Colonial Project Research Articles

Meat, Livestock and the Colonial Project in 1830s and 1840s Australia: The Frontier, the City and the Colonial Imagination

From the 1820s, the settler occupation of Australia expanded rapidly, driven by the growth of sheep and cattle grazing. Like similar histories in other settler societies, this story is well-known and has begun to be told in ways that centre the active role played by these animals in both aiding and resisting this colonising project. Yet the ways in which this frontier expansion related back to colonial cities is less widely recognised; pastoral expansion relied on settler cities, and limited export markets meant that beef and mutton glutted the markets in colonial cities. This article reveals how the movement of cattle and sheep (living, slaughtered and imagined) linked the pastoral frontier of New South Wales (the oldest Australian colony) to Sydney (the major city of the colony) and then to Britain. Exploring the movement (physical and imagined) of meat and livestock reveals the extent of the impact of settler pastoralism in new ways.

Unwrapping oppression: Black latinas in craft chocolate marketing

ABSTRACT This article examines how Black women from Latin America are portrayed on craft chocolate bar wrappers. The analysis is rooted in Lélia González’s qualificação ‘professional’ and Patricia Hill-Collins’s controlling images. González and Hill-Collins introduce the mammy, jezebel, matriarch, welfare queen, hot momma, mulata, doméstica and mãe preta, aiming at explaining how Black women’s oppression are ideologically justified through mass media. Drawing on a critical visual analysis of craft chocolate bar wrappers, I conclude that one figure emerges: the savage black woman – she is depicted as too wild to love and be loved, yet perfectly docile to serve and maintain ongoing colonial projects in the fine cocoa and craft chocolate industry.

Horizons of liberation: materialism, ecology, and the colonial question

The question of materialism – what it is, how it is studied and practised, and who takes it seriously enough – has long animated debates among Marxists and scholars of race and the colonial question. Today, our contemporary socioecological crises challenge established understandings of materialism and merit a return to these debates with the goal of collective liberation on a warming planet in mind. Taking up this task, this article builds an understanding of materialism as theory and practice working towards liberation – a theory and practice shaped variously by culture, ontology, and the experience of oppressive structural conditions. The contributions of scholarship focused on race and colonial projects and legacies particularly illuminate these multiple dimensions of materialism. Among a wealth of other insights, anticolonial Third Worldist thinkers left us with an astute diagnosis of value in the world system; Black radical scholars have revealed the ontological roots of material struggles; decolonial scholars have exposed the solidification of racial classification systems as structures; and Indigenous (Fourth World) ontologies continue to maintain a commitment to metabolic repair and reciprocity. While contemporary ecology-focused conceptual innovations – such as metabolic rift and material throughput – expand materialist analyses, approaches focused on race and the colonial question bring particular insight to the global structural elements of socioecological crises and generate a materialism oriented towards horizons of liberation for all.

“Canada remains deeply concerned”: (de)politicized feminist foreign aid, settler colonialism and reproductive justice in occupied Gaza

ABSTRACT Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP) was introduced in June 2017, representing a positive shift in Canadian foreign policy and a reaffirmation of the Trudeau government’s intended global leadership on gender equality and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). Since its inception, FIAP has faced growing criticism as a neoliberal, individualized approach to achieving gender equality that is void of an understanding of underlying systemic inequities. This paper applies this critique to Canada’s complicity in Israel’s ongoing military violence in Gaza. Adopting a reproductive justice framework, we argue that the reproductive violence against Palestinian women enacted during the current war on Gaza must be understood as part of Israel’s larger settler colonial project. For Canada to fulfill its commitments to global SRHR as set out in its own foreign policy framework, the Trudeau government must adopt a more politicized and intersectional approach to feminist international assistance, including taking political action against Israel’s colonial violence in Gaza.

The Anticolonial Turn in Journalism and the Media in Pre-Independence India: How Newspaper Coverage by Foreign and Indian Newspapers of the Champaran, Dandi, and Dharasana Movements Made Gandhi a Household Name

ABSTRACT This article argues that the role played by the print media in India’s anticolonial struggle was a pivotal point of departure in the episteme of postcolonial histories—one that provided an impetus and guiding light to similar struggles worldwide, a position often ignored by Eurocentric academia studying media historiographies. It is based on extensive reviews of newspaper archives from the northeastern and northwestern states of Bihar and Gujarat in India, as well as archival review of the British press, and it outlines the coverage of Gandhi’s interventions in the two states that ultimately resulted in nationwide mobilization. The authors argue that the journalistic tradition of anti-colonial protest that developed in India provided an impetus to the advancement of anticolonial sentiments and the movement as a whole. This was supplemented in some measure by the more radical members of the British press, while the mainstream British press remained committed to the colonial project.

Artificial intelligence-based automated determination in breast and colon cancer and distinction between atypical and typical mitosis using a cloud-based platform.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology in pathology has been utilized in many areas and requires supervised machine learning. Notably, the annotations that define the ground truth for the identification of different confusing process pathologies, vary from study to study. In this study, we present our findings in the detection of invasive breast cancer for the IHC/ISH assessment system, along with the automated analysis of each tissue layer, cancer type, etc. in colorectal specimens. Additionally, models for the detection of atypical and typical mitosis in several organs were developed using existing whole-slide image (WSI) sets from other AI projects. All H&E slides were scanned by different scanners with a resolution of 0.12-0.50μm/pixel, and then uploaded to a cloud-based AI platform. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) training sets consisted of invasive carcinoma, atypical and typical mitosis, and colonic tissue elements (mucosa-epithelium, lamina propria, muscularis mucosa, submucosa, muscularis propria, subserosa, vessels, and lymph nodes). In total, 59 WSIs from 59 breast cases, 217 WSIs from 54 colon cases, and 28 WSIs from 23 different types of tumor cases with relatively higher amounts of mitosis were annotated for the training. The harmonic average of precision and sensitivity was scored as F1 by AI. The final AI models of the Breast Project showed an F1 score of 94.49% for Invasive carcinoma. The mitosis project showed F1 scores of 80.18%, 97.40%, and 97.68% for mitosis, atypical, and typical mitosis layers, respectively. Overall F1 scores for the current results of the colon project were 90.02% for invasive carcinoma, 94.81% for the submucosa layer, and 98.02% for vessels and lymph nodes. After the training and optimization of the AI models and validation of each model, external validators evaluated the results of the AI models via blind-reader tasks. The AI models developed in this study were able to identify tumor foci, distinguish in situ areas, define colonic layers, detect vessels and lymph nodes, and catch the difference between atypical and typical mitosis. All results were exported for integration into our in-house applications for breast cancer and AI model development for both whole-block and whole-slide image-based 3D imaging assessment.

A New Moral World Order: Carl Alexander Simon and the German Colonization of Southern Chile

Abstract This article focuses on overlooked aspects of German colonization in southern Chile by examining the treatise Auswanderung und deutsch-nationale Kolonisation von Süd-Amerika mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des Freistaates Chile (Emigration and German National Colonization of South America with Special Attention to the Free State of Chile) by Carl Alexander Simon. Simon was a Romantic artist who advocated for overseas colonization and settled in Chile to promote his ideas. His treatise, which blended poetry and Romantic rhetoric with political ideas, aimed to encourage German occupation of Chile and South America based on the supposed physical and intellectual superiority of the Germans. This article argues that Simon’s work is integral to understanding the intersection of Romanticism and German colonialism in the nineteenth century and how racial and nationalistic sentiments fuelled German colonialism in remote corners of the world. Furthermore, it contributes to discussions on German nation-building overseas and the connections between German colonialism and race, the legacies of German colonialism, German colonial fantasies, and indigeneity and Germanness. Finally, this study of Simon’s work complements existing research on German settlements in Africa, Asia and the Pacific from 1850 onwards, highlighting the importance of considering the role of Germany in the global colonial project.

“Peace Is Dangerous”: Toward a Du Boisian Theory of Colonial Post-fascism

This article asks: “How was the rhetoric of post or anti-fascism used to develop colonial projects in the inter and postwar period?” Through investigating the Du Bois archive, I answer this through producing a Du Boisian theory of colonial post-fascism. While many have written about the connections between European fascism and colonialism in theories of “colonial fascism,” a Du Boisian approach leads us to the concept of colonial post-fascism, demonstrating the array of colonial practices which were instigated in the name of world peace in the inter and postwar era. Colonial post-fascism is characterized by three processes that Du Bois wrote about. First, colonial post-fascism involves a bifurcation between colonial violence and peace, such that Western powers in the inter and postwar period could make commitments to world peace without interrogating the actions of their empires. Second, colonial post-fascism involves the process by which empires developed their imperial practices to rebuild from the effects of the war against fascism. Finally, colonial post-fascism involves the U.S. empire increasing its militarization, which developed in the fight against fascism, to secure colonial power under the rhetoric of maintaining world peace. This article makes several contributions. First, instead of highlighting the link between European fascism and colonialism, I demonstrate how colonialism shaped European post-fascism. Second, I contribute toward the project of undoing bifurcated histories of the West which elide discussions of colonial violence. Finally, I highlight how Du Bois’s involvement in the peace movement was not just activism, but also generative to social theory.

Settler militarism: Affective colonial pursuits and the militarized atmosphere of war commemoration

This article examines settler militarism and how it is mobilized through affective practices that ultimately bolster the settler colonial project. With this intent, it develops the concept of ‘militarized atmosphere’ defined as a staged environment where war is positioned outside politics and critical scrutiny through a series of affective manoeuvres and aesthetics. A militarized atmosphere operates through military aesthetics to attune people’s bodies to a position of uncritical validation of a given discourse of war. This article argues that a militarized atmosphere crucially sustains the settler colonial project by removing or reducing contestation around the theme of war, which is a pillar of settler colonialism. In settler societies, numerous Indigenous individuals perceive themselves as embattled and seek acknowledgement of the history and legacy of colonial violence and warfare. In contrast, settler governments have a vested interest in concealing this history and its enduring legacy, and they do so by exalting military warfare as the foundation of the modern nation and creating affective attachments to the military. The article uses the case of Australia to elucidate the argument. It examines how the aesthetics of war commemoration at the Dawn Service, Australia’s major commemorative event, contributes to producing a militarized atmosphere that sustains the Australian settler colonial project. It proposes a framework that links the feminist concept of affective militarism to settler colonialism and contributes to the emerging literature on settler colonialism and militarism.

Gendering Empire: A Historiographical Exploration

In her landmark work in feminist theory The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir argues how gender is a totalising, transformative social experience. In this essay, I will argue that this total construction of power and identity finds resonance the colonial project. As alluded to in Franz Fanon’s vision of decolonisation, colonialism wholly moulds and creates individuals. The link is established in using gender as a category of historical analysis for empires, where the principal analytical prism is a Foucauldian dispersion of power, in which power emanates through knowledge-fields, discourse and social relations rather than through simple, unmasked, top-down imposition. Two strands emerge: the genealogy of power and the reproduction of power. The former traces how gender has contributed to moulding, naturalising and essentialising colonial hierarchies, while the latter addresses how historical writing itself illuminates or occludes narratives, agencies and subjectivities, in turn creating new meanings. However, gender as a category of historical analysis is useful for historians of empire, contingent upon the adoption of an intersectional approach that does not posit gender as primary to other axes of oppression. Furthermore, the consciousness of its inessentiality – particularly that of the binary – is necessary to avoid perpetuating Eurocentrism and its specific demarcation of the concepts of gender and race.

Science Fiction in the Anthropocene

This article catalogs major recent trends in ecological science fiction (sf), focused primarily on sf published after the completion of N.K. Jemisin's paradigm-setting Broken Earth trilogy in 2017. Major subdivisions in the genre include dystopian and antiutopian narratives about climate collapse, technocratic solutionism, reckoning with climate change as a colonial project, intergenerational conflict, and posthuman formulation. Noting that sf both as literary genre and as fan community encompasses a wide range of political perspectives ranging from reactionary hypercapitalism to utopian socialism, the article does not seek to advance any particular political position but rather seeks to name the major currents of political and ethical debate within sf in this moment of ecological crisis. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the way the sf genre, in reframing the present as the history of multiple possible futures, calls on us to act to shape that future toward human thriving.

Relocating occupation: A critical environmental justice analysis of the US military migration from Okinawa to Guåhan

The US military buildup across the Pacific is an ongoing colonial project reproducing oppressive power structures, human rights violations, and systemic environmental injustices. As the United States bolsters its Pacific presence, islands and peoples living on them are particularly vulnerable. However, not all places face overtly growing military-colonial occupations. Following decades of substantial military presence in Okinawa, 2024 marks the beginning of a precarious troop withdrawal from the Japanese prefecture. This significant reduction in Marine Corps personnel is the result of decades of political activism by Okinawans, who have continually resisted occupation and longstanding patterns of violence and oppression. Yet these military forces are not just leaving, they are relocating. The withdrawal coincides with 5,000 Marines and a new base coming to Guåhan (Guam), a territory where about 30% of land is under military control. This article examines these processes of military buildup and relocation through a critical environmental justice lens. We expand upon research on these issues by centering the critical environmental justice pillars concerning intersectionality, multiple scales, state power, and indispensability. We analyze the interconnections between Okinawa and Guåhan and argue that environmental justice scholarship must consider global geopolitics, interconnectivity, and sovereignty to adequately approach environmental movements in the Pacific region. In addition, we demonstrate that environmental justice victories in non-self-governing territories remain vulnerable to reversal and we advocate for inter-island coalition-building to avoid passing environmental harms from one island to another.

Provincial Drag in the Philippine Tropics: Towards a Decolonial Queer Tropical Aesthetics

Drag, in its neoliberal permutation, has become the most consumed queer art form everywhere in the world. The popularity of drag is often attributed to the bourgeoning empire of the Drag Race franchise. While the cultural phenomenon that is Drag Race has constructed a platform for drag to thrive in the mainstream scene, it has also created a limited and hegemonic understanding of drag as simply glamour and superstardom. This essay problematizes what has become “homonormative drag” and outlines the need to turn to pluriversal drag aesthetic praxes. It is argued that deploying a decolonial queer tropical lens, following Rolando Vazquez’s decolonial aesthesis and Samantha Nöel’s tropical aesthetics, opens our understanding of drag to situated local experiences in the tropics. This essay, unpacks the aesthetics of what I call “provincial drag,” found in the digital content produced by queer subjects in the Philippine provinces, to illustrate and re-locate the critical function of drag not simply for gender subversion, but also to laugh at neoliberal and colonial projects.

White Masters and Black Servants: A Decolonial Analysis of Winky D’s “Happy Again” Music Video

In December 2021, Zimbabwean musician Winky D (born Wallace Chirumiko) released the video to his song “Happy Again.” While many cheered the release, the “Happy Again” video was not immune to criticism. Drawing on concepts of coloniality and decoloniality as well as framing theory, this article uses thematic analysis to deconstruct the kinds of selections that perpetuate coloniality that were spotlighted and made noticeable in the “Happy Again” music video. Further, the article discusses the implications of such depictions as well as proposes possible representations that could have been less problematic. By focusing on race, this article contributes to scholarship on representations in Zimbabwean music which has predominantly examined portrayals of gender. Considering that Winky D’s artistic creation lives on YouTube where many continue to view it, this article relies on cultivation theory to justify why contesting and rejecting the problematic depictions of Blackness and Whiteness in the video is urgent. Despite the British formally leaving Zimbabwe at the country’s flag independence in 1980, the framing of Blackness and Whiteness in the video shows a continuation of imperialist ideas that anchored the colonial project. White people are framed as affluent masters while Black individuals are portrayed as poor servants. These representations have potentially deleterious consequences when embraced by credulous and unwary audiences. The article concludes by highlighting its contributions to nuancing theories used to scaffold the analysis.

Walking in Parallel: Roman Catholicism and Protestant Christianity in Korea, 1899–1945

In the early twentieth century, Korean Catholic and Protestant Churches found themselves in a period of significant power transition, from a neo-Confucian dynasty to a colonial regime. Imperial Japan and Christianity thus posed a mutual challenge: church leaders worked to sustain and increase their Evangelical mission field within Korea's new socio-political environment, while, simultaneously, the Japanese depended on the cooperation of the Korean Christian communities to fulfil their colonial project. In this dynamic of State-Church relations, Catholics and Protestants constantly vied for ascendancy. This article examines how the two Christian denominations engaged with each other and with Korea's coloniser, as imperial Japan's policies varied and its international status fluctuated.

‘Solidarity of Action:’ Is Africa Reclaiming Its Historic Role as the Center of Palestinian Solidarity?

Solidarity against the colonial regime is one of the keys to overcoming the oppressor. This is why the 20th century, which is seen as the century of decolonization, experienced many demonstrations of solidarity from Africa to America. Palestine’s long resistance against the Israeli colonial project should be considered as another decolonization movement. Unfortunately, many Arab regimes have not shown solidarity with Palestine in recent years. While the Arab states have hesitated to show full solidarity, it is the African continent that has stepped in, internationalizing the debate regarding genocide. This is, indeed, not limited to Africa. South American states also show their support for Palestine and have halted their relations with Israel. How do we make sense of this solidarity, from Namibia to South Africa and from Nicaragua to Cuba? This commentary analyzes the evolution of Global South solidarity with Palestine since the foundation of Israel, with a more focused focus on the African continent. It demonstrates that as decolonial nations, African states have once again shown their solidarity with Palestine, even though there have been some hesitant times due to realpolitik and the U.S. role in protecting Israel’s status.

Racial Capitalism: From British Colonialism to the Settler Colonial Apartheid State

This article explores the development of capitalism in Palestine under British colonialism and the Zionist settler colonial project. It examines first, Israel's internal and external capitalist dynamism, including its treatment of its non-European citizens, namely indigenous Palestinians, and non-Ashkenazi (Arab) Jewish settlers. Second, it explores the state's interdependent relationship with Western, especially US imperialism. The article argues that the British colonial state was crucial in enabling the Zionist project to materialize, leading to weakening the socio-economic fabric of the Palestinians in their own lands and homeland, creating a favourable condition for the Zionist project to gradually penetrate the land of Palestine and dispossess its population. As a European (Jewish) settler colonial movement, Zionism, founded on racism and racialization, aimed at establishing a new Jewish enclave separate and independent from the indigenous Palestinians. This separateness made it resemble apartheid South Africa, yet the historical specificity of Palestine, where the Zionist settlers did not just alienate, exclude and when needed, use and exploit the Palestinians, but also expelled the indigenous Palestinians and claim Palestine as a ‘pure’ Jewish state.

Apartheid in the Twenty-first Century: Racial Capitalism and the Struggles in Palestine

Apartheid has become an increasingly important framework for understanding and challenging Israeli rule in Palestine. The Apartheid Convention states apartheid is a crime against humanity. We contend what is missing from this definition of apartheid is an economic and ontological link. Although the current legal definition focuses solely on the political regime, it does not provide a strong basis for critiquing the economic aspects of a settler colonial state embedded in apartheid. To address this concern, we propose a more comprehensive definition of apartheid which grew out of the struggle in South Africa during the 1970s that gained support among revolutionaries due to the limits of decolonisation in South Africa after 1994 — highlighting the reality(ies) that apartheid is intimately connected to capitalism. This conceptualisation was termed racial capitalism. This article argues that racial capitalism provides a more thorough understanding of the destructive dynamics of the Israeli settler colonial project, one that insists that the struggle against Israeli domination must confront both the apartheid state and the racial capitalist system if Palestinians ever hope to achieve liberation.

Colonial Racial Capitalism and Violence: Theorising the Relationship between Empire and Israeli Settler Colonialism

This article theorises the relationship between empire and Israeli settler colonialism through the interplay between violence and capital accumulation in colonial racial capitalism. It argues that Israel's genocidal violences of land theft is the means and grounds for Israeli and US imperial capital accumulation. This can be observed in the genocidal operation in the Gaza Strip. The first section contextualizes the genocide in the Gaza Strip within a larger structure of genocide. The section highlights the centrality of the conquest of land in the Zionist settler colonial project and how that appealed to the British empire in the early parts of the twentieth century. The second section examines why the US empire has actively participated in the genocide. States in the US imperial bloc essentially reduce the whole question of Palestine to a simple equation where Palestinian liberation does not equate with their own economic interests, while Israeli settler colonialism does. Though there exists a tension between imperial and settler colonial interests around the question of what kind of violence is preferable for capital accumulation, the article concludes by arguing that a transformation of the logics and systems of colonial racial capitalism cannot arise without activism and pressure from below on states and capitalist structures.

Britain and imperial rhetoric of reforms in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Morocco

ABSTRACT Although Morocco was not fully colonised until 1912, the second half of the nineteenth century saw significant changes in the country’s politics, culture, and economy as European colonial powers intensified competition for control of the southern shore of the western Mediterranean. This essay examines the British conceptualisation of social, economic, fiscal, and military reforms that precolonial Morocco tried and/or was wreaked to implement under the auspices of the British. The rhetoric of reform and rescue served as the British Empire’s civilising mission and was complementary to the discourse on supremacy and hegemony. This rhetoric fed into a larger colonial project of domination but also served a more surreptitious purpose of self-fashioning and self-legitimisation. British envoys, officials, and travel writers, the most prominent of whom are John Drummond Hay, Arthur Leared, Walter Burton Harris, Hugh Stutfield, and Budgett Meakin, treated the reform and rescue of Pre-protectorate Morocco as a peculiar and bounden duty of the white race. This essay revisits the representational strategies these writers deployed in their accounts and how they propagated the premise that the implementation of these reforms would enable Morocco to be transformed from a fragmented ‘Sharifian Dominion’ replete with bureaucratisation, embezzlement, and decay into a modern state. In this sense, this essay traces the reciprocal relationships between writing, policy making, capitalism, modernity and the broader European colonialist discourse and zeitgeist of this period.