Decolonization Struggles Research Articles

Indigeneity, Gender, and Resistance: Critique and Contemporaneity of Bolivian Anarchism in the Historical Imagination of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui

From the 1920s to the 1940s, Bolivia was a hub of Andean transnational solidarities rooted in artisanal trades, and spearheaded by migrant workers whose cultural, educational and social activism reflected a mosaic of influences from older militant traditions in neighbouring countries. Virtually absent from existing overviews of Latin American anarchism in English, Bolivian anarchism engaged extensively with autonomous indigenous and communal movements, and is therefore a distinctly revealing case from which to evaluate the engagement of anarchists with indigenous majorities in the Andean space where they lived. This article explores the work of sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, whose dense tapestry of pioneering scholarship on the intertwining horizons of conquest, rebellion, republicanism, resistance and populism in Bolivia over five hundred years includes profound and nuanced assessments of indigeneity and gender, pointing to the need for a more nuanced understanding of how racialised identities are defined in society, and the ways in which they are deployed discursively by revolutionary movements. From the rebellions Tupac Katari and Pablo Zárate Willka in the late 19th century, the subsequent quest of Aymara 'caciques apoderados' for allies among organized artisans and the urban poor, struggles of anarchist women, independent agrarian trade unionism, and the Katarista movement of the 1960s and 1970s to the popular insurgencies of the past three decades, Cusicanqui's work threads together archival, oral and iconographic history while enlisting the participation of popular movements in an ongoing critique of the legacies of internal colonialism, racialization, patriarchal inheritances, and languages of resistance in Bolivia; as well as the lessons of struggles for autonomy, freedom and decolonization in which anarchists and the movements they subsequently influenced took part.

Anti-Asian violence and US imperialism

The early months of 2020 witnessed a spike in anti-Asian violence in the United States, which many commentators attributed to President Donald Trump’s racist remarks calling the coronavirus the ‘Chinese virus’. This essay offers a historical lens through which to understand anti-Asian racism within the current conjuncture of the COVID-19 pandemic and US racist state violence. It argues that anti-Asian violence should be seen not merely as episodic or as individual acts of violence targeting Asian peoples but as a structure of US settler colonialism and racial capitalism. The first half of the essay examines this history; the second half focuses on Asian American activist organisations that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, including the Coalition Against Anti-Asian Violence: Organizing Asian Communities and Nodutdol, to illustrate their abolitionist visions of justice and how they are finding space to enact these visions in the current moment. The essay ultimately argues for the need to approach the struggle against anti-Asian racism expansively so as to encompass the struggle for decolonisation and Black liberation.

Decolonizing European Colonial Heritage in Urban Spaces – An Introduction to the Special Issue

ABSTRACT The contributions presented here were written in late 2019 and finalized in the early months of 2020. What unfolded on the global stage while the special issue was making its way through the publication process – the murder of George Floyd, the rise of Black Lives Matter as a global agenda and the reenergizing of protests against both material and ideological colonial heritage – seemed at times almost about to overtake it; to render it “preemptively anachronistic” as a consequence of a radical transformation of the stakes, forms and intensities of the decolonial struggle. Ultimately, however, we think that this new context has only further validated the importance and urgency of the work undertaken here: not only is the connection between issues of contemporary racism and the colonial past which those events highlighted here explicitly conceptualized, but also the various forms and content that the decolonial struggle can be invested with are revealed and examined in both European metropoles and their global counterparts.

Between Publics and Privates

Abstract This article discusses the hypervisibility of the Sahrawi munaḍila (female militant) within dominant representations of a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism. Drawing connections between nation-state building processes, the production of space, and gendered subjectivities, it destabilizes assumptions of institutions as devoid of political movement and shows how the spaces of the National Organization of Sahrawi Women allow women to inhabit the position of loyal critic toward their movement's dominant model of female empowerment. These positions reveal transformations to the way in which space is inhabited intragenerationally, and they reflect the regeneration of a Sahrawi female militancy under the conditions of a protracted struggle for decolonization.

Decolonization and Diaspora

Decolonization and Diaspora

Complex communication and decolonial struggles: The forging of deep coalitions through emotional echoing and resistant imaginations

Complex communication and decolonial struggles: The forging of deep coalitions through emotional echoing and resistant imaginations

Complex Communication and Decolonial Struggles: The Forging of Deep Coalitions through Emotional Echoing and Resistant Imaginations

AbstractThis article elucidates and expands on María Lugones's account of complex communication across liminal sites as the basis for deep coalitions among oppressed groups. The analysis underscores the crucial role that emotions and resistant imaginations play in complex communication and world-traveling across liminal sites. In particular, it focuses on the role of emotional echoing and epistemic activism in complex forms of communication among oppressed subjects. It elucidates Gloria Anzaldúa's storytelling and Doris Salcedo's visual art as exemplary forms of epistemic activism that issue coalitional gestures and critical provocations that can wake people up from their epistemic slumbers and instigate forms of complex communication that can create new possibilities for coalitional politics.

Tango Dancing with María Lugones

Tango Dancing with María Lugones

West Papua and the International History of Decolonization, 1961-69

Scholars of international history have argued for the separation of decolonization struggles in Africa and Asia between 1945 and 1965 from Pacific struggles that occurred after 1960. Yet the West Papuan campaign for independence demonstrates how deeply connected decolonization in the Pacific was to anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia. In their petitions to the United Nations, West Papuan activists drew on race and rights discourse – evoking the principles of Pan-Africanism and self-determination – to appeal to African leaders and the UN General Assembly.Ultimately West Papuan claims to independence were foreclosed due to the shifting terrain of international politics and global governance of the 1960s. Papuan activists found it hard to gain support amidst the rise of Third World power, shifting politics of human rights and self-determination, and the dynamics of the Cold War. The very conditions that had created opportunities for African and Asian nations to achieve independence worked against the claims of the West Papuans. In this article I argue that expanding the geographies and temporalities of decolonization creates a more international history of decolonization and demonstrates the transformation of anticolonial politics and global governance in the 1960s.

When Did the Masks of Coloniality Begin to Fall? Decolonial Reflections on the Bandung Spirit of Decolonization

The ‘Bandung spirit of decolonization’ pre-dates and post-dates the physicality of the Bandung Conference of 1955. The concept of the ‘spirit’ encapsulates a melange of resistance and struggles against colonial encounters, colonialism, and coloniality—going as far back as the time of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). This article posits that to gain a deeper appreciation of the significance of the ‘Bandung spirit of decolonization’ it is vital to begin with an analysis of technologies of the invention of the Global South within global coloniality. The ‘Bandung spirit of decolonization’ gains a broader canvas as a name for the long standing anti-colonial resistances and decolonial struggles not only against global imperial designs and breaking from Cold War coloniality but also as a terrain of self-invention in opposition to the Northern domination. Thus, this article performs the following tasks: conceptually, it frames the ‘Bandung spirit of decolonization’ with decolonial theory; historically, it traces the politics and technologies of the invention of the global South together with its entrapment in global coloniality and empirically, it lays out the long-standing struggles for liberation beginning with the Haitian Revolution right up to the post-1945 decolonization and pan-African initiatives in Africa. Africa is the author’s locus of enunciation of the ‘Bandung spirit of decolonization’ without delinking it from the rest of the Global South.

Postrevolutionary Affect and the Consolidation of Zionism: The Case of Mercedes Sosa

This essay traces the Zionist conversion of iconic revolutionary folk singer Mercedes Sosa to theorize the shifting forms of racial empire in the movement from the Dirty War to the War on Terror. I read Sosa’s story as emblematic of the thwarted revolutionary dreams of the late twentieth century and the subsequent forms of recolonization—and in this case Zionism as settler colonialism—that came to flourish in their stead. The arc of Sosa’s work spans the transitions of the epoch and their attendant affective economies: from the revolutionary hopes of the 1960s–1970s, to the deep sorrows of the early military regimes, to the infinite deferrals of justice that animated the neoliberal project. In closing, I examine solidarity responses to the 2014 attack on Gaza. Embodying the rejuvenation of joint decolonial struggle, they rupture the Zionist stronghold that has shaped dominant structures of feeling, overwhelmingly laying purchase on the popular imagination.

Comparative Philosophy and Decolonial Struggle: The Epistemic Injustice of Colonization and Liberation of Human Reason

AbstractThis essay explores the extent to which comparative philosophy can assist decolonial struggle. In order to accomplish this task, I offer not only a description of philosophy's colonization but also an account of how this discipline remains subject to the coloniality of knowledge. In short, insofar as race, gender, class, and sexuality are considered irrelevant or accidental to the production of philosophical knowledge, professional philosophy replicates, if not continues, what Rajeev Bhargava terms the epistemic injustice of colonialism. One response to the colonization of philosophy is “diversification” by means of putting into conversation philosophers, systems, and ideas from differing cultures or regions throughout the world. While a step forward, insofar as philosophical comparisons occur primarily on an East–West axis, philosophers are not necessarily addressing the biases, prejudices, racism, and exceptionalism endemic to their discipline. In fact, such a directionality typically reinforces the sense of historical development that undergirds Western philosophy's self‐understanding. This essay, therefore, offers a series of recommendations for how to radicalize comparative philosophical efforts so as to address global epistemic injustice and aid in the process of decolonization.

Decolonization Is Not a Dinner Party: Claudia Jones, China's Nuclear Weapons, and Anti-Imperialist Solidarity

This article examines Claudia Jones's view on nuclear weapons and her attempts in the West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News and Renmin Ribao to link Beijing's nuclear project to global anti-imperialist and nationalist movements. In hailing China's first successful nuclear test as a major advancement in the international struggle against U.S. empire, Jones underscored the overlaps between her internationalist politics and Beijing's militant foreign policy pronouncements to drive home the need for intensified resistance against imperialism and for national liberation. In this way she also rejected the Soviet doctrine of peaceful coexistence and articulated a peace politics that emphasized the dismantling of imperialism and colonialism as the prerequisite for lasting peace. Her journalistic efforts to wage a global decolonial struggle culminated in her reporting on her 1964 visit to China, where she found “evidence” for Beijing's anti-imperialist commitments. Although she constructed romanticizing, if not entirely counterfactual, narratives of Chinese socialism that corresponded to the party-state's geopolitical and domestic aspirations, she downplayed the implications of the deepening Sino-Soviet Split, thereby formulating a relatively independent position that differed from Beijing's line. Jones's activism around the issue of nuclear weapons, as well as its inconsistencies and contradictions, exemplified the hard work that Black internationalists had to put into forging transnational solidarities and tilting the global geopolitical balance in the favor of the decolonizing world.

Decolonized and Afrocentric Education: For Centering African Women in Remembering, Re-Membering, and the African Renaissance

The pan-African struggle for decolonization, both in the continent and the diaspora against European slavery and colonialism, was an expression of an African Renaissance (rebirth, reclamation). Col...

The Struggle for Reconciliation and Decolonization: Navajo Uranium Miners

The Struggle for Reconciliation and Decolonization: Navajo Uranium Miners

Introduction: Cultural production under multiple colonialisms

ABSTRACTIn this introduction to the special journal issue, we elaborate a multiple colonialisms framework that allows us to examine the complex relationalities of multiple and converging colonial relations in historical and contemporary contexts within which cultural production does its work. Through examples of cultural production from the Americas and Asia, Special Issue contributors analyse rarely-recognized sites of colonialism that bear a palimpsestic relationship to other articulations that are more commonly legible as colonialism. Such an approach makes new analytical connections and gives greater depth to conventional theorizations of coloniality and decolonization. We also illustrate the centrality of the scholarship of Indigenous, Black, and Dalit-Bahujan scholars to the framework, especially the ways in which their work challenges our collective and accumulated racialized and colonial unknowings and illuminates what often remains unthinkable in conventional analyses of cultural production and the colonial contexts of their making. Overall, rather than analytically imply pluralism and equivalence among varied colonialisms, we argue that a multiple colonialisms framework enables cultural studies scholarship to dwell on the relationality, contradictions, and incommensurabilities generated within converging structures and multiple articulations of colonial and racialized violence across spaces. Weaving the various contributions into the framework, we invite readers to consider what histories, structures, and relationships help to explain why actually existing colonialities remain illegible as such in the particular context of each paper, and what that implies for solidarity and decolonization struggles. We hope that highlighting the specific creative methodological practices and significant spatial and temporal rethinking that a multiple colonialisms approach can generate incites conversations about how we might enrich theorizations of coloniality and decolonization.

On Frantz Fanon: Key Concepts

Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) was a Martinique-born psychiatrist, theorist, philosopher, playwright, and a leading political actor and figure in the struggle for decolonization. Between the publication of his two best-known works, Black Skin, White Masks (Peau Noire, Masques Blancs), in 1952 and The Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la Terre) in 1961, Fanon defended his medical thesis in Paris, was a resident psychiatrist at the Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria, and published several more books and numerous clinical and critical articles advancing counter-narratives on colonialism and colonial psychiatry in various medical and radical journals. In the following decades, his work would become canonical in postcolonial studies, and has shaped the common parlance of scholarship on the Global South. This vignette showcases Fanon’s contribution through an examination of his most prevalent scholarship and theories, and a brief summary of his influence on decolonization studies.

Unweaving Colonial Frames, Restorying Indigenous Potentialities

Unweaving Colonial Frames, Restorying Indigenous Potentialities

Infiltrating the Academy through (Anarcha-)Ecofeminist Pedagogies

ABSTRACTIn this manuscript I hope to clarify my use of a pedagogy that is sensitive to social and ecological struggles by reflecting on my personal teaching trajectory, ethnographic experiences, and theoretical reservations to feminism, anarchism and anti-/de-colonial struggles, because these can effectively inform students that we are tied to one another in biospheric knots by histories of domination and structural violence in ways that cannot be ignored. Any institutionalized, essentialist, corporate-driven teaching content cannot be challenged without a mutual synthesis of teacher-student knowledge, critical formulations of social and political realities through praxis, action and place-based environmental pedagogy. To me, this has been the first and most vital reason for the development of an anti-authoritarian pedagogy that is sensitive to (indigenous) people-environmental relations. Different sections of the manuscript focus on disciplinary boundaries around geography, anarcha-ecofeminist and de-colonial philosophical trends, my adopted philosophies and methods of human geography instruction. I conclude by emphasizing the ecosocialist orientation to human geographies because the real world is not divided into silos and disciplines, but is connected, complex and untidy. Hence, my intervention in support of the urgent need to bring sustainability, indigeneity, interdisciplinarity and intersectionality into the curriculum of the discipline in which I find myself, i.e. human geography.

"What a Native Looks Like": Academic Feminist Spaces, the Logic of Elimination, and Survivance

I write to share ways I have seen Native colleagues and their knowledges (Native, feminist, and otherwise) denied and rejected in feminist academic spaces. I also write to think through my responses to these incidents, in the moment and after the fact, as I grapple with my responsibilities as a non-Native feminist. The attempts I witnessed to eliminate/disappear/erase these colleagues fell into three broad categories: not being recognized as "real" Natives; not being seen as adequately feminist; and disappearing behind/into a near totalizing Black-white racial binary. These occurrences are homegrown demonstrations of the structural persistence of settler colonialism manifest in the logic of elimination. Overall, this paper argues that feminist academic spaces are often hostile territory for Native scholars who face attempts at elimination upon entering them. "Survivance" and "resurgence" assist these Native academics in their navigation of these territories, in their refusal of erasure, in their struggles for decolonization. Non-Natives wishing to facilitate that navigation and Native presence in the academy can learn to recognize these acts of resurgence and deepen our understanding of, and commitment to, decolonization.