A Pluriversal Alliance: The Postcolonial Consensus

In 1516, Thomas More published Utopia as a work of both literary and political thought. Being a literary production rather than a political treatise, Utopia has had little influence on political thought. The result is that what was meant to be the terminus ad quem, the goal of political thought in the manufacturing of a good society, has since been supplanted by realism and pragmatism in political thought. I intend to argue that More’s Utopia was meant to provide political thought with an imaginative framework from which politics could build a good society, and I will illustrate my position by positing that postcolonial thought historically activated in the 1955 Asia–Africa Conference in Bandung exemplifies the operationalisation of the philosophy of utopia and that ever since the conference postcolonial states have continued to guide their politics using the political thought of utopia.