Aimé Césaire lamented in 1956 in his letter of resignation to the communist party, the imposition of Soviet "fraternalisms" and their US-Cold War cousins in the Global South created powerful erasures of race and ethnicity.9 Although destalinization sought to remedy Soviet representation in the Global South, friendship as a form of affective agitation enacted a simultaneous marking and unmarking of race and ethnicity on the bodies of Black and brown subjects, promoting a socialist internationalist vision of an anti-racist melting-pot in the global North. Alterity was conscripted to serve spectacular internationalisms by Soviet and US-led Afro-Asian initiatives, which obscured the bodies mobilized in the literal construction of halls, stadiums, or festival processions. And it is tempting to trace the ends of an anticolonial agitational politics to these instances of waning or failed anticolonial internationalist imaginaries, or to the end of the cultural Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is tempting also to explain that loss as a result of the withering of multipolar socialist anticolonial solidarity amidst neoliberal acceleration. But within the ruins of twentieth-century internationalism — from the collapse of anticolonial solidarity networks to the exposure of the coercive nature of such modes of collective feeling — perhaps some agitational practice can yet be mined.

Agitation After Post-

The genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the war in Ukraine present pressing calls to reimagine agitational strategies in the contemporary present. In the fall of 2023, a special issue of n+1 entitled Agitation argues powerfully that liberal pundits' failure to understand the war in Ukraine as a result of diachronic historical and transregional histories has in turn promoted the lingering Cold War fantasy of a geopolitical battle between NATO and Russia over liberal freedom. This is further underscored by the recent 95 billion-dollar US emergency spending package pledging the continued funding of military aid to Ukraine, Israel, and to counter-Chinese aggression. This context intensifies an otherwise urgent demand to think beyond the historical and transregional blindness of the "post-Soviet," both its claims to the end of history and the whitening of the Soviet Union as homogeneously ethnically, linguistically, and confessionally Russian and Christian. The geopolitical whitewashing and historical erasure of ethnic minorities in the region has impeded left solidarity networks from addressing a range of issues transregionally. These include: Turkey and Israel's support for Azerbaijan's violent displacement and murder of Armenians in Artsakh; the continued failure to create anti-nuclear solidarities that transcend borders and existing coalitions; president Zelensky's suspension of protections for worker's rights'; threats to the multiethnic social fabric of Ukraine and other countries in the region; the social concerns raised by mass Russian immigration to Georgia and Kazakhstan; and the continued political suppression in Belarus by Putin-backed Lukashenko.10

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the Oslo accords in the 1990s rendered old forms of agitation obsolete by securing the neoliberal features of emerging states, generating the conditions that Francis Fukuyama called the "end of history." As local economies fell apart from eastern Europe to Central Asia, Israel consolidated its control under the two-state solution,11 and neoliberal hegemony ascended as the highest liberal democratic ideal. The rhetoric of the Cold War ossified even as cartographers redrew the geopolitical maps of a bipolar globe.  The politics of the post-Oslo / post-Soviet era mark the withering of mid-century anticolonial internationalist networks, but they also make affective agitation increasingly reliant on dehistoricized humanitarian claims.12 The end of the Cold War inaugurated a neoliberal era which coercively weaponized the logic of friendship through a range of political processes that have obscured the complex history of anticolonial thought and its intertwining with Cold War networks. And these historical erasures, met with authoritarian neoliberal modes of extraction, continue to impede aesthetic and political agitational imaginaries into the present.

What forms of agitation then make new fields of action visible? How might we attend to the material infrastructure and haptic topography that undergirds affective agitation to make forms of embodied difference legible while undermining ethno-nationalist, fascist, tribalist or other forms of authoritarian political moods that operate through post-Cold War post-Oslo neoliberal circuits? How can we return to the somatic registers of agitation—an attunement to moving with others in the world— to rethink anticolonial resistance beyond reductive geopolitical poles, so we can generate friction instead between affective and embodied labors? To answer these questions and others like them, it is necessary to locate the western media's portrait of Russian aggression in Ukraine in the history of Post-ness that obscures the political visibility of regions like the Caucasus and Central Asia, which unlike Ukraine fall beyond the purview of the battle for US-European hegemony due to their distance from Europe and largely Muslim and non-Slavic populations. That difference becomes more apparent when we see contemporary Russian aggression in Ukraine alongside the history of the Soviet colonialism in Central Asia and the Caucasus, where the Soviet state routinely redrew national borders and stoked inter-ethnic violence as a means of retaining control. And it requires that we further attend to the rich histories of intertwining solidarities between resistance struggles from Palestine to Vietnam and South Africa. How can we reimagine cross-regional modes of solidarity, neither under the mid-century banners of feelings of friendship nor the turn of the century's movements in step, but by invoking alternate agitational forms that expose the elisions and erasures of Cold War geopolitics?13

The charge to reimagine agitation in our authoritarian neoliberal present requires attending to the ways the post-Soviet post-Oslo moment has been conditioned by the infrastructural collapse of anticolonial institutions and networks—the withering of the former Afro-Asian, Bandung, and transcontinental congresses, conferences, festivals, and translation and publication initiatives that facilitated Global South-South exchange. At the same time, it requires asking how the transformation of the field of anticolonial thought has been shaped by an attention to particular geographies and aesthetic registers that remain in lock-step with Cold War geopolitics. An attention to sensuous forms of agitation has over the course of the twentieth century been scripted onto performative genres such as theatre, dance, performance art, and video art. While these media have proved potent agitational sites that foregrounded the body as central to anticolonial praxis, the narrow focus on specific media and genres also risks fetishizing a neo-Cold War debate about the liberal 'modernity' of avant-garde, neo-avant-garde, modernist, and post-modernist aesthetics as the privileged sites of revolutionary agitational imaginaries.

Novel Agitations

In the present moment marked by an insistence on postcolonial failure, what modes of agitation are available to us? I would like to briefly think about novels and specifically the realist novel, which has long served as a litmus test for adjudicating statist sovereignty and civilizational modernity. While perhaps an unlikely contemporary agitational genre because of its history as a bourgeois form, the realist novel was instrumental in the negotiation of anticolonial affects during the mid-century, and it was used to evidence Cold War debates over the politics of aesthetics. To think through this legacy as it persists in the twenty-first century, I turn to two novels The Underground [Mbobo] and Touch [Masās], written in 2009 and 2002 respectively by Uzbek journalist, poet, and novelist Hamid Ismailov (b. 1954) and Palestinian critic, essayist, novelist, and playwright Adania Shibli (b. 1974).14

Were he born twenty years earlier, Ismailov might have been a seminal figure of the mid-century era of anticolonial internationalist literature, headlining Afro-Asian congresses and publishing in multilingual journals. Instead, his work was penned amid their collapse, as he was exiled from Tashkent and then Moscow, and his novels censored from Uzbek and then Russian, leaving much of his work published only in English translation. While Shibli's work has been translated into German and English and honored by international literary prizes, her recent cancelation at the Frankfurt Book Fair award celebration marks an escalation in the suppression of Palestinian voices in the US and Europe.  Reading these novels together against a moment of post-Oslo post-Soviet crisis and postcolonial failure offers a renewed agitation of the hollowed-out 'friendly' affects of the waning anticolonial project.  Such comparative forms of reading undercut coercive strategies of feeling and moving in-step to render sensible alternative agitational possibilities in the present.

The novels follow the lives of two youths. The Underground tells the story of a mix-raced child named Mbobo (nicknamed Pushkin), who was conceived in a one-night stand during the 1980 Moscow Olympics between a Siberian Khakass migrant worker and a sportsman from a "friendly African country." Touch follows the life of an unnamed "little girl," the youngest of nine sisters in a Palestinian family living in the West Bank. Over the course of the novel, the children navigate the violence of post-Soviet Moscow and occupied Palestine through scenes of colonial collapse that are horrifying in their ordinary portraits of daily violence, which is juxtaposed against the beauty of simple, sensuous pleasures.

Ismailov and Shibli allude frequently to nineteenth century Russian and European realist fiction, but they subvert the trajectory of the realist bildung novel as the children grow up to the promise of death. Mbobo's death is announced at the outset of the novel and Shibli's refusal to name little girl and the death surrounding her underscores her life's precarity. Death is as much a narrative element as an implied historical certainty in both novels, amidst the racist violence of post-Soviet Moscow and the occupied West Bank. And yet Ismailov and Shibli animate these enclosed spaces, generating wonderous sensuous worlds made from broken infrastructures and scenes of violence, where the red dust from rusty water tanks and urine become the glittering colors of a dress and folktales warm the cold, iron tracks of the metro.

The ambiguity in the novels' play between realism and speculation, materiality, and imagination, agitates Cold War formal boundaries and activates new axes of agitational solidarity. Seen through the children's eyes, painterly or poetic abstraction becomes an integral part of the fabric of the real. Imagination becomes not a form of escape but an immediate strategy of endurance and survival.15 Sensuous details render the settings material and palpable  while they also estrange the reality that makes the children vulnerable to violence and trauma, which disorient linear and three-dimensional portraits of space and time. The walled, rusty, and broken infrastructure of the West Bank in Touch and the hollowed out imperial Soviet architecture of the metro in The Underground become sites of violence and spaces of shelter.

For Mbobo the metro is a "womb" and his "closest friend."16 Mbobo is born and dies in the metro and the intimacy of the setting is captured in the textures of the his embodied experience in life and his corpse in death: "The ground will hum, when a passing train shivers not far away, and bones begin to involuntarily beat against one another, teeth chattering in time, and ants who have made their home here begin to scatter though the darkness where there once was skin."17 A powerful hapticity in the buzzing ground under speeding trains reverberate in this proleptic vision of Mbobo's death, the narrative animating his future corpse in the novels first lines. While life in the above ground world of the Moscow streets is characterized by Mbobo's experiences of deception, violence, and betrayal, the rhythms of the metro with its "hum and tremble" make his dead bones "knock to the beat."

Shibli's novel does not end with little girl's death, but rather her wedding. However, the wedding is not presented as a horizon of futurity, but rather her encounter with the walled space of the occupation: "The bride sits on the bridal seat all alone, embracing the wall with her eyes. Everyone is looking at her and she looks back. At the wall. It encompasses all vision. Between the bumps on it, she strings lines in every direction [. . .] She cannot escape it."18 The little girl's confrontation with the wall resonates with Mbobo's death in the metro in its sensuous hapticity, as the bumps and lines on the wall join the hums of the metro to form currents that animate life. Ismailov's and Shibli's novels close with these scenes that conjure rich aesthetic worlds from within spaces of violent enclosure. The foreclosure of futurity contrasts with the boundedness of space, emphasizing the novel's generic ability to create immersive worlds by generating a vivid and sensuous present. The refusal of futurity thus becomes a site for reimagining anticolonial agitation as a quotidian yet capacious form of present-world-making. The novels do not aim to repair postcolonial failure, but to agitate vibrant words from within enclosures and precarious spaces.

The agitational work of the present requires challenging the limited geopolitical axes across which we read, and it requires challenging narrow conceptions of medium, genre, and style that foreclose political potential. Agitation cannot be captured by formal boundaries, because it suggests a transcendence of art and life across unlikely geographies, languages, and histories of colonial containment.19 Those alternate comparative circuits reroute post-Cold War geopolitics to bring more attention to sensory repertoires of resistance—the hums, cries, stories, colors, and textures that have been erased from archives by disciplinary power.20 In this sense and others, agitation represents a departure from the haunted specters of twentieth century anticolonial memory. It activates comparative modes of reading and thinking to negotiate ambivalent attachments to anticolonial internationalism and generate new modes of being and belonging together in time.

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Leah Feldman (Twitter: @leahmfeldman) is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. She is the author of On the Threshold of Eurasia: Revolutionary Poetics in the Caucasus (Cornell UP, 2018) and Azbuka Strikes Back: An Anticolonial ABCs (coauthored with artist collective Slavs and Tatars). She has published in boundary2, Slavic Review, TDR, and Post.MoMA.

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