Anti-colonial Theory Research Articles

US Imperialism and its Legacies in East Asia: Thucydides Trap or Thrasymachus Paradox?

The US presence in East Asia is not simply a result of the victory over Japan in WW2, but a legacy of the US takeover of the Spanish overseas empire in 1898. Today, the threat of war between China and the US has little to do with Allison’s Thucydides trap, which is based on a misreading of Thucydides’ work: It originates from what in China is seen as a US imperial presence that mirrors Western interference in Chinese affairs during the so-called “century of humiliation.” China is an authoritarian state with regional hegemonic ambitions, yet the West has been endorsing other authoritarian states, even absolute monarchies, that fit its geopolitical interests. Notwithstanding the purported US support of “freedom” and “democracy,” the US in East Asia has been carrying out a foreign policy that, as an extension of misinterpretations of the Monroe Doctrine, is a legacy of empire. This legacy is too often overlooked, while overseas interests are justified on the basis of security concerns. Thucydides is relevant, but to compare the American and Athenian empires and their demise, not to drag China into US geopolitical discourse, when focus should have long been on Russia. Anti-colonial theory shows how interstate relations, in particular in the East Asian context, are not defined by Thucydides trap, but Thrasymachus paradox.

Engaging First Nations People at Work: The Influence of Culture and Context

The paper seeks to understand organisational context and culture’s influence on engaging First Nations People in Canada in work. Organisations have many opportunities to attract and engage Indigenous people, who have distinct worldviews and unique cultural customs not necessarily reflected in a North American workplace. Indigenous people also grapple with the historical and ongoing disparate impacts of settler colonialism that intersect colonial systems in most every area of their lives. This study worked within Indigenous research principles to encourage the articulation of deeply felt experiences and points of view of how First Nations people viewed and interacted with their work. The findings reviewed the experiences of twelve First Nations individuals working in non-Indigenous organisations. Through anti-colonial and critical organisational theoretical lenses, the study reveals how the context and culture that defined this sample of First Nations people shaped their views of what is essential to engaging them in the workplace. The findings illustrate what First Nations people would like to see in a workplace culture, what they feel needs to be recognised as part of their unique Indigenous context, and the approaches and practises that are most important for engaging them. Understanding the effect of context and culture on positive work interactions provides new information for organisational leaders, managers, diversity officers, and Human Resource practitioners to better support First Nations engagement in the workplace. It may also offer an approach to better engaging other culturally diverse organisational groups. The results add value to the fields of critical theory, anti-colonial theory, critical management studies, and Indigenous wholistic theory. The results further the discussion on the processes of decolonization and the recognition of Indigenous and minority rights in the workplace.

A Chinyanja, Ciyao and Chitumbuka Conception of Malaria

This paper explores an African conception and understanding of malungo, the Chinyanja name for malaria. Regarding the cause, symptoms, treatment and prevention of malaria, the dominant Western paradigm is at variance with the Malawian experience of malungo. Malawian indigenous ways of knowing and doing, including treatment and prevention of malungo, derive from centuries of experience that produced an independent epistemology that Western science rejects as myths and misconceptions. For the past four decades, researchers have reported low knowledge of malaria in Malawi while using the term malungo during data collection. Anchored in anti-colonial theory and hermeneutics, this paper reviews the 2017 Malawi Malaria Indicator Survey and discusses malungo from the African epistemology perspective. The paper further suggests that malaria and malungo be studied through Western and African lenses to understand whether or not the two are one or different conditions. A clear understanding of malungo and malaria as one or two conditions would lead to developing competent interventions.

Sociology after the postcolonial: Response to Julian Go's 'thinking against empire'.

Julian Go's 'Thinking Against Empire' identifies the corpus of 'anticolonial thought' as being instructive for a wider rethinking of how sociology might rally its key conceptualisations of social relations. He insightfully identifies the marginalisation of such thinking from Sociology as an institutionalised discipline. In our response we take up some of the warnings Go provides in the closing sections of his essay-which concern the expanse of intellectual engagement being currently bracketed under or connected to the 'anti-colonial', not least vis-à-vis the 'decolonising/decolonial' turn-to further unpack how the 'anti-colonial' might be adapted for thinking through contemporary socio-political dynamics. Offering, first, a precis of some particularities of British Sociology vis-a-vis the contributions of anticolonial social theory, this article then expands upon the dilemmas arising when anticolonial theory contemporaneous to the pre-decolonisation era is transposed to contingencies of the present 21st century. Namely, whilst the anticolonial archive has proved invaluable to upending the omissions but also complicities of European social theory canons, allowing for a much more expansive sense of how the modern world and its violences were conjured and how we might accordingly escape its miseries, it is also clear that much of the postcolonial world has undergone sufficient shifts to warrant an adapted sense of how we consider the anti-colonial for our current politics. We suggest that the important deviations which anti-colonial theorisations might heed include the dangers of conflating the anticolonial with an affirmation of Global South, non-white nativist identity; the need to recognise some key conjunctural premises by which the anticolonial is no longer geographically indexed to a straightforward Global North-Global South distinction; and the need to acknowledge that, at its most radical, anticolonial thought is itself still invested in traversing both the dreams but also corruptions of those dreams as intrinsic to modernity.

Where children naturally belong: colonialism, space, and pedagogy in Waldorf kindergartens

ABSTRACT How do assumptions about where children naturally belong reinforce colonial productions of the human? This paper presents research from a study examining how North American Waldorf educators navigated the colonial legacies of common-sense understandings of childhood. I focus on the ideas about childhood that emerge in a belief that Waldorf kindergartens are ideal places for children. The pedagogical space of the Waldorf kindergarten is built on intuited assumptions about children being close to nature, family, and home. I bring together childhood studies and anticolonial theory to argue that these assumptions are not neutral or ahistorical, but instead originate in colonial stories of the human structured by settler geographies. This paper explores how relying on these assumptions ultimately meant that participants had to negotiate the racism and ableism embedded within their origins, illustrating larger implications for other educators who navigate dominant Western understandings of childhood that organise pedagogy and pedagogical spaces.

Mino-Pimaatisiwin Beginning the Journey towards Decolonisation and Reconciliation

Mino-Pimaatisiwin is an Ojibwe term for life in the fullest, healthiest sense. Grounded in anti-colonial theory, this case study explores the impact of infusing Indigenous perspectives into an elementary school curriculum on students, school staff, parents, and community. With a focus on building self-esteem and cultural connectedness among Indigenous students, it uses the cultural frameworks of Mino-Pimaatisiwin and the Ojibwe seven sacred teachings of a good life. Findings indicate high levels of cultural connectedness and a reduced gap in self-esteem levels between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students, an increased awareness among staff of Indigenous history and culture, a greater parent comfort level with visiting the school, and increased involvement from the community.

Movement Texts as Anti-Colonial Theory

Despite the decolonial turn among sociologists, we have yet to engage a vast amount of thought produced by anti-colonial movements. The circumvention of much of this thought indexes overly restrictive understandings of what constitutes social theory, and I diagnose three ways in which this plays out. Anti-colonial movement texts provide striking demonstrations of this limitation, and of what is lost as a result. Through a close study of a banned 1970s pamphlet from Pakistan, I show that critically deepening the decolonial project through an engagement with movement texts raises ethical questions about the academy’s relationship to political struggle and demands new methodologies of archival retrieval that recognise the scattered, fragmented condition of texts subject to colonial violence. If addressed, southern movement texts reveal counter-infrastructures of knowledge production replete with counter-political vocabularies that challenge homogenising academic definitions of the Global South and enrich our theories of decolonial praxis.

Mistrust in Dysfunction, Culture in/Sensitivity in Era of Pandemics: How Ibibio People of South Eastern Nigeria Responded to 1918-1921 Influenza Vis a Vis COVID-19 Pandemics

In an exhibition of social responsibility against COVID-19 outbreak, almost all governments of African nations have taken proactive measures to close down potential sources of the virus transmission to the public. In this paper we engaged sequential text interpretation of historical and current health documents, professional publications and media reportage on the post WW1 influenza and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemics in order to fully explore the tensions and issues arising from the responses of Indigenous Ibibio people of South Eastern Nigeria to the pandemics’ interventions. We employed anti-colonial theory and the philosophical trajectory of African traditional ecological knowledge, TEK to investigate the two devastating global pandemics. We observed that the Ibibio people’s responses to intervention efforts of the ruling authorities and NGOs in the two pandemics were shaped by suspicion, and as the world is urgently turning into a densely populated global village, trust has become an essential commodity with respect to ways professional multinational corporations and agencies deal with the Indigenous peoples around the world. Non-toxic, unbiased, and accurate information from media reportage is sine qua none in fostering trust and restoring the confidence of Indigenous communities in Western science, a condition marred by misinformation and experiences of racism and stereotype. We argued that a multi-world approach to understanding and finding solutions to global socio-cultural, and health problems will provide sustained benefit to the multicultural society the world has become. We conclude by advising that the continents of the world share a collection of diverse Indigenous peoples’ epistemic saliencies (lived experiences). The unique ecological approach each of the Indigenous communities has lived with over the centuries constitutes their identity with the ecological environment. To gain the trust and acquiescence of these communities with respect to disaster interventions, these beliefs and practices, including in matters of health emergency, should be, evaluated, and incorporated into programs intended for the Native peoples.

Rethinking and Reinventing Intercultural Education in Post-Secondary Institutions: A Critical, Anti-Colonial Approach

Critical and anti-colonial scholarship helps us imagine how intercultural education might begin to address the power imbalances inherent to issues of culture and epistemology. This paper reflexively dialogues anti-colonial theory with my own experiments of practically implementing these theories within the Intercultural Program (IP), an extracurricular program at a Canadian postsecondary institution, to demonstrate possibilities for shaping intercultural education towards ethical ends. Through curriculum, programming, and community-building that is cocreated with students, the IP aspires to shape intercultural education towards social justice and equity, opening spaces for engagement with nondominant epistemologies, and promoting the critical thinking necessary for evaluating the historical, economic, political, social, and ethical implications of students’ own and others’ positions. At the same time, the IP provides a helpful site for exploring the challenges of doing critical work in an internationalizing institution, and the need, perhaps, to move intercultural education away from internationalization within higher education.

News Fixers at the Digital Interface: Precarious Labor and International Journalism in the 21st Century

Abstract This article conducts a discursive interface analysis of World Fixer, the most visible online platform currently connecting foreign correspondents with local news workers who can help them translate interviews, navigate unfamiliar places, and stay safe in the field. Placing Johanna Drucker’s theory of the digital interface into conversation with the critical frameworks found in global communication studies, anti-colonial theory, and anti-racist communication scholarship, the goal is to illuminate both the opportunities that the World Fixer site provides its users, as well as the inequalities that the website still perpetuates.

Documenting Student Representation of Indigenous HIV/AIDS Information and Integration Into the School Curriculum

Often times, contemporary health and epidemiological practices ignore indigenous information on HIV prevention. Colonial hegemony tends to replicate indigenous knowledge bases as primordial, superstitious, and lacking vivid scientific explanation to qualify the test for medical diagnostic study. Using an information science viewpoint and an anti-colonial discursive theory, this paper challenges the skewed discernment that it is only Western knowledge production that is considered legitimate knowledge. The authors argue that indigenous HIV/AIDS information exists and can be integrated into the curriculum to complement Western knowledge paradigms on adolescent HIV prevention.

A Confluence of Anticolonial Pathways for Indigenous Sacred Site Protection

AbstractThe confluence of the Little Colorado and Colorado Rivers is an Indigenous socio‐ecological landscape, revolving in large part around water resources. Substantial surface and groundwater use within the Little Colorado River (LCR) basin threatens the water sources of the confluence, springs in the LCR basin, and specifically the Hopi Sipapuni—a sacred site of cultural emergence. To address concerns about diminished flows of sacred springs, we engaged in praxis through collaborative, reciprocal, community‐based research processes. Through the lens of anticolonial theory, we ask: Can federal policies be employed in an anticolonial pursuit of water and sacred site protection? How do Indigenous grassroots organizers envision protection and work to re‐Indigenize water management? Semi‐structured interviews with Indigenous community organizers and federal land managers were coupled with policy analysis of the National Historic Preservation Act/Traditional Cultural Properties, the ongoing LCR Adjudication, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Findings point to multifaceted, complex, and contradictory themes that elucidate the continued influence of colonization on water governance and the degree to which protection solutions can be anticolonial. Criteria were generated for anticolonial protective pathways that highlight the centrality of reciprocal relationships, Indigenous Knowledges, and meaningful inclusion. While details about protection pathways for the confluence and Sipapuni are many, the salient finding is that the struggle for water protection in the LCR is the struggle for protection of inherent Indigenous rights.

Students’ Voices on How Indigenous Languages Are Disfavoured in South African Higher Education

South Africa is a country with 11 official languages. However, teaching and learning in South African universities continue to be dominated by a language that was imposed by colonialism. Drawing on a broader doctoral study which explores students’ experiences of (de)coloniality in post-apartheid education, this article reports on how access to education is hindered by the absence of indigenous languages as languages of learning and teaching. This article is based on data that was collected through in-depth individual interviews with 10 social work graduates. In a setting dominated by English, graduates spoke of their hardships in accessing education. Framed within the Afrocentric paradigm and anti-colonial theory, the article calls for the advancement of African indigenous languages in South African universities as part of the transformation agenda. The article draws attention to a need for the university community to commit to the formulation and implementation of language policies that promote translanguaging.

Darcy Ribeiro e os estudos pós-coloniais: aproximações e afastamentos

Em artigo chamado: “A crítica pós-colonial a partir de Darcy Ribeiro: uma releitura de o povo brasileiro”, Adelia Miglievich estabelece relações entre o pensamento de Darcy Ribeiro e da teoria pós-colonial. Neste artigo, porei em questão essas ligações para pensar até que ponto elas se aproximam e onde se afastam. Para isso, farei uma exposição das principais ideias do autor e dessa corrente de pensamento. A principal conclusão deste trabalho é que o pensamento do antropólogo está mais perto de um tipo de teoria anti-colonial do que do pós-colonialismo.

Marxism Beyond the Economy and Exploitation Beyond the Wage

ABSTRACTSince its inception Marxism has largely operated with a narrow definition of the economy which closely resembles capitalism’s own, focusing on wage labor as the pre-eminent example of capitalist relations of labor. A century-long series of challenges from heterodox radical economists, including those based in feminism and anti-colonial theory, has yet to broaden this definition of capitalism, but the fading importance of wage labor and the advent of new forms of precarious labor relations may allow us to break the hold of restrictive ideas of the economy. A larger, more comprehensive concept of economics locates value production and material exploitation in many forms of labor in addition to waged work, and provides a theoretical platform for building solidarity among seemingly disparate movements and constituencies. Marxism can and must incorporate critiques if it is to have continuing relevance. In fact, Marx’s original understanding of capitalism included the concepts of primitive accumulation and the reproduction of labor power, allowing broader concepts of capitalist exploitation to be incorporated into the Marxist worldview. New insights into the essential nature of capitalism and new possibilities for organizing and change may emerge from this paradigm shift.

A time for anticolonial theory

A time for anticolonial theory

Third Cinema Approach and Anti-Colonial Theory: Two trains towards one destination (A Comparative Study of Sidhwa s Ice-Candy-Man and Deepa Mehta s Earth 1947)

This research paper is an effort to analyze the Third Cinema1 approach and Anti-colonial theory by a comparative study between Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-Man and its visual adaptation Earth 1947 by Deepa Mehta. The paper explores the objectives of the mentioned theories/approaches and terms them as two trains towards one destination. The statement metaphorically refers to the geographical resemblance between the Anti-colonial theory and Third Cinema approach (as both deal with the issues of Third World countries) and ideological similarities between them in respect of their goals and aims. The article examines Anti-Colonial theory as a counter-narrative2 in the domain of Post-Colonial Studies. Similarly, it analyzes Third Cinema approach as a counter-projection in Third Cinema studies because it deconstructs the false and biased projection of the issues of Third World by dominant cinema and reconstructs a new version of projections based on reality. The paper shows that these theories challenge the notion of colonialism and create awareness among the suppressed and marginalized people and finally prepare them to take action, to define their identity and to resist against the colonial cruelties.

The school play and the murder machine: Nationalism and amateur theatre in the work of Patrick Pearse and Rabindranath Tagore

Using as its starting point the performance of Patrick Pearse’s An Rí and Rabindranath Tagore’s The Post Office at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin in 1913, this article explores the importance of performance in the two men’s approach to anti-colonial theory and practice. It argues that this “oddity of Irish theatre history”, as Robert Welch terms it, brought together two parallel traditions of thought and activism in Ireland and Bengal that found fullest expression in the plays made by Pearse and Tagore for their respective schools. Their treatment of cultural identity suggests the ways in which new formations of indigeneity and modernity were set against colonial modes of instruction whilst also marking a distinctive divergence from developing models of nationalist organization in the colonies. Viewing these school plays as political agencies allows a reappraisal of the importance of Tagore’s and Pearse’s educational theories, and of amateur theatres within postcolonial studies more generally.

Steve Biko and a critique of global governance as white liberalism

This article asks what it might mean to use African anticolonial theory – and Steve Biko's critique of white liberalism in particular – to speak directly to contemporary debates about global governance. Biko argues that white South Africans who opposed apartheid yet still benefited from racial privilege could not be the engines of meaningful political change. The difficult task of creating a more just and equitable form of governance, instead, depended upon the political activities of those most marginalized under apartheid rule, namely, the majority black population. I apply this argument to the claim that global governance institutions and ‘global’ civil society are best positioned to address the many problems facing Africa. Looking specifically at Invisible Children's KONY 2012 campaign and the United Nation's Millennium Development Goals, I argue that liberals who today advance global governance not only often ignore their own complicity within the existing ‘global’ order, but also are actually not well positioned to offer meaningful solutions to the problems of violence, poverty, and weak states.

Economies of Violence: TheBhagavadgītāand the Fostering of Life in Gandhi's and Ghose's Anticolonial Theories

This article compares the political theories that Mohandas Gandhi and Aurobindo Ghose develop around the assumption that harm or violence is an unavoidable feature of all human action. Both Ghose and Gandhi venerated theBhagavadgītāand shared a concern to foster life, and they shaped Hindu political theory by combining modern biological concepts with spiritual perspectives to determine the impact of harmful human actions within a totality of interdependent living beings. Although each thinker develops his anticolonial theory by balancing the value of life, the acceptance of an economy of violence, and the duty to act rather than renounce action, they diverge on the acceptability of violence whether in politics or in interactions with nature. Analyzing their framing of human actions as simultaneously biological and spiritual opens up a new perspective on Gandhi's refusal and Ghose's willingness to resort to violence in resistance to British colonial rule in India.