Colonialism and Decolonization on a World Scale—Three Perspectives

To take up colonialism or decolonization, let alone both, is of necessity and by definition to think on a world scale-to think the "international," in the many and varied senses of that word.This Essay focuses on three texts that operate on a world scale, and do so in different but cross-cutting ways: Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, first published in 1961 and translated into English two years later; 1 Andre Gunder Frank's Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America, put out by Monthly Review Press in 1967; 2 and Issa Shivji's The Concept of Human Rights in Africa, a classic, if somewhat less widely known, contribution that first appeared in 1989.3 The contention at the heart of the Essay is that revisiting these three texts, each a classic that has garnered a large readership, is useful in the current conjuncture because they exemplify divergent and often competing Marxist