Colonial Amnesia Research Articles

Reframing colonial amnesia: German colonialism and multilingual memory in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives

ABSTRACT Cultural memory of German colonialism is too often described as overshadowed, absent, or forgotten, with references to factors such as the short period of German colonialism, its abrupt end, and the relative lack of postcolonial immigration to Germany. This article reframes established understandings of German colonial memory and colonial amnesia by engaging with representations of German colonialism in the anglophone novel Afterlives (2020) by Abdulrazak Gurnah. I argue that Afterlives provokes a rereading of German cultural memory of colonialism by demonstrating its transnational and multilingual entanglements. My reading of the novel specifically addresses the spatial, temporal, and textual layers of its representation of colonial memory and the roles that archives and intertextuality play in its rereading of the colonial past. In doing so, I illustrate how Gurnah’s text insists on the various layers, entanglements, and intertexts between German colonial memory and anglophone postcolonial texts.

The next [white] thing: neocolonial white feminism in Disney’s Frozen II

ABSTRACT This essay critically analyzes how Disney’s animated film Frozen II responds to the current landscape of multicultural liberal feminism by emphasizing white women’s self-discovery as a principal means to resist colonial amnesia and advance an anti-racist agenda. Drawing upon scholarship about the anti-racist white-hero movie subgenre, we argue that this turn toward consciousness demonstrates an emerging mode of strategic whiteness in popular culture that we refer to as neocolonial white feminism. This form of feminism ultimately serves structures of white supremacy and undermines Indigenous sovereignty by centering white intrapersonal experience as sine qua non for advancing decolonial justice.

In the gutters of grief and shame: drawing displacement in Kim Suk Gendry-Kim’s Grass

ABSTRACT This essay explores the haunting shadows of coloniality through the lens of shame and grief. Highlighting the graphic novel Grass by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, I trace the diasporic linkages between gendered violence, colonial amnesia, and the patriarchal silencing of the stories of ‘comfort women.’ I argue that the search for legibility and homecoming trouble shame, grief, and memory. Shame and the female body play a central role in the narrative and visual framework of Gendry-Kim’s graphic novel. It challenges us to reconsider our understanding of history by engaging with shame that disrupts history. Such alternative archives of memory are important in that they articulate exclusions that frame history, documenting stories about home, diaspora, displacement, and their aftereffects from the vantage point of women who are relegated to the haunting shadows left by the legacies of war.

Colonial Amnesia and the Material Remains of Italian Colonialism in Mogadishu

This essay examines the material legacies of Italian colonialism in Mogadishu in the aftermath of postcolonial transformations and the devastation of the Somali Civil War. It traces the history of colonial Mogadishu and the deep imprint of the Italian state on the city's spatial organization and architectural heritage. From 1893 to 1941, the city was transformed into a colonial capital through the imposition of a new European-style city upon the old historic centre. This required the demolition of pre-colonial structures and homes, and the displacement of many Somalis to the outskirts the city. With independence, colonial sites were appropriated and nationalized – streets honouring Italian figures were renamed to honour Somalis; colonial buildings became national buildings. With these transformations, however, the colonial history of the now postcolonial capital city became invisibilised and easily forgotten.

Disrupting Colonial Amnesia via Land-Based Sensory Fieldwork

The authors, Geneve Berkenkamp, Surya Butterworth, Noah Derkat, Chelsea Godschild, Alison L. Grittner and Shane Yu combine film, poetry and photography to disrupt settler amnesia narratives regarding colonization of Canada.

Catastrophe colonialism: Global disaster films and the white right to migrate

ABSTRACT This article argues that post-9/11 global disaster films exemplify a social imaginary preparing white, Western subjects to envision settler (re)colonization of the Global South as the only option in the face of increasing ecological devastation. Using the films The Day After Tomorrow and 2012, I demonstrate how this catastrophe colonialism pairs the racialization of migration with the coloniality of disaster. Together, a perceived white right to migrate and colonial amnesia invert the material threat of crisis as experienced in the lived world to make (re)colonization appear as the natural response to global disaster.

I am Queen Mary

This article focuses on sustained protest through the I am Queen Mary statue, sitting in front of the West Indian Warehouse in Copenhagen’s waterfront. I am Queen Mary was co-created by artists La Vaughn Belle and Jeannette Ehlers, and inspired by Mary Thomas, a key figure of rebellion from the 1878 Fireburn labour revolt on St Croix against the ‘contractual servitude that continued to bind workers to the plantation system after the 1848 abolition of slavery’ (Ehlers and Belle n.d.). The statue is then ‘a hybrid of bodies, nations and narratives’ (Ehlers and Belle n.d.) that simultaneously invites the viewer into reflections on Denmark’s ‘colonial amnesia’ (Belle n.d., 2019; Ehlers and Belle n.d.; Stenum 2017; Odumosu 2019). Through the lens of Laura Shalson and Mary Lynne Gasaway Hill’s thinking on performance and protest, the following analyses I am Queen Mary from her artistic making, to the invitation into critical and reflective viewership and the necessary ongoing campaigning for a ‘permanent space to holistically tell the history of slavery and colonialism’ (Odumosu, 2019: 628).

Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination

Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination

Between “colonial amnesia” and “victimization biases”: Double standards in Italian cultural heritage law

AbstractThis article offers a critical appraisal of the evolution of Italian cultural heritage law with respect to issues of colonial and war restitution and of control over the import of potentially trafficked cultural property. As Italy is usually considered a “source country” and a victim of historical depredations, a form of “selective blindness” to its colonial past and to its role at the receiving end of both past and current misappropriations of cultural objects is discussed. Some recent restitutions of cultural property taken in times of colonial occupation are also analyzed as signs of a possible change in policy and practice, but the article also highlights the features of political expediency that have influenced them as well as the many legal and practical obstacles still to be faced by restitution and repatriation claims. Finally, the potential effects of recent (mostly international) inputs on Italy’s cultural heritage policy are presented.

Colonial genocide and the German-Namibian ‘reconciliation agreement’

It has been a ‘blind spot’ in Western history that the German empire in the early 20th century ranked fourth in terms of the size of colonial territories. There remains ‘colonial amnesia’ in German...

‘Ecobordering’: casting immigration control as environmental protection

ABSTRACT Based on an analysis of 22 European far-right parties, we identify an emergent discourse in environmental politics, which we conceptualise as ‘ecobordering’. This discourse seeks to blame immigration for national environmental degradation, which draws on colonial and racialised imaginaries of nature in order to rationalise further border restrictions and ‘protect’ the ‘nativist stewardship’ of national nature. As such, ecobordering seeks to obscure the primary driving causes of the ecological crisis in the entrenched production and consumption practices of Global North economies, whilst simultaneously shifting blame on to migration from the Global South where ecological degradation has been most profound. In an era of increasing climate migration, ecobordering thereby portrays effects as causes and further normalises racist border practices and colonial amnesia within Europe.

Abolition of a National Paradigm

The “geography” of the Balkans is “prisoner” to a double discursive “incarceration”: externally, within the field of balkanism and internally, within the national paradigm. “Geography” is a symbolically inscribed region, and the Balkans’ historical legacy defines the region as a specific “geography,” however national paradigm defines historical legacy. If the national paradigm were abolished, this would rupture the chain of top-down signification and leave the geography open to a multitude of intersecting histories. To this end, this essay examines two canons of national paradigms: those of Benedict Anderson and Maria Todorova. Central to each paradigm is the incommensurability thesis of nationalism and racism, race, and nationality. To argue the opposite to their thesis – that modern nations are racial formations, that nation is not imagined but rather racialized communities – this essay strategically uses “race” to show how the national paradigm recycles Eurocentric colonial amnesia and inscribes the Balkans “geography” as raceless.

Signifying Aboriginal Identity, Culture and Country in Central Queensland Through a Public Art Project

Abstract Alongside Toonooba (the Fitzroy River) in central Queensland, a series of Aboriginal flood markers are embedded within the earth, commanding attention to the river that flows on one side and the colonial infrastructure of Rockhampton that lies on the other. The flood markers are part of an arts project commissioned by the Queensland Government in 2013 to mark Rockhampton’s history and its relationship to the river. The flood markers, named Honouring Land Connections, assert Indigenous voices into discourses of place, particularly discourses about the significance of rivers on Country. This article explores how art represents wider socio-cultural and politicised contexts of Indigenous and non-Indigenous discourse. The authors discuss the artworks as a form of social action that signifies Rockhampton as an Indigenous space with a history that cannot be neatly divided into three time periods. Any suggestion that Honouring Land Connections represents Rockhampton’s precolonial period disregards Indigenous people’s ongoing connections with and responsibilities for Country. The artworks signify contested spaces, places and knowledge of Country, culture, and waterways. Honouring Land Connections maintains cultural connections and speaks back to White preconceptions of Indigeneity. The artists wage war on the selective readings and colonial amnesia in Australia to directly challenge notions of terra nullius and intellectual nullius. This article shows how art can facilitate interaction through which Aboriginal artists can affirm, negotiate, share, and explore their identities while challenging dominant Eurocentric preconceptions of place and identity.

Confronting Colonial Amnesia

Abstract Colonial injustice has suffered from the effects of amnesia in international law. Law has served as an instrument to justify injustice in the past and to silence its contemporary effects. The rise of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, TWAIL scholarship and the current debate on racism, slavery and return of cultural colonial objects illustrate the ongoing effects of colonialism. Some seemingly neutral principles and institutions of international law contribute to colonial amnesia. This contribution argues that it is time to revisit this status quo. It draws on emerging case law, scholarship and practices to identify news ways of relational engagement with the past. It suggests a re-reading of three fundamental dimensions of post-colonial engagement with colonial injustice: intertemporality, legal subjectivity and the approach towards cultural colonial objects. It claims that international criminal law has only a modest role in relation to colonial crimes. However, some wider lessons and methods from the field of transitional justice may help to mitigate contemporary dilemmas and contribute to a more post-colonial international law.

Picturing Forgotten Filipinx: Family Photographs and Resisting U.S. Colonial Amnesias

U.S. imperialism in the Philippines has led to the multiple generations of diasporic conditions of colonial amnesia and systematic forgetting of history. Its impact on the Filipinx community has left unrecorded memories and voices of immigrants silenced, and considered lost to history. This study examines the relationship between U.S. colonialism and imperialism in the Philippines and the experiences of Filipinx immigration to the U.S. through a critical Indigenous feminist lens of visual imagery and storytelling. Given that many of the experiences within the Filipinx diaspora in relation to the American Empire have been systematically forgotten and erased, this study utilizes family photographs in framing the challenges and reinscribes harmful hegemonic U.S. colonial and imperial narratives. With a combination of semi-structured interviews and photo analysis as a form of visual storytelling, the family photographs within the Filipinx diaspora may reframe, challenge, and resist hegemonic U.S. colonial and imperial narratives by holding memories of migration, loss, family belonging, and community across spatial and generational boundaries that attempt to erase by the U.S. nation-state. Results shed light on resistance and survivance through bayanihan (community care) spirit.

Anti-gypsyism, racial knowledge and colonial amnesia

This intervention brings together insights from race critical theories and historical sociology to provide a framework for understanding the longstanding racism against Romani people across Europe. It directly draws on Picker's 2017 monograph Racial Cities , and argues that in order to understand the racial segregation of Romani people in Europe, racial knowledge and colonial amnesia should be squarely placed at the core of analytical scrutiny and political intervention. The reason for this is that when looking at several cases of urban authorities' actions on Romani people in 21st-century Europe, key similarities can be detected with colonial authories's actions on "natives" in the cities of European empires. This intervention brings together insights from race critical theories and historical sociology to provide a framework for understanding the longstanding racism against Romani people across Europe. It directly draws on Picker's 2017 monograph Racial Cities , and argues that in order to understand the racial segregation of Romani people in Europe, racial knowledge and colonial amnesia should be squarely placed at the core of analytical scrutiny and political intervention. The reason for this is that when looking at several cases of urban authorities' actions on Romani people in 21st-century Europe, key similarities can be detected with colonial authories's actions on "natives" in the cities of European empires.

Revealing and Revelling in the Floods on Country: Memory Poles within Toonooba

Revealing and Revelling in the Floods on Country: Memory Poles within Toonooba

The Caribbean Scorpion

Sweden became a slaveholding nation when it acquired its only Caribbean colony, Saint-Barthélemy—a.k.a. St. Barths or St. Barts—from France in 1784. When the island was retroceded in 1878, the records created during ninety-four years of Swedish Caribbean rule were left behind and are now held in France. Examining the history of this archive that stands as a metaphor for Swedish colonial amnesia, this essay discusses the reluctance in Sweden to recognize a past that goes against a self-image untainted by slavery and colonialism. The essay also discusses a project that aims to open the archive to a larger audience through digitization.

Introduction

Introduction

Colonizing cuts of labyrinth mythology, a tangling parable of white sensibilities

This article demonstrates the way wounds, and affects generally, are figured by the writing of history. It traces patterns of thinking about the labyrinth primarily in histories, theories, and myths of the past 150 years to demonstrate how the labyrinth has been cut by colonization. From the Mycenaean colonization of Indigenous Cretans (inaccurately named “Minoans”) to the emergence of white feminism and its present day practice, figures of the labyrinth iteratively cut history to perpetuate the un/common loss of colonized communities and to enact white racist sensibilities of exclusion. Entangling Karen Barad’s cutting together-apart and Kent Ono’s colonial amnesia, colonizing cuts are constitutive exclusions that wound and exclude colonized communities from history and world making.