The “Little Traditions” of Black Worldmaking

Abstract

AbstractShilliam approaches Adom Getachew's book Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination as an intervention into political theory. The book provides three provocations to that field. Getachew helps recast the sources and materials by which political theory interrogates the prospect of global justice. Getachew's intervention is field-shaping and especially helpful to those who pursue political theory in the field of international relations (IR). In this article, Shilliam wants to orient Getachew's argument in a direction that she herself implicitly tacks toward. The question: to what degree should the conventional conceptual frameworks of political theory carry the weight of Getachew's challenge? Shilliam addresses this question by looking at a “little tradition” of worldmaking: Ethiopianism. He presents the challenge provided by Ethiopianism as an analytical one: its worldmaking requires no analytical or ethical scaling up.