Mahmood Mamdani specialises in the study of African and international politics, colonialism and post‐colonialism, and the politics of knowledge production.
Zohran Mamdani is all set to win the New York Democratic mayoral primary polls. The 33-year-old soared to popularity with his social media campaigns that were earnest and spoke directly to New Yorkers about what he intended to do if he were to be elected as the mayor. Mamdani has promised to control rents, make New York’s buses free, carry out energy reforms, and increase taxes on the city’s wealthiest persons. In addition to these, he has also been a vocal supporter of the Palestinian cause.
How might being the son of filmmaker Mira Nair and Ugandan academic Mahmood Mamdani have shaped his views? Many of us are already familiar with Mira Nair’s filmography. What about the mayoral candidate’s father’s works?
Born on April 23, 1946, Mahmood Mamdani is an Ugandan academic and author. He specialises in the study of African and international politics, colonialism and post‐colonialism, and the politics of knowledge production. Here are seven books by the scholar that explore the intersection between politics and culture, the history of civil war and genocide in Africa, the Cold War and the War on Terror, and the history and theory of human rights. (All information sourced from publishers.)
In this genealogy of political modernity, Mamdani argues that the nation-state and the colonial state created each other. In case after case around the globe – from the New World to South Africa, Israel to Germany to Sudan – the colonial state and the nation-state have been mutually constructed through the politicisation of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally manufactured minority.
The model emerged in North America, where genocide and internment on reservations created both a permanent native underclass and the physical and ideological spaces in which new immigrant identities crystallised as a settler nation. In Europe, this template would be used by the Nazis to address the Jewish Question, and after the fall of the Third Reich, by the Allies to redraw the boundaries of Eastern Europe’s nation-states, cleansing them of their minorities. After Nuremberg, the template was used to preserve the idea of the Jews as a separate nation. By establishing Israel through the minoritisation of Palestinian Arabs, Zionist settlers followed the North American example. The result has been another cycle of violence.
Neither Settler nor Native offers a vision for arresting this historical process. Mamdani rejects the “criminal” solution attempted at Nuremberg, which held individual perpetrators responsible without questioning Nazism as a political project and thus the violence of the nation-state itself. Instead, political violence demands political solutions: not criminal justice for perpetrators but a rethinking of the political community for all survivors – victims, perpetrators, bystanders, beneficiaries – based on common residence and the commitment to build a common future without the permanent political identities of settler and native. Mamdani points to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa as an unfinished project, seeking a state without a nation.
