Colonial Imagination Research Articles

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

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

PhEminist skins of resistance: creative activism as a decolonial tool for the empowerment of young people within the neo-liberal educational setting

ABSTRACT In this article, I discuss the legacy of the art historical trope of the female nude in perpetuating colonial narratives that inform young women’s understanding not only of the idealized female body, but also what is perceived as ‘good’ drawing in the contemporary art classroom. Theoretically informed by phEmaterialism (feminist new materialism and post-humanism in education), I review the skin as a post-human assemblage to diffract heteronormative and raced colonial imaginings of the female skin. I discuss the PhEminist Skins project, a collaboration with six young women artists (the YWAs), where critical engagement with creative methods, such as life drawing, mobilized the agency of the skin and created opportunity for creative activism. I further share how the methods developed by the YWAs instigated the creation of The Centre for Creative Explorations, a creative research centre that explores alternative pedagogical approaches to the decolonial endeavour in secondary education.

Review: Architecture and Development: Israeli Construction in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Settler Colonial Imagination, 1958–1973

Review: <i>Architecture and Development: Israeli Construction in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Settler Colonial Imagination, 1958–1973</i>

Architecture and Development: Israeli Construction in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Settler Colonial Imagination, 1958–1973, Ayala Levin (2022)

Review of: Architecture and Development: Israeli Construction in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Settler Colonial Imagination, 1958–1973, Ayala Levin (2022) Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 320 pp., 53 b&amp;w and 16 colour illus., ISBN: 9781478015260, $107 (hardback)

An intimate procedure: translating val flores

This translator’s note prefaces my translation of the essay “The Intimacy of the Procedure: Writing, lesbian, south as practices of the self” by the Argentine lesbian activist and writer val flores. I comment on flores’s writing from the perspective of translating it, attending to the corporeality of her language, its imbrication with lesbian writing across languages and continents, and her tactics of citation, as well as providing some context for her first-time anglophone readers. I then dialogue with the text to think about translation itself as an “intimate procedure”: an act of (self-)transformation and desire; the work of bridging worlds and tongues; and a kind of queer or feminized labor rendered invisible in a colonial imagination. I offer lesbian, anticolonial translation as part of literature's possibilities and erotics.

Model Settlers, Model Laborers, and the Limits of the Anti-Slavery Colonial Imagination

Abstract After the passage of the British law abolishing the slave trade in 1807, Great Britain devoted 60 years to attempting to suppress slave trading from the African continent. One major consequence of this campaign against the slave trade was the rescue of over 500,000 Africans from illegally operating slave ships. During the first two decades after 1807, Great Britain brought approximately five thousand such Africans into British Caribbean colonies. This article explores the earliest British policies related to this population, in conversation with more recent discussions of refugee management, and the impact of European colonial histories on professedly humanitarian projects.

A Food Utopia? Italian Colonial Visions of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, 1911-13.

This article explores the uses of utopian rhetoric of food plenty in Italian colonial visions before the First World War. It examines the travel writings of three leading Italian journalists, Enrico Corradini, Arnaldo Fraccaroli, and Giuseppe Bevione, who visited the Ottoman provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica and campaigned for their colonization by Liberal Italy. By reconstructing their utopian rhetoric of food plenty, this article seeks to show the relevance of arguments about food and agriculture produce to early twentieth century colonial visions, shedding light on an aspect of Italian political thought that has been hitherto marginalized in existing historical scholarship.

Fluid Internationalisms: The Ocean as a Source and Forum of Indigenous International Law

To rethink ‘the international’ necessarily enables revisioning where sources of law can be located, how normative paradigms operate in situ, and which processes foster cultural, political, and legal principles. In grounding this international reorientation in the ocean and ocean thinking, this analysis offers a brief point of entry into the worlds of Indigenous internationalisms from a coastal, oceanic reference of analysis. We underline not only how the ocean is an international law forum for Indigenous internationalisms, but also how they are vibrant spaces that foster connections between kin and generate legal principles through the methodology of reading seascapes. Through this process, what follows is a submerging of particular ideologies of ‘the international’ and an emerging account of ‘the international’ that facilitates a dynamic transcendence of thinking and being beyond state-premised borders, international relations, law, and sovereignty. Understanding oceans as Indigenous international law fora, as sources of Indigenous legalities, as physical interpretive legal methodologies, and as the connective structures that foster deep connections within and beyond an Indigenous nation, brings us into a socio-legal geography that suspends restrictive, colonial visions of ‘the international’ for a vibrant oceanic future. Recognizing and affirming these oceanic connections contributes to reinscribing Indigenous sovereignty at the scales of individuals, nations, and international relations.

Island of dreams: Post/colonial imaginaries in contemporary Cypriot Anglophone literature

The island of Cyprus has for centuries been a contested terrain, and occupied by various colonial powers. I use Cyprus joining the Commonwealth in 1960 as a starting point to explore the relationship between Cyprus and specifically British colonial rule in the twentieth century, read through the lens of two works by contemporary Anglophone Cypriot authors Polis Loizou and Alexandra Manglis. I examine how these authors undermine colonial imaginaries of the island, using speculative and literary forms to emphasize the slippages, instabilities, and fugitive nature of colonial subjects. Enfolding the complex history of the island within these readings, I posit Cyprus as a mythologically rich and boundary-vexing “island of dreams”, and foreground imaginative writing from Cypriot authors in counterpoint to historical colonial attitudes.

“A Flight from History”? Nadine Gordimer’s Congo Journey

The aim of this article is to shed light on Nadine Gordimer’s political convictions in the context of the decolonization processes in the Belgian Congo (later the Democratic Republic of the Congo) in the years 1960–61. The article begins with a brief overview of Gordimer’s political views. It is argued that while Gordimer’s stance in the early 1950s had been that of liberal humanism (an influence that came to her also from the reading of E. M. Forster), by the end of this decade she began to question its relevance in South Africa. As a result, she decided to redefine both her political and artistic views, trying to forge a vision that would be more attuned to her position as a white writer in postcolonial Africa. This attempt is visible in her essay “The Congo River” (1961), at whose centre lies an ambivalence: while Gordimer welcomes the political transformation in Congo with cautious optimism, she also demonstrates a tendency to de-emphasize the country’s colonial history by focusing on the natural habitat and describing it as an ahistorical space. This notion of nature is, to a large extent, a repetition of the colonial vision of the natural environment, which Gordimer unwittingly perpetuated, creating her own example of the socioecological unconscious.

Vortext

This article introduces the special issue of Law & Literature on “Colonial Legal Imaginaries | Southern Literary Futures”. The aim is to advance two imperative tasks. The first, analytic, task is to pay attention to the diversity of colonial imaginaries across the very different terrains, literatures, and epistemologies of the so-called South. Rather than continue to impose a Eurocentric canon on the domain of law and literature, the argument here is that we need to better immerse ourselves in the diversity of colonial imaginaries from places whose experiences were as different as Indigenous Australia, India under the Raj, African game reserves, or the post-conquest Americas. The second, ethical and aesthetic, task is to accept literature’s invitation not simply to document colonial, or for that matter post-colonial, ideologies, but to reimagine them. The realms of literature and art represent a crucial opportunity to talk back to power through the very modalities of fantasy and imagination, myth and story, that have been so indispensable to its maintenance. Each author in this collection wholeheartedly contributes to these two tasks, combining an analytical expansion of the past with a creative ethical engagement with the present and the future.

Afrofuturist Worlds: The Diseased Colonial Imagination and Christian Hope

This article argues that the cultural tradition of Afrofuturism offers one potential solution to the diseased Christian colonial imagination diagnosed in the work of Willie James Jennings. This diseased imagination buttresses structures of domination after colonization and creates the self-sufficient white man as an anthropological norm. Afrofuturism names an emerging cultural tradition across different media that explores potential futures in response to Black suffering. As a conversation partner for this tradition, the theology of Edward Schillebeeckx critically engages the eschatological images of the New Testament to depict Christian discipleship as practical world building. This praxis dismantles violence threatening the humanum, the new humanity announced by Jesus of Nazareth. As an example of the potential resources offered by Afrofuturism, Janelle Monáe’s multi-media Dirty Computer project evinces a practical hope reimagining social life and humanity beyond the world built by colonization, thus inspiring a decolonial Christian praxis based on eschatological hope.

Unveiling the neo-Moroccan city: a historical exploration of Casablanca's Habous district (1917-1926)

ABSTRACT This article examines the history and significance of Casablanca's Habous district, a unique colonial urban experiment blending traditional Islamic and early 20th-century European principles. Built between 1917 and 1926 to house large influxes of migrants, it represented a deviation from initial French plans to simply preserve existing medinas. It even supplanted Casablanca's medina as the nucleus of Muslim life. Through extensive archival research from the National Moroccan Archives (Rabat) and the Chaillot Archives (Paris) this article argues that while initially an exception, the Habous proved central to colonial visions of ordering urban space and society in Morocco's growing economic capital. It reflected core aspects of Resident-General Lyautey's strategy, showcasing French power and paternalism while providing locals with symbolic cultural continuity amidst modernization. Unearthing the unusual history of the Habous holds significance for comprehending the history of colonial political agendas and their materialization in colonial planning and housing, and also of architecture experimentation and innovation. After all, it earned the reputation of being the most surprising and impactful colonial creation in Morocco, which served as an inspiration for subsequent architectural projects. But its level of refinement remained unmatched by subsequent mass housing districts. The conclusion ponders whether its status warrants greater international recognition.

Tracing (de)colonial imaginaries through personal archiving: A decolonial methodology tool

This article stems from a research internship I undertook in São Paulo, Brazil, as part of my doctoral project. As a white Portuguese woman researching the relationship between museum narratives and racism in Portuguese society, this internship forced me to confront my own colonial/racist imaginary. This confrontation was prompted and documented by a personal archive, used as a methodological tool to decolonise both research and researcher. This article presents the process of creating this personal archive and its decolonising effects on the research so other researchers can assess the relevance of this decolonising methodology and possibly reproduce and expand on it.

Beyond Borders and Beasts: Exploring an Ottoman Traveler's Colonial Discourse and his Contribution to the Formation of Race in the Early Modern Period

Abstract: This article explores the extraordinary journey of Ilyas ibn Hanna al-Mawsuli (Reverend Ilyas/Elias), a late seventeenth-century Ottoman traveler, to the Spanish Americas. Spending eight years in the Spanish colonies with special permission from the Spanish court, Ilyas narrated remarkable experiences during his travels through the Caribbean, Venezuela, Peru, and New Spain. The article primarily focuses on this narrative as it relates to extraordinary encounters with fantastic beasts and creatures, and how these encounters contribute to emerging conceptions of race. It thus addresses crucial issues: first, the colonial discourse within the traveler's narrative; second, the intercultural colonial imagination shaped by the Amerindians, Europeans, and Ottomans; and third, the traveler's subaltern identity in the Ottoman Empire, which is reimagined via global Catholicism, leading to his endeavor toward the "Ottomanization" of the Spanish Empire's colonial domain. This research ultimately suggests that the traveler's colonial discourse contributed to the formation and codification of race in the early modern era.

Cruelties of Occupation and Indignities of Dispossession: Advancing Palestinian Narrative as a Decolonial Praxis in Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin

The proposed study explores the ways in which Abulhawa uses fiction to humanize the Palestinian condition of dispossession and displacement thus advancing the Palestinian perspective of the conflict. Analysing the important role of narratives in decolonizing the colonial imaginaries for example “Palestinians do not exist”, or “they are savages or terrorists”, it contends that, for Abulhawa, retrieving the Palestinian narrative is a fundamental praxis for seeking decolonization and to end dehumanization and exclusion. Reclaiming native narrative of the conflict will enable Palestinians to affirm their existence and propel their struggle against settler colonialism. The study will be done with the help of the analysis of Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin.

Essentialism and intersectionality in the selection and recruitment of staff: the devaluation of migrant women’s skills in France and Italy

ABSTRACT While skilled migration has become one of the most acceptable ways of entering Western European countries, the skills of migrant women with tertiary education continue to be undervalued in labour markets. To understand why these women are confined to the bottom of the employment structure, we argue that it is necessary to analyse how essentialism, based on the intersection of gender and racialization, influenced by colonial imaginaries and global inequalities, shapes recruiters’ representations. The article is based on multi-sited fieldwork which consisted of 52 in-depth interviews conducted in France and Italy with migrant women, recruiters, and social workers. Our analysis emphasizes that intersectional essentialism influence recruiters’ assessments of education, work experience, soft skills, and language skills while it reinforces the eroticization of migrant women’s bodies, ultimately leading to the devaluation of migrant women’s capacities.

The mice plague and the assemblage of beastly landscapes in regional and rural Australia

AbstractBeginning in the spring of 2020, a mouse and rat plague spread across the rural grain belt in New South Wales, Australia. Lasting for almost 10 months, the plague was described by the local media as a ‘horror’ which ‘terrorised’ farmers and ‘ravaged’ farms. Focusing predominantly on news media reporting of the plague, this article shows how the mice and rats were constructed as abject matter out of place. This construction reveals how the interspecies dynamics of managing pests render rural landscapes vulnerable and unsettle colonial imaginaries regarding the management of the Australian environment. The plague signals a disturbance of the ‘natural’ order of things where the landscape is ‘normally’ anthropocentrically managed for monocultural farming. Drawing on Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert's identification of ‘beastly spaces’, this article explores the plague as facilitating a beastly landscape that radically de‐centres human control and investment in the environment.

Review: Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad. Volume I, Obeah: Africans in the White Colonial Imagination, by Tracey E. Hucks; Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad. Volume II, Orisa: Africana Nations and the Power of Black Sacred Imagination, by Dianne M. Stewart

Review: <i>Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad</i>. Volume I, <i>Obeah: Africans in the White Colonial Imagination</i>, by Tracey E. Hucks; <i>Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad</i>. Volume II, <i>Orisa: Africana Nations and the Power of Black Sacred Imagination</i>, by Dianne M. Stewart

The coloniality of the religious terrorism thesis

Abstract A dominant narrative, produced and reproduced especially by terrorism scholars, holds that terrorism in its worst form is religious. The most dangerous and non-negotiable form of terrorism, in other words, is the religious kind. At the same time, there is a recurring implication, proposed by many terrorism scholars and reflected in public discourse, that terrorism, no matter its official designation, is always inherently ‘religious’ or ‘religious-like’. Both this implication and the dominant narrative about the uniquely dangerous character of ‘religious terrorism’ – which I summarise as the Religious Terrorism Thesis – builds on colonial knowledge and assumptions about ‘religion’. Religion is also, as I argue, written into the category ‘terrorism’ and enables its negative discursive power and the colonial imagination of ‘terrorism’ as racialised and a system-threat to (Western) modernity. Terrorism, therefore, can never constitute a neutral signifier of a specific kind of political violence. Instead, it functions as a negative ideograph to Western societies, which means it functions to uphold the project of Western modernity/coloniality. The Religious Terrorism Thesis, which I identify as the foundation for the dominant discourse on terrorism today, is a crucial element of coloniality and justifies many controversial and contemporary counterterrorism practices.