Decolonial Movements Research Articles

Help, The Women are Naked: Bodies, Power & Resistance in ‘Post-colonial’ Uganda

This paper engages with acts of naked protest in Uganda to explore their effect and affect as a decolonial praxis for both gender and human rights. In this paper, the successes of such rights activism by Ugandan women are made clear. With regard to womanhood, this paper discusses how naked protest questions Western epistemologies of gender in colonized Uganda – troubling an exclusionary and racialized sex/gender dimorphism through its anachronistic performance that relies on bringing a specific pre-colonial power imbued in Ugandan womanhood into a ‘post-colonial’ present. With human rights, this paper proposes that both human rights and gender are inextricably linked and must be read in tandem to truly actualize the significance of naked protest. Where claims to womanhood are made, inevitably, claims to a denied humanness are too. Decolonizing the human in human rights requires reconceptualization that consequentially returns us to Wynter’s question: what does it mean to be human? This paper attempts to offer some preliminary answers by necessarily reading this decolonial movement with an epistemic disobedience and by emphasizing the importance/power of the category ‘human’ in ‘post-colonial’ Uganda. Notably so, the ‘limitation’ of naked protest is also explored, particularly its participation within a colonial framework for the way in which naked protest fails to move beyond established gender boundaries. That said this paper questions whether this circumstance marks an inadequacy or, given that naked protest infuses agentic and political meanings to what it means to be a Black Ugandan woman, a necessary utility. Altogether, this paper is interested in reading the performance of naked protest through a lens that goes beyond the corporeal, or more precisely, that reads this corporeal performance in a metaphysical or macro-societal arena paying particular attention to the ways that it utilities pre-colonial cultural meanings as a source of power to demand rights and lay claim to the categories woman and human.

Why the Brazilian Jewish Left Is Not Anti-Zionist

Abstract This paper explores the praxis of the Zionist Left in Brazil, particularly during the 2010s. It argues that the Zionist Left, which claims to be a progressive grouping that stands in solidarity with the oppressed people in Palestine and in Brazil, functions in fact as a colonial counterrevolutionary actor against radical-left emancipatory politics. Indeed, the Zionist Left functions as a gatekeeper, blocking sectors of the Jewish community and the Brazilian Left from joining the growing anti-Zionist decolonial movement in Brazil. This paper aims to show how various Zionist Left groups have historically worked with the Zionist elite and the Brazilian state to undermine anti-Zionist communist Jewish alternatives by resorting to fraudulent discourse and even force in order to build support for the Zionist settler-colonial project in Palestine. This paper utilises a Marxist, anti-Zionist and anti-colonial framework in order to provide a counter-hegemonic critique for an emancipatory praxis that rejects colonialism.

Degrowth from the East – between quietness and contention. Collaborative learnings from the Zagreb Degrowth Conference

While degrowth as a plural and decolonial movement actively invites the Global South to be part of its transformative project, the current North-South dichotomy threatens to miss the variety of semi-peripheral contexts. Against this backdrop, we aim to contribute to dialogues on degrowth from the often-overlooked ‘East’ – specifically post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Instead of being viewed as a site for transformative examples and inspiration for degrowth-oriented socio-ecological transformation, CEE is often portrayed as ‘lagging behind’. Problematising such reductionist narratives, this essay explores CEE as a lively and rich site of postcapitalist alternatives. Based on two special sessions organised at the 2023 International Degrowth Conference in Zagreb, we ref lect upon insights gathered on various degrowth-aligned traditions and practices in CEE with a goal to 1) advance an equitable dialogue between the global degrowth scholarship and the East, and 2) strengthen a context-sensitive degrowth agenda in CEE.

From dematerialising race to distorting decoloniality: development-as-imperialism and Hindu supremacy

This article explores how race in international development currently operates globally. It is not simply a discursive legacy of colonialism but also inextricably embedded in contemporary processes of imperialist extraction and accumulation, which the architecture of development both legitimises and extends. The article argues for deeper engagement with Marxist thinkers located in the Global South in contemporary theorisations of race in development. In the context of multiple anti-racist and decolonial movements globally, many mainstream development actors are claiming to engage with questions of racism within their organisations. This is explored through an analysis of several texts produced by the British Overseas Network for Development (Bond), a large network of organisations working on international development in Britain, in response to the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement since 2020. While contradictions within these texts evidently reflect internal contestations over understandings of racism and anti-racism, they ultimately propose the adoption of diversity-based ‘solutions’ to racism and coloniality in development. These are analysed in the context of a long line of initiatives to relegitimise colonialism and development in order to sustain racialised structures of global capital accumulation. The essentialisation inherent in these approaches facilitates the appropriation of notions of decoloniality by forces of Brahmanical Hindu supremacism in India, which are closely tied to racialised and racialising global corporate capital. The second part of the article explores these processes, highlights the synergies between anti-caste and anti-racist thinking about capital and labour, and argues that Hindu supremacism incorporates, is sustained and strengthened by, and in turn feeds global supremacist ideologies.

ENGLISH-DECOLONIAL MOVEMENTS AND THE RISE OF ISLAMISM IN PAKISTAN

This research enterprise investigates the decolonial movements against the rule of British India and the subsequent spread of Islamism that shaped and influenced the socioeconomic, political, and cultural landscape of Pakistan. To understand this phenomenon, the study employed the analysis of historical events through thematic, discourse, and content analysis of narratives and texts. The data analyzed is based on the qualitative analysis of secondary sources of data. The core objective of the study is to understand the process of decolonization and the development of Islamic philosophy in Pakistan. The findings of the study suggest that the decolonization process has had a significant bearing on the formation and development of religious ideology in Pakistan paying way to the growth of Islamism as a unified cultural and political force in the country. The analysis of historical events also presents a sketch of the contemporary socio-economic, political, and cultural landscape of the country influenced by the ideological grounds.

On struggle as experiment: Foucault in dialogue with Indigenous and decolonial movement intellectuals, for a new approach to theory

Abstract If critical thought is to contribute to liberatory struggle, it arguably requires a general, even structural, theorisation of the nature and sources of power and oppression. This appears to be at odds with the critical project of questioning the immanence of truth to power, as famously framed by Michel Foucault. Yet Foucault’s philosophical project in fact hinged upon his own attempts to grapple with this tension. What is more, his ultimate failure to resolve it led to ambiguities that might be considered generative (especially in light of increased rapprochement between Foucauldian, Marxian, and decolonial International Relations [IR]). Reading Indigenous and decolonial movement intellectuals in tandem with Foucault, alongside the philosophy of science of one of his major influences – Gaston Bachelard – we advocate attentiveness to the ‘experimental’ way in which struggles against capitalist extraction and (neo)colonialism hold together dissonant theoretical – and ontological – commitments when putting forward structural accounts of power. This leads us to an ethos of inquiry that starts from lived thought, as well as to a non-linear approach to the relations between method, theory, and associated ontological commitments, from which scholars are traditionally trained away in social science.

Decolonization Projects

Decolonization Projects

Introduction: The Global 1970s from a History of Emotions Perspective

Abstract The 1970s have been identified through a range of emotional markers. This special issue critically analyzes the emotional history of this decade through a global perspective. In doing so, the contributions in this issue consider the different registers and scales at which emotions were experienced, perceived, and discussed. Drawing on discussions of gay liberation struggles in Latin America, decolonial movements in Palestine, the New International Economic Order, the North American Left, and forms of post-imperialist belonging in New Zealand and Australia, we detail how new emotional communities were produced and how distinct emotionalities were shaped in conjunction with shifting global politics.

Muuseumikogude potentsiaali kaardistamine päritolu-uuringute kaudu

This article focuses on the possibilities created through provenance research in the museum. Setting out current interest in provenance research against the backdrop of antiracist and decolonial movements such as Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall, the article focuses specifically on the history of research in ethnographic museums shaped by legislative acts such as NAGPRA in the USA, critical thinking about representational practices in anthropology, and collaborative work with originating communities. Using the Siberian collection acquired by Maria Czaplicka in 1914 and held at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford as a case study, I argue that broad-ranging and open-ended provenance research akin to anthropological fieldwork allows to uncover different narratives pertaining to museum objects. It enables to understand why and how the objects were brought to the museum, the kinds of epistemic realities they have helped to build but also to attend to different cultural meanings and realities embedded in these objects. A close historical study of the Czaplicka collection has added to our understanding of the nature of ethnographic research in the early 20th century, brought to attention immoral acquisition of grave goods and human remains during the Siberian expedition but also highlighted close relations between ethnographers and their Indigenous hosts. Contemporary fieldwork in Siberia and creative engagement with the collection have further broadened the understanding of the origin of these objects in relation to Evenki worldview and lived experience. Through such nuanced research, a “thick description” emerges that enables a museum interpretation that can speak to the emergence of drifts and fault lines in the society, bring different worldviews into one space, and within that space address topics of global concern.

Resistance to revolutionary love: The struggle to decolonise the republic

This conversation with French-Algerian thinker and activist Houria Bouteldja focuses on her book Whites, Jews, and Us: Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love. By zooming in on contemporary debates around racism and decolonization in France, this interview focuses on questions of how gender and masculinity, sexuality, class, and race form political relationships within the modern nation-state. In particular, it asks follow-up questions to Bouteldja's epistemology in the chapter “We, Indigenous Women,” the chapter that explicitly focuses on women, gender, and sexuality. And while gender and sexuality are always also inherently public, we follow up on tracing how her book, Les indigènes de la république (the movement of which she was the spokesperson from 2005 to 2020), and she herself have been received in French public debate, including in academia, politics and the media. Within the latter power fields, we address the role of women of color intellectuals and the challenges they pose to current debates and “moral panics” through the optics of popular decolonial movements. Eventually, a conversation unfolds where an ostensible “(too) liberal academia” has been marked by contemporary accusations of “Islamogauchisme” in a wider discourse that portrays Europe as being “in crisis” and what that means for the decolonization of Europe.

Decolonising meritocratic higher education: key challenges and directions for change

ABSTRACT In the context of the global decolonial movement, this paper aims to identify major challenges faced by higher education institutions by following an integrative literature review as a methodological approach. A review of two main bodies of scholarly literatures – decolonisation of higher education and meritocracy in higher education – showed that higher education is a colonial project in which meritocratic logics have been used to justify social, economic and racial inequalities. The paper identifies that the commodification of life, exclusion of racialised faculties and students and colonisation of their epistemologies are three major challenges. Reorienting the praxes of higher education towards collective well-being, taking action for the meaningful inclusion of faculties and students and embracing epistemological plurality for higher education decolonisation are discussed as three potential directions for change.

Expanding Imaginations for a Post-2030 Agenda: The Interaction between Christian and Indigenous Spiritualities in the Philippines

Abstract Encounters with marginalised spiritualties and religions can assist in the creation of a post-2030 agenda that recognises the limitations of existing ideas of ‘sustainable development’ and ‘progress’, the necessity of which is evidenced by our worsening climate and ecological crisis. The acknowledgement that religion plays an important role in the lives of the majority of the world’s population has led to increased partnerships between religious communities, humanitarian and development practitioners, and policy makers. At best, this has resulted in fruitful partnerships with those whose world views fit into predefined understandings of religion and development. At worst, it has led to the instrumentalisation of religious and spiritual leaders to implement western, individualistic, capitalist, anthropocentric ideas of development. Knowledge flows have remained unidirectional with the aforementioned partnerships yet to see the transformative potential of engaging with a greater diversity of religious and spiritual communities when imagining a post-2030 agenda. This paper draws on ethnographic engagement and interviews with the Iglesia Filipina Independiente and Lumad Indigenous people in the Philippines to highlight how learned ignorance, encounters and horizontal relationships can expand individual and collective imagination – deconstructing imperial imaginations and prioritising people and planetary flourishing above profit. It highlights the potential way in which diverse subaltern, abyssal and decolonial movements can be engaged to support a burgeoning of ecologies of knowledge capable of challenging hegemonic understandings of ‘progress’ and ‘development’, essential to the post-2030 debate.

Black Women and Their Discontents in the French Context

This essay explores the decolonial future imagined by the Black women who make up Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel’s Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire (2020). A much-needed project of historical redress, Joseph-Gabriel’s study proposes the concept “decolonial citizenship” as a framework to tackle the archival and scholarly invisibility of Black women’s contributions to decolonial movements and their espousing new ways of belonging that are grounded in practices, geographies, epistemologies, and communities that persist despite the French colonial orb. This essay argues that the contemporary Afrofeminist movement in France’s fight for Black liberation and articulations of new forms of belonging point to the continued discontents of the country’s Black population with the universalist pretenses of the French republic.

Summertime Politics: Cultural Resurgence, Resource Sovereignty, and the Aasivik Movement

While Home Rule negotiations between Kalaallit Nunaat and Denmark were underway, the Aasivik summer festivals, founded in 1976, proposed an alternative model of collective politics. Borrowing its name from a term for historical gathering sites, the modern Aasivik movement hosted debates on a wide range of topics, bringing political activity into settlements and camps. Although Aasivik’s influence on Kalaallit Nunaat’s political history has been widely recognized, the movement’s theoretical complexity has gone largely unacknowledged. In this article, I discuss several key episodes from the festival’s first decade, emphasizing how Aasivik mobilized cultural heritage as a means of responding to social inequalities introduced by Danish colonial rule. First, I outline Aasivik’s roots in local and global Indigenous decolonial movements and describe how these influences led activists to analyze topics such as dispossession, labor, Marxist thought, and collective land access in the festival’s early debates and public statements. I then examine how the presence of customary performance and avant-garde theater at several Aasiviit intersected with the movement’s political positions, focusing on the activities of the Tuukkaq Theater and the revitalization of uaajeerneq (mask dancing). Finally, I discuss the significance of Aasivik’s land-based model of politics for contemporary debates in Indigenous critical theory.

Decolonial movements in rural teacher's training: resistance to the segregated knowledge pattern

The year of 2020 is the milestone of a decade since the implementation of the Rural Education Policy, also known as Procampo, which was enacted through Decree n. 7.352, from November 4, 2010. This policy, as victory of social movements, is changing university spacetimes, territorialities and the daily lives of rural communities. Therefore, it summarizes the counter-hegemonic struggle for different educational rights, for the emancipation of teaching practices and for schools and communities’ autonomy. Based on such elements, the aim of the present article is to present autobiographical narratives according to which students and teachers rescue different decolonial movements observed in academic training as the very outcome of experiences built on Interdisciplinary Degree in Rural Education at Fluminense Federal University (UFF). The narratives highlight that Rural Education breaks up with the Eurocentric view of knowledge in order to acknowledge the richness of different knowledge fields, identities, and students’ historical and epistemic place with a colonial scene that denies differences to the detriment of submission practices. In order to face such reality, the narratives point out that the Rural Education proposes decolonial movements – as prevailing feature in teachers’ training – focused on coping with, as well as on resisting and repairing historical violence imposed by the coloniality.

"Youth speaking truth to power": intersectional decolonial activism in Namibia.

This article portrays a recent movement towards intersectional activism in urban Namibia. Since 2020, young Namibian activists have come together in campaigns to decolonize public space through removing colonial monuments and renaming streets. These have been linked to enduring structural violence and issues of gender and sexuality, especially queer and women's reproductive rights politics, which have been expressly framed as perpetuated by coloniality. I argue that the Namibian protests amount to new political forms of intersectional decoloniality that challenge the notion of decolonial activism as identity politics. The Namibian case demonstrates that decolonial movements may not only emphatically not be steeped in essentialist politics but also that activists may oppose an identity-based politics which postcolonial ruling elites have promoted. I show that, for the Namibian movements' ideology and practice, a fully intersectional approach has become central. They consciously juxtapose colonial memory with a living vision for the future to confront and situate colonial and apartheid history. Young Namibian activists challenge the intersectional inequalities and injustices, which, they argue, postcolonial Namibia inherited from its colonial-apartheid past: class inequality, racism, sexism, homophobia, and gender-based violence.

Navigating Colonial Space: A Case Study of an Indigenous Student-Led Decolonial Movement in Canadian Higher Education

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada widely shared its Reports and Calls to Action regarding the “Indian Residential School System” in 2015. Since that time, higher education institutions across Canada have been engaged in diverse institutional reform efforts. This article is a case study of an Indigenous student-led reform initiative at The University of Winnipeg that resulted in the first mandatory Indigenous course requirement as a graduation requirement for all undergraduate students in Canada. The research is designed and conducted with Indigenous leadership and partnership and relies on the insights of Indigenous students that led the initiative to consider the impetus, nature, and strategies underlying this curricular reform. Three emergent themes were discerned that are important to systemic reform in post￾secondary education: the university as colonial space; navigation of white Settler dominance; and timing as significant to systemic change. The study can be seen as a unique example of the complexity, opportunities, and limitations of decolonial reform in higher education through an Indigenous student-led social movement embodying contentious co-governance and prefiguration.

Gaelscoil Activists as a Postcolonial Subaltern and the Emergence of the Gaelscoileanna, ca. 1970

Abstract This is the first attempt to analyze Gaelscoil (Irish-medium school) activists using the lens of Gramscian subalternity. The activists who founded Irish-medium schools in the early 1970s are situated as part of the subaltern that exists in postcolonial countries. Drawing on later work on subalternity by Indian scholars, this article considers Gaelscoil activists within the context of colonial social production. Heeding Gramsci’s call to study the changing modes of production that give rise to new subaltern groups, it then examines the emergence of the Gaelscoil founding groups formed by these activists within the context of the rapidly globalizing capitalist economy of the Southern Irish state. Though the Gaelscoil activists drew on nineteenth-century ideologies of revitalization, during the early 1970s they managed to accommodate the Irish language to the Anglophone-dominated modern world. In the process, they birthed a decolonial movement that has impacted the lives of hundreds of thousands of Gaelscoil students over the last fifty years.

Education for Black Liberation

Popular education has played a central role in Pan-African liberation struggles historically and in the present moment. In the period following African independence, social movements that emerged around and through education in Africa were informed by and in dialogue with related decolonial movements of the Global South. However, the specific contributions of Pan-Africanist revolutionaries to the broader philosophy and praxis of education for liberation is often under-appreciated. This paper explores this impact through Paulo Freire’s political and intellectual engagement with Pan-Africanist popular education movements, radical intellectuals, and broader revolutionary struggles. In considering Freire’s work in dialogue and practice with African revolutionary thinkers, this paper shows that, while Freire shaped elements of liberation education in Africa, he was also deeply shaped and influenced by the historical conditions of the time and key African revolutionaries who were struggling towards similar objectives. Additionally, we explore the continued salience of Freirean educational praxis in contemporary Pan-Africanist social movements, through the example of a present day online pedagogical experiment, the Pan-African Activist Sunday School and Solidarity Collective.

Rhythming: a manifesto

ABSTRACT Rhythming is a practice of listening otherwise. Rhythming develops perspectives that enrichen how the situations, the actions and the apparatuses that make rhythm in everyday life are understood to matter. Rhythming articulates sonic research that listens and thinks through doing, noticing, and intervening into rhythm. The rhythming manifesto calls for a multi-sensorial, performative, and critical practice of listening and sonic thinking through the following propositions: Rhythming is a practice of listening otherwise Rhythming plays with rhythm machines and tacit habits Rhythming reconfigures the rhythm machine of the future Rhythming cultivates listening as attunement Rhythming activates sonic-material respondings Rhythming reveals listening positionalities This rhythming manifesto speculates on the principal and particular roles that listening and sensing the sonic have in perceiving the material, physical, technological, and imaginary entanglements of situated experience, as well as their distinct qualities for communicating relations. In this way, the manifesto contributes to an ecology of affinitive relationships, which currently drives eco-political and decolonial movements. There is a current need to be able to identify our systems, and to grow from our practices and analyses new languages, concepts, and modes for understanding interspecies and transcultural relationships.