Arwa Awan

Biography

Arwa Awan’s research interests are in historically grounded approaches to anticolonial political theory, which are animated by questions central to critical and social theories of capitalism. She is interested in the various ways capitalism became an object of critique in continental thought and anticolonial theory, and in the intellectual and political fermentation and friction characterizing the encounters between both of these traditions of thinking.

Her current book project To Make the World Our Own: The Marxist Critique of Alienation in Anticolonial Thought brings to light a strand of anticolonial political theory, which drew on Marx’s theory of alienation, to critique the colonial structure of capital as it manifested especially in Martinique, Algeria, and Iran. The project traces how this distinctive strand of thought was shaped by the encounters of its thinkers with Hegelian, existentialist, and left Catholic philosophical currents in France, themselves deeply shaped by Marx’s theory of alienation. This anticolonial humanist current of Marxist thought, which made human alienation the center of its critique of colonial capital, proved conducive to a reinvention of Marxism. This allowed for Marxism’s appropriation by the colonized world so that it can speak to the social reality of the colonies, which differed markedly from that of Western industrial capitalist societies.