Colonial Project Research Articles

Aesthetics of Afro-Andean Smoking Culture: Early Modern Peruvian Tobacco Pipes at the Edge of the Atlantic World

Although situated at the geographic margin of the early modern Atlantic World, the Pacific coast of Peru was an important region in the development of African diasporic material culture. Adopting an interdisciplinary material historical approach, we present the first systematic discussion of the known Afro-Atlantic-style tobacco pipes to be archaeologically recovered in Peru. Eighteen Afro-Atlantic-style tobacco pipes or pipe sherds dating to Peru’s Spanish colonial period have been identified across sites in the coastal cities of Lima and Trujillo and from a vineyard hacienda in rural Nasca. Tobacco pipes are among the most recognized and debated forms of early modern Atlantic African and diasporic expressions of material culture, as such, they present a powerful entry point to understanding the aesthetic consequences of colonial projects and diverse articulations across the Atlantic World. The material history of Afro-Atlantic smoking culture exemplifies how aesthetics moved between localities and developed diasporic entanglements. In addition to the formal analysis and visual description of the pipes, we examine historical documentation and the work of nineteenth-century Afro-Peruvian watercolorist Francisco (Pancho) Fierro to better understand the aesthetics of Afro-Andean smoking culture in Spanish colonial and early Republican Peru.

Us and them: colonialism and racism in remote Aboriginal healthcare discourse

ABSTRACT Background The origins of modern Australia are settler colonialist, the logic of which initiated theft of land and attempted erasure of First Nations peoples. This study explores the role of non-Aboriginal Health Care Workers (HCWs) in the ongoing settler colonial project and the formation of mental models that lead to dualistic discourse embodying structural and interpersonal racism. Methods Using van Dijk’s sociocognitive model of Critical Discourse Analysis, colonial ideology, HCW mental models and discourse about Aboriginal people were explored. Results The dualistic categorisation of Us and Them underlies racist discourse around responsibility, dependence, health, illness and the role of culture in health. HCWs had poorly conceived ideas about cultural safety and demonstrated hierarchical thinking, exclusion and collusion in racism. Conclusions Remote HCWs will continue to propagate the ideology of settler colonialism unless cultural safety, critical reflexivity and anti-racism training are prioritised in cultural training.

Camouflaging colonialism: a case study of a NeoColonial Museum

Museums are presented as institutions housing a society’s most outstanding artistic collective achievements. They are racialized organisations helping preserve white supremacist normativity in the racialized social system. We argue that museums are colonial projects that often camouflage colonialism. Museums’ hierarchal nature in prioritising Europe is blatantly apparent but rendered unseen unless you study its presence. Then, you discover differences through indifference. We used ethnographic observations and photography to explore how the Boston Museum of Fine Arts conceals colonialism. We find, for example, that the Art of Africa is demoted to two transitionary passageways. The pre-Columbian exhibit is relegated to the basement and camouflaged by other exhibitions. Additionally, Black bodies are subject to out-of-place sexualised portrayals. These findings reinforce our earlier argument that museums are white sanctuaries, safe spaces allowing whites to reaffirm their dominance in society.

Colonial Project Finance Initiative: to what extent did the UK export its public-private partnership model to Caribbean British Overseas Territories?

ABSTRACT Public–Private Partnerships (PPP) are long-term agreements for procuring public projects that bundle up design, build, finance, operation and management. The UK’s version, Project Finance Initiative, was a policy-based framework, now defunct. Instead, PPPs in Caribbean British Overseas Territories (BOTs) are based on rigid models, with early stopovers focused on ensuring financial sustainability. A comparative analysis among Caribbean BOTs concludes that they show common models, and that those BOTs that need PPPs the most have set up the biggest hurdles to get them started. The analysis comprises four features: legal sources, administrative safeguards, scope restrictions for sector and value, and accountability.

Resistance and stylistic reverence: A typological study of colonial facades in Tlemcen (Algeria)

Abstract In Algeria, which was colonised for over a century, the arrival of the French colonisers led to the introduction of new architectural styles imported from Europe. This adoption of an exogenous style in a different cultural context was only made possible by French military domination. Importing and imposing a style was not always easy, as Algerian resistance was as much stylistic and socio-cultural as it was military. To illustrate this point, we have taken the case of the historic city of Tlemcen (Northwest Algeria), where the French occupiers met with stylistic resistance complicating the achievement of their colonial project. Our research raises the following question: What forms of stylistic resistance are manifested in colonial architecture in the city of Tlemcen? Our aim is to identify the specific characteristics of colonial architecture in Tlemcen, in order to bring out the signs of stylistic resistance that testify to a desire to maintain a local cultural identity despite the colonial influence. The typological analysis of colonial facades serves as a tool and a means of providing in-depth understanding of architectural facades and typological classification in view of the diversity of styles and ornamentation of colonial facades in Tlemcen. This resistance manifests itself in European revivalism in Tlemcen, which involved an exceptional effort aimed simultaneously at composition and a search for stylistic anchorage and originality. It also manifested itself at the level of the native population, who stepped in to protect their cultural heritage and identity against the colonial authorities. Moreover, a certain form of stylistic reverence can be detected, expressed in avoiding pronounced aesthetic or stylistic expressions, favouring instead a more universal and timeless appearance.

Educación de los pueblos originarios en Colombia, subalternización e injusticia cognitiva

This article has been derived from a documentary research work, which offers a balance of education for Indigenous Peoples in the Latin American sphere, in the Colombian sphere and in the specific sphere of the Nasa Indigenous People in Colombia. It also realizes the way in which the relationship between Own Education and the fight for territorial autonomy has been raised. Finally, for the Colombian case, some problematizations present in the relationship between Indigenous Education and state policy on education are collected. It is concluded that the ontological and epistemic violence that generates injustices in knowledge and understanding, and that affected the indigenous peoples under the colonial project, is resisted based on the educational experiences of the Nasa Indigenous People.

Storytelling As a Counter-narrative Technique Against Colonial Project in David Milroy’s Windmill Baby

Storytelling As a Counter-narrative Technique Against Colonial Project in David Milroy’s Windmill Baby

Nomadic responses to rainfall: Nighttime light evidence from wadis in Djibouti

This study examined the association between human activities and precipitation in dry areas, focusing on nomadic people in Djibouti. Nomadic communities often lack access to essential social services, and water resource management is crucial for their survival and social welfare. Understanding how they respond to variations in water availability could contribute to effective policy implementation. Using satellite-derived information, this study found that nighttime light brightness increased in response to precipitation around wadis, with potential water spring locations, and decreased with distance from a wadi. Specifically, we observed no effect when the distance was more than 5 km. Furthermore, no effect of precipitation was found in urban areas, while a positive effect was found in remote areas. These findings suggest that the activity of nomadic people increases around wadis in response to increased water resource availability, indicating that water supply is important for settlement projects because it can reduce water-seeking costs and improve social welfare. This study provides the first empirical evidence using satellite data and statistical analysis to show that water availability is critical for nomadic communities which can inform better resource management and policy decisions in African countries.

Why do they stay? A spatial perspective on settler colonialism, decolonization and the case of Kosovo Serbs

ABSTRACT This study offers a new perspective on settler colonial theory through the case of Serbia/Kosovo. It develops two hypotheses: (1) settler colonial projects in neighboring territories differ markedly from those overseas, necessitating a revised conceptualization called here ‘contiguous settler colonialism,’ and (2) these projects may prompt settlers to remain amid decolonization despite adverse conditions. The empirical analysis identifies three key factors leading to this outcome: the 'Serbianization' of the physical environment, the (im)mobility arrangements of Kosovo Serbs, and Serbia's coercive cooptation system, resulting in a 'settler colonial make-believe space' between the former colonial state and the emerging decolonizing polity.

Going Beyond the Tropes of ‘Friendship’ and ‘Modernization’: Internal Colonialism in Siam and Scandinavia in the Age of Empire

ABSTRACT This article contributes to a reconceptualization of the relationship between Siam and Scandinavia at the turn of the twentieth century. At that time, the relationship was manifested by the presence of a large group of Scandinavian, mainly Danish, entrepreneurs and professionals in Siam and repeated visits between the royal houses in Siam and the Scandinavian countries. The tropes of friendship and modernization dominate the main representation of the relationship. In accordance with this representation the Scandinavians were not perceived as a colonial threat to the Siamese rulers but co-producers of a modern and independent Siam. This narrative, created both by the Scandinavians and Siamese, reproduces a dominant royalist narrative in Thai historical writing that presents the absolute monarchy as a disinterested elite who launched a series of reforms to modernize Siam and safeguard the country against foreign encroachment. With reference to a revisionist tradition in Thai historical writing, we argue that Scandinavian–Siamese relations at the turn of the twentieth century needs to be accentuated in relation to the Siamese royal elite’s project of internal colonialism.

Mapping for connection, a life beyond mapping for control: lessons from ‘mapping-as-performance’ with Empatheatre in South Africa

This paper critically examines the intersections of Science, colonialism, and cartography in shaping perceptions of the ocean and its human-nature relationships. Drawing on Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies (PCSTS) and Decolonial Theory, it scrutinizes historical mapping practices, revealing how they perpetuated ontological hierarchies and controlled narratives of the ocean. Through archival research spanning from the Revolution to colonial exploration, the paper exposes how maps framed the ocean as a controllable entity, obscuring socio-cultural dimensions of biodiversity. Focusing on a case study in Northern Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa, the authors explore an Empatheatre mapping process, that challenges Western ontologies and promotes counter-hegemonic cartographic practices. Situating this within critical cartography and PCSTS literature, the paper reveals how colonial projects molded perceptions of oceanic space and influenced environmental governance. In the South African context, the ocean is haunted by a violent history of racial exclusion and ecological exploitation. Initiatives like Operation Phakisa’s Blue Economy plan underscore the tension between economic growth and ecological sustainability, leading to rapid coastal developments. Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) emerges as a tool to reconcile these interests, yet its implementation raises questions about inclusivity and community participation. Introducing the Empatheatre method, characterized by a ‘Call and Response’ approach, the paper invites local communities to co-create maps reflecting their concerns and relationships with the ocean. Through attentive listening and collaborative storytelling, Empatheatre challenges traditional consultation methods, prioritizing meaningful engagement and collective meaning-making. Mapping in this context is not merely a static representation but a dynamic process of collective thinking and relationality. By foregrounding the social, cultural, and ecological context, Empatheatre’s approach redefines the mapmaker-map relationship and empowers communities as active agents in shaping their narratives. The transformative potential of Empatheatre lies in its ability to shift power dynamics and foster empathy between diverse stakeholders. Through performative storytelling and visual representations, Empatheatre creates space for marginalized voices and alternative modes of knowledge transmission. In conclusion, this paper advocates for a decolonial approach to oceanic cartographies that acknowledges diverse ontologies and fosters inclusive governance structures.

Agroecological Yards, Food Sovereignty and Production of Ecosystem Services in South Bahia, Brazil

Objective: This study aims to characterize productive backyards, in the identity territory of the Far South of Bahia, highlighting the challenges, potential, characteristics, productive arrangements and ecosystem services perceived by families. Theoretical Framework: In this article, we will discuss the concepts of ecosystem services, productive backyards and agroecosystems. Method: The study was carried out in 18 agrarian reform settlement lots in the municipalities of Teixeira de Freitas and Prado/BA. Data were collected through interviews, semi-structured questionnaires, transversal walks, soil collection for chemical analysis and plant collection for identification. Results and Discussion: Productive backyards stood out for being a biodiverse space, important in generating income, especially non-financial income, promoting food sovereignty, improving soils and promoting quality of life for the families surveyed. The backyards ranged from 0.54 to 3.1 hectares and 94.4% have predominantly agroecological management. 230 special species were found, such as fruit, native, medicinal, horticultural and spiritual, and 15 ecosystem services were evaluated. We conclude that backyards are a powerful tool in promoting food sovereignty, generating income, environmental and biodiversity restoration and promoting of ecosystem services. Research Implications: Assess whether ecosystem services resulting from productive backyards are important for the construction of public policies and socio-biodiverse productive strategies for the family farming segment. Originality/Value: It is unprecedented research on settlement projects, presenting a research method, data and important information for evaluating productive backyards.

Mechanics Institutes in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Victoria: Racial Difference and Liberalism in the Settler Colony

ABSTRACT In the second half of the nineteenth century, mechanics institutes proliferated across the Australian colonies at such a rate that, by 1900, they were more widespread, proportional to population, than in Britain. This article examines the first 30 years of their development in colonial Victoria to offer a new interpretation of their deep entanglement with settler colonial liberalism. As in Britain, the Victoria mechanics institutes largely failed to deliver technical education to working-class men. However, the men who propelled their proliferation had much wider hopes for their pedagogic function in the settler colony. This article examines how the twin forces of political liberalism and settler colonialism underwrote and shaped mechanics institutes in mid-nineteenth-century Victoria. Examining the ideas of colonial liberals who propelled their proliferation and the activities that took place within them, it becomes clear that these institutes were imagined to cultivate certain kinds of settler Britons, capable of bearing the freedoms of an emerging settler modernity. At the same time, moreover, they both legitimated and implemented a settler colonial project of dispossession and demographic replacement. Mechanics institutes, I argue, were thus agents of both settler colonial destruction and liberal cultivation.

Maintaining the Ramesside Empire: Isotopic Evidence for Elite Migration to Upper Nubia under Pharaonic Rule

Abstract Pharaonic Egypt ruled Upper Nubia (now northern Sudan) from around 1450 to 1070 BCE: previous research has demonstrated how co-opted local elites and descendants of earlier immigrants held senior administrative positions following the initial conquest. Strontium isotope data from 39 individuals buried at the colonial centre of Amara West, combined with archaeological and epigraphic evidence, enable us to demonstrate that elites continued to arrive from outside Nubia in the last 150 years of pharaonic rule, settling amongst long-standing communities. Migration to the occupied territory clearly remained a key component of the colonial project, at a time when indigenous Nubian material culture and practice had become more visible within the pharaonic towns. This pattern of immigration seems to have ceased following the pharaonic state losing control of the region.

Medieval Pasts and Eugenicist Futures: Grant Allen, Masculinity and Early English History

ABSTRACT Grant Allen was a Victorian scholar and novelist who published widely on science, literature and history. Embedded within these publications is a fascination with early England, particularly early English masculinity. Allen saw in England's origins a blueprint for the kind of white, hegemonic masculinity he wished to see reproduced not only in contemporary English society and culture but also in the eugenic makeup of the English people as well. By reaching to early English history to legitimise his own visions of imperial white masculinity, Allen weaves a fantasy of medieval male virility into the fabric of his Victorian present. This essay discusses Allen's interest in the social apparatus of gender, contemporary eugenicist discourse and the interpretive potential of an imagined medieval past and argues that Allen uses early English history to justify ongoing colonial projects and to frame white men as the rightful heirs to global power.

Gaza’s Broken Lullaby: Genocidal Unchilding and the Impossibility of Mothering

ABSTRACT This article describes the devastating impact of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the strategies used to dismantle the social and familial structures of Palestinian people, particularly targeting women and children. It sheds light on the severe conditions and the complex layers of violence that affect these mothers, who struggle to provide a semblance of normalcy and safety for their children amidst such adversity. The focus on women and children is a deliberate tactic by the settler colonial project to ensure there is no future for the Palestinian nation. By disrupting the ability to mother and nurture, the settler colonial forces aim to erase the continuity and resilience of the Palestinian identity, culture, and community, essentially targeting the very reproduction of the nation itself.

(UN) COVERING KARACHI: THE CREATION OF A BRITISH VISUAL LANGUAGE IN SINDH

Karachi, a city of 14000 people, was evolving as an important port for strategic geopolitical reasons and increasing trade at the time of the British conquest in 1843. However, it was not equipped with the infrastructure — such as an all-weather port — required for its continued economic progress. The fort town had a Chabutra (Custom House), shrines, temples, and caravanserais interspersed among the large havelis and houses of Hindu merchants and government functionaries. Neither the fort nor the Chabutra survived British colonial rule in Sindh. In fact, in keeping with their plans for the city, the British demolished these structures fairly early on in their rule of Sindh. The subsequent establishment of British institutions and political infrastructure was reinforced by the construction of buildings and monuments that looked distinctly European in style. This was not only because of the architectural styles employed in these buildings but also in the choice of ornamentation. For example, by patronizing artisans that were well versed in stone engravings and sculpture making, the British shifted attention away from the art of traditional frescoes, painting, and glazed tiles. This paper explores how the Occident imported architectural and visual cultural styles and forms into their colonies to create an entirely new visual language for their colonized subjects in South Asia. It argues that this was done deliberately to ensure political legitimacy in the eyes of their subjects as well as to highlight their own cultural superiority. The lack of native creative expression and the emergence of the modernist movement eventually led to their disappearance from structures built after Independence. This was a colonial project deeply entrenched in discourses of racism and inequality. Keywords: Colonial Architecture, Hegemony, Tradition, Architectural Movements, Colonialism

Embodied Creative Practice as a method for cultural recovery.

We exist in the marriage of physical and spiritual remembrance. It is in these spaces that we identify with our physical and imagined bodies.’” (Saye, 2017, p. 42).” This paper weaves through my artistic journey, and my adoption of an embodied practice, as a methodology of recovering my voice and self, as a creative practitioner. This paper examines the photograph as an immortal object that transcends time and space, and highlights its capabilities in producing non-linear narratives, challenging fixed notions of time which underpinned the western colonial project. Through my analysis of works of the British Gambian Photographer Khadija Saye, and my photo project ‘Orí Inú’, I showcase the ritualistic process of photography, as a liberatory force of sustaining life, as well as its capabilities in carving a space of solidarity for the photographer and viewer. By focusing on Ìṣẹ̀ṣe (Yoruba Spirituality) and Spiritualist Photography, I demonstrate the power of photography in imagining speculative possibilities, that go beyond the normative understandings of marginalized bodies, and the rethinking of our vulnerable world.

Colonial Sustainability: Tracing the Sustainability Industry’s Ecocidal Lineage from the Doctrine of Discovery

The concept of “sustainable development” fuelling today’s sustainability industry may be traced back to the turn of the 14th century. The Holy Roman Empire’s imperialistic expansions into Africa and the Canary Islands eventually morphed into a burgeoning capitalist European colonial project, which then sought to undo the very environmental harms it had wrought through colonial extraction from further colonial domination and social control. Post-World War II “peace” efforts birthed supranational entities that continue to impose white supremacist epistemological systems, frames, and standards on the neocolonised Global South. These impositions led to the creation of the contemporary sustainability industry, enabling the obfuscation of Global North expansionism through the application of white supremacist, Western-centric sustainability rhetoric. The cultural evolution of “sustainability” moves steadily apace as decolonial counternarratives struggle to materialise amid active silencing and stamping out by the mechanisms of coloniality.

Walter Gropius, history of the IV CIAM Congress, the Charter of Athens and some of its results

The history of the emergence of the idea of multi-story housing construction is described, starting with the project of the experimental settlement of Spandau-Haselhorst by Walter Gropius and the subsequent report of Gropius to the third CIAM congress. The conditions under which the IV CIAM Congress met are shown - the world economic crisis, the strengthening of authoritarianism in the world, the absence of German, American and Soviet architects, as well as opponents of Le Corbusier in other delegations. The history of the IV Congress and the appearance, ten years after it, of two versions of the Athens Charter are described. The differences between José Luis Sert's version and Le Corbusier's version are presented, as well as some results of its implementation. The implementation of ideas, both different from the Athens Charter and its followers, in Great Britain and the place that the construction of multi-storey housing eventually took in the country is described. An example of construction regulation in Germany is given, which makes the construction of multi-story housing economically unprofitable.