Colonial History Research Articles

Between Remembrance and Forgetting: Memory and the Concept of Home in Map of the Invisible World

ABSTRACT This essay examines the complex interplay between memory and homemaking in Malaysian Chinese novelist Tash Aw’s novel Map of the Invisible World (2009), conceptualizing home not as a fixed origin but as a space of fluid belonging situated on a continuum between past and present. It argues that memory shapes and destabilizes the protagonists’ sense of belonging, beginning with an analysis of Adam’s and Karl’s understanding of home. Challenging essentialized connections between memory and home, the essay further explores Margaret’s homemaking practices, which prioritize immediate experiences over memories of the ancestral homeland. The protagonists’ struggles with remembering and forgetting epitomize the dilemma of the postcolonial nation-state, which navigates colonial history and establishes a new national identity. The analysis reveals how Aw’s novel advocates for an equilibrium between remembering and forgetting. Map of the Invisible World portrays both homemaking and nation-building as ongoing and incomplete processes that involve the interaction between historical complexities and present realities.

Beyond spatial bias: Understanding the colonial legacies and contemporary social forces shaping biodiversity data

Abstract With over 2 billion observations of species from across the earth, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) has become an influential repository of information for not only ecologists, but also conservation scientists and policy makers. Yet biodiversity data reveal more than species distributions. They reflect colonial histories, economic inequities, and cultural differences. This article argues for moving beyond ideas of “spatial bias” in conservation science to highlight the colonial legacies and contemporary social forces that shape biodiversity data. Drawing on interviews with the GBIF staff and data publishers as well as critical mapping of GBIF data patterns, we visualize and analyze how and why colonial patterns persist and shift in this global biodiversity data. To explain diverse trajectories of postcolonial production of data, we identify three social forces–colonial legacies of collecting, infrastructures of international development, and contemporary data cultures–that structure biodiversity observation distributions and data ownership and availability. Together, these findings demonstrate how, even in the age of open access, colonial and postcolonial practices and politics continue to shape what we know about the natural world.

Black Joy as Resistance: Exploring the Lives of African Mothers in Helsinki Through an Abolitionist Lens

ABSTRACT Social work, as a profession rooted in social justice, advocates for marginalized groups. However, social work literature and curricula often depict Black communities through controlling images that emphasize social problems over resilience. The concept of Nordic exceptionalism portrays Finland as a welfare society, largely ignoring its colonial history, neoliberal influences, and ongoing racism. Despite this, contemporary austerity measures in Finland align with the processes identified by abolitionist social work as foundational to the development of a carceral welfare state. This article introduces the concept of Black joy as a counter-narrative to these controlling images within Finnish society. It examines Black joy through the experiences of African mothers living in Helsinki, using their own words and images. By analyzing texts and photographs provided by these mothers, the article employs thematic analysis to understand how these mothers view African motherhood in Finland. Key themes identified include the significance of embracing African culture, resilience, unconditional love, and viewing children as the future. The article concludes by discussing the implications for enhancing Finnish social work education by challenging controlling images of African mothers.

Crossroads of consciousness: whose decolonization is it in Nigeria?

The call for decolonial discourse has increasingly gained global purchase, yet its growing visibility often masks an unresolved question: who possesses the voice and agency to participate in these conversations? This paper tries to answer this question within the context of Nigeria, where the impacts of colonial history persist in education and societal norms. Through an autoethnographic approach, we reflect on our experiences growing up and schooling in Nigeria and, subsequently, the UK for postgraduate education to interrogate how these encounters have shaped our understanding of colonialism and de/coloniality. We propose a novel framework to structure our narratives that maps key decolonial erasure and rediscovery stages. These stages illustrate how systemic barriers within Nigeria’s educational systems obscure colonial histories and hinder decolonial engagement. We appropriate Habermas’s public sphere and Fricker’s concept of hermeneutical injustice as theoretical incisions to illuminate how power dynamics influence the availability of critical spaces for decolonial discussions and how knowledge disparities create interpretive limitations. This study offers insight into the lived dimensions of decolonial engagement, questioning its accessibility and resonance beyond intellectual circles. It also contributes to ongoing efforts to bridge decolonial theory and practice by offering insights for more inclusive educational reforms and public engagement in Nigeria.

“Demand for Scheduled Tribe status for Adivasis in Assam, India”

ABSTRACT The demand for Scheduled Tribe (ST) recognition by Assam’s Adivasi community highlights deeper questions of identity, marginalization, and indigeneity in Northeast India. This paper explores how the Adivasis – descendants of tribal laborers brought from Central India during colonial times – remain excluded from ST lists in Assam despite being recognized as such in their places of origin. Using qualitative data drawn from field interviews and official documents, the study identifies three core dynamics in the Adivasi movement: the contradiction between their indigenous identity and their colonial migration history; the ambiguous and shifting stance of the Indian state; and the tensions with other tribal communities who oppose the inclusion of Adivasis. The paper argues that the Adivasis’ movement goes beyond affirmative action, representing a wider struggle for dignity, justice, and political voice. It concludes that their quest exposes the limits of current frameworks of recognition and belonging in Assam’s complex ethnic landscape.

Paramedics’ understandings and perceptions of cultural safety and the provision of culturally safe care

BackgroundAboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples experience persistent disadvantage and health inequity in today’s society. It is widely accepted that this is resultant of Australia’s colonial history. Current literature suggests that an increase in culturally safe care may assist in bettering the health outcomes of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander recipients of care. Research in nursing has suggested that cultural safety is largely misunderstood, however, there is no research into paramedic understanding of this approach.MethodsA qualitative descriptive design was adopted for this pilot study. Semi-structured interviews were held with six paramedics from December 2022 – February 2023. Interviews were transcribed verbatim, and data was analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Findings were then critiqued against the cultural safety framework and the democratic racism framework.ResultsData identified four major themes; characteristics of being culturally safe, approaches to clinical practice, inferiority stereotyping and education.ConclusionsLimited understanding of cultural safety was identified in participant voices. Participants did not display critical cultural reflection, and instead discourses within a democratic racism framework were present. This suggests that for this small qualitative study, paramedic practice is not underpinned by the principles of cultural safety, thus questioning the provision of culturally safe care.

Decolonization legacies and financial contributions to international organizations

Abstract This article examines why some states emerging through decolonization are more actively contributing to international organizations (IOs) than others, focusing on their voluntary financial contributions to the United Nations System (UN). I argue that the birth legacies of states, particularly modes of decolonization, significantly influence their subsequent financial contributions to the UN. A regression analysis of 95 former colonies, mandates, and dependencies suggests that states with a negative legacy – derelict decolonization – provide larger financial contributions to the UN. This finding highlights the impact of colonial history on state behavior within IOs and suggests that former colonies may seek active participation in global governance, valuing international resources highly.

Decolonising Counsellor Education: Exploring an Emerging Paradigm

ABSTRACTBackgroundDecolonisation has become an ubiquitous concept applied to myriad disciplines and programmes in academia in the United States. For counsellor educators, the construct is newly emerging, differentially understood, and only marginally acknowledged.MethodThrough a consensual qualitative research study, we explored the definition and application of decolonisation through 20 in‐depth qualitative interviews with 10 educators who train counsellors.ResultsThematic findings related to the defining constructs of decolonising are reported, including the complexities in operationalising the paradigm within participants’ respective training settings.ConclusionFindings suggest that decolonisation in counsellor education involves complex, fluid, and ambiguous definitions. Findings also alluded to how counsellor educators should interrogate the histories of their training, models, and professional standards, especially if they are steeped in colonial histories that enact violence on Indigenous communities. Findings described how counsellor educators can train practising counsellors to invite their clients to reflect on ways that leverage their community, medicines, knowledge, and relationship to land as a vehicle to restore their culture, spirituality, mind‐body connection, and Indigeneity. Related to policy, findings indicated that practising counsellors and counsellor educators dismantle healthcare guidelines underlying common treatment modalities, diagnosis and DSM structures, and insurance reimbursement, which can instigate harm and stigma for historically marginalised and Indigenous communities.

Engaging decolonial approaches to deracialize and humanize migrants.

We are continuing to live in unsettling times that demand responses from researchers, scholars and activists to create and mobilise knowledge for liberation, wellbeing, and justice. This commentary draws from my lived experience and research in migration that I use to highlight the rootshock of displacement and the contributions of community psychology to understand these impacts. The commentary invites engagement with the decolonial turn, the need to examine longer histories of colonization and imperialism and how these continue to shape understandings of self and others, and intergroup relations. The commentary also emphasizes decoloniality as a movement of embrace that involves expanding our ecologies of knowledge and practice to support critical solidarities for liberation, wellbeing, and justice.

Performing and Policing Prostitution: Race and Sexuality in Colonial Hong Kong Under the Contagious Diseases Ordinances.

This paper delves into the complex construction and regulation of prostitution in colonial Hong Kong, exploring how intersecting dynamics of race, gender, class, and sexuality influenced perceptions and governance. Drawing on intersectionality, doing gender, and performativity frameworks, it analyzes the role of patriarchal imperialist capitalism, medical expertise, and humanitarian networks in shaping colonial attitudes toward prostitution, particularly through the enactment of contagious diseases (CD) ordinances. Despite existing scholarship on imperial regulation, there is anotable gap regarding the nuanced construct of the prostitute herself and its impact on regulatory practices. Through examination of historical documents, the paper reveals the interdependence between colonial and domestic constructions of race, sexuality, and class, highlighting their influence on legislative approaches in Britain and its colonies. By situating Hong Kong within broader imperial networks and scrutinizing medico-moral discourse and capitalist imperatives, the study exposes contradictions in colonial regulation, emphasizing the enduring legacies of exploitation. It advocates for further research into the performance and policing of prostitution, stressing the necessity of an intersectional lens to comprehend the complexities of colonial history.

Firearms analogies and settler colonialism in US nuclear deterrence strategy

Nuclear strategy has long been formulated through analogies. We focus on one in particular: guns. Early nuclear strategists in the United States used multiple analogical comparisons to make sense of the new, apparently unprecedented technology that confronted them. They compared nuclear deterrence to gun dueling and the nuclear revolution itself to the rise of gunpowder on European battlefields. Both analogies invoked empire, in the form of American settler frontier gunfights and the impact of firearms on European expansion. This article offers a critical reading of them. We show both analogies were historically flawed, relying on outdated accounts of how firearms shaped military-political change. Our argument proceeds in three stages. First, we document the role of gun analogies in early US nuclear strategic writing. Second, we critically evaluate the analogy, showing its historical and analytical limits. Drawing on firearms literatures in history, sociology, criminology, and economics, we show that much of what we now know about firearms diverges from nuclear theory and history. Third, we develop an alternative interpretation, contrasting these analytical fictions with the actual history of nuclear colonialism.

Colonial Rule and the Power of Chiefs over Land Resources

Property rights over land—a pivotal asset in developing countries—exhibit significant variations across economies. Nonetheless, the causes for such variations remain open empirical questions. We focus on colonial rule, as Africa’s colonial history suggests that British rule may have entrenched the power of chiefs over land resources. Using micro-data, we find that chiefs in anglophone countries have greater authority in land allocation than their francophone counterparts. This result holds across various specifications, including discontinuity analysis focusing on observations near anglophone–francophone borders. This effect increases with the intensity of British indirect rule and with the formal recognition of chieftaincy by postcolonial states. The findings highlight the enduring impact of colonial rule on contemporary land institutions.

Re-imagining ‘Maratha’ Through Marriage and Kinship Strategies

Recent debate regarding reservation for the Marathas in the state of Maharashtra has not only reverberated across the nation but has also found similar echoes in the demands by the Jats and Gujjar communities in North India. Scholars have estimated that the Maratha (Maratha–Kunbi) caste cluster accounts for 33% to 40% of the total population of the state. To complicate matters, Kunbis have been included in the other backward class list of the Central Government in the 1990s during the implementation of Mandal Commission recommendations. To complicate matters, the Marathas, who are deeply intertwined with the Kunbis through marriage and kinship throughout precolonial and colonial history, have been denied the same. Colonial ethnography and local narratives suggest that the terms ‘Maratha’ and ‘Kunbi’ have been used interchangeably in the past. Moreover, the term ‘Maratha’ is multi-layered and when contextualised it could mean a linguistic group, a geographical community, a jati and even a feudal class. This article explores the historical conjectures and strategies employed by the political elite belonging to the Maratha–Kunbi caste cluster that facilitated this caste cluster to appropriate various identities ranging from kingship and kinship to martial race and also that of a peasant caste group.

“Nurse Flora, in Jamaica” and Her Afterlives

This article responds to the twin impulses of anticolonial literary and cultural studies of the Caribbean to create counter-archives that demonstrate the significance of colonized peoples and spaces to global modernity and to forge cultural memory from what Orlando Patterson and Derek Walcott call an “absence of ruins.” Taking a long historical view of one image, “Nurse Flora, in Jamaica,” from Maria Nugent’s Journal of Her Residence in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805, the article examines the image’s literary and visual afterlives from 1801 to the present day in order to show what the iterations of Flora reveal about our current approaches to archiving colonial images and texts, and to interrogate the processes and problems of representation that animate colonial histories.

Querying the Ecological Sublime: Colonial Aesthetics, Anticolonial Thought, and the “Double Fracture”

This article examines the ecological sublime in its relationship to the history of colonial aesthetics, anticolonial thought, and contemporary colonialism. It argues that, while Edmund Burke utilized the sublime in support of colonialism (including settler colonialism) in North America and colonial slavery, Samson Occom and Ottobah Cugoano developed versions of the sublime to contest British colonialism in the Americas. The history of this aesthetic contestation has not been represented in scholarship on the ecological sublime, which, this article shows, has a vexed relationship with historical and contemporary colonialism. The article argues that the ecological sublime exhibits the “double fracture” of modernity in its inadequate handling of the history of colonialism and environmentalism. It concludes by evaluating the potential of the ecological sublime for anticolonial uses by Indigenous and Black thinkers.

Cultural Deconstruction in Abdulrazak Gurnahs Refugee Narratives: A Postcolonial Reading

This study explores the intricate process of cultural deconstruction in the refugee-centered narratives of Abdulrazak Gurnah, specifically focusing on By the Sea, Desertion, and Afterlives. Through a postcolonial lens, the paper examines how Gurnah dismantles fixed notions of cultural identity by portraying characters caught between memory, migration, and historical erasure. His refugee protagonists challenge the binaries of homeland versus exile, tradition versus modernity, and self-versus other. The paper argues that Gurnah’s fiction presents culture as a fluid and contested terrain, shaped by colonial histories and diasporic realities. By employing fragmented narrative techniques and hybridized language, Gurnah reclaims marginalized voices and reconstructs the cultural self in exile. This research contributes to broader conversations in postcolonial and refugee studies by highlighting how literature can become a site of cultural resistance and transformation

Revisiting Colonial Historiography: The British Raj in Shashi Tharoor’s An Era of Darkness

Shashi Tharoor’s seminal work, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India, offers a critical examination of the British Raj and its profound impact on India. Published in 2016, Tharoor’s narrative challenges the long-standing myths of British benevolence and progress, presenting a comprehensive analysis of colonial exploitation, economic plunder, and cultural suppression. Through meticulous research and impassioned rhetoric, Tharoor explores the complex dynamics of imperial rule, detailing the systematic dismantling of India’s political institutions, economic structures, and socio-cultural fabric. Central to Tharoor’s argument is the debunking of the notion that British colonization was a benevolent force that modernized India. Instead, he exposes the brutal realities of British policies, from economic exploitation through mechanisms like the draining of India’s wealth to cultural denigration through deliberate efforts to undermine Indian identity and education systems. Tharoor draws extensively from historical records, parliamentary debates, and contemporary accounts to illustrate how British rule perpetuated poverty, exacerbated communal tensions, and laid the groundwork for enduring postcolonial challenges. Moreover, Tharoor’s critique extends beyond historical analysis to engage with contemporary implications, highlighting the persistence of colonial legacies in India’s socio-economic disparities and political discourse. By interrogating the ideological underpinnings of imperialism and its enduring impact on Indian national consciousness, Tharoor invites readers to reconsider narratives of colonial history and their implications for global power structures today. This abstract provides a foundational overview of Tharoor’s exploration, emphasizing its scholarly rigor, historical depth, and relevance to ongoing debates on colonialism’s legacy in postcolonial societies.

Unravelling Perceptions: Reviewing the Media Depictions of India-China Relations

India and China, as major Asian powers, share a complex relationship shaped by border disputes, regional competition, and diplomatic tensions. Anti-China sentiment in India, rooted in colonial history, has been intensified by incidents such as the Doklam and Galwan clashes. The media plays a crucial role in shaping public perceptions, influenced by nationalism, territorial issues, and geopolitical dynamics. This article employs agenda-setting theory to examine information control, propaganda, and content filtering within the media landscapes of both countries, and compares narratives across Indian, Chinese, and Western media outlets.

Geographical imaginaries of escape: Discourses of escapism in the Tasmanian archive

AbstractLifestyle migration and existential threats of the climate crisis are unified through the need for escape. Geographical imaginaries of distant, pristine refuges not only define contemporary relationships with these phenomena, but these imaginaries have their inception in colonialism. Research into how geography and colonial history influence imaginaries of escape is underdeveloped. This article uses the Australian island state of Tasmania to address this gap through a critical discourse analysis of online news articles, travel blogs, and history texts. These texts sample the Tasmanian archive and popular cultural discourses about Tasmania’s identity. Martin Polin’s bunker, the Earth’s Black Box project, and tourism and tree‐change emerge as key sites for showing how Western geographical imaginaries of Tasmania are reciprocally related to escapism. Analysing the archive through these texts reveals what place identities are deemed desirable in Tasmania, why and by whom, and illustrates how they are unequally distributed. Investigating escapism in Tasmania offers opportunities for similar analyses in other setter colonies and wilderness places, begins conversations about the relationships between apocalypticism, tourism, and migration, and asks how we may decolonise them.

Joseph-Pierre de Bonnécamps: A Jesuit Scientist Living in Turbulent Times

Joseph-Pierre de Bonnécamps, S.J. (1707–90), was a Jesuit scientist, educator, and hydrographer whose career intersected with key events in 18th-century French colonial history. Trained in mathematics and hydrography, he taught at the Jesuit College in Quebec (1744–59) and participated in the 1749 Céloron expedition, documenting geographic, botanical, and cultural observations in his journal. His meticulous measurements and maps contributed to French strategic efforts in North America. Following the fall of Quebec in 1759 and the suppression of the Jesuits in France, Bonnécamps returned to pastoral work, including a controversial assignment in Saint-Pierre. Ultimately, he spent his later years as a tutor and scientific observer in Brittany. His life offers insight into the roles Jesuits played as educators, scientists, and intermediaries between military, political, and Indigenous communities. This study reexamines Bonnécamps’s contributions, situating him within the broader scientific and geopolitical transformations of his time.