Colonial Past Research Articles

Reckoning with Colonial Legacies of Harm: Victoria’s Yoorrook Justice Commission

ABSTRACT Australia’s colonial era is formally over. Yet the legacies of structural inequality, dispossession, exploitation and racism against Indigenous Australia remain alive and well. In 2021, Victoria established the Yoorrook Justice Commission, culminating in a formal truth-telling and treaty process. Seeking to address harm since colonization, the state process is unprecedented both nationally and abroad. This article considers the relevance of the commission to truth recovery, accountability and structural reform in Australia. To date, national efforts to deal with the colonial past have been piecemeal and relatively ineffective. The Yoorrook Justice Commission departs from previous single-issue inquiries as well as from reconciliation policies driven by white-Australian federal institutions. While the Commission is not a panacea for resolving colonial injustice, it provides an important means of relational and structural truth-telling towards more just relations and righting racial wrongs. Ultimately, the Yoorrook Justice Commission sets a valuable precedent for Australia and other postcolonial nations. Its level of Indigenous ownership, its authority as a Royal Commission and the breadth of its inquiry make it a significant transitional justice project.

News media coverage of LGBT identities over 10 years in a 400-million-word corpus.

This study is the first to analyze LGBT portrayals in a news media dataset over a decade (2010-2020). We selected Singapore as a country of interest, emblematic of a nation grappling with state-encouraged heteronormativity and a remnant colonial law against homosexuality (377A), fraught with calls for its repeal that was only enacted in 2022. Our study is interested in this period bookended by challenge and change, particularly in newspaper portrayals of LGBT narratives. Newspapers are an important source of current information and have the power to shape societal perceptions. We lay the groundwork and provide a framework to analyze news media narratives of other Commonwealth nations with colonial pasts and inherited laws criminalizing LGBT communities. This study analyzes LGBT portrayals in a 400-million-word news media dataset over a decade (2010-2020). First, we aimed to track the volume of LGBT media coverage over time and elucidate differences in coverage of different identity markers. Second, we aimed to track sentiments on LGBT portrayals. Third, we aimed to track salient narratives circulated about LGBT stories. The study leveraged a 400-million-word corpus from news media in Singapore, identifying the following target keywords: LGBT, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Pink Dot (a local Pride event), 377A. First, coverage volume was tracked using annual changes in keyword mentions per million, elucidating differences in coverage of different sub-groups. Second, sentiment analysis on a valence scale was conducted on LGBT collocates. Third, we distilled salient narratives about LGBT identities using thematic labelling of top-frequency collocates. First, overall coverage of LGBT steadily increased over the decade, though Gay identities evidenced asymmetrical coverage-outstripping 'Bisexual' keywords by seven times, 'Lesbian' by four, 'Transgender' by two. Second, sentiment scores for Pink Dot (a local pride event) were most positive; Lesbian, Gay, LGBT, Transgender were neutral; Bisexual and 377A dipped slightly negative. Third, topics differed across the four identities: uniquely, 'Lesbian' collocates related to sensationalized cinema; 'Gay' about hate crimes; 'Bisexual' about population surveys; 'Transgender' about challenges (transitioning, alienation, suicide). Practically, we presented a decade-long barometer of LGBT sentiments and themes on a national level, providing a framework to analyze media for more effective communication strategies-applicable to Commonwealth countries with similar inherited colonial laws. Salient repetition through media association may unwittingly frame certain issues negatively; caution is prudent in representing each sub-group adequately, rather than portraying the LGBT identity as monolithic.

Colonial trauma: Terrains of disappearance, traumatic reflexivity, and historicizing countertransference

AbstractThis article analyzes trauma as an interplay of mass violence connecting imperial occupation in British Hong Kong, and an Anglo‐Chinese family in England. It takes Devereux's concept of countertransference to interrogate how killings in the author's family reverberate as traumatic transferences in fieldwork engaging the transgenerational violence of Partition in postcolonial Pakistan. Routing through transferences, it advances a comparative analysis of colonial trauma; moving from the individual to universal through layerings of traumatic silence, existential struggles, and the unconscious. It asks: what kinds of reflexivity are entailed by the double‐nature of the traumatized subject writing about trauma? Can colonial trauma retain specificity, while speaking to the discordant temporal settlement and relational formation of broader interconnected histories, geographical partitions, and generational loss? Psychological anthropology offers a mode for filling in blanks; privileging the subjectivity of inheritors of colonial trauma for ethnographic theorizations into ways anthropologists might reckon with the psychic violence of colonial pasts.

Complexity of Legal Harmonisation in Southeast Asia: A Diversity of Legal Systems & Languages

The eleven countries of the Southeast are quite diverse in terms of culture, religion, language and legal system. All members except Thailand were colonies of European powers who introduced their legal systems. Even Thailand, which was never colonised, was influenced by the laws of the European powers. This European influence has resulted in a range of political and legal systems. Although English is the working language of ASEAN, it is the national language of none. Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, and Thailand use a non-Latin script, and Vietnam uses Latin-based orthography to complicate matters further. The diversity of national and official languages is a crucial element impacting the ability of ASEAN member states to harmonise their laws, so there is a common approach to prosecuting international criminal activity. Such an approach is critical as the ASEAN Economic Community moves to greater integration. The article briefly describes the importance of language in understanding legal concepts. Then, it describes the variety of legal systems in place across Southeast Asia, which, other than the case of Thailand, are vestiges of their colonial past. The article discusses three possible models for harmonisation/ cooperation: a set of model laws, accession to an international treaty, or an agreement to cooperate. In the case of Brunei Darussalam, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore, where legal systems use English, all three models could be used. For the other seven countries, because of their language diversity, it is argued that the set of model laws is inappropriate. The preferred option is a treaty or convention that sets out the scope and minimum requirements to be included in the local law and the obligations to cooperate. The Convention on Cybercrime (Budapest Convention) is a possible model. Keywords: Southeast Asia, Cybercrime Convention, Law harmonisation, Legal translation, Model law

Three Concepts of Internationalism in the Global South: Solidarism, Pluralism, and Developmentalism

Throughout modern history, internationalism has been one of the most powerful forces that drives global political changes. While existing research focuses exceptionally on liberal internationalism, studies devoted to internationalism beyond its liberal and Western forms remain relatively scant. Building on a conception that perceives internationalism as a form of human practices, this article explores the evolution of the concept of internationalism in the Global South through a series of political practices from the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung to the proposal of the New International Economic Order in 1974 and the BRICS’s contestation over NATO’s Libyan intervention in 2011. It is argued that the normative core of internationalism in the Global South is constituted of three major components – pluralism, solidarism, and developmentalism, each in its particular form. Taken together, it envisions an international order rooted in the solidarity of the post-colonial peoples based on their shared colonial past, underpinned by a pluralistic outlook of political life, and places emphasis on redistributive justice in structuring the international economic order. Though some argue that with the rise of the BRICS countries, there will be a revival of Global South internationalism, this article concludes that this is not likely to happen at present.

Value-Semantic Blocks in Images of African Poetry (in the Context of Historical and Social Changes)

The article presents an interdisciplinary study at the intersection of culturology and African studies. The author suggests that the formation and transformation of values and meanings in Africa were influenced by specific facts of the history of sub-Saharan Africa. On the one hand, a colossal cultural layer is associated with the colonial past of African countries, with the influence of Western culture and Western values. Colonization of the continent, the struggle for freedom and independence, racial problems have determined the identity of Africans, the specifics of their identification, the need to restore their dignity. On the other hand, there exists a powerful foundation of traditional culture. The paper analyzes specific African value-semantic blocks associated with the facts of African history. It raises the question about the mission of Africa and the “Black man”, expressed in the value-semantic block “the black man is the savior of faith, the guardian of spirituality and honor” and the question of the unique “cosmogonic” system of representations of the African man, embodied in the value of connection with ancestors, with nature, with the earth and with heaven. Examples of the reflection of a number of value-semantic blocks in the images of African poetry are given.

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.

Please take her as your wife

Abstract This article investigates linguistic and visual representations of the Ainu, the indigenous people of northern Japan, in Satoru Noda’s popular televised Japanese anime Golden Kamuy (GK). The study employs multimodal analysis, focusing on content, context, characters, and perspectives related to the deployment of the Ainu language using the perspectives of raciolinguistics, coloniality, and intersectionality, to examine GK’s representations of Ainu regarding two Japanese national discourses on race: the current discourse of “ethnic harmony” (or multiculturalism) and Ainu as a dying race, popularized in the early 20th century. It argues that GK unintentionally constructs a sanitized Ainu-Japanese relationship that epitomizes the discourse of ethnic harmony by erasing Japan’s colonial past. Simultaneously, GK reproduces Ainu as a dying race discourse by contrasting a young bilingual Ainu co-protagonist and her monolingual grandmother. The article discusses how advanced/backward distinctions that the Japanese elites appropriated from the 19th-century colonial discourse are reinscribed in this anime with a modern twist. It also advocates our need to raise critical questions about language, race, and power for a just society in various contexts, including popular media.

The geopolitics of queer archives: Contested Chineseness and queer Sinophone affiliations between Hong Kong and Taiwan

Hong Kong and Taiwan, two Sinophone societies peripheral to continental China, have divergent colonial pasts and distinct cultures. Yet, their fates have been increasingly intertwined since the rise of China in the global economy. We propose the geopolitics of queer archives to trace minor–minor exchanges of queer knowledge and activism that are neither officially recognized by the state nor mapped into mainstream discussions of international relations. Through a conjunctural analysis of queer scholarship in Hong Kong and Taiwan since the 1980s, we contest the notion of Chineseness in shaping the knowledge of queer sexualities and argue that a wholesale recycling of postcolonial critique on these two societies’ resistance to China risk reproducing US-centrism.

The Politics within the Histories We Write

Abstract This article is a case study of Musaeus College, Colombo, especially its colonial past and the postcolonial histories written about it and its founder, Marie Musaeus Higgins. Marie Higgins, the founder of the school, is not only celebrated within the school, but also throughout the country as the mother of girls’ education. Strikingly, being a white woman coming from ‘the West’ to establish this school as well as some vernacular village schools and a teachers’ training college, is not criticised within postcolonial Sri Lanka as other imperial remains are. This article will look at exactly this opposition between the memory of Higgins today and the historical sources to illuminate the ways in which a present-day narration of the past is used to construct a postcolonial Buddhist-Sri Lankan identity within which contemporary issues of racialised religion are obscured by Buddhist nationalism.

“What did I Eat?”: Misrecognition and the Neocolonial Picaresque in Ousmane Sembène’s Mandabi and Mrinal Sen’s Interview

Abstract: While the international reach and political energy of the Third Cinema movement is widely acknowledged, its aesthetic modes and forms have received less attention. This essay hopes to provide such an understanding through a comparative analysis of two Third Cinema films—Mrinal Sen’s Interview (1971) and Ousmane Sembène’s Mandabi (1968). Using the category of the picaresque, the essay examines how neocolonial domination informs the postcolonial atmosphere in the two aforementioned works. It reflects on the economic and political aspects of Indian and Senegalese independence and then studies how the two films engage with their respective sovereign states and their colonial pasts within the affective realm of “cruel optimism.” Through an analysis of characterization, cinematography, and narrative arrangement, this essay unearths an array of similarities between these works, indicating a larger formal constellation through which Third Cinema works produced political meaning for their audiences.

Online hate speech on social media in Portugal: extremism or structural racism?

ABSTRACT This paper analyses online racial hate speeches in Portugal. The theory underpinning this research challenges the idea that racism is an epiphenomenon in European and Portuguese history. Beginning with a theoretical framework which conceives racism as a historically constructed system of power and privilege, we argue that its structural nature paved the way for the consolidation and normalisation of openly racist discourses. Moreover, this paper demonstrates that the nature of racist narratives can only be understood from a theoretical conceptualisation which problematises the Portuguese colonial past and its current continuities. In this research, a critical analysis of discourses produced and reproduced on social media, namely Facebook and Twitter, was carried out. From a comparative analysis of the periods before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, the idea that this health crisis coincided with a shift of the dominant racist narratives is thus challenged.

Reversible Comparisons: Policing Criminality and Criminal Policing in South Africa

AbstractJohn D. Brewer’s (1994) seminal study of the South African Police claimed that structural factors would inhibit democratic reforms in law enforcement agencies, regardless of which political party controlled the public administration. Thirty years of majority rule, and a series of subsequent works (Altbeker 2005, 2007; Steinberg, 2008; Lamb 2018), demonstrate that Brewer’s thesis remains relevant. Occasional efforts at fully reconstructing state security agencies never took hold and the South African Police Service remains mired in the sordid practices of its colonial past. McMichael and Brown concur with this established narrative while Shaw’s study on vigilantism adds insightful subtleties that deromanticize subaltern social movements. All three authors tackle sharp distinctions between policing and criminality, arguing that the two processes often intertwine and are frequently interchangeable. This review article combines structural determinants of coercive law enforcement with elite political agency. Political choices made by South Africa’s ruling African National Congress reinforce criminal practices in policing and precipitate the formation of volatile vigilante organizations.

One State’s Rebel Is Another State’s Agent

Abstract In State Responsibility and Rebels, Kathryn Greenman explores the post-colonial history of state responsibility, the doctrine of international law that determines whether a state has breached its obligations and what, if anything, can be done about it. Today, the doctrine is one of the most frequently referenced ones of international law. Greenman shows that international arbitrators have applied the rules of state responsibility in order to support a global economic order that sustains Western investments and trade. Greenman also highlights the bilateral or transactional nature of the doctrine. The early practice of state responsibility has been a story of political concessions. Western states would often withhold their recognition of governments until the latter agreed to arbitrate international claims such as injuries to aliens during the rebellions. The resulting awards were often inchoate analyses of international law, in which arbitrators would attribute liability to states for conduct that was often out of their control. These findings are as interesting as they are relevant to today’s international practice. Indeed, says Greenman, imposing state responsibility for conduct that is outside of a state’s control is effectively sustaining the legacy of international law’s colonial past.

A Book in a Thousand. Translating Dutch (Post-)Colonial Literature in the Late Fifties: Maria Dermoût’s The Ten Thousand Things In the U.S. and Italy

ABSTRACT This paper examines the successful translation and reception of Maria Dermoût’s De tienduizend dingen (1955), most particularly in the U.S. and Italy: a quite unique case of a Dutch book which has found its way to world literature. In the late Fifties, this beautifully crafted literary work about the faded world of the Dutch Molucca’s prior to WWII, could reckon on sympathy, empathy and interest in different countries. In the U.S., the ongoing decolonization process found a certain support, while Italy did its best to fully erase all traces of its colonial past and only few people with colonial roots tried to keep them alive. The ambivalent, liminar status of this fascinating book, written from a distant elsewhere by a displaced Eurasian author, can explain its appeal to translators Hans Koning and Quirino Maffi – both displaced, too – and international audiences.

Environmental and Colonial Histories: Art, Memoir and Gardens in the Flinders Ranges, South Australia

ABSTRACT This article is concerned with a pressing question of the 21st century: how do we negotiate places with complex colonial pasts? In the Mid North of South Australia, rugged mountain ranges rise up from stony plains. Adnyamathanha-speaking people have lived here and maintained connections to Country for tens of thousands of years. In the late 1920s, artist Hans Heysen travelled to the area known as the Flinders Ranges and stayed at Aroona, an outstation on a pastoral property, painting landscapes of a dry, uninhabited place. At the same time, a memoir of colonial settler J. F. Howard was printed that openly described attempts at dispossession of Aboriginal people for pastoral interests. With a focus on gardens and food in representations of Flinders Ranges landscapes, this article revisits old material with new concerns, arguing that the intersection of environmental and colonial histories offers productive territory for grappling with complex pasts.

Challenges in creating humane and equitable policing: A focus on the Global South

AbstractResearch SummaryPolice brutality is a widespread phenomenon around the world. Particularly gruesome human rights abuses in the course of policing take place in Latin America, the world's most violent region outside war zones. Democratic institutions such as competitive elections, checks and balances, and judicial independence are insufficient to prevent police from abusing their power. What factors explain that police engage in abusive behaviors, including illegal arrest, the fabrication of evidence, the use of torture to extract confessions, and the excessive use of force causing injury or death? How can societies restrain these abusive behaviors and subject police to the rule of law? Police behavior is shaped by a combination of institutional, societal, political, organizational, and individual factors. Inquisitorial criminal justice institutions, inherited from the colonial past, have persisted in Latin America until very recently. This meant that democracies in the region were born with weak due process protections that have enabled state authorities and police to abuse their coercive powers as they investigate and prosecute crimes. Police brutality is further the product of security policies. High crime rates and the presence of highly organized criminal groups have pushed many Latin American governments to adopt militarized security interventions ‐including deploying the armed forces to control crime and militarizing police forces. Populist demands for harsh policies, moreover, generate incentives for politicians to adopt security strategies that violate human rights and which, in the long run, increase violence in society. The most affected groups are the poor, people of color, and those living in impoverished minoritized communities.Policy ImplicationsIt is essential to strengthen due process protections and judicial oversight over police to reduce torture and other forms of police brutality. Police demilitarization and, under some conditions, community‐oriented policing approaches can sharply reduce the use of excessive force causing injury or death. Body‐worn cameras (BWC), moreover, can effectively be used to reduce police abusive behavior —and violence against police officers — even in high violence situations and where toxic police‐community relations prevail. One limitation of this technology is that it gives too much leeway to frontline officers to turn their cameras on. Poor supervision can further undermine police compliance with camera protocols. These problems can be overcome by assigning cameras to supervisors and using more advanced technologies that allow turning cameras on from the main station. Monetary incentives that reward police officers “to kill less” is another effective policy intervention to reduce police violence causing injury or death.

Lens to difficult history: Museums of Hansen’s disease in Malaysia, South Korea, and Taiwan

A recent revisit of the history of leprosy in East and Southeast Asia led to the establishment of museums of Hansen’s disease. Given that the history of leprosy has been a touchy subject due to its social stigma and complicated colonial past, these museums become spaces for the curious to comprehend memories of the forgotten past. In this article, we investigate contradictory purposes of reappraising the heritage value of the history of leprosy for present needs. Museum exhibitions in three colonial leprosaria in Malaysia, South Korea, and Taiwan are examined, specifically focusing on three areas of interpretation: the medical past in a post-colonial present, the difficult life of former patients, and the unsettled present. In contrast with the traditional museum as a place for the repository of glorious national identity, museums of Hansen’s disease offer diverse pathways to new museum culture created by activists, museum visitors, and officials.

Decolonizing applied linguistics in Africa and its diasporas: disrupting the center

ABSTRACT The decolonization of applied linguistics is a critique of applied linguistics (see Phillipson, 1999; Phipps, 2018 and Pennycook & Makoni, 2020). We argue for a shift toward the Global South, in particular Africa, and for the importance of paying attention to ‘race’ as a significant category of analysis in applied linguistics in Africa. Three points require attention in a decolonized applied linguistics: 1) The identification of northern sociolinguistic theories masked as universal and a shift toward Southern frameworks, 2) The acknowledgment of ‘white privilege’ and ‘white fragility’ in language studies, more generally, and the inclusion of ‘race’ as a category of analysis among authors, and 3) The under-representation of female African scholars. The challenges transcend an agenda that redresses exclusions, and the colonial past of linguistics and location in neoliberal times. We question principles underlying applied linguistics in the Global North, often based on patriarchal and capitalist impositions, and epistemological racism in applied linguistics. We argue for a decolonized applied linguistics which draws from indigenous cosmovisions. These cosmovisions sidestep the dualism that is typical of Global North scholarship: individual/collective, body/mind. We show that Euro-American applied linguistics is evolving toward Africa in particular fields.

Post-Colonial Feminist Perspectives In Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Select Novels

Post-colonial literature as an extensive genre includes diasporic, immigrant feminist genres too. The advocate of Post-colonial theory Edward Said has proposed the concept of ‘otherness’. This is considered to be an important theory, especially for diasporas from South Asia bearing a colonial past. It also helps in understanding the effect of power relations between the colonizers and the colonized, the reason for otherness and alienation experienced by immigrants in their respective host lands. The representation of women as an object, sexual toys, and a maid before post-colonial had its transformation with the debut of postcolonial literature. Simon de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex had a huge effect on the readers in the transformation of stereotyped ideologies and myths about the female gender.  Later with the advent of The Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, the females were made to think of their rights, independence, identity, and the need to achieve them. Many post-colonial feminist writers took it as their prime responsibility to propagate and advocate the rights, efficacies, and strengths of women to the patriarchal chauvinists. The writers who move from one country to another occupy significant positions between culture and countries. They realize that their culture or identity doesn’t remain the same as it was earlier. Identity evolves, grows, and is subject to many changes. The act of writing makes him/her explore both cultures of homeland and hostland. Memories of homeland are kept alive in his thoughts and imagination in fact, becomes a channel between the self and the world. (Shailja, 2008, 52)
 Post-colonial feminists, who work for the advancement of women, also challenge the assumption that the gendered oppression is the primary force of 23 patriarchy. They question the approbation of the oppression as it leads to the misrepresentation of their lived experiences. Currently, they struggle to fight the gender oppression within their own society to preserve and safeguard the dignity of their women. Thus, the concepts of freedom, equality, and rights to women, stem from the Enlightenment based on the egalitarian beliefs and principles and have become the main area of concern for the postcolonial feminists of today. In short, postcolonial feminism is not just literature written by women, but literature of women voicing their experiences from within. This principle has created a welcoming ambiance for many of the women writers in Indian Writing in English to use literature as a vehicle to present the true state of Indian society, its treatment of women, and the psychological traumas of women due to their own traditional and cultural barriers. To this school of post-colonial transformed feminist ideologies belong the works of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. This paper aims to discuss the reformed feministic perspectives with special reference to Sister of My Heart and Oleander Girl.