Anticolonial Critique Research Articles

Supernatural, Unnatural, Queer: Gratitude and Nature in Islamic Political Theology

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the problem of gratitude for the gift of nature from the perspective of Islamic political theology, which it reads alongside queer ecology to arrive at an anti-colonial critique of anthropic sovereignty. In classical Islamic theology, (as in the philosophy of Derrida, Nietzsche and Kant), a gift entails a necessary curtailment of the beneficiary’s sovereign freedom and autonomy. Islamic eco-theology, however, frequently valorizes the exercise of anthropic “vice-regal” power over a “subservient” nature, a power that has historically secured the exile of various non/human ontologies from nature and thence from politics. In their shared exile from nature and normativity, Islam, queerness and indigeneity come to form attachments and alliances that interrogate universalizing accounts of nature and humanity. Islamic theology and queer theory also furnish resources that allow irony and jest to emerge as modes by which the Qurʾān stages its playful political critique of anthropic sovereignty.

Articulating women's bodies: Montesquieu, Diderot, and the imperial and settler-colonial politics of gender and sexuality

ABSTRACT In this essay I develop a feminist anti-colonial critique by reading two eighteenth-century literary texts that discuss Middle Eastern and Indigenous gender and sexual practices at length: Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes (1721) and Diderot's Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville (1772). While Montesquieu and Diderot are often heralded as anti-imperial European Enlightenment thinkers, the specific ways in which Montesquieu and Diderot use gender and non-European women's bodies to construct their political-theoretical arguments show us two distinct colonial logics, one imperial and the other settler-colonial. I show that whereas Montesquieu uses Persian and Muslim sexual and gender practices to put forward an imperial vision premised on the superiority of French political order over a despotic ‘oriental’ order, Diderot uses Indigenous sexual practices to denote a settler-colonial logic premised on the erasure of conquest and pacification of Indigenous women's bodies. In doing so I build on existing feminist and post/anti-colonial scholarship to develop gender and sexuality as central analytics of imperial and settler-colonial politics.

Queer Militarism?!

Does advocating for queer and trans people to serve in the US military move the struggle for queer and trans justice forward toward liberation by improving the lives of queer and trans soldiers and increasing societal acceptance of queer and trans people? Or does it legitimize US military imperialism and increase the likelihood of more queer and trans people being abused and traumatized in the US military? This article consists of a conversation between Aaron Belkin, director of the Palm Center, who has spent decades advocating for queer and trans military inclusion, and Dean Spade, a trans racial- and- economic- justice–focused activist and scholar who opposes military inclusion advocacy. The conversation examines fundamental debates about the possibilities and limits of legal equality for marginalized and stigmatized groups, drawing on critical race theory, women of color feminisms, anticolonial critique, and competing theories of queer and trans liberation work.

'Fuel Burns Mixed with Seawater': The Relationship Between the Refugee Tragedy and the Ecological Crisis in the Mediterranean Sea in Khaled Mattawa’s Mare Nostrum (2019)

With environmental sustainability gaining more attention in contemporary literature, Arab-American poets have begun to focus on the connection between nature and current Middle Eastern and North African politics. Khaled Mattawa's fifth collection of poems, Mare Nostrum (2019), discusses the twenty-first-century refugee crisis in the Mediterranean through the effects of economics and environmental destruction on both humans and marine ecosystems alike. This paper aims to examine the Mediterranean migrant tragedy's entanglement with its ecological crisis in Mattawa's poems. The study seeks to answer the question: can an analysis of Mare Nostrum (2019) illustrate a parallel between humans' oppression and the environment? A postcolonial ecocritical lens can explore this connection by looking at the changing relationship between people, animals, and environment . . . that can be recuperated for anticolonial critique (Huggan and Tiffin 12). The study's significance exists in showing the destructive impact of political crises that extend beyond human displacement to become an ecological issue that threatens marine ecosystems. The study's findings reveal that Mattawa's poems illustrate that the environmental and humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean is a result of both economic and political instability.

“Fuel Burns Mixed with Seawater”: The Relationship between the Refugee Tragedy and the Ecological Crisis in the Mediterranean Sea in Khaled Mattawa’s Mare Nostrum (2019)

With environmental sustainability gaining more attention in contemporary literature, Arab-American poets have begun to focus on the connection between nature and current Middle Eastern and North African politics. Khaled Mattawa’s fifth collection of poems, Mare Nostrum (2019), discusses the twenty-first-century refugee crisis in the Mediterranean through the effects of economics and environmental destruction on both humans and marine ecosystems alike. This paper aims to examine the Mediterranean migrant tragedy’s entanglement with its ecological crisis in Mattawa’s poems. The study seeks to answer the question: can an analysis of Mare Nostrum (2019) illustrate a parallel between humans’ oppression and the environment? A postcolonial ecocritical lens can explore this connection by looking at the “changing relationship between people, animals, and environment . . . that can be recuperated for anticolonial critique” (Huggan and Tiffin 12). The study’s significance exists in showing the destructive impact of political crises that extend beyond human displacement to become an ecological issue that threatens marine ecosystems. The study’s findings reveal that Mattawa’s poems illustrate that the environmental and humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean is a result of both economic and political instability.

Taking Wilde to Sri Lanka and Beardsley to Harlem: Decadent Practice, Race, and Orientalism

This article examines the reworking of decadence by writers of color in the early twentieth century, focusing on the uses to which the Harlem Renaissance writer Richard Bruce Nugent and the Sri Lankan writer Lionel de Fonseka put decadent style while engaging in anticolonial critique and contesting rigid categories of power and identity. I read the implementation of decadent aesthetics by Nugent and de Fonseka as a form of criticism that teases out the troubles and potentialities of thinking race and empire through the lens of decadence.

Effective Ambiguity: Algerian negotiator Hamdan Khodja building anticolonial critique on identity expression and admiration for the colonizer

This article identifies and analyzes a rhetorical pattern in the Algerian negotiator Hamdan Khodja’s responses to the French occupation of Algeria in 1830. In his book The Mirror, published by a Parisian editor in 1833, Khodja sophistically and obliquely builds anticolonial critique on expressions of sympathy and identification with France, a manoeuver that makes him appear relevant. Speaking from an ethical vantage point that is shared by the French reader, Khodja’s criticism becomes credible and influential. In other words, Khodja’s appreciative judgments permit him to attack the opponent from within enemy lines: his argument is grounded in his opponent’s ethical pretentions. By the same token, Khodja displays that the inhabitants of Algiers that he represents are morally and culturally mature; they are not the uncivilized masses that colonial discourse will often have them look like. By carefully decontextualizing Khodja’s anticolonial tract, and reading it not just as a historical document but also as an articulation of personal themes and desires, as well as sympathy for the colonizer, the study contributes to our understanding of early anticolonial expression as more intricate and heterogeneous than it would appear when studied from a purely politico-historical or rhetorical perspective.

The organic crisis of Internationalism and the challenge of remembering alternative futures: Woman suffrage, parliamentarism, and anti-colonial critique in the Communist International

ABSTRACT The function and meaning of voting can vary across political systems. Despite its diffusion as a norm alongside the global spread of political liberalism in the post-colonial period, women's franchise continues to expose key fault lines in the foundations of democratic theory. Recalling the Third Comintern's debates and activities in the aftermath of World War I, this paper explores how gender organized the left's critiques of bourgeois parliamentarism and its imperial tendencies in the early twentieth century. It draws particular attention to how, in the context of global anti-capitalist and anti-colonial struggles, the woman suffrage issue juxtaposed the promises and premises of bourgeois and proletarian internationalism, the democratic potential and limits of electoral systems and their political alternative, the soviet. From these experiences, this paper highlights the radical challenge that gender poses to the development of alternative democratic imaginations.

Irrelevance of Basic School Education in Nepal: An Anti-Colonial Critique on Problems and Prospects

Despite its contextual, theoretical, and practical relevance, contextualized teaching and learning has not been the priority of school education of Nepal. The policy provision of local curriculum and the use of locally available resources for teaching and learning have continuously lost its position in educational circle. To this background, taking anti-colonial critical stance, this paper analyses problems and prospects of contextualized teaching and learning in school education of Nepal. Taking evidences from the first author's lived experiences, and experiences from a Participatory Action Research (PAR) project in a public school of Nepal, the paper exposes manifold challenges and dilemmas initiated by Western-modern educational ideologies, and promptly illustrates how those uncritically imposed/accepted schooling agendas were responsible to demolish rural (and indigenous) identities of Nepal. The paper eventually proposes policy makers and curriculum practitioners of Nepal to pursue agency in school education, making it more place-relevant; enabling school graduates to learn to ‘live’ (rather than ‘leave’) their place.

The “Right to Wage War” against Empire: Anticolonialism and the Challenge to International Law in the Indian National Army Trial of 1945

This Article treats the Indian National Army Trial of 1945 as a key moment in the elaboration of an anticolonial critique of international law in India. The trial was actually a court-martial of three Indian officers by the British colonial government on charges of high treason for defecting from the British Indian Army, joining up with Indian National Army forces in Singapore, and waging war in alliance with Imperial Japan against the British. In this trial, the defense made the radical claim that anticolonial wars fought in Asia against European powers were legitimate and just and should be recognized as such under international law. The aim of this Article is to draw attention to the understudied role of anticolonial movements in challenging the premises of international law in the aftermath of World War II.

An accumulated wrong: Roger Casement and the anticolonial moments within imperial governance

Taking three moments of governance – executive, legislative and judicial – this paper explains how forms of anticolonial critique were composed and articulated within the general regime of imperial rule. Through the career of Roger Casement, this paper shows how international human rights could develop out of the administration of empires as they monitored and compared the treatment of their own subjects in other imperial spaces. Casement drew particularly on his Irish heritage to identify the expropriation of direct producers as the basis of colonial rule. For Casement, colonialism was coeval with the destruction of native life. This was a far more systematic critique than was typical in commentary on the evils of colonialism. It finally impelled Casement into open rebellion, giving him one last opportunity – from the dock as a convicted traitor – to make public an anticolonial epistemology that challenged the legitimacy of imperial sovereignty.

Emptying lakes, filling up seas: hydroelectric dams and the ambivalences of development in late Soviet Central Asia

ABSTRACTIn the late Soviet Union, large-scale projects such as the Toktogul Dam in the Kyrgyz Soviet Republic were promoted as emblems of the Soviet model of development in Asia. While Central Asian politicians and intellectuals usually tuned in to the enthusiasm, the construction also revealed different opinions about the precise direction and goals of Soviet development. Large-scale investments became focal points of political and intellectual debates; they not only helped bind the periphery closer to the Soviet centre, but also revealed the different economic, political and cultural priorities of the regional, republican and union-wide actors. The construction of dams and reservoirs eventually triggered conflicts between the republics and laid the foundation for an anti-colonial critique of the late Soviet state.

Colonizing, decolonizing: Bad-faith liberalism and African space colonialism in Doris Lessing’s screenplay The White Princess

Although Doris Lessing frequently wrote about Africa over the course of her career, and her relationship to colonialism is undeniably critical, changing theoretical paradigms have complicated readings of her anticolonial critique. From a treasure trove of unpublished African material contained in her papers at the Harry Ransom Center Archives at the University of Texas, this article looks at one of her unpublished screenplays, The White Princess, as a complex and fraught attempt to generate an ethos of decolonization well in advance of its contemporary, post-postcolonial preeminence in twenty-first-century theoretical discourse. Lessing’s positing of a speculative future African recolonization of Britain would have emerged into a smattering of British speculative fictions of the late 1960s and 1970s that likewise imagined African colonialism, but did so, this article argues, hampered by a bad-faith liberalism. Despite the subversive potential of exploring inverted colonial dynamics, this article argues that Lessing ultimately cannot break free of generic conventions, political and theoretical limitations, or colonial discursive structures to achieve real decolonization work in The White Princess – although she may succeed elsewhere in her oeuvre.

Anti-colonial critiques of sport mega-events

ABSTRACT The paper reviews several theories about coloniality/modernity, Indigenous land, global securitisation and decolonial feminism in relation to sport mega-events. We use this special issue as an opportunity to reflect[1] which aspects of our own research may have been decolonial, and what is more accurately described as anti-colonial or anti-settlercolonial critique. In this paper, we review four different decolonial theories – coloniality/modernity, Indigenous land; global securitisation and decolonial feminism. We illustrate, and reflect upon, ways we have used these theories in our recent research about the Olympics, FIFA and Egyptian Ultras soccer fans. What became clear was that different decolonial theories helped us produce critiques of colonialism and settler colonialism in sport, but this raised the question whether our critiques of colonialism and settler colonialism are part of decolonisation. Some decolonial feminists suggest that decolonisation happens in the intersubjective, embodied realm of social erotics and queer affinity beyond coloniality. We conclude that, for us, decolonisation only happens within our relationality and process of doing research, from our social locations as queer arabyyah and white researchers respectively, working with and across our colonial differences.

Fanon and the New Paraphilias: Towards a Trans of Color Critique of the DSM-V.

This essay places psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon's anti-colonial, anti-racist message from Peau Noire, Masques Blancs/Black Skin, White Masks (1952; 1967; 2008) in conversation with the new diagnoses of "Gender Dysphoria" and "Transvestic Disorder" in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V). Specifically, the essay discusses sexologist Ray Blanchard's controversial theory of autogynephilia alongside Fanon's ambivalent rendering of transgender desire and interracial trans phenomenology in a crucial but frequently overlooked passage in Black Skin. Fanon's anti-colonial critique of psychiatry allows us to reconsider how Blanchard's theories on paraphilia engage with the foundational psychoanalytic concepts of identification and desire, as identified by the Freudian and Lacanian models and explored in the writings of Judith Butler, Catherine Millot, Charles Shepherdson, and others. By offering a fresh interpretation of the French text, this essay argues that a "trans of color critique" can benefit from Black Skin's unexpected insight into trans desire: Fanon's "man of color," who simultaneously undergoes a gender transition and a racial transformation, represents the literal embodiment of his critique of colonial racism. Given the role of the new paraphilias in the DSM-V, this essay concludes that a trans of color critique is well positioned to reinforce the anti-colonial message Fanon addressed to the psychiatric and psychoanalytical fields, which have tended to diagnose psychic injury while ignoring its causation, and which continue to neglect the fact that medical access is just as important as material support and security for minority subjects, in particular.

Through an Anticolonial Looking Glass: On Restitution, Indigenismo, and Zapatista Solidarity in Raiders of the Lost Crown

This essay examines Raiders of the Lost Crown (2013), by Fran Ilich (b. 1975, Tijuana), as an example of current experimental artistic-literary production that uses transmedial narrative forms to articulate a capacious anticolonial critique and trace historical connections between (neo)colonial and (neo)imperial formations. Raiders took the form of an alternate reality game whose players were charged with recapturing a legendary pre-Columbian Mexica (Aztec) headdress from an Austrian museum. The gameplay unfolded across myriad platforms, including an intervention at the museum, epistolary exchanges, a petition campaign, and participation in a solidarity economy. With mordant wit and calculated deception, Raiders puts on display the colonial character of museums, neoliberal economic regimes, and the geopolitical determinations that define debt and property while ironizing and provincializing Eurocentric humanism's universalizing claims and the moral feelings founded on these. Raiders critiques the neocolonial character of the Mexican state and its indigenismo in a manner that attests to the influence that Zapatista discourse and the history of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation have had on the politics and aesthetics of Ilich's work. Finally, in a speculative and utopic register, Raiders invokes the possibility of a future beyond European colonial modernity.

Beyond borders: the Egyptian 1947 epidemic as a regional and international crisis

This article examines the post-Second World War regionalization and internationalization of public health by focusing on the 1947 cholera epidemic in Egypt. We argue, first, that for the Egyptian medical profession, the epidemic served as an opportunity for both anti-colonial critique and soul-searching and self-criticism: it attested to the poor medical condition of the Egyptian countryside and the work required to ameliorate it. Second, we place the Egyptian epidemic in its regional context. We show how travel restrictions affected the mobility of people and merchandise between Egypt and its neighbours, as newly formed borders were solidified, crossed or transgressed. At the same time, the epidemic served as an opportunity for Arab solidarity. Finally, the since epidemic erupted during the short term of the WHO’s Interim Commission, Egypt served as the WHO’s first testing ground, helping to prove its capability to mobilize medical assistance, disseminate medical alerts and negotiate the abolition of quarantine restrictions. The epidemic, moreover, erupted against the background of renegotiation of international sanitary conventions, which historically placed cholera and the Muslim pilgrimage to the Hejaz at their centre. The source of the epidemic in a British military base and Egypt’s ability to contain the epidemic resonated with on-going debates over international travel restriction, international health policies and local sovereignty. The 1947 cholera epidemic was thus, a defining moment in the emerging relationship between international organizations and the decolonizing world.

Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative by Amy L. Brandzel

Reviewed by: Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative by Amy L. Brandzel Dean Spade (bio) Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative by Amy L. Brandzel. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016, 236 pp., $95.00 hardcover, $28.00 paper. At the center of Against Citizenship is a question that many scholars and activists have examined: how does advocacy for inclusion in citizenship reproduce the violences of the terms of citizenship itself? Brandzel sheds new light on this inquiry through a mobilization of critical paradigms from several radical intellectual traditions and the use of particularly demanding sites of investigation. The result is a book that exposes some of the most straining tensions these questions place on social movements seeking transformation. As Brandzel describes in the preface, many scholars who take up the critique of inclusion-focused efforts by activists undertake that critique aggressively, taking precious little time to inquire about the nuances of decisions to pursue such aims and sometimes openly mocking the naïveté of inclusion-focused advocates. Brandzel refuses such an approach, raising an important set of ethical inquiries for critical scholars and suggesting that a more careful examination of inclusion advocacy can accompany rigorously critical engagement rather than undermine it. Taking seriously the pressures that propel social movement actors toward inclusion strategies, and examining how those actors navigate them closely, can provide a more full account of the causes and results of such strategic choices. Brandzel's humility and care is refreshing and significant, bringing nuance and reflection at every turn to the application of various critical tools to moments of purported inclusion that reveal vital insights about the shape and operations of US citizenship. Brandzel convincingly argues that citizenship is an exclusionary project, and efforts at including more types of people in it inevitably reify its exclusive nature and undermine opportunities to practice coalition among populations targeted for exclusion. They make this argument with careful attention to the reasons why advocates and movements seeking liberation are relentlessly attracted to harmful inclusion-seeking tactics. Brandzel argues that in the wake of September 11, 2001, an anxious nationalism stirred long-present anxieties about the possibility of retaliation by nonnormative subjects. They describe, with great clarity, the discourses of normative citizenship and justified exclusion of the nonnormative that have shaped recent decades and [End Page 212] come into particularly sharp relief in the last year. They use the term "cultural defense" as a way of understanding connections between a range of racist and colonial discourses that produce logics justifying the exclusion of non-normative populations from citizenship and the targeting of those populations with state violence. They write, [T]he cultural defense utilizes the fear that the violent machinations of citizenship and the privileges they afford the normative will create the conditions in which the nonnormative will rise in retaliation for their experience. This fear is rarely described directly, as if naming it would bring it into fruition; rather, this fear is … [c]ouched in terms of tendencies (such as the tendency for criminality, the tendency for dependency on state resources, the tendency for border crossing, the tendency for sexual lasciviousness, and so forth). (4) Brandzel argues that "the ever-lingering promise of citizenship has been one of the most resourceful tools for producing and maintaining anti-intersectional, anti-coalitional politics" (4).1 They assert that intersectional, coalitional politics is what is "most threatening" to violent systems of control (4). The US nation state maintains these systems by requiring "that challenges to the norms of citizenship be articulated in simple, single-axis formulations" (5). Brandzel suggests that left organizations and academics also reproduce anti-intersectionalities. In particular, academic work focused on citizenship frequently, even when engaging some critique, maintains an investment in the idea of an inclusive citizenship that prevents a necessary rupture with the anti-intersectional approaches that such inclusion requires. Against Citizenship's chapter on hate crime legislation mobilizes the concept of "anti-intersectionality" to closely examine the historical conditions, Congressional proceedings and legislative developments related to hate crime legislation that demonstrate "anxiety about the recognition of violence and citizenship" (67). The chapter on same-sex marriage advocacy deftly engages anti-colonial critique to examine the...

The Politics of Comparison

Although the language of internal colonialism has faded since the 1970s, ixon's 1968 speech serves as the reference point for the title and central ideas in Chris Hayes's recent book A Colony in a Nation . While it would be welcome to see the vocabulary of black radicalism enter the American mainstream, Hayes diminishediminishes the stark differences between black activists' understandings of internal colonialism and Nixon's, and he fails to understand the implications of the idea. Ultimately, Hayes saps the language of anticolonial critique of its power.

Selma to Saigon: The Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam WarDaniel S.Lucks. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014.

Selma to Saigon: The Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War Daniel S. Lucks. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014.According to historian Daniel S. Lucks, the death toll of the Vietnam War was more than the millions of Vietnamese and fifty-plus thousand American troops. To the list of casualties we can add the Civil Rights Movement. In Selma to Saigon: The Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, Lucks argues that the war not only extinguished the movement as a pressing national issue, it also spurred an internal fracturing of the Civil Rights coalition along generational and ideological lines.The relationship between the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War has been explored before, most notably in Simon Hall's Peace and Freedom: The Civil Rights and Antiwar Movements in the 1960s. Lucks extends this scholarship by anchoring his analysis in a Cold War context. critical move elucidates how the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s created a political terrain that demarcated the fault lines for the Civil Rights coalition's eventual three-way split into moderates (NAACP and National Urban League) wedded to LBJ's anticommunist foreign policy, radicals (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC] and Congress of Racial Equality [CORE]) critical of America's colonial character, and hesitant critics of Vietnam (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.).Lucks begins by examining the effects of the postWorld War II Red Scare on African American intellectuals and organizations. Many of these early Civil Rights leaders viewed their racial oppression in Jim Crow America through an internationalist prism wherein racism was tied to colonialism and imperialism perpetrated by white oppressors against people of color. Their anticolonial critiques against American foreign policy, however, led to political persecution in the age of McCarthyism. Lucks argues convincingly that, in order to avoid being red-baited, prominent African American organizations like the NAACP and National Urban League quietly conformed to Cold War ideology, sealing a decades-long allegiance to liberal anticommunism, which set them at odds with others in the Civil Rights coalition.However, the Cold War orthodoxy that ensnared an older generation of Civil Rights activists didn't affect younger, more radical members of the coalition. As the war in Vietnam began to escalate in 1964 and 1965, African American activists and organizers within SNCC and CORE resurrected the racialized anti-colonial critique against American foreign policy that had been obliterated during the Red Scare, a position summed up most poignantly by SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael: This Vietnam War ain't nothing but white sending black to kill brown men, to defend, so they claim, a country they stole from red men (122). …