Echoes of Imperialism in LGBT Activism Rahul Rao At least one early critical reaction to the emergence of the term ‘postcolonial’, expressed disquiet about its ‘premature 1 celebration of the pastness of colonialism’. 2 Writing in 1992 and citing the then continuing coloniality of Northern Ireland, Palestine, South Africa, East Timor and other places, Anne McClintock worried that this premature celebration ran ‘the risk of obscuring the continuities and discontinuities of colonial and imperial power’. 3 While her examples focused on instances of enduring territorial colonialism, it is salutary to bear in mind that imperialism crucially also always had a non-territorial ideational dimension, expressed in projects such as the civilizing mission. It is in the form of this non- territorial dimension that imperialism today is more visible and ubiquitous, enduring long after the reduction of territorial imperialism to a few anachronistic vestiges, and inflecting even those apparently radical and oppositional spaces of politics in which one might least expect it. In this chapter, I explore the ‘echoes of imperialism’ in one such space – that of global contention for the recognition of the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) subjects, as well as of other sexual minorities who might not identify in these terms. 4 In doing so, I hear two sorts of echoes. First, my critique of imperial tendencies within contemporary Western LGBT politics, parallels and tries to learn from an earlier critique levelled by Third World feminists such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty at white Western feminism. Just as these earlier critiques punctured lazy slogans of ‘global sisterhood’ that are inattentive to hierarchies of race, class and nationality within women’s movements, I question the putative singularity of an assumed global gay subject that seems to underpin some contemporary Western LGBT activism. 5 Second, I attempt to peel away the layers of discourse that encrust such activism in our own time, to reveal the underlying political interests that sustain it. In doing so, I find it helpful to think about the political interests that