Colonial Matrix Research Articles

Coloniality and tourism: the fabric of identities and alterities in India

Country crossed by the colonial matrix, India constitutes a relevant example for thinking about tourist situations and showing how institutional (Indian government) and non-institutional actors (companies, domestic tourists, members of the diaspora) mobilize tourist imaginaries for support or redefine collective identities and alterities - even sometimes reinforce them. This contribution seeks, on the one hand, to question the processes by which tourism in India has become a political instrument, facilitating the rewriting the national myth by erasing the stigma of colonization while reifying the West, and on the other hand, to show, from intermediate situations – the Indian diaspora and Indian domestic tourism - how hybridizations are forged in which post- and decolonial paradigms act on identities.

The Struggle to Decolonize Official Knowledge in Texas’ State Curriculum: Side-Stepping the Colonial Matrix of Power

ABSTRACTThis article relies primarily on both postcolonial theory and Critical Indigenous Studies to demonstrate how the Mexican American Studies (MAS) PreK-12 Committee of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Tejas Foco, or chapter, successfully waged battle in getting the Texas State Board of Education to officially incorporate Ethnic Studies, generally, and MAS, specifically, into state curriculum. I situate this struggle in Texas against the backdrop of the fight for MAS in the Tucscon Unified School District in Tucson, Arizona, and make the case for the valuable role that a collectively-shared, Chicana feminist mestiza consciousness played in our ultimate victory, even as we faced, a formidable “colonial matrix of power” embedded in official, social studies curriculum. Drawing on both postcolonial theory and Critical Indigenous Studies, I develop the argument that this colonial matrix of power has deep roots that find expression today in vexed Anglo-Mexican race relations in both Texas and Arizona. In Texas, this has been historically manifest in social studies curricula, alongside deep-seated white supremacist ideology and state structures like the Texas State Board of Education and the Texas State Legislature. Via an Anzaldúan Chicana feminist mestiza consciousness, this article further situates MAS at a theoretical crossroads of postcolonial theory and Critical Indigenous Studies.

Decolonizing the Study of Religion

As with many other subject areas within the humanities, the contemporary study of religion is the product of European colonial history and remains firmly embedded in what Anibal Quijano (2007) described as the ‘colonial matrix of power’. This article explores questions about how to respond to these structures of history — in particular what the concept of ‘decolonization’ may mean and how it may be applied within the context of the study of religion. Such decolonization should be approached as not simply an exercise in ‘diversity’ but rather as a challenge to (and potentially a dismantling of) the field of study. Such an approach is relevant not only to those scholars who identify within the disciplinary boundaries of the ‘study of religion’ (or religious studies), but much wider to the broad academic study of (what is thought of as) ‘religion’ within humanities and social sciences. This article is, in short, an attempt to map out some of the key points about such a decolonization, in terms of curriculum and research practice, on the disciplinary level and within the wider institutional structures of the academy.

Geographies of the Pluriverse: Decolonial Thinking and Ontological Conflict on Colombia’s Pacific Coast

Recent debates in decolonial thinking have engaged the notion of the pluriverse to question the concept of universality at the heart of Western epistemology and hermeneutics that has historically underpinned processes of colonial domination and exploitation. The idea of the pluriverse calls for a coexistence of many worlds as an acknowledgment of the entanglements of diverse cosmologies. These entanglements are often of a conflictual nature, in that different ways of being in the world are intricately linked through the colonial matrix of power, leading to what has been termed ontological conflicts. Although much of this literature on decoloniality is highly sophisticated on a conceptual level, it often displays a dearth of ethnographic evidence, which would strengthen its theoretical claims. In this article I attend to this critique by first reviewing the principal arguments regarding the pluriverse and ontological conflicts to then offer an in-depth examination of what such a pluriverse might actually look like in particular places. For this I examine the world in the Pacific coast region of Colombia that is constituted through what I call the aquatic space—an assemblage of relations resulting from human entanglements with an aquatic environment characterized by intricate river networks, significant tidal ranges, and labyrinthine mangrove swamps. This aquatic space, I argue, has informed the political organization of Afro-Colombian communities in the region in a conflict with capitalist modernity, which, crucially, is not merely about land rights and resource extraction but an ontological conflict over ways of being in the world. I finish by suggesting that the pluriverse constitutes a third space, challenging our accustomed ways of thinking spatially and ontologically. Key Words: Afro-Colombia, aquatic space, coloniality of power, modernity, third space.

Anti-fascism

This article stresses the need for an investigation into how the wounds of colonialism are treated in the West European public sphere. It uses a decolonial lens to look specifically at artistic actions in the form of both monuments and interventions in existing public space that reference European guilt around the genocidal crimes of colonial occupation and the Holocaust. In the course of the research it became clear that little comparative work has been done on the monuments to these two catastrophes. The article therefore serves more as an introduction to the reasons why the Holocaust and colonial violence might be brought into closer relationship with each other, arguing that establishing such a relationship through public art, among other sites of critique, can and should contribute to contemporary articulations of anti-fascism in Europe. The article looks at art monuments by Jochen Gerz and Hans Haacke in the 1980s and 1990s and laments the lack of similar responses to colonialism in the continent. It looks further at more recent anti-colonial and decolonial public actions and at a few artists, such as Yael Bartana, who do draw parallels between the Holocaust and other genocides. Finally, the article speculates on how future monuments might respond to a broader understanding of the causes of land occupations, slave labour, ethnic cleansing and mass murder by thinking about the colonial matrix of power as a common European epistemology that developed after 1492.

Dancing the rainbow nation as it bleeds: the Surialanga Dance Company in post-apartheid South Africa

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes the work of the Surialanga Dance Company of Durban, South Africa, which debuted at Nelson Mandela's inauguration in 1994. Inspired by Mandela's vision of intercultural harmony and created through sustained engagement with Zulu culture, Surialanga created a uniquely South African version of Indian classical Bharatanatyam that threatens colonial and apartheid constructs of “pure” Indian identity. But the company's powerful decolonial message has become less resonant in a post-apartheid context that continues to be structured by what Ndlovu-Gatsheni has called the “colonial matrix of power,” a legacy of colonialism and apartheid that results in a narrow focus on ethnic and racial identities. Drawing both from direct participation and interviews with the director and company members (2001–2008; 2018), this article traces the history of Surialanga's decolonising praxis from Mandela's inauguration to the present, arguing for the continued salience of Surialanga's dance, even in the face of particularism and violence.

Performing the Hyphen

Abstract: The goal of this paper is to present a decolonising research methodology. The first section of this paper problematises western knowledge production, using Aníbal Quijano’s colonial matrix of power. The second section theorises how an epistemological pluralism that is critical, decolonising and performative could address western knowledge production and the colonial matrix of power. The third section discusses how this methodology has been applied to Butoh to develop Critical Butoh. The final section presents He rawe tona kakahu/ She wore a becoming dress, a Butoh performance exploring the intersection of gender and colonisation, as a practical application of this methodology.

The Flags of Time: Temporal Decoloniality in Casa de areia and O ano em que meus pais saíram de férias

In the films Casa de areia (2005) and O ano em que meus pais saíram de férias (2006), time serves as an avatar of the larger colonial matrix. Though both films explore other expressions of coloniality, such as race, ethnicity, gender, assimilation, and politics, what sets them apart is that their disobedience against colonial forces takes place on a temporal plane. Both protagonists, Áurea and Mauro, find themselves on geographic or social islands, wrestling against the power of time. Áurea’s story highlights many of the scientific issues of time reckoning. Mauro’s involves rejecting the fusion of a political and temporal colonial project during the 1970 World Cup. In crucial instances of disorientation for each character, they "delink" from colonial paradigms of time, revealing that neither coloniality nor time itself is absolute.

From Institutional Critique to Institutional Liberation? A Decolonial Perspective on the Crises of Contemporary Art

Over the past decade, we have witnessed a proliferation of self-organized activist initiatives taking aim at the institutions of the art system. From the Guggenheim to the Brooklyn Museum, institutions have been targeted for their complicity in perpetuating, neglecting, or concealing various forms of injustice. These developments have involved a simultaneous decentering of authority and an intensification of accountability. Looking beyond the art-historical legacies of institutional critique, which is often invoked to analyze these developments, “From Institutional Critique to Institutional Liberation?“ offers a decolonial perspective on the political crises of contemporary art, one grounded in the work of movement-building. It argues that without acknowledging and confronting the “colonial matrix of power” that binds white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and settler violence, activist engagements with art institutions are liable to remain confined to single-issue campaigns lacking in solidarity with one another and easily neutralized by their targets. Decolonize This Place, an ongoing artistico-political formation best known for its three-month conversion of Artists Space into a “movement undercommons” in 2016, is presented as one example of what decolonial organizing could look like when the art system and contemporary liberation struggles meet.

Interwar Romania and the Greening of the Iron Cage: The Biopolitics of Dimitrie Gusti, Virgil Madgearu, Mihail Manoilescu, and Ştefan Zeletin

This study examines the reconfiguration of the colonial matrix of power along biopolitical lines in interwar Romania. I reconstruct a shifting field of human sciences and governmentality whose cognitive interest resided in identifying the proper template for national subject-making and social modernization. This undertaking was predicated on diagnosing economic, political, and cultural blockages hindering the transformation of Romanian peasants into active political subjects. Building human capacity in the full, renewable, and open-ended sense implied by the term “bios” was seen as essential to overcoming what world-systems scholars would later characterize as conditions of dependency. But the empowerment/ knowledge inherent in the biopoliticization of national development was simultaneously circumscribed and enabled by its transformation into power/knowledge mechanisms. I thus show the strong linkages between economics, sociology, and biopolitical theorizing during that era. Drawing on Weberian notions of the iron cage, Foucauldian approaches, decolonial thought, and the concept of alternative modernities, I examine several important projects of national development. These are exemplified by Dimitrie Gusti, Virgil Madgearu, Mihail Manoilescu, and Ştefan Zeletin. Said projects were based on analyses that reveal how Romania’s domestic status quo, peripheral characteristics, and role in the international political economy were conceptualized at the time. Furthermore, the biopolitical visions and alternative modernity programs advanced by these thinkers were imagined as upgraded variations of the Weberian iron cage. These variants were geared towards creating subjects capable of reproducing their distinctive internal economic, social, and political logics. In this way, these competing modernity projects, which were connected with well-defined organizational actors, helped crystallize the broader interwar colonial matrix within Romania.

Imaginarios y estrategias decoloniales

Enunciando el delinking de la matriz moderna/ colonial, este artículo imagina un territorio crítico teórico creativo partiendo de la aesthesis decolonial con el fin de dialogar con una serie de hacedores culturales que emplean estrategias creativas decoloniales en proyectos creativos. Un acercamiento a la exposición Haceres Decoloniales (2015) realizada en Bogotá, ofrece la oportunidad de conversar sobre el hacer creativo de Benvenuto Chavajay, Rosa Tisoy Tandoy y Marco Alonso Roa. Los efectos de la colonialidad sonora conllevan a dialogar con la artista maya k´iche Sandra Monterroso y el creador maya yucateco Isaac Carrillo Can. Discursamos sobre el proyecto Espejo Negro (2010) de Pedro Lasch y el mural Las Aguas Sagradas de La Llorona (2004) de la artista xicana Juana Alicia. Terminamos con una interpretación crítica sobre el proyecto Mariposa Memoria Ancestral (2013-2015), y el performance multidisciplinario Whip It Good (2013) de la artista danesa trinitobaguense Jeannette Ehlers.

Fidel and The Tricontinental Imagination

Fidel and The Tricontinental Imagination Aditya Nigam (bio) Recently a Left-wing music group from Delhi, Parcham, uploaded a Hindi version of the song "Guantanamera," the Cuban folk song revolutionized by the poetry of Jose Marti. In part, it was an exercise in nostalgia about what we had left behind, but in equal measure it was still a longing for a future that many of us had come to associate with the Cuban Revolution and the figures of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. If Che was the perennial revolutionary, the figure of Fidel increasingly embodied for us, in our youthful revolutionary days, the "tricontinental" imagination—that is, the coming together of the oppressed peoples of three continents: Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In this imagination the small Caribbean island offering dogged resistance to the big bully in the North appeared as a powerful voice of support and solidarity for us all. We knew that "Guantanamera" was not just a plaintive love song, it was a song that embodied the fighting spirit of Cuba. And clearly its resonances were felt in similar ways elsewhere in the three continents as well. In October 2016, some of us were in Johannesburg for a workshop on Democratic Marxism. The Rhodes Must Fall movement, begun in Cape Town, had galvanized the very air of Johannesburg—and indeed all of South Africa. Acquiring massive dimensions, the struggle had transformed into the militant Fees Must Fall campaign for the democratization of higher education. One evening, after the workshop, our hosts took us to a restaurant with live music. Well into the night, as we were preparing to leave, the band suddenly started singing "Guantanamera," and the effect was electrifying. Almost everyone present joined in, we were singing an inspiring collective anthem. [End Page 320] What does this have to do with Fidel? And why talk of him today, in 2017? To my mind, the tricontinental spirit embodied the spirit of decolonization and was part of a process that has acquired newer dimensions today. It has been noted by analysts that it was the first Tricontinental Conference that not only brought together towering figures like Amilcar Cabral, Salvador Allende, and Fidel Castro, but also helped, along with unwavering Cuban support, the Palestinian cause enter into Latin American consciousness. At one level, we could say that even today, in 2018, the "colonial matrix of power" (Quijano; Escobar) continues to structure our world, and imperialist bullying across the three continents continues unabated. That legacy of decolonization, therefore, continues to be important for us today. But that perhaps does not tell us the whole story. For too long have we labored under the illusion that while we fight imperialist bullying and domination we can happily continue to build capitalism "in our own way" in our respective societies. Capitalism, after all, was also supposed to be about liberating ourselves from so-called backwardness and underdevelopment. For it was the agent of history just as colonialism—its overseas adventure—was an "unconscious tool of History." Even though there were theorists who proclaimed "underdevelopment" at one pole to be structurally linked to "development" at the other, the fascination for capitalism continued to hold its seduction through the desire for development. It is only in recent times that the realization has started dawning among some sections of the Left that capitalism, in any form, is antithetical to the very existence of humankind. It is perhaps time to recognize that "capitalism" is not just an economic system (or a mode of production) ordained by history to unite the whole world into a modern cosmopolitanism. Rather, "capitalism" and "the economy" are Euro-America's poisonous gifts to humanity, for it is through the institution of bourgeois private property and the idea of "the economy" as an autonomous domain with its own self-fulfilling logic that the hegemony of the West is established over our minds. It is only now that we have seriously begun to appreciate how deeply and constitutively this hegemony is tied to the genocide of indigenous populations and racial slavery—tied to the idea that these are merely accidental by-products [End Page 321] of an otherwise emancipatory discourse through which the West colonized...

The Future of the Witness: Nature, Race and More-than-Human Environmental Publics

Taking leave from obstacles to the creation of an 'environmental public' in contemporary post-apartheid South Africa and the political silencing and objectification of both nature and racialised subjects, this article interrogates and seeks to expand a specific figure: that of the witness. In the broader, global context of environmental violence, the witness – who, according to classical theories of testimony, is a sovereign subject who speaks in their own name – is considered in the context of constructed categories of active/passive and subject/object as these play out across race, nature and shifting conceptions of the human. The title, 'the future of the witness', prompts two questions: (i) In the context of (missing) environmental publics, in what ways we must reconceptualise the figure of the witness – on ontological, epistemological and political levels – as we move into the future? (ii) Faced with ever-escalating Anthropocenic destruction, is it possible for a witness to testify not only to past events and experiences, as per the generally accepted temporal schema of witnessing, but also to ongoing experiences that unfold into the future? In responding to these questions, it is argued (a) that the witness can no longer be considered as an isolated figure, but rather must be conceived as part of a testimonial constellation; and (b) that, in responding to ecological concerns, this constellation must be a more-than-human collective: an entangled form of sociality between humans and nonhumans that does not take recourse to modernist categories of 'human' and 'nature'. Moving, via South Africa, from the European Holocaust to global humanitarian and forensic practices, through European and North American science and technology studies as well as Amerindian thinking, the article gathers a generalised set of questions and propositions that might in turn be folded back into specific locales. Key is the classic postcolonial question of who ought to or has the right to speak in the name of whom. Where the witness is often denied self-representation or, more gravely, entirely absent or missing, the article surveys various practices of supplementary witnessing. However, such practices ofen find themselves caught within a representational dilemma whereby, despite the necessity of defending the rights of humans and nonhumans alike, 'speaking for' or 'giving voice' to dispossessed or missing subjects – including nature – runs the risk of further replicating the original colonial matrix of being, knowledge and power that is being contested. Drawing from aesthetic and speculative practices, the article asks what possible strategies might be available for navigating the challenges of representation and for conceiving of more-than-human environmental publics that contest the neoliberal indivisualization of responsibilty and actively bear witness both to unfolding environmental degradation and possible more liveable futures.

Power, Knowledge, and Epistemic Delinking

In this paper I shall argue that radical epistemic delinking has a key role in liberation from the Colonial Matrix of Power as well as the change in the existing global power relations which are based in the colonialism and maintained through exploitation, expropriation and construction of the (racial) Other. Those power relations render certain bodies and spaces as (epistemologically) irrelevant. In order to discuss possible models of struggle against such condition, firstly I have addressed the relation between de-colonial theories and postcolonial studies, arguing that decolonial positions are both historicising and re-politicising the postcolonial theory. In my central argument I have focused on the epistemic delinking and political implications of decolonial turn. With reference to Grada Killomba I have argued for the struggle against epistemic violence through decolonising knowledge. Decolonising knowledge requires delinking form Eurocentric model of knowledge production and radical dismantling the existing hierarchies among different knowledge. It requires recognition of the ‘Other epistemologies’ and ‘Other knowledge’ as well as liberation from Western disciplinary and methodological limitations. One of the main goals of decolonial project is deinking from the Colonial Matrix of Power. However, delinking is not required only in the areas of economy and politics but also in the field of epistemology.

Aboriginal laws and colonial foundation

ABSTRACTFirst Nations Peoples of this continent we now call Australia experienced the violence of colonialism for longer than the coloniser and now the Australian state is prepared to admit. A more than 150-year frontier war has been passed off as peaceful settlement. This was a lie. Terra nullius was another lie, if terra nullius was the truth why was there a frontier war. This war enabled the invasion and colonisation of Aboriginal lands. While ‘justice’ remains overdue, this paper examines how it is the Australian state has mythologised the rejection of terra nullius. And at the same time normalising the Australian colonial project. This paper considers how it is we might move beyond the colonial matrix of impossibility and ‘skeletal foundation.’

El Caribe se traduce: la traducción como praxis descolonial en las revistas Tropiques, Bim y Casa de las Américas

This article investigates the translation practice of three influential twentieth-century Caribbean journals: Tropiques, Bim, and Casa de las Americas. It offers a comparative description of their translation praxis taking into account the editorial vision of each and the specificity of its translation practice, focusing specifically on the origin and selection of translated texts. The analysis aims to take translation as a starting point and as a key element to understand the journals’ narrative praxis and to shed light on the relationship between intellectual production and the so-called colonial matrix. The article discusses translation practices in light of broader editorial practices and of the extent to which each journal realizes, via translation, its decolonial possibilities. Ultimately, it seeks to reveal the contours of an image of the Caribbean that emerges from each journal’s discursive fabric.

Harnessing Social Media to Promote Arab-centric Understanding of Middle East Affairs

It has been nearly a generation since Edward Said, Michel Foucault and Homi Bhabha pointed out the invariable effects of the dominant discourse on the ‘other’, such as the stereotyped depiction of the Arab world in the global media. This essay argues that one of the reasons for the entrenched stereotypes relate to a historical colonial and imperial power matrix. It excavates a few of these critical ideas and queries whether the limitations of social media on the dominant discourse can be understood through this theoretical lens. It aims to provide a better understanding of how a more Arab-centric understanding of Middle East affairs can be fostered through social media.

Statues Also Die

“African thinking,” “African thought,” and “African philosophy.” These phrases are often used indiscriminately to refer to intellectual activities in and/or about Africa. This large field, which sits at the crossroads between analytic philosophy, continental thought, political philosophy and even linguistics is apparently limitless in its ability to submit the object “Africa” to a multiplicity of disciplinary approaches. This absence of limits has far-reaching historical origins. Indeed it needs to be understood as a legacy of the period leading to African independence and to the context in which African philosophy emerged not so much as a discipline as a point of departure to think colonial strictures and the constraints of colonial modes of thinking. That the first (self-appointed) exponents of African philosophy were Westerners speaks volumes. Placide Tempels but also some of his predecessors such as Paul Radin (Primitive Man as Philosopher, 1927) and Vernon Brelsford (Primitive Philosophy, 1935) were the first scholars to envisage this extension of philosophy into the realm of the African “primitive.” The material explored in this article – Statues Also Die (Marker, Resnais, and Cloquet), Bantu Philosophy (Tempels), The Cultural Unity of Negro Africa (Cheikh Anta Diop), and It For Others (Duncan Campbell) - resonates with this initial gesture but also with the ambition on part of African philosophers such as VY Mudimbe to challenge the limits of a discipline shaped by late colonialism and then subsequently recaptured by ethnophilosophers. Statues Also Die is thus used here as a text to appraise the limitations of African philosophy at an early stage. The term “stage,” however, is purely arbitrary and the work of African philosophers has since the 1950s often been absorbed by an effort to retrieve African philosophizing practices before, or away from, the colonial matrix. This activity has gained momentum and has been characterized by an ambition to excavate and identify figures and traditions that had hitherto remained unacknowledged: from Ptah-hotep in ancient Egypt (Obenga 1973, 1990) and North-African Church fathers such as Saint Augustine, Tertullian and Arnobius of Sicca (Mudimbe and Nkashama 1977), to “falsafa”-practising Islamic thinkers (Diagne 2008; Jeppie and Diagne 2008), from the Ethiopian tradition of Zera Yacob and Walda Heywat (Sumner 1976), to Anton-Wilhelm Arno, the Germany-trained but Ghana-born Enlightenment philosopher (Hountondji [1983] 1996).

Media, Race and Capital: A Decolonial Analysis of Representation of Miners’ Strikes in South Africa

ABSTRACTThis article explores media representation of a strike at Lonmin Platinum Mine in Marikana in August 2012, in which the police gunned down 34 miners. Data was collected from randomly selected articles from South African English-language print media. My main argument is that the South African print media provided coverage of the strike that privileged mining interests and generally ignored the concerns and voices of the miners. Using a combination of decolonial and neo-Marxist critical political economy of the media theoretical approaches, I suggest the media in South Africa operates in a global ‘colonial matrix of power’ that (re)produce dominant discourses and ideologies that favour elite interests. The article concludes with some remarks on the need for media in South Africa to adopt a different ethical and normative framework that gives voice to silenced and marginalised voices.

Decolonizing knowledge: neoliberalism beyond the three worlds

ABSTRACTThis article argues that critiques of neoliberalism tend to rely on and reproduce the coloniality of knowledge. It analyzes how recent academic scholarship has mobilized the notion of neoliberalism to make sense of postsocialist transformations and identifies in it an epistemological meta-geography that reproduces the three-worlds scheme, a specific Cold War era articulation of the colonial matrix of power. The article traces various ways in which this meta-geography has structured academic debates on postsocialist neoliberalism. It emphasizes the importance of moving beyond the spatial and temporal infrastructure of the three worlds, and identifies a set of epistemological alternatives that would enable decentering this infrastructure. In conclusion, the paper argues that although postsocialism has received relatively little attention in attempts to decolonize knowledge, it has potential to serve as a critical form of thought in destabilizing Eurocentric assumptions in theorizing neoliberalism and opening up spaces for imagining the world differently.