Colonial Violence Research Articles

The Coloniality of Academic Freedom and the Palestine Exception

This article reflects on my experience of being suspended and reinstated. It demonstrates how administrators, including those at my institution, knowingly violate academic freedom and free speech. Throughout, I discuss the institutional and political machinations seeking to silence dissident voices, particularly those who critique Israel and Zionist settler colonialism. The aim is to make more visible the linkages between external pressure and the capitulation of administrators influenced by donors. I highlight the university’s role in producing technologies of colonial violence used on Palestinian bodies and the significance of the Gaza solidarity encampments. In the subsequent sections, I critique the weaponization of antisemitism and the Palestine exception to academic freedom. The article concludes by emphasizing the importance of speaking and writing truth to power during a genocide.

“Especially in This Free Country”: Webs of Empire, Slavery, and the Fur Trade

Spanning the years from late 1600s and into the early 1800s “‘Especially in This Free Country:’ Webs of Empire, Slavery and the Fur Trade” challenges a historiography that positions what has come to be known as the Canadian fur trade as exceptional in its relationships between colonizers and Indigenous peoples, where interactions between Indigenous producers and non-Indigenous traders are presented as largely cooperative and peaceful and as rooted in relationships that operated in the absence of coerced or unfree labour. In fact, the fur trade, connected as it was through webs of family/business relationships to the rest of the colonial world was not exceptional. Across northern North America the fur trade world experienced the same sorts of violence, including chattel slavery, as the rest of the empires with which these webs connected. Far from absent, colonial violence was a part of the Canadian fur trade just as it was a part of empire. Located in the pre-history of Canada, this thesis responds to Harvey Amani Whitfield’s observation that, although there have been some excellent studies of slavery in Canada recently, “slavery has not become part of the Canadian national narrative” 1 by arguing that chattel slavery in the fur trade in what would become Canada was linked to the empires it was a part of, pervasive, integrated into all aspects of the fur trade, and occurred across the northern North American continent.

Landscapes of Recarbonization: Carbon Neutrality, Settler Colonialism, and Cumulative Environmental Effects in the Peace River Region, Canada

Contemporary discourses of net-zero decarbonization (also referred to as carbon neutrality) routinely overlook the landscape transformations required to offset carbon emissions. Conventional analyses also often fail to engage with decarbonization as an inherently spatial process, embedded in landscapes in which the biophysical, socionatural, and political economic dimensions of energy intersect. This creates a conceptual pitfall: the potential to misread and depoliticize strategies of putative decarbonization that might not, in fact, be carbon neutral, particularly when the cumulative effects of broader landscape transformations are considered. To illustrate this pitfall, our analysis queries net-zero decarbonization strategies that arise alongside—and often as a result of—simultaneous investments in fossil fuel production, a process we term recarbonization. We posit recarbonization as a variegated sociospatial phenomenon that materializes through the site-specific interplay between capitalist social relations and biophysical processes. In making this claim, we seek to bridge political economy with concepts of materiality and relationality that, we suggest, enable deeper theoretical engagement with multifaceted landscape transformations entailed by processes of energy transition. Drawing on a case study of the Peace River region in the western Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, this article exposes the cumulative environmental effects and ongoing forms of colonial violence of some net-zero decarbonization agendas.

Settler Colonialism and Mortal Dangers: Affective Responses to COVID-19 and the 2021 Israeli Bombings among Young Palestinians in Gaza

Abstract The article examines the affective dynamics of collective survival and resistance under Israeli settler colonialism in the Gaza Strip. Focusing on Gaza as an under-researched enclave of Israeli settler colonialism, it analyzes how young Palestinians renegotiated their affective bonds in response to two coinciding deadly events: the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2021 Israeli bombings. Theoretically, we extend the politics of emotions and affect to encompass experiences of settler-colonial violence. Drawing on original interviews with Palestinians in Gaza, we trace how affective bonds were impacted among families, friends, and neighbors and, from a transpersonal perspective, across the political community. We show how settler colonialism shaped responses to the pandemic, deepening existing inequalities and causing social frictions. The bombings, by contrast, triggered a unified response of pure terror and universal concern for collective survival. The military targeting of homes was countered by practices of physical and emotional togetherness in the face of death. Overall, our study shows how (i) different kinds of mortal dangers are experienced politically by colonized people, (ii) these experiences are conditioned by collective histories of colonial violence, and that (iii) they constitute expressions of collective affective life, necessary for the preservation of peoplehood amidst colonial oppression.

Challenges and Possibilities for Truth and Reconciliation In Teacher Education: An Engagement with the Literature

This article delves into the evolving landscape of teacher education within the context of truth and reconciliation, acknowledging the profound role education has played in perpetuating colonial violence against Indigenous peoples. To assess reconciliation efforts in teacher education, a targeted search was undertaken, which resulted in an inductive thematic analysis of 36 scholarly works and the emergence of five overarching themes: anti-racist/anti-oppressive perspectives, decolonization, critical forms of pedagogy/narrativity, indigenization, and historical thinking. The analysis provides valuable insights and highlights challenges of advancing truth and reconciliation in education including the need for a paradigm shift within teacher education programs, urging them to adopt community-focused, land-based, and decolonizing approaches. By aligning with the spirit and intent of truth and reconciliation, and as the studies demonstrate, teacher education has the potential to contribute significantly to advancing the process of healing, justice, and mutual understanding in the journey toward a more equitable and harmonious future.

Multiple Unbelongings: Filipino American Theology and the Problem of Home

After centuries of colonial violence, Filipino American identity and Christianity are characterized by experiences of unbelonging. To show this, I trace these developments historically and sociologically, highlighting pastorally and ecclesially significant ways this unbelonging manifests, as US Filipinos negotiate Christian faith with increasing distance from the Philippines itself. This unbelonging sets Filipino American Christianity and community apart from other Asian Americans, and this uniqueness must be understood in order for Filipino American theology to be grounded contextually. Finally, I demonstrate that Filipino American theology and ministry are works of “home construction,” as the idea of home is continuously contested and reconceived. 1

Dirty Documents and Illegible Signatures: Doctoring the Archive of British Imperialism and Decolonization.

This article uses the surviving records of the Hanslope disclosure to track the British government's efforts to censor colonial archives in the era of decolonization. As staff withdrew from colonies around the world, they were instructed to either destroy or 'migrate' to Britain large quantities of records that held sensitive, embarrassing, or potentially incriminating details about the history of British colonial administration. Some 25,000 files were eventually shipped to the UK in a program called 'Operation Legacy' where they fell into legal limbo and out of institutional memory. Millions more were burned or ditched at sea. This article pursues these archival policies as they gradually evolved from Malaya to East Africa, the Caribbean, and into the post-colonial era. In giving special attention to Operation Legacy's broader temporal and geographic sweep, this article meditates on two key points. First, while colonial officials actively learned from their colleagues in other colonies, they were forced to adapt Operation Legacy to local circumstances. The uneven application of this policy reflected the late British Empire's status as a patchwork of sovereignties in which people were governed differently. Second, while evidence is limited, officials across disparate colonial administrations were bound together by a common impulse. They sought not only to destroy and 'migrate' records but also to doctor files that could then be transferred to newly independent governments. In the end, the goal was to mask the disconnect in the archives between rhetoric and reality-of the alleged aspirations of Britain's 'civilizing mission' and its history of colonial violence, systemic racism, and other inconvenient truths.

Unlearning emotional imperialism in education: political, theoretical and pedagogical implications

ABSTRACT This paper emerges from a set of questions about what it means pedagogically to undertake the paradoxical and difficult task of unlearning the emotional experience of imperialism. The analysis discusses the notion of ‘emotional imperialism’ and the various forms in might take; to do so, the author draws on concepts from affect theory (Reddy’s notion of ‘emotional regimes’) and decolonial theory (Fanon’s concept of ‘affective ankylosis’) to shed light on what emotional imperialism might involve in social and political life, including education. The analysis concludes with a discussion of the political, theoretical and pedagogical implications of ‘unlearning emotional imperialism’ in educational settings. It is argued that calls for undoing and unlearning emotional imperialism in education are an inseparable part of new onto-epistemological, affective and political imaginaries that aim to transform colonial violence into nonimperial ways of living in our common world.

The emergence of the non-Indigenous people: Confronting colonialism in the translation of Indigenous myths

What, to echo Walter Benjamin, is the task of the translator in interpreting an Indigenous myth? The author faced thorny issues of translation and colonial violence working with an Indigenous population in a Venezuelan rainforest. Renowned healer, storyteller, and political leader Santiago Rivera performed the myth of “The emergence of the non-Indigenous people”, framing it as not only addressed to the author but as being about him. The analysis begins with work by Indigenous scholars Chris Teuton, Cutcha Risling Baldy and Gerald Vizenor in interpreting an ironic section about how Indigenous people came to be poor and non-Indigenous people wealthy, interpreted by a missionary as evidence of an Indigenous inferiority complex. Rivera brilliantly posed fundamental questions for translating Indigenous myths, questioning who gets to determine what constitutes a myth and what a decolonial translation entails, by tying the myth’s action to struggles to confront non-Indigenous exploitation of their lands, coastal water, labour and women’s sexuality. Just as the performance challenged the author to participate in Indigenous struggles, it raises questions for the rich mythic analyses and decolonial ambitions of ‘ontological turn’ scholars Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Philippe Descola, extending questions posed by Descola’s Araweté interlocutors. A synopsis of this article can be found here.

Embodying sound: body, territory, and community in the music of Mare Advertencia and Cynthia Montaño

ABSTRACT Rap and urban music have become increasingly relevant in the study of alternative practices of art, activism, and resistance in Latin America. This article examines how Mare Advertencia Lirika (Zapotec) and Cynthia Montaño (Afro-Colombian) use rap to build community and women’s agency through staging Indigenous and Afro ancestral knowledge in Oaxaca, Mexico, and Cali, Colombia, respectively. Grounded on an analysis of their albums and the conduct of ethnographic work in Oaxaca and Cali, I contend that these artists’ rap art embodies alternative forms of Indigenous, Black, and grassroots expressions from a feminist community perspective. By embedding their work on ancestral knowledge, community practices, and an interwoven sense of cuerpo-territorio, both at the sound and lyrical levels, these artists challenge patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist violence. This study aims to understand better the intersections between music, women of color’s agency, and social movements in local/global scenarios.

Resisting Divides: Assimilation, Multiculturalism, and Place-Based Solidarity in Sápmi and Palestine

Like roots reaching for the nourishment of familiar ground, generations of resistance lineages continue to weave a worldwide tapestry of solidarity. These efforts help to disrupt various forms of colonial violence, including under the guise of liberal democracies. One of the multiple mechanisms they target is how people and lands are pitted against one another through adversarial categories of difference. Such efforts are a powerful antidote to colonial fragmentations, mobilizing differences via shared goals based on grounded solidarities. This article seeks to answer how anti-colonial struggles in Palestine and Sápmi engage with three ways of structuring similarities and differences. We thereby utilize Coulthard’s (2014) framework of recognition politics, divided into (1) assimilation, (2) multiculturalism, and (3) place-based solidarity. Next to excerpts from local organizers and a speculative dialogue between interviewees, we reference Audre Lorde’s work to better understand the relational qualities of differences. Our research shows that the structural dominance of assimilatory and multiculturalist approaches to difference tends to stabilize injustices while normalizing colonial violence, including via Westernized peace politics like the Oslo Accords or state-led reconciliation initiatives. On the other hand, the integrity of place-based solidarity generates reciprocal relationships and interdependent responsibilities, which undermine colonial divide-and-conquer politics. With the help of our interviewees, this article provides a shared analysis to further the solidarity between the struggles of two of colonial modernity’s most critical fronts, Sápmi and Palestine.

Oceanic feeling in Mati Diop’s Atlantique

ABSTRACT The ocean is a constant presence in Mati Diop’s award-winning film Atlantique/Atlantics (2019), a ghostly love story about the ongoing migration crisis set in Dakar, Senegal. A critical issue Diop explores in this film is the contradiction between the geopolitical stasis of a high-rise tower and the expansive continuity of the sea, making the physical reality captured by the lens overlap with the unrestricted flow of presences carried by waves of sea and sound through the film frame. This article analyses oceanic aesthetics and the unrestricted flows of bodies of water and work in both Diop’s recent feature film and her first experimental documentary of almost the same title, Atlantiques/Atlantics (2009). These corporeal drifts disrupt narrative and temporal flows and position the cinema as a space for poetic and political change. What the ocean embodies is not only a tragic archive of colonial violence, as Rosalind Galt has recently argued, but also a space for a feminist and decolonial refusal of such loss.

Girmit, intimacy and sexual violence: indentured women on colonial sugar plantations, c. 1834–1917

ABSTRACT This essay investigates the sexual violence against Indian indentured women during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on colonial plantations around the world through the lens of intimacy and labour. Beginning in the 1830s, Indian men, women, and children were brought to various overseas plantations by colonial planters under the indenture system, which was designed to fill the labour shortage that resulted from the 1833 abolition of slavery in the British Empire. This essay uses the petitions, depositions and letters of indentured women---available in colonial archives in both their native Indian languages and in English translation---to argue that the violence against women was not only perpetuated by plantation authorities but equally by Indian male indentured workers. The paper identifies two forms of violence on the plantations: colonial violence related to racial hierarchy and control over the subjugated subject and patriarchal violence related to Indian social control and domination. Each type of violence was related to intimacy, i.e. closeness of people on plantations. While colonial violence was enacted through power relations, the Indian male violence was enacted through imposition of the patriarchal norms.

Reading the “living rock”: Excavating the transhistorical record of racial sedimentation in the literature of Navassa Island

ABSTRACT This article interrogates transhistorical layers of colonial violence, and resistance to it, linked to the island of Navassa, located off the southwestern coast of Haiti. Long the subject of territorial disputes, the island and its literary entanglements point to the interconnectedness of resistance to colonialism by subalterns in the circum-Caribbean. To illustrate this, I analyze, among other texts, a sixteenth-century Spanish colonial account of a canoe journey, a nineteenth-century benevolent society pamphlet written in defense of revolting miners of guano (fertilizer made of avian excrement), a North Carolina mayor’s twentieth-century local history project, and a twenty-first-century narrative by ham radio hobbyists of an expedition to the island. Ultimately, I identify thematic continuities and argue that Navassa Island and its entanglements signify as synecdoche for the (anti)colonial hemisphere, an observation which has repercussions for how we understand the semiotic charge of individual islands and their respective historiographies.

Windigo Violence and Resistance

The windigo is a generally malicious figure in several Indigenous cultures of the land currently administered by the governments of the USA and Canada. In traditional narratives, the windigo is generally associated with hunger, greed, winter, and cannibalism. In this paper, I discuss how both Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers have used the figure of the windigo to critique and challenge environmental injustice. While some windigo stories present the being as a terrifying monster of the “wilderness”, others use the figure as an embodiment of environmental destruction and the injustice that comes with it. Windigo stories also highlight three further aspects of colonial violence: military violence, sexual violence, and religious violence. Although some stories depict windigos being defeated through violence, many stress the importance of care and healing to overcome the windigo affliction. In fact, storytelling itself may be part of the healing process. Windigo stories, I argue, can be a useful way to interrogate the injustices created by colonialism and environmental destruction, and the stories can also offer hope for healing and for an environmentally just future.

Decolonizing the Gospel of Love in Africa

The violence of missionary agents on Africans contradicted the gospel of Christ’s redemptive love, which they preached. In response to the contemporary manifestations of the violence and dehumanization of “colonial love”, this article proposes the decolonization of the gospel of love, both as theological hermeneutic and a moral imperative in the African Church. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus commands us to recognize every human being as a neighbor. Within a colonial context, this means rejecting the dualistic logic of colonial love, its segregation, dehumanization, and violence.

Koloniale Laster

Abstract In this article, Carlos Pereda introduces the concept of “colonial reason” and explores how philosophical practices and modes of thought are entwined with colonial political structures of exploitation, exclusion, and oppression. Pereda argues that philosophy in Latin America risks perpetuating and reinforcing the colonial gesture, either by turning to the European centers of thought (thus pursuing debates that always take place elsewhere) or by isolating itself and idealising the “own.” According to Pereda, both approaches fail to dismantle colonial violence within philosophy. In his alternative approach, Pereda outlines principles and methodological criteria for the decolonisation of reason and philosophy. He emphasises the importance of methodological prudence that discerns between innocent, paralysing, and strategic uses of identity expressions and advocates for modes of reading and argumentation that conceive philosophy as an inclusive and ongoing dialogue. In Pereda’s terminology, this entails fostering “permeable reason” that manifests itself through “nomadic thinking,” a form of thinking that is capable of questioning itself and being questioned.

Das Problem der Kolonialität des Geschlechts

Abstract In this article, Breny Mendoza examines and critically discusses María Lugones’ concept of the “coloniality of gender.” Lugones’ influential thesis asserts that the binarity of gender was introduced in the colonies as part of colonial rule and displaced previously predominant egalitarian systems of gender relations. As Mendoza outlines, this thesis has been challenged in recent years by Latin American and indigenous feminisms (such as the Argentinean anthropologist Rita Segato, and indigenous feminists from countries such as Bolivia, Guatemala, and Mexico). In light of these new perspectives, Mendoza expounds and acknowledges Lugones’ ideas, while also pointing out their pitfalls and limitations, since such an approach can lead to a romanticisation of pre-colonial orders, presenting them as the “absolute other” of colonial violence. In contrast, drawing on the analysis by Bolivian Aymara feminist Julieta Paredes, Mendoza argues that the imposition of gender can only be understood as an “entanglement of patriarchies.” Finally, Mendoza applies these discussions to issues surrounding sexualised violence, i.e., feminicide, in Latin America proving them to provide a fruitful framework for understanding and addressing these current forms of violence.

The Doomsday Economy: Colonial Violence, Environmental Catastrophe, and Burning Tires in Palestine


 
 
 The article analyzes the Palestinian act of tire burning at the intersection of the following frameworks – colonial violence, racial capitalism, and environmental discourse. The analysis considers the many functions of Palestinian tire burning: capital accumulation, waste management, protestors’ protection, counter-violence, pollution redistribution, and spectacle production. This analysis leads to the argument that Palestinian tire burning takes part in a “Doomsday Economy.” The article promotes the concept of a “Doomsday Economy” as a frame for understanding violence toward Palestinians and the contemporary intent of tire burning. The Doomsday Economy is a violent economic structure that involves two interplaying processes: (a) the positioning of a discursive catastrophe in a deferred future by colonial powers in order to conceal the present violence and production of a daily doomsday for the oppressed; and (b) the oppressed’s acceleration of the future-doomsday’s arrival for all participants of this economy – through pollution and images – introducing doomsday as a present state.
 
 

"Ché Coco, ché Coco": An animal reading of Coco the parrot in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

The various human characters of Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) have attracted the attention of literary scholars from different perspectives. However, the novel’s nonhuman animal characters have previously been studied mainly as symbols for human actions and destinies. In this article, I problematise this type of anthropocentric approach from a Human-Animal Studies and a literary criticism perspective. I analyse Coco as a character of the novel and as a member of his own species. My analysis examines the nature of human-animal relationships, their representations in literature, and the binary oppositions inherent in them. Additionally, I critically evaluate the ways in which nonhuman animals are perceived and depicted in cultural representations. I argue that Rhys shows Coco as a parrot with species-typical behaviour and as a character with his own agency. Nevertheless, one should not disregard his symbolic functions, which draw attention to gendered colonial violence. Furthermore, the symbolic and linguistic violence in the novel forces the nonhuman animal into a position below the human animal and normalises violence towards nonhuman animals. The human-animal relationships in Wide Sargasso Sea vary from something akin to close companionship all the way to subjugation under the will of the more powerful.