Migrant members of racially marginalized groups pursue their political struggle in places outside their land of origin. How would they resist racialized collective violence in the diaspora by engaging in solidarity as they acculturate to a new societal order? Combining traditional social psychological approaches of intragroup relationships with anticolonial and antiracist combative praxis, the current research examined (post)migrant Kurds' narratives of solidarity as resistance as they shared their experiences of Turkish racialized colonial violence in Belgium. We conducted a mixed methods study combining in-depth interviews with researcher participatory truth-witnessing. We interviewed 24 Kurds (2 sexual and gender minorities, 10 cisheterosexual women, 12 cisheterosexual men) about their intragroup relations and Kurdish resistance against collective violence. Reflexive thematic analysis centring around intragroup solidarity showed that participants understood and practiced solidarity as resistance and existence in several ways. In the diaspora, they navigated resistance against Turkish collective violence, transnational repression and the structural challenges of migrational acculturation through diverse, multi-sited, multi-layered and liminal intragroup solidarity despite some intragroup exclusions, with a desire for intragroup unity. Participatory truth-witnessing revealed that political organization and critical consciousness are central to intragroup solidarity beyond ethnocultural cohesion.

Rotten roots: the colonial genealogies of Irish enslavers

ABSTRACT This article offers a contrapuntal reading of Returning to Haifa and Mornings in Jenin to examine how Palestinian narratives of return, displacement, memory, and cultural sustainability are reconfigured across generations. Drawing on Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis and adaptation theory, the article argues that Mornings in Jenin functions not only as a thematic continuation of Returning to Haifa but also as an adaptive reconfiguration that expands its historical, psychological, and narrative scope. While Kanafani foregrounds the immediate trauma of dispossession through Said and Safiyya’s return to Haifa, Abulhawa extends this trajectory through Amal’s intergenerational experience of exile, postmemory, inherited loss, and the struggle to sustain Palestinian identity under prolonged settler colonialism. Read contrapuntally, the texts reveal how Palestinian subjectivity is shaped by evolving structures of colonial violence, where return becomes both desire and traumatic confrontation. The protagonists’ encounters with occupied homes mark an encounter with the Lacanian Real, exposing the irreversibility of displacement and affirming literature as a site of resistance and cultural memory.

In 2019, five Inuit from Iglulik, Nunavut, sued the federal government for medical experiments, including painful skin grafts, conducted on them in the 1960s and 1970s. From 1968 to 1972, researchers – academics, dentists, and physicians employed by Canadian universities and government – arrived in two Nunavut communities to study the Inuit. As part of the International Biological Programme (ibp), they engaged with a transnational scientific construction of the world’s Indigenous peoples as “primitives” who were assumed to embody the secrets of human evolution and adaptation. Research would reveal those secrets for the “civilized” world seemingly on the brink of environmental destruction. In return for the promise of needed health care, the community councils agreed to cooperate with researchers who then took away blood, tissue, teeth, x-rays, personal data, photographs, and at least one child. John Dossetor, who directed the skin graft experiments, was subsequently hailed as a pioneer in medical ethics and memorialized in the University of Alberta’s medical ethics centre. This article argues that the ibp experiments indulged professional interests and advanced careers while implicating the developing field of bioethics in colonial violence.

With over 54.9 million monthly listeners on Spotify alone, Lana Del Rey has taken the world by storm with her dreamy, melancholic music, and vintage American aesthetic (Spotify, 2024). This article thus seeks to identify and analyze the perpetuation of settler colonial privilege and power structures within the music and aesthetic of Lana Del Rey. I argue that despite having the potential to critique a heteronormative, capitalist ideal of the American dream, Del Rey’s aesthetic ultimately perpetuates settler-colonial power structures and imaginaries through a nostalgic idealization of America and of white femininity, founded on colonial violence. I interrogate the aesthetic of Del Rey using a settler colonial framework, specifically Kevin Bruyneel’s concept of “settler memory” which describes how structures of settler politics, history and media selectively remember and frame the past to erase Indigenous existence and sovereignty (Bruyneel, 2021). I first argue that Del Rey’s aesthetic romanticizes open landscapes and erases the past and ongoing reality of settler colonial violence within the United States. I then highlight how Lana’s depiction of Kennedy-era politics reaffirms settler colonial power structures and bolsters her white femininity. I then analyze the implications of Del Rey’s “sad girl” aesthetic in bolstering white fragility and framing the sexuality of Indigenous and racialized women as inferior and degrading. I finally analyze the decolonial potential of Del Rey’s music in spite of her perpetuation of settler colonialism.

ABSTRACT This article examines how national and Afro-diasporic Brazilian museums negotiate the heritage of slavery through exhibition storytelling. Focusing on three museums in Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, we explore how museum practitioners engage in memory work that challenges hegemonic narratives of slavery, often centred on violence and silencing. Drawing on exhibition analysis and expert interviews, we observe the persistence of a ‘narrative of shackles’ that defines and binds the memory of slavery and foregrounds its trauma through material artefacts of violence and narratives of suffering. In contrast, museum spaces employ strategies to reframe and resist this established narrative, emphasising the museum’s complicity in colonial violence, Afro-diasporic historical and contemporary resilience, and joyful and celebrational narratives. By analysing exhibitions that are not solely dedicated to trauma but embed slavery within broader cultural narratives, the study contributes to debates on the ongoing struggles to negotiate difficult heritage in institutional memory spaces and the possibilities and limitations afforded to museum producers to negotiate colonial legacies in the present.

This article examines how La vie privée d’oubli (2024c) by Gisèle Pineau elaborates a poetics of justice grounded not in narrative closure or historical repair, but in the ethical force of literary representation. Drawing on the interrelated concepts of prosopopoeia, epigenetics, and postmemory, I argue that the novel constructs memory as something that neither belongs to the past nor can be resolved through narration, but instead continues to act on bodies, voices, and affects. Through the spectral figure of Agontimé, Pineau mobilizes prosopopoeia as a mode of intrusive transmission, staging a memory that speaks through the living rather than being voluntarily recalled. This oral and spectral memory is then complemented by a second regime of transmission: the body itself, figured through discourses of epigenetics and contemporary genetic practices. By integrating real scientific languages and technologies into the narrative space, the novel does not reduce history to biology but represents the body as a site where fragments of historical truth persist when archives fail. Rather than delivering justice as verdict or reparation, Pineau’s writing displaces justice to the act of reading itself. In dialogue with theories of moral imagination (Nussbaum) and literary justice (Gefen), I show that the novel creates the conditions for ethical judgment, leaving readers to confront colonial violence through empathy, responsibility, and attentive reading.

This article examines Israel’s use of mass graves as instruments of settler colonial violence against Palestinians, situating the practice within a continuum from the 1948 Nakba to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Mass graves are commonly associated with mass violence, such as massacres, ethnic cleansing, and genocide and are generally understood to serve two primary functions: concealing criminal evidence and terrorising populations. However, this understanding is insufficient in settler colonial contexts. As this article argues, dominant legal and forensic frameworks, with their focus on criminal, evidentiary, and affective dimensions, overlook how mass graves operate as tools of colonial power. Examining Israel’s continued use of mass graves, it identifies three additional spatial and temporal functions targeting indigenous presence: erasure from the geography; severing ancestral, historical and cultural ties to the land; and inducing mass displacement. Mass graves, the article contends, are not merely discrete forensic sites of past atrocities, as typically understood in dominant legal and forensic discourse, but active mechanisms that sustain settler colonial rule.

ABSTRACT Colonial violence is ongoing. It started with the first imperial invasions of Indigenous lands and continues harming communalist ways of life. Indigenous scholars think of the trauma of colonial violence as historical, connecting past, present, and future and wounding the spirits and souls of body-territories. Collective healings are ritual practices that strengthen or restore memories, identities, knowledge, and practices, reconnecting reciprocal relationships across beings and territories and alleviating colonial wounds. As such, collective healings processes support Indigenous resurgence in colonially wounded lands. As Indigenous knowledges, practices, identities, memories, languages, and rituals are strengthened, the body-territory rebalances what colonial violence disrupts.

ABSTRACT This article builds on Juliet Nebolon’s conceptualisation of settler militarism (2024) to argue that settler militarism operates through the process of technification that emerges as a specific mechanism through which settler colonialism and militarisation seek to mutually constitute, legitimise, and conceal each other. By examining the Navajo Code Talkers program during the Second World War, I highlight how technification attempts to systematically transform Indigenous peoples, epistemologies, and sovereignties into technical resources that can then be militarily appropriated, operationally deployed, and rendered obsolete even as it obscures the political violence of this process under the guise of technical necessity. Crucially, through analysis of Navajo oral history interviews I contend that the process of technification must be understood as unstable, contested, and continually perturbed by Indigenous efforts to exceed, resist, and refuse its terms and the broader logics of settler colonial violence.

Amidst renewed “reading wars,” censorship debates, and yet another “crisis” in literacy, early childhood educators are facing increased pressure to develop and demonstrate professional dispositions that are linked to content knowledge, values, attitudes, and ethics. This article explores professionalism otherwise in early childhood literacies—as a post↔feminist↔“witchy”↔assemblage. We think-with the figure of the witch as a heuristic to highlight the hegemonic production of professionalism as taking place with/in the project of colonialism. We present a case for embracing the “witchy” nature of literacies as central to a reconceptualization of professionalism in early childhood education. We argue that to think professionalism otherwise involves following “the witch's flight.” We ask: How can thinking-with the post↔feminist↔witch trouble/unsettle colonialist grammars, resignifying professionalism in early childhood education? While the witch/witchcraft cannot quite escape colonialist histories, we consider how its relations to literacies enable us to reimagine professional early childhood education communities that aren't oriented toward colonial violence and the post-enlightenment subject of Man.

ABSTRACT This paper synthesises dialectical materialism, phenomenology, and critical pedagogy to analyse postcolonial texts by Frantz Fanon, Amílcar Cabral, and Kwame Nkrumah, revealing colonialism as an integrated system of psychological, cultural, and economic domination. Scholarly treatments fragment along disciplinary lines, obscuring what these thinkers grasped: that colonialism operates as a total system. Through close readings of three foundational postcolonial texts by Fanon, Cabral, and Nkrumah, this study applies a four-stage integrative method, close reading, multi-lens coding, cross-textual comparison, and integrative analysis, to identify three convergences. First, colonial education simultaneously produces internalised inferiority, cultural erasure, and class structures serving imperial interests. Second, colonial violence operates across bodily, epistemic, and economic registers as a single integrated apparatus. Third, genuine liberation requires simultaneous transformation of consciousness, culture, and economic structure, since partial interventions leave colonial logic intact. A contemporary case study of digital colonialism in Kenya illustrates how data extraction, algorithmic consciousness-shaping, and platform pedagogy reproduce colonial patterns in new technological forms. The study’s contribution is primarily methodological: the four-stage framework offers a transparent and replicable approach to multi-dimensional postcolonial analysis, demonstrating that systematically integrated readings reveal convergences, and productive tensions, that fragmented, single-lens approaches consistently miss.

This article argues that the long-standing Zionist discourse of “self-defense” from “terrorism”—used to justify the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza—emerged in the late 1960s and escalated in the wake of the September 1972 Munich Olympics incident when Palestinian activists took Israeli athletes hostage. UN Resolution 3034, adopted that December, condemned attacks on civilians but also stressed that colonial domination breeds violence and that colonial violence itself constitutes terrorism. In response, Israel and Zionist groups in the US worked to reverse this by weaponizing the term “terrorism” as a means to delegitimize Palestinian struggles for self-determination. This article focuses on the 1970s, examining UN debates around international terrorism, laws and security policies enacted in the US, and The New York Times’ coverage of terrorism to show how Palestinians and Arabs came to be legally, politically, and ideologically defined as terrorists by the late 1970s—a discourse that persists to this day.

Les Blancs (1970) by Lorraine Hansberry offers a compelling exploration of the violent structures underlying colonial power and their impact on indigenous life and subjectivity. Through the lens of Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, this study examines how the play reconfigures colonialism as a regime governed not merely by authority or ideology, but by the systematic management of life and death. The analysis focuses on key elements such as missionary intervention, racial dehumanization, militarized authority, and colonial education to reveal how these forces operate as interconnected mechanisms that sustain a necropolitical order. Central to this reading is the construction of the colonial space as a “death-world,” where indigenous populations are subjected to conditions of extreme precarity and reduced to states of living death. The play’s portrayal of racial hierarchies and linguistic violence highlights the ways in which colonial discourse legitimizes disposability and normalizes brutality. Major Rice emerges as the embodiment of sovereign violence, through whom colonial authority is enacted via the regulation of life and death. By foregrounding the psychological and existential dimensions of colonial domination, this study also examines the central character, Tshembe Matoseh, whose internal conflict reflects a condition that may be understood as necropolitical paralysis, wherein agency is constrained within a system that renders all choices ethically and materially compromised. Ultimately, this paper argues that Les Blancs not only critiques colonial violence but also exposes the structural logic through which power operates by producing and sustaining conditions of death.

The Island of Heterotopia: Scientific Racism, Colonial Violence, and the Manufacture of the Colonial Subject

Hustlers and tricksters: Colonialism, the war on drugs, and survival strategies of people who inject drugs.

Drawing on qualitative narrative testimonies from 35 displaced Palestinian refugee women collected during the 2024–2025 assault, the study illuminates the relational, embodied, and ethical labor through which life is sustained under siege. Using a decolonial feminist psychological framework, the study integrates structural analysis, narrative interpretation, and thematic mapping across six experiential domains: rupture of home, cyclical displacement, embodied precarity, silenced endurance, maternal survival work, and testimony as presence. The analysis challenges dominant trauma paradigms by situating emotional and bodily experiences within ongoing colonial violence, enclosure, and infrastructural collapse. Findings demonstrate how care, vigilance, moral restraint, and relational commitments form a coherent survival praxis. The study contributes to transnational feminist scholarship by foregrounding locally grounded knowledge production and offering an alternative understanding of psychological life that resists depoliticization and pathologization. • Decolonial feminist narrative study of women's survival in Gaza's genocidal violence • Shows how displacement reshapes space into gendered sites of resistance and memory • Reveals women's agency and collective care as central to survival under warfare

ABSTRACT Indigenous women, two-spirit, transgender, and gender-diverse people in Canada experience disproportionate HIV and sexually transmitted and blood-borne infection (STBBI) inequities shaped by colonial violence and systemic racism. While Indigenous doula work is resurging as reproductive justice, its application to HIV/STBBI prevention and care remains underexplored. We examined how Indigenous HIV/STBBI doula care is envisioned and what competencies are needed to support implementation.This community-based study was guided by an Indigenous Community Guiding Circle of people living with HIV/STBBI and anchored in cultural protocols and ceremony. We conducted 40 in-depth interviews with Indigenous community members living with HIV/STBBI (n = 20), relatives (n = 7), helpers/service providers (n = 8), and Elders/Knowledge Holders (n = 5). Interviews were analyzed using thematic analysis guided by Indigenous storywork principles.Participants described doulas as kin and “helpers” who: (1) provide sustained, nonjudgmental presence across diagnosis, parenting, substance use, and grief; (2) reconnect people to culture, land-based healing, and ceremony; (3) offer peer mentorship rooted in lived experience; (4) deliver practical HIV/STBBI education and stigma reduction; and (5) enact structural advocacy across healthcare, justice, housing, and child welfare systems.Indigenous HIV/STBBI doula care offers a culturally grounded, peer-led model with potential to strengthen engagement across the HIV/STBBI care cascade.

This article studies an important transitional justice case, Mauritius, where a novel truth commission was established to address colonial violence and its legacies. In its recommendations, the commission outlined a slate of projects to commemorate victims and educate the public. Leveraging geographic information systems tools, we map atrocity sites, memory sites, and population centers, and find that contrary to the commission's recommendations, memory projects have been relegated to a few atrocity sites far from most Mauritians, rendering memorialization less effective. Our work contributes to quantitative and mixed-method approaches to studying transitional justice and nascent efforts to more systematically study memorialization.

The concept of the emancipatory violence of the colonized from Frantz Fanon is the core of this work. Given the dimensions of violence for the author, the emancipatory violence of the colonized is fundamental for thinking about decolonization. It represents a choice of direction at a crossroads where one opts to channel the violence stemming from colonial violence not against one's peers, but toward the true culprits: colonialism and its agents. In this sense, this violence should not be seen as a starting point for the struggle, but rather as a fundamental and intrinsic non-instrumental element of the colonial context for conceptualizing national liberation; the rehabilitation of the human; the end of inferiorization; the rehabilitation of life in the face of the death that is colonialism; and collective self-recognition toward the unification of the people. Thus, the emancipatory violence of the colonized is an integral part of a struggle that seeks to destroy the colonial world in its physical and metaphysical forms.