John Narayan
King's College London, European & International Studies, Faculty Member
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In 1990, A. Sivanandan published an essay subtitled 'The hokum of New Times', which took aim at Stuart hall and Martin Jacques' theorisation of Thatcherism and the neoliberal revolution. Central to this criticism was Sivanandan's... more
In 1990, A. Sivanandan published an essay subtitled 'The hokum of New Times', which took aim at Stuart hall and Martin Jacques' theorisation of Thatcherism and the neoliberal revolution. Central to this criticism was Sivanandan's decade-long tracing of the 'new circuits of imperialism' that had been engendered by a new global division of labour and hierarchies of production, technological change and the domestic fallout of such processes in forms of British state racism and racialised forms of exploitation. Although hall's work has diffused into the field of international political economy, Sivanandan's take has largely been neglected. This article, developed from a presentation at the 'New Circuits of Anti-racism Conference', King's College, London, october 2022, will briefly return to the hall and Sivanandan debate to help foreground Sivanandan's international political economy and also highlight how it took racism and imperialism to be integral to the neoliberal order in Britain and beyond. It will show how Sivanandan's anti-racist and anti-imperial international political economy can help us to frame and understand the current crisis of neoliberalism from the vantage points of 'over here, and over there', and how thinking with and through international political economy must be at the heart of contemporary anti-racism's address of the current crisis of capital. John Narayan is Senior Lecturer in European and International Studies at King's College London, and the Chair of the Institute of Relations (IRR); he organised the 'New Circuits of Anti-racism Conference' held at King's in october 2022. he is currently working on a book about A. Sivanandan's thought and the history of the IRR.
Research Interests:
What is the relationship between Brexit and biomedicine? Here we investigate the Vote Leave official campaign slogan 'We send the EU £350 million a week. Let's fund our NHS instead' in order to shed new light on the nationalist stakes of... more
What is the relationship between Brexit and biomedicine? Here we investigate the Vote Leave official campaign slogan 'We send the EU £350 million a week. Let's fund our NHS instead' in order to shed new light on the nationalist stakes of Brexit. We argue that the Brexit referendum campaign must be situated within biomedical policy and practice in Britain. We propose a rethinking of Brexit through a cultural politics of heredity to capture how biomedicine is structured around genetic understandings of ancestry and health, along with the forms of racial inheritance that structure the state and its welfare system. We explore this in three domains: the NHS and health tourism, data sharing policies between the NHS and the Home Office, and the NHS as an imperially resourced public service. Looking beyond the Brexit referendum campaign, we argue for renewed sociological attention to the relationships between racism, biology, health and inheritance in British society. *Authors are listed in alphabetical order; authorship is distributed equally and the article should be cited as such.
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The history of the US Black Power movement and its constituent groups such as the Black Panther Party has recently gone through a process of historical reappraisal, which challenges the characterization of Black Power as the violent,... more
The history of the US Black Power movement and its constituent groups such as the Black Panther Party has recently gone through a process of historical reappraisal, which challenges the characterization of Black Power as the violent, misogynist and negative counterpart to the Civil Rights movement. Indeed, scholars have furthered interest in the global aspects of the movement, highlighting how Black Power was adopted in contexts as diverse as India, Israel and Polynesia. This article highlights that Britain also possessed its own distinctive form of Black Power movement, which whilst inspired and informed by its US counterpart, was also rooted in anti-colonial politics, New Commonwealth immigration and the onset of decolonization. Existing sociological narratives usually locate the prominence and visibility of British Black Power and its activism, which lasted through the 1960s to the early 1970s, within the broad history of UK race relations and the movement from anti-racism to multiculturalism. However, this characterization neglects how such Black activism conjoined explanations of domestic racism with issues of imperialism and global inequality. Through recovering this history, the article seeks to bring to the fore a forgotten part of British history and also examines how the history of British Black Power offers valuable lessons about how the politics of anti-racism and anti-imperialism should be united in the 21st century.
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Huey P. Newton remains one the left's intellectual enigmas. Although lauded for being the leader of the Black Panther Party, Newton is relatively unacknowledged as an intellectual. This article challenges the neglect of Newton's thought... more
Huey P. Newton remains one the left's intellectual enigmas. Although lauded for being the leader of the Black Panther Party, Newton is relatively unacknowledged as an intellectual. This article challenges the neglect of Newton's thought by shedding light on his theory of empire, and the present-day value of returning to his thought. The article centres on how Newton's critique of what he called 'reactionary inter-communalism' prefigures many of the elements found in the work of Hardt and Negri on empire. This comparison will be used to show how Newton not only foresaw elements of the rise of contemporary neoliberal globalization, but also offered an idea of political solidarity and revolutionary politics for such a context. The article concludes by highlighting how Newton's ideas about the need for a war of position based on 'survival pending revolution' presents a more theoretically and empirically salient conceptualization of resistance than his successors.
Research Interests:
In November 1970, Black Panther Party leader Huey P. Newton gave a lecture at Boston College where he introduced his theory of intercommunalism. Newton re-articulated Marxist theories of imperialism through the lens of the Black... more
In November 1970, Black Panther Party leader Huey P. Newton gave a lecture at Boston College where he introduced his theory of intercommunalism. Newton re-articulated Marxist theories of imperialism through the lens of the Black liberation struggle and argued that imperialism had entered a new phase called 'reactionary intercommunalism'. Newton's theory of intercommunalism offers nothing less than a proto-theorisation of what we have come to call neo-liberal globalisation and its effects on what W. E. B. Du Bois had seen as the racialisation of modern imperialism. Due to the initial historical dismissal of the Black Panther Party's political legacy, Newton's thought has largely been neglected for the past 40 years. This paper revisits Newton's theory of intercommunalism, with the aim of achieving some form of epistemic justice for his thought, but also to highlight how Newton's recasting of imperialism as reactionary intercommunalism provides critical insight into the rise of Trumpism in the US.
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From the writings of Lenin, the guerrilla activity of Che Guevara, the anti-racism of the Black Panther Party and the Third World’s plan for a New International Economic Order, the idea of imperialism and the politics of anti-imperialism... more
From the writings of Lenin, the guerrilla activity of Che Guevara, the anti-racism of the Black Panther Party and the Third World’s plan for a New International Economic Order, the idea of imperialism and the politics of anti-imperialism were a mainstay of political vernacular throughout most of the twentieth century. Yet, with the onset of neo-liberal globalisation in the Global North and, most importantly, in the Global South the idea of imperialism has seemingly disappeared or been deemed irrelevant. This special issue draws on a range of theoretical contributions that use the prism of imperialism to explore the strengths and limits of classical Marxist theories of imperialism; the relationship between Marxist, post-colonial and de-colonial approaches; imperialism and social movement theory; and the strengths of returning to ideas of Black Marxism and Pan-Africanism in the midst of contemporary neo-imperialism. These theoretical debates are in turn complemented by the collection exploring the idea of imperialism from different empirical vantage points in the Global North (Europe, US) and Global South (Africa, the Caribbean, Cuba and Kashmir). The issue thus provides both theoretically and empirically innovative interventions on how we should conceptualise and approach the idea of imperialism in the twenty-first century.
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In 1990, A. Sivanandan published an essay subtitled ‘The hokum of New Times’, which took aim at Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques’ theorisation of Thatcherism and the neoliberal revolution. Central to this criticism was Sivanandan’s... more
In 1990, A. Sivanandan published an essay subtitled ‘The hokum of New Times’, which took aim at Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques’ theorisation of Thatcherism and the neoliberal revolution. Central to this criticism was Sivanandan’s decade-long tracing of the ‘new circuits of imperialism’ that had been engendered by a new global division of labour and hierarchies of production, technological change and the domestic fall-out of such processes in forms of British state racism and racialised forms of exploitation. Although Hall’s work has diffused into the field of international political economy, Sivanandan’s take has largely been neglected. This article, developed from a presentation at the ‘New Circuits of Anti-racism Conference’, King’s College, London, October 2022, will briefly return to the Hall and Sivanandan debate to help foreground Sivanandan’s international political economy and also highlight how it took racism and imperialism to be integral to the neoliberal order in Britain...
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As the post-war European project of union – whether ever-closer, or not – approaches its sixtieth anniversary, the continent is beset by the twin issues of austerity and migration. Since 2008, the financial crash and the related politics... more
As the post-war European project of union – whether ever-closer, or not – approaches its sixtieth anniversary, the continent is beset by the twin issues of austerity and migration. Since 2008, the financial crash and the related politics of austerity have enveloped both individual countries and the EU as a whole as it has sought to address the growing tension between its commitment to democratic values and the perceived need for a response that maintains the technical infrastructure of the Eurozone. This has been most evident in the response to the situation in Greece (although similar issues have arisen in Portugal and Spain and also in Ireland). Migration, intersecting with the politics of austerity in many ways, has become the other defining issue of our times, especially, once again, in its vivid manifestation in Greece as surrounding countries put up fences to restrict the movement of people.
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What is the relationship between Brexit and biomedicine? Here we investigate the Vote Leave official campaign slogan ‘We send the EU £350 million a week. Let’s fund our NHS instead’ in order to shed new light on the nationalist stakes of... more
What is the relationship between Brexit and biomedicine? Here we investigate the Vote Leave official campaign slogan ‘We send the EU £350 million a week. Let’s fund our NHS instead’ in order to shed new light on the nationalist stakes of Brexit. We argue that the Brexit referendum campaign must be situated within biomedical policy and practice in Britain. We propose a re-thinking of Brexit through a cultural politics of heredity to capture how biomedicine is structured around genetic understandings of ancestry and health, along with the forms of racial inheritance that structure the state and its welfare system. We explore this in three domains: the NHS and health tourism, data sharing policies between the NHS and the Home Office, and the NHS as an imperially resourced public service. Looking beyond the Brexit referendum campaign, we argue for renewed sociological attention to the relationships between racism, biology, health and inheritance in British society.
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The history of the US Black Power movement and its constituent groups such as the Black Panther Party has recently gone through a process of historical reappraisal, which challenges the characterization of Black Power as the violent,... more
The history of the US Black Power movement and its constituent groups such as the Black Panther Party has recently gone through a process of historical reappraisal, which challenges the characterization of Black Power as the violent, misogynist and negative counterpart to the Civil Rights movement. Indeed, scholars have furthered interest in the global aspects of the movement, highlighting how Black Power was adopted in contexts as diverse as India, Israel and Polynesia. This article highlights that Britain also possessed its own distinctive form of Black Power movement, which whilst inspired and informed by its US counterpart, was also rooted in anti-colonial politics, New Commonwealth immigration and the onset of decolonization. Existing sociological narratives usually locate the prominence and visibility of British Black Power and its activism, which lasted through the 1960s to the early 1970s, within the broad history of UK race relations and the movement from anti-racism to mul...
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This book provides a fresh examination of the cosmopolitan project of post-war Europe from a variety of perspectives. It explores the ways in which European cosmopolitanism can be theorized differently if we take into account histories... more
This book provides a fresh examination of the cosmopolitan project of post-war Europe from a variety of perspectives. It explores the ways in which European cosmopolitanism can be theorized differently if we take into account histories which have rarely been at the forefront of such understandings. It also uses neglected historical resources to draw out new and unexpected entanglements and connections between understandings of European cosmopolitanism both in Europe and elsewhere. The final part of the book places European cosmopolitanism in tension with contemporary postcolonial configurations around diaspora, migration, and austerity. Overall, it seeks to draw attention to the ways in which Europe’s posited others have always been very much a part of Europe’s colonial histories and its postcolonial present.
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Huey P. Newton remains one the left’s intellectual enigmas. Although lauded for being the leader of the Black Panther Party, Newton is relatively unacknowledged as an intellectual. This article challenges the neglect of Newton’s thought... more
Huey P. Newton remains one the left’s intellectual enigmas. Although lauded for being the leader of the Black Panther Party, Newton is relatively unacknowledged as an intellectual. This article challenges the neglect of Newton’s thought by shedding light on his theory of empire, and the present-day value of returning to his thought. The article centres on how Newton’s critique of what he called ‘reactionary intercommunalism’ prefigures many of the elements found in the work of Hardt and Negri on empire. This comparison will be used to show how Newton not only foresaw elements of the rise of contemporary neoliberal globalization, but also offered an idea of political solidarity and revolutionary politics for such a context. The article concludes by highlighting how Newton’s ideas about the need for a war of position based on ‘survival pending revolution’ presents a more theoretically and empirically salient conceptualization of resistance than his successors.
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In 1971, the Black Panther Party (BPP) seemingly went through an ideological transformation. Between 1968 and 1970 the Party had forged strong national and international solidarity and support through a politics of revolutionary armed... more
In 1971, the Black Panther Party (BPP) seemingly went through an ideological transformation. Between 1968 and 1970 the Party had forged strong national and international solidarity and support through a politics of revolutionary armed self-defence and a commitment to anti-imperialism. Yet, in late 1970 as the sands of both national and geo-politics shifted, and as allies, both at home and abroad, became less supportive, the Panthers found themselves on less solid ground. Black Panther leader Huey P Newton, realizing this shift in the political landscape, and the futility of attempting an armed insurgency against the state without widespread support, now steered the BPP towards the idea of ‘Survival Pending Revolution’. This saw the Panthers abandon the idea of immediate armed insurrection against the state and reorient towards a focus on their community engagement ‘survival programs’. This article argues that Newton’s orientation of the BPP away from armed insurrection and towards s...
Research Interests:
In 1971, the Black Panther Party (BPP) seemingly went through an ideological transformation. Between 1968 and 1970 the Party had forged strong national and international solidarity and support through a politics of revolutionary armed... more
In 1971, the Black Panther Party (BPP) seemingly went through an ideological transformation. Between 1968 and 1970 the Party had forged strong national and international solidarity and support through a politics of revolutionary armed self-defence and a commitment to anti-imperialism. Yet, in late 1970 as the sands of both national and geo-politics shifted, and as allies, both at home and abroad, became less supportive, the Panthers found themselves on less solid ground. Black Panther leader Huey P Newton, realizing this shift in the political landscape, and the futility of attempting an armed insurgency against the state without widespread support, now steered the BPP towards the idea of ‘Survival Pending Revolution’. This saw the Panthers abandon the idea of immediate armed insurrection against the state and reorient towards a focus on their community engagement ‘survival programs’. This article argues that Newton’s orientation of the BPP away from armed insurrection and towards s...