Colonial Situation Research Articles

The Rational Colonial and the Civilised Modern: An Indian Perspective on Western Epistemology and Personality Formation

This article critically compares the social formation and tenants of Indian and British knowledge systems through an analysis of British colonisation in India. Specifically, it draws on Gandhi’s understanding of the id, ego and super-ego relationship that is revealed in the colonial situation and its legacy. While Europe characterises Asian societies and individuals as id-like and therefore in need of meditation by the ego represented by European modernity, in actuality pre-colonial Indian civilisation is better represented by the super-ego that is driven to sacrifice for the collective security of the whole and Europe is better characterised as the id-driven by the desire for capital accumulation with the ultimate goal of self-satisfaction. Within this framework, I explore how each society was deeply formed by the respective id and super-ego orientations—from their knowledge systems to their understandings of the human being and sociopolitical arrangements. This analysis better helps to understand how the political economy of India was corrupted through British colonisation and why so-called European modernity could not fulfil its promise, creating instead new crises in its wake.

A Singular Enlightenment: C. L. R. James, Anti-Colonialism, and Transatlantic Political Thought

This article formulates an original account of the Enlightenment through an interpretation of C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins, a landmark work of transatlantic anti-colonial thought. It defends a dialectical account of the Enlightenment as a singular transatlantic historical process whose content and critical import changes across space and time. In The Black Jacobins, James shows the Enlightenment’s revolutionary and emancipatory political legacy by staging the dialectic of the Enlightenment in a colonial situation defined by a slave-plantation economy. James illustrates the Enlightenment’s political legacy as a “concrete universal” that has particular and singular aspects, each with its own unique contours. In doing so, the article considers other themes at the center of both historical and contemporary political theory such as how to best conceptualize colonialism; the traveling and misplacement of Enlightened ideas; and the critical importance of the dialectical legacy and critical theory in these efforts.

Mapping the Unmappable Dublin: The Breakdown of Space and Place in James Joyce’s “Two Gallants”

By defining space as the physical location itself and place as a way in which space is socially, culturally, politically, and historically organized, this paper argues that James Joyce’s “Two Gallants” does not simply signify the paralytic and colonial situation of Dublin. Whereas the anglicized streets and buildings shows that the space of Ireland and the place of England are unified, the unnamed street and the shop connotes that the unification of the Irish space and the British place comes apart. Moreover, with the shop’s white letters and Lenehan’s food (the green peas and the orange ginger beer), which can be understood as the Irish flag, Joyce hopes to override the place of the British, therefore reattaching the space of Ireland to the place of Ireland.

¿Pa ‘rriba o pa ’bajo? Upward mobility, anti‐Blackness, and the independence question among Puerto Ricans in NYC: A decolonial psychoanalytic study

AbstractPuerto Rico is one of the world's oldest colonies, with thousands of its people dislocated to the United States (U.S.) mainland in the wake of Hurricane Maria and the ongoing economic crisis. However, since the 2019 protests ousting then governor Rosello, Puerto Ricans across the Diaspora are imagining new emancipatory realities, including the possibility of independence. This paper draws on data from the Colonial Mentality Study in New York City (CMS‐NYC, N = 19) to explore how Puerto Ricans in the Diaspora narrativize new political possibilities despite the challenges posed by post‐disaster migration and racial and economic inequality. Using a decolonial psychoanalytic approach, we show how two colonial logics—moving “up and out” of Puerto Rico and “up and in” American capitalism—are textured by discourses of racial inferiority and upward mobility, and illustrate how these are experienced by Puerto Ricans who identify as Multiracial (Multiracial‐Identified Puerto Rican, N = 11), and Puerto Ricans who identify as Black (BIPR, N = 8). Reading our findings in the sociogenic context of race, class, and colonialism in Puerto Rico, and race and class among Puerto Ricans in NYC, we explore how racism toward Puerto Ricans and racism among Puerto Ricans intersect with notions of upward mobility, revealing how anti‐Blackness supports economic inequality in the U.S. mainland alongside with Puerto Rico's colonial situation. Complementing decolonial psychoanalytic theory with the Afro‐Puerto Rican radical tradition, we outline the implications of this research for future scholarship, clinical practice, and political action.

I Saw Ramallah and its Approach to Realistic Colonial Literature

The concept of alienation and exile was very important among the postcolonial enthusiast literary researches. Due to the sporadic nature of the topic, it was estimated that a new area of research exists to be investigated. Due to this interest, this study attempted to discuss the concepts of exile, alienation from homeland and the colonialism in Mourid Barghouti's I Saw Ramallah with postcolonial theory.The research attempted to discuss the problem of resistance and personal choices in dealing with the wave of modernization in the colonized countries or regions. It should be mentioned that while this study focused on the ideological clashes caused by colonialism, it was interested to see how a new concept of comparative literature as a discourse tolerance can reveal the meaning of literary works. To do so, this study investigated comparative literature as a form of literary studies against nationalism. In this case, the Mourid Barghouti's I Saw Ramallah investigated new ways of reading about the literature of Palestine. On the Other hand, I Saw Ramallah showed that the ideology of nationalism was one of the main reasons which cripples the Palestinian literature to offer a more realistic investigation of colonial situation in Palestine which Mourid Barghouti attempted to criticize in the novel.

“L’Européen Sait et ne sait pas”: Frantz Fanon and Epistemologies of Ignorance

ABSTRACT This article argues that Frantz Fanon’s critique of the epistemology of the colonial situation is a complex, pluralized, epistemology of ignorance, where ignorance takes three main forms. Fanon first produces a critique of colonial ideology, in which ignorance is the product of the colonizers’ false justificatory ideology. Fanon unveils how Europeans, through human sciences such as “ethnopsychiatry” and “ethnophilosophy,” deliberately produce ignorance and devaluation of colonized subjects and colonized knowledge for purposes of domination. Second, ignorance is the unintentional result of the partial, situated, standpoint of embodied knowers. Fanon does not intend to substitute a “black truth” to white ideology. He rather insists that while truth is unattainable under colonial conditions, the affective perspective of the oppressed/colonized is a necessary constitutive part of any objective account of the world. Third, by analyzing the “Conducts of confession in North Africa,” characterized by deliberate denial, lies, and opacity as resistance mechanisms, Fanon insists that no objective knowledge is possible in a colonial situation because of the total separation, and impossible epistemic collaboration, of dominant and dominated knowers. An anticolonial politics has to focus on producing the conditions of possibility of knowledge.

Sömürgeciliğin İkiyüzlülüğü: This Earth of Mankind Adlı Romanda Irkçılık ve Kimlik Kavramları

This Earth of Mankind, by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, is a moving literary masterpiece that looks into the complexity of identity and the lingering impacts of colonial subjugation. The novel's analysis of oppression reveals the deep web of power relations inherent in colonial countries. The novel illuminates the enormous inequalities between the colonizers and the colonized, as well as the racial and socioeconomic hierarchies that sustain the systemic oppression of the indigenous population. It follows Minke, a Javanese native protagonist, as he struggles with his multiple identities as an educated man finding his way through Dutch-dominated society and as a representation of his indigenous culture. In this regard, this article emphasizes the varied nature of identity creation in a colonial situation through an in-depth investigation of major characters and their relationships. Additionally, the article focuses on how the authoritarian colonial system impacts and constrains the identities of other individuals in the novel. Drawing upon postcolonial theories and historical context as well, this article also sheds light on the recurring themes of identity negotiation, cultural assimilation, and resistance within This Earth of Mankind. It aims to foster a better understanding of the psychological, social, and cultural impacts of colonialism on both the colonizers and the colonized. Ultimately, this article aims to contribute to the ongoing discourse on decolonization, identity politics, and the legacy of colonialism through an in-depth analysis of Toer's masterpiece.

Phenomenology and its phantoms: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Michel Leiris

My essay focuses on the figure of the phantom in the work of phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the ethnographer Michel Leiris. I study their evocation of gestures as a site of communication and argue that within the colonial situation all communication—including the gestural—is ghosted by histories and cultural understandings that remain opaque.

« À l’exemple des Abeilles » : Daniel Thaly poète-apiculteur

The purpose of this article is to introduce the West Indian poet Daniel Thaly (1879-1950), who was both a poet and a beekeeper. In his collection of poems L’île et le voyage, Thaly devotes the Fourth Chant to "La maison aux abeilles" (The house of bees), in which he celebrates the insects he cares for, which teach him both an art of living and an art of poetry. Thaly’s example shows how the practice of beekeeping informs poetry, particularly by renewing man’s relationship with the landscape. Beekeeping and the observation of bees also led the poet to set up these insects as poetic models: the motif of the bee is frequently used in poetry to represent the practice of innutrition. Like the bee, the poet gleans inspiration from his readings to produce his own honey, the poetic result of his influences. The case of Daniel Thaly is an interesting one, since we are dealing with a French-speaking poet in a colonial situation marked by the influence of Western literature and the force of assimilation. Thaly and the apiary metaphor invite us to examine the notions of imitation, innutrition and originality in the context of West Indian colonisation. Here, the prism of beekeeping offers a fresh look at a form of writing that for too long has been relegated to the category of servile imitation and stigmatised by critics as regionalist, exotic and doudouist literature.

‘It’s in my blood, in my food and in my soul’: current understandings of Puerto Ricanness within the Puerto Rican nation

ABSTRACT Although the United Nations no longer classifies Puerto Rico as a colony, Puerto Rico poses theoretical and empirical challenges to inquiries about national identity within (post-)colonial situations. Gazing through a sociohistorical lens, the present study explores how beliefs about legitimate membership criteria relate to self-identified Puerto Ricans’ understanding of their and in-group others’ national identity. By contextualizing current perceptions of national identity as linked to an emergent Puerto Rican nationalism throughout the nineteenth- and twentieth-century, this paper relates individual-level conceptions of membership criteria to institutional and discursive interventions, thereby contributing to studies of national identity in colonially (un)settled times.

Sandwich Tern Feeds Juvenile on Wintering Grounds in Southern Namibia

Seabirds have long lives, reproduce slowly and usually do not attempt to relay within the same breeding season after nest failure. In Sandwich Terns Thalasseus sandvicensis, renesting has never been documented despite the large number of studies on their breeding ecology and recorded prospecting behaviour after nest failure. In 2020, we observed how three GPS-tagged Sandwich Terns moved 115 km after nest failure for a second breeding attempt. One of these birds hatched a chick from the second clutch successfully. We hypothesize that synchronous breeding usually prevents Sandwich Terns from trying again after nest failure and that the relays observed in 2020 were facilitated by the unusual situation of a successful breeding colony that started three weeks later than all other colonies in the Netherlands.

From Imperial Persecution to Colonial Situation: Alternatives to Persecution Theories in Revelation Studies

For centuries the idea that John wrote the Book of Revelation to comfort Christians suffering Roman imperial persecution dominated the interpretation of the text's social setting. Due to the lack of archaeological and literary evidence, scholars have abandoned such a view and offered alternatives ranging from prophetic rivalries to Christian complacency to account for the Revelation's crisis rhetoric. However, these depoliticizing views assume that an absence of persecution amounts to a lack of systemic oppression and reflect the limitations and strengths of competing interpretation paradigms in biblical studies as well as the guild's Eurocentric ethos. Framing Revelation's rhetorical situation as a colonial situation, new approaches explore how John and his interlocutors turned idol food into a site for negotiating power, identity, and wealth.

Honeybee (Apis spp.) (Hymenoptera: Apidae) Colony Monitoring Using Acoustic Signals from the Beehive: An Assessment by Global Experts and Our Feedback

Because the sounds emitted by a managed honeybee colony embrace a wealth of information about the status within and outside the beehive, researchers are interested in developing a beehive sound-based assessment of the colony situation. However, how the global experts rank this approach is unclear. We assessed the importance of beehive sound-based colony monitoring using formal expert elicitation. Our results indicate that policy-making bodies should focus on a non-invasive acoustic approach to monitor swarming, honeybee health, pesticides, and environmental pollution at apiaries, as these were considered very important factors with high confidence by global experts. Moreover, all other factors (pests and pathogens, weather conditions, predators, food availability, and spatiotemporal patterns) are rated as important, but experts’ confidence in acoustically monitoring a few of the factors differs. Because experienced forager bees emit bursting sounds during the waggle dance (particularly during the waggle-run phase) at a specific angle on a vertical comb within the hive, we propose an acoustics-based recording setup using a Raspberry Pi and a QuadMic Array to investigate how this sound can predict the spatial and temporal information of the available food sources. In this article, we highlight how the factors falling into the inconclusive category of confidence have the potential to be acoustically monitored. Besides, this paper suggests new and unexplored directions for opening a window for future research in beehive acoustics.

Baznīca, biedrības un krogs – trīs atšķirīgi lokusi un socializācijas veidi Augusta Deglava romānā “Rīga”

In the novel “Riga” by Augusts Deglavs (1862–1922), places (space, object, geographical location) are carriers of important and varied meaning. In these meaningful places or loci, the issues that are important both for the respective individuals and their societies are being actualised and resolved. Taking into account that the aforementioned novel essentially depicts a society permeated by colonial and patriarchal relationships, it is in these loci that a differing model of socialisation and important oppositions in terms of power relations are manifested. From the wide catalogue of objects, three types of spaces and the related social organisations and types of interactions will be discussed: pub, church and associations (also known as societies). The least restrained and dynamic from the aforementioned are different associations that became popular in Latvian circles in the last decades of the 19th century. Employing the semiotic method and Pitirim Sorokin’s (1889–1968) theory of social mobility, the meaning of the loci in regard to the colonial structure and the ability of the actors of the colonial situation to change their standing in the society is outlined.

ШЕВЧЕНКОВА КОНЦЕПЦІЯ УКРАЇНИ НА ТЛІ ВИКЛИКІВ НАЦІОНАЛЬНОГО БУТТЯ ДОБИ

The research examines T. Shevchenko's concept of Ukraine in two aspects: as a supreme value and the embodiment of the national idea – in the context of the national existence of his period and the challenges that faced Ukrainianism. The main one of them was the threat of transformation into an integral part of the Russian nation (inferior part) – the Malorussians. At the end of the 18th century the empire actually managed to absorb Ukraine and deprive Ukrainians of their self-assertion, through the policy of denationalization and Russification. Depriving Ukrainians of their name was an effective means of denationalization implemented by the empire, because among the attributes of the nation, the name itself is primary. The literature of the first half of the 19th century (prior to T. Shevchenko), marked by a powerful national movement, had no manifestations of opposition to Russia. The Ukrainian intelligentsia of that time mastered the concept of Russia's dominance over Ukraine. While talking about the poetic concept of Ukraine, we drew attention to the difference between the vision of Ukraine, reduced to folklore and the past events of that period, and the vision of T. Shevchenko. He contrasts the imperial narrative about the colonial situation of Ukraine with the poetry about the Cossack victory and the liberation struggle. T. Shevchenko shows the real state of the decline of the empire-ruled Ukraine. He debunks the central myth created by the imperial ideology, which significantly influenced the consciousness of Ukrainians. This myth states that the unity with Muscovites has been achieved through the person of B. Khmelnytskyi and, accordingly, in the subtext, via the event of the Pereyaslav Agreement. For the first time such thoughts of T. Shevchenko were set out in "The Unearthed Grave"and a little bit later in his merciless anti-colonialist, anti-tsarist lyrics "Night Dream (Сomedy)", "Caucasus", etc.). By doing so, T. Shevchenko makes a revolution in Ukrainian public opinion, being ahead of his time. T. Shevchenko gave new meanings to the topic of Ukraine. His poetry gave answers to the most important challenges of national existence: it participated in the ormation of national existence with the help of words; discovered the authentic self-identity of Ukrainians' formed the nation as a spiritual community; opposed the imperial culture. T. Shevchenko affirmed the very idea of Ukraine as an independent subject. He raised the idea of Ukraine to the level of supreme value. The fate of native Ukraine, as T. Shevchenko shows, disproportionately prevails in the paradigm of all possible interests.

Changing Universality

Is it possible to conceptualize universality in a way that does not exclude particularity, difference, and change? In his approach to universality, Merleau-Ponty distinguishes between acquired universality, which is supposedly objective and non-temporal, and the lateral differentiation of universals, which is temporal and changing. My suggestion, in this article, is that he does not assert that there is a specific kind of unchanging universal norm to which all different styles of experience should be anchored; instead, there is a never-finished diversification through which universal dimensions are instituted. However, I will also present a critical examination of the concept of change as it can also mean oppressive transformation. Ultimately, Merleau-Ponty’s political view of colonial situation seems to contradict his concept of open universality.

Tunis in the Global Radical Web: Diasporas, Transnational Anarchism, and Labor Movements (1887–1912)

AbstractThe paper focuses on the Italian-speaking anarchists of the end of the nineteenth century and their involvement and legacy in trade union movements and strikes in Tunis during the first decade of the twentieth century. A perspective privileging the internationalist and trade-unionist activities, and their impact on that specific colonial context, avoids the dangers of a rigid ethnoscape and methodological nationalism. Even though most of the actors of this story were considered by the states as Italian nationals, their conflictual (at least for the anarchists) nationality helps us to understand the complexity of the national-cultural belonging of subversive migrants in the Imperial Mediterranean. The ideological struggle on the subversive legacy of Giuseppe Garibaldi at the end of the nineteenth century and the conflictual relations of the trade unions with consular authorities at the beginning of the twentieth century showed an Italian-speaking internationalism in the Southern Mediterranean shore, tightly connected with the European and the American areas. Based on understudied diplomatic, colonial, and police records, this research aims at analyzing the attempts of an international working-class movement in a hierarchical colonial situation also through Italian, French, and Tunisian sources.

Sayyid Qutb: An Intellectual Biography

Sayyid Qutb: An Intellectual Biography

Decolonial encounter with neo‐nationalism: The politics of indigeneity and land rights struggles in Okinawa

AbstractThis paper aims to make a contribution to ongoing debates in decolonial, indigenous, and island geographies through a case study of the Okinawan indigenous movement and its recent encounter with a neo‐nationalist, and in effect neocolonial, movement. The Okinawan indigenous movement emerged against the backdrop of the continuing US military presence on Okinawa Island, which is the direct result of the post‐war American military occupation and continues to be maintained by Japanese post‐colonial policies. In the early 2000s, the movement achieved indigenous recognition by United Nations human rights bodies, which have since issued recommendations to the Japanese government to implement protective measures for the islanders, including indigenous land rights measures that are hoped to alleviate the militarised colonial situation. Not only does the Japanese government continue to ignore the recommendations, but the Okinawan indigenous movement today also confronts a new form of neocolonialism. In the past few years, a group of neo‐nationalists and conservative politicians have initiated a countermovement against the Okinawan indigenous status. They have mobilised the unpopularity of the term ‘indigenous people’ in Japanese (‘senjūmin’) among Okinawans as a pretext for demanding the retraction of the recommendations. The case study shows that the different conceptualisations of decolonisation and indigeneity represent not only an analytical usefulness but also an empirical importance for they create a space in which these ideas can be (ab)used to both promote and hinder a decolonial pursuit of the reappropriation of colonised (is)lands. It illustrates a particular geopolitics of knowledge in which different actors mobilise different understandings of decolonisation and indigeneity for a decolonial or neocolonial end. The paper concludes with a discussion of the challenges for decolonial geographies that arise from the present study.

U.S. Indian Affairs, British Imperial Africa, and Transcolonial Dialogues over Conservation and "Native Development" in the 1930s

Throughout the 1930s, as technical officers from multiple territories in British imperial Africa toured the United States to study federal soil conservation efforts in the wake of the Dust Bowl, they made particular observations of programs among southwestern Native American populations and conferred with colleagues in the U.S. Office of Indian Affairs (OIA). These previously unexplored exchanges extended far beyond purely technical matters: they became significant opportunities for both British imperial and OIA officials to reflect comparatively on America's enduring settler colonialism, colonial situations in eastern and southern Africa, and parallel state agendas of "native development." This article focuses on three case studies—involving visitors from colonial South Africa and Lesotho, Zimbabwe, and Kenya to various reservations and Pueblos in New Mexico and Arizona—to reveal how officials used these transcolonial dialogues to articulate their particular interests in and promote their preferred approaches to managing colonized peoples and their landscapes.