Colonial Framework Research Articles

La influencia del poscolonialismo en el estudio de Israel/Palestina: de la perspectiva anticolonial al marco decolonial, pasando por el colonialismo de asentamiento

Aunque la presentación del denominado “conflicto palestino-israelí” o “árabe-israelí” como consecuencia del fenómeno sionista como una ideología colonialista se remonta a principios del siglo XX, con una mayor relevancia y profundidad intelectual en los años 1960-1970 gracias en particular al apoyo de estudios al respecto por parte de la Organización para la Liberación de Palestina, no es menos cierto que estos últimos años el estudio del conflicto ha sido testigo de un resurgimiento del marco conceptual del colonialismo. Este resurgimiento se inscribe dentro de la cada vez más concienzuda aplicación del marco de los estudios postcoloniales tanto en las relaciones internacionales en general como en Oriente Próximo en particular, para lo cual las aportaciones de Edward Said representaron un punto de inflexión clave, y muy particularmente dentro de una nueva subdisciplina como es la teoría del colonialismo de asentamientos. La utilización de este último marco epistemológico arroja sin embargo luz sobre varias de las diferencias en el estudio de la situación en la Palestina histórica a lo largo de las últimas décadas, como son la relevancia del elemento etnonacional, el peso cada vez mayor de los estudios indígenas y la importancia de las redes transnacionales y la interseccionalidad, además de un peso cada vez mayor de la perspectiva decolonial.

Recognizing multiple sovereignties: A starting point for Native American cultural resource consultation

ABSTRACTThe practice of archaeology within the USA necessarily involves issues of sovereignty, multiple worldviews and colonialism. Archaeologists must acknowledge both the reality of colonialism's legacy as well as our role in either supporting or confronting that history, and consultation with indigenous communities is oftentimes the main (if not only) venue for interrogating this legacy. This article, written in a dialogic format, presents and explores the role of a government agency's consultation policy within this framework of colonialism and dual sovereignty. However, it also discusses the limitation of policies and identifies areas in which continued improvement is needed. This article provides insight into the issues that are in play within consultation, concerns that may not be expressed but nevertheless have an impact, and the broader issues that agency representatives must consider so that archaeologists may have a better understanding of the decisions made within consultation discussions.

The Contempt of Public Property: the Datooga Salt Fracas and the Resistance against Colonial Definition of Property in Central Tanzania (1923-1927)

Abstract This paper discusses the Datooga resistance to the British land law as announced by the Land Ordinance in 1923. The discussion centres itself in the provocation that the law implied and commanded on the local Datooga’s ownership and control of the natural resources within the jurisdiction of the chief. The Datooga as shown in the paper were probably the first to openly resist the public ownership of resources as announced by the Ordinance, because for the Datooga the land resources, particularly the salt deposits from Balangida Lalu or any other that fell within the reach and borders of their chief’s power were completely Datooga. The pinnacle of this contradiction is whether local chiefs in colonial Tanganyika understood the limits of what the British had claimed to offer to the local chiefs or they sometimes needed to resist what they considered undesirable situation. The salt fracas in Mbulu district that the paper discusses is an indicator of the irony of colonialism that offered local chiefs political power which the recipients could not use beyond the colonial framework.

Space and Mobility in Palestine by Julie Peteet

Reviewed by: Space and Mobility in Palestine by Julie Peteet Livia Wick Julie Peteet, Space and Mobility in Palestine. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. 252 pp. Julie Peteet has worked for years with Palestinians over a large geographical and social expanse—from the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt), through Jordan, to Lebanon and its refugee camps. She has now published a book dealing with the political and personal consequences of restrictions placed on movement in the West Bank. In it, she analyzes the most striking aspect of the Palestinian natural and human landscape: the closure which divides the land into small spaces chopped up by checkpoints, barriers, a system of unequal identity cards, the Wall, permits, and other bureaucratic and physical impediments to people's mobility. Her writing is the product of fieldwork conducted between 2004 and 2008, a time of continuing severe closure and repetitive clashes in villages near the Wall. In the introduction, she identifies her theoretical framework for studying Palestine as "a modern settler colonial context" (2). In the oPt, access to space, and therefore mobility, derives from racialized categories of ethnicity, religion, nationality, place of origin, and residency, as well as an expanding/contracting expanse (the former for newly installed Israelis, the latter for indigenous Palestinians). Zionism, she points out, is now ever more commonly seen as a form of settler colonialism in which land and water resources are expropriated for the use of the colonials while the indigenous population is either expelled or contained rather than, in classical colonial fashion, incorporated as a labor force. Indeed, the publication of this book and others in the field illustrates the shift in political and conceptual understandings of Palestine/Israel in the world academy from a "conflict" to a "settler colonial" focus. Endowed since 2011 with its own scholarly journal (Settler Colonial Studies), this classical field has [End Page 283] increasingly concentrated on contemporary examples, among which Israel/Palestine figures prominently. But what kinds of processes does the framework of settler colonialism make visible? This is the question Peteet endeavors to answer in her ethnography of mobility, for which she interviewed numerous local actors and Palestinian as well as foreign observers. She argues that her role as an anthropologist in the colonial present is, first, to compile an ethnographic archive of life under settler-colonial occupation and, second, to analyze the ever-changing spatial parameters and rules of contemporary forms of colonial power. Her goal is thus not simply to document the disciplinary effects of closure in a Foucauldian manner, but, perhaps like Michel de Certeau, to watch people in their everyday, as they actually move through the maze of obstacles. The first chapter, "'Permission to Breathe': Closure and the Wall," analyzes the regime of closures and the ever-present Wall as forms of immobilization, an escalation in the Israeli tactics of monitoring and entrapping the Palestinian population. In this form of segregation, the people are assigned particular spaces and constrained in their access to others. She traces segregation between Arabs and Jews to the beginnings of the Zionist agricultural projects in Palestine, through the policies of the Israeli state after its creation in 1948 and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967. The issuing of identity cards, color-coded for quick assessment of the holder's rights to mobility and residency, distinguishes between Arab and Jew but also between Palestinians' places of origin. The hierarchy of identity cards is multiple: the right to mobility (i.e., to cross checkpoints and visit various parts of Israel and the oPt) differs for holders of Israeli citizenship, Jerusalem IDs, West Bank IDs, Gaza IDs, and those with Jordanian passports. The sequence of chapters following: "Mobility: Legibility, Permits, and Roads" (Chapter 2); "Geography of Anticipation and Risk: Checkpoints, Filters, and Funnels" (Chapter 3); and "Waiting and 'Stealing Time': Closure's Temporality" (Chapter 4) document the all-pervasiveness of a process of enclavization, with reduced space and expanded time. In Chapter 2, she shows how each Palestinian enclave (Nablus, Ramallah, Hebron, Gaza, Jenin, and so on) is granted a specific status, entailing its own particular right to mobility, whose parameters vary from day to day. These numerous enclaves, Peteet...

Figuring Korean Futures: Children's Literature in Modern Korea by Dafna Zur

Reviewed by: Figuring Korean Futures: Children's Literature in Modern Korea by Dafna Zur Yeojoo Lim (bio) Figuring Korean Futures: Children's Literature in Modern Korea, by Dafna Zur. Stanford UP 2017. Tongsim is a Korean word which is a "combination of the character tong for child and sim for heart/mind" (6). The concept of tongsim, or the child-heart as Dafna Zur translated, has been recognized as the most essential element of children's literature for most Koreans for a century. Even though the interpretation and the application of the concept slightly varies by scholars and writers, no one can deny the natural and tight connection between Korean children's literature and the concept of the child-heart. With Figuring Korean Futures: Children's Literature in Modern Korea, Dafna Zur focuses on this relationship. As in the title of the book, "Figuring Korean Futures," Zur pays special attention to the point that the figure of the child was recognized as the future and hope of the nation during the colonial and postcolonial periods of Korea. She insists the concept of the child-heart—the perspective on [End Page 205] children as pure and innocent beings untouched by the burden from the past—worked as a driving force among intellectuals and writers to dream about a brighter future even in the darkest hours. Based on the idea that texts and images in the children's magazines exhibit the desire for modernization and nation-building, Zur traces children's periodicals published between 1908, when the first magazine for youth appeared, and 1950, when the Korean War broke out. The introduction to Figuring Korean Futures, "The Child and Modern Korea," explains the historical, political, and social background of the emergence of child-heart and its relationship with Korean children's literature. Indicating that the term child-heart has been used indiscriminately so far and thus obscured the meaning of children to different interest groups in different periods, Zur argues that she intends to "flesh out this term and trace its political and social contours" through this book (6). Chapter 1, "The Youth Magazine in Early Colonial Korea," begins with introducing two literary figures who had great influence on the history of Korean literature in the early twentieth century—Ch'oe Nam-sŏn and Yi Kwang-su. Zur mentions that both Ch'oe and Yi "saw youth as the only group capable of carrying Korea forward into a new future" (32). She indicates the purpose of Ch'oe's first magazine, Sonyŏn, which was first published in 1908, was to educate and reform Korea's youth, most of whom were still illiterate and had no reading materials for pleasure. By thoroughly analyzing texts and images from Sonyŏn, Zur demonstrates how this magazine pursued delivering modern knowledge to Korean youth and encouraging them to build a spatial sense of nation. Her keen analysis also points out that the adventure and development of Korean youth were only encouraged within the boundaries of a Japanese colonial framework. Zur argues that despite its contribution to Korean children's literature by providing pleasure reading materials for youth, Sonyŏn did not confront the important question of what it means to be young people in a politically unstable country that was on the verge of colonization. In explaining these intellectuals' longing for Korea's modernization in the early twentieth century, Zur refers to Yi's manifesto, "On the Centrality of Children," which severely criticized Korea's old tradition, even to say "Let us feast on our parent's blood … and destroy the graves of the ancestors" (45). While reading this chapter, I was quite bewildered, because there was no mention that Yi's manifesto was extremely controversial at that time. Zur also neglects to reveal that Ch'oe and Yi [End Page 206] were notorious pro-Japanese collaborators. Even though the two intellectuals were Korean independence activists in the beginning, they later changed their minds and became enthusiastic supporters of Japanese rule. They encouraged Korean youth to volunteer for the Imperial Army and extolled the greatness of the Japanese emperor when they were still influential literary authorities. Absence of this information is particularly noticeable given...

Settler Colonial Demographics: Zionist Land Purchases and Immigration During the British Mandate in Palestine

The settler colonial framework provides Palestine studies with a useful tool, opening new lines of inquiry and leading to new fields of study. This essay examines the impact of the Zionist settlement policy on rural Palestine during the Mandatory period. Through a demographic analysis, the essay argues the displacement of these peasants was the result of an intentional transfer policy by the Jewish community. Transfer constituted an important part of the overall Zionist ideology and attitude towards the local population. The displacements and removal of the indigenous population started before the Nakba, including the British Mandate period, due to the settler colonial need to become a demographic majority in the land under dispute. Zionist historiography argues Zionists did not interfere in the daily life of the Palestinians and stresses the profitable aspects of Jewish immigration. This essay, using settler colonial theories, challenges this historiography and proposes new tools to deal with other settler colonial cases around the world. This essay is based on four population sources used during the British Mandate to determine the consequences of land purchases and immigration in the Haifa and Nazareth sub-districts during that period. The analysis of the growth rates of all the communities and villages will illustrate the consequences of the Zionist settler-colonial project. This essay discusses the replacement of population and the importance of population, access to land, and immigration trends for the Zionist settler-colonial enterprise on their way to becoming the demographic majority on the land of the Historical Palestine.

Who dreams this dreaming? Patanjali’s symbolic usurpation of the trope of the ‘enslaved’ Indian economy

ABSTRACTScholars have argued that the national economy is the symbolic rallying point around which the idea of India has long been grafted, from its depiction as ‘enslaved’ in colonial times to being enshrined at the heart of the nation-building processes which marked the early years of post-independence India. The past decade has seen the meteoric rise of a local fast-moving consumer goods giant which is the brainchild of an ascetic named Baba Ramdev. This company, Patanjali, is today valued at just over Rs. 10,000 crores (US$1560 million), and is India’s second largest consumer goods company. To be read in the narrative crafted around Patanjali is a return to the notion of the enslaved Indian economy, with new villains here cast – foreign multinational players standing in for the English within the colonial framework – from whom India (starting conveniently with its economy) must be saved. This new ‘swadeshi’ (home-grown or locally made) movement seeks to create, in its own words, ‘patriots’ out of consumers, forging a new national culture on the anvil of an overtly capitalist base. This article critically analyses Patanjali’s communication, and seeks to revisit the question of the role played by the national economy in this iteration of India’s dreaming.

Neo-colonialism in cultural governance in the EU: a Maltese case study

The case of cultural governance in Malta will be assessed to throw light on neo-colonialist practices persistent in relations between the European Union (EU) and Member States today. A sense of continuity between British rule in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and current cultural governance in Malta seems to have facilitated EU support of neo-liberal economic approaches to culture. It will be argued that this tension has allowed nationalistic tendencies and the instrumental use of the sector to grow. The term ‘culture’ is interpreted following Edward Said with regard to the acknowledgment of general social practices together with the struggle for the assertion of identities. This paper makes the case that the adherence of the EU to the principle of subsidiarity in culture, combined with the prioritisation of economic principles, seem to have compromised cultural development in Malta through the dilution of a critical approach towards cultural practice. This strategic approach seems to have enabled the continuation of a colonial framework by enabling the subtle yet pervasive dominance of culture by the state elite.

From appropriation to conservation: Mughal monuments, colonial tourism and the Dak Bungalow

ABSTRACTThe rise in colonial tourism in the post-uprising decades propelled the need for tourist infrastructure in the Indian Subcontinent. This need was met by appropriating historic monuments and reusing them as tourist rest houses, called Dak Bungalows – a common occurrence in Agra and Delhi, former Mughal capitals and popular tourist destinations. Even as the state established the Archaeological Survey of India to safeguard the Subcontinent’s monuments, the transformation carried out by colonial engineers undermined their historic worth in the absence of guidelines. Critical of the engineers’ undertaking, Viceroy Curzon, took up the challenge of ridding monuments, particularly Mughal monuments, of modern interventions. While being instrumental in providing monuments with statutory protection, Curzon appropriated these monuments to legitimize the colonial state’s authority. This paper examines the seventeenth century Mughal city, Fatehpur Sikri, a popular tourist destination in the nineteenth century, where three historic buildings were appropriated and transformed into Dak Bungalows prior to the building of a new Dak Buangalow at Curzon’s behest. Examining these developments against the backdrop of the colonial state’s post-uprising political dispensation, through the prism of monument conservation and colonial tourism, it argues that all forms of engagement with monuments operated within the colonial framework.

Unintended consequences of cosmopolitanism: Malcolm X, Africa, and revolutionary theorizing in the black power movement in the US

During the black power movement (BPM) in the US and the contemporaneous anti-colonial movement in Africa, African-Americans sought to emulate the liberation struggles in Africa. BPM revolutionists, epitomized by Malcolm X, attempted to adopt the practices of the African liberation struggle to overthrow white supremacism in the US. Pursuant to that, Malcolm developed his thesis on black revolution in the US from a static, unidimensional, religious-based conception into a dynamic, multidimensional, secular framework; however, the cosmopolitan turn in Malcolm’s influential thesis inadvertently limited its applicability to the US. Specifically, it contributed to (1) Malcolm’s reverse civilizationism, which privileged developments in Africa over those in the US; (2) his conflation of the conditions facing Africans with those faced by African-Americans, suggesting the salience of a colonial framework in understanding both; (3) his adoption of a UN petition strategy to address the human rights issues of black America, following a failed strategy of previous activists. Each of these unintended consequences of Malcolm’s cosmopolitan turn contributed to the theoretical enervation of the BPM.

“…to the Grave”—Autopsy, settler structures, and indigenous counter-conduct

In February 2015, two Anishinaabe tribal members, Mushkoob Aubid and Autumn Martineau, passed away after car accidents in Northeastern Minnesota. Their bodies were slated to undergo autopsy, sparking opposition from their families on religious grounds. This sparked a struggle that pitted the families and tribal allies against state structures, in what led to the recovery of the bodies and changes in Minnesota state laws surrounding autopsy. The role of 'quotidian' settler violence in the events that transpired, through a theoretical framework of settler colonialism, biopolitics and the importance of autopsy, is placed in opposition to the role of ‘quotidian’ indigenous resistance, informed by a theoretical framework of counter-conduct and indigenous modes of knowledge and being. It is argued that although settler colonial society and its associated structures are able to reconfigure themselves at will in a variety of articulations in order to subjugate indigenous peoples, indigenous people are able to resist this subjugation with resourceful and multifaceted resistance of their own. This can be seen in the ability of the Aubid and Martineau families to recover the bodies of their loved ones. The paper concludes by considering the implications of the case study for future Anishinaabe/indigenous resistance against autopsy, and in more general applications.

Locked Down

Locked Down Pippa Holloway (bio) Carolyn Strange. Discretionary Justice: Pardon and Parole in New York from the Revolution to the Depression. New York: New York University Press, 2016. x + 323 pp. Halftones, notes, selected bibliography, index. $55.00. Kelly Lytle Hernández. City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. 301 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $28.00. At first glance, Discretionary Justice and City of Inmates appear to take similar approaches and might, considered together, suggest a framework for understanding the long history of incarceration in America. Both are local studies that cover the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. Both make arguments about the long legacies of old practices. With the former set in New York state and the latter in Los Angeles, California, they could offer fruitful contrasts between the east and west coasts and highlight histories of locations that still today are critical points on the carceral landscape. Upon closer inspection, though, the two books could not be more different. Discretionary Justice looks at incarceration from the perspective of who gets released and why. Tracing the history of pardons and parole, two paths by which criminal punishment might be modified or rescinded, this is a detailed and impressive examination the gubernatorial policies, criminal justice procedure, and legislative actions of the administrative state. In contrast, City of Inmates foregrounds ideas about incarceration more than the management of public policy. To understand how and why Los Angeles built a massive system of incarceration, Hernández turns to the framework of settler colonialism, finding the origins of mass incarceration in the earliest attempts to eradicate native sovereignty. Discretionary Justice looks at the politics and policy behind clemency in New York, identifying changes but also locating common threads between the Revolutionary era and the 1930s. Pardons find their origins in an ancient practice, the ability of a sovereign to grant mercy to any subject. Despite their undemocratic origins, pardons were enshrined in the first state constitutions, [End Page 413] such as the one in New York, which gave the governor the power to grant mercy in order to curtail criminal punishment. The odd persistence of this "ancient prerogative power of kings" in the new American model of republican government was observed by many, including Alexis de Tocqueville on the occasion of his 1831 visit to the United States (p. 210). Strange notes that pardons faced opposition on several fronts in New York. Two constitutional conventions, in 1821 and 1846, debated the executive pardon but failed to limit it, also rejecting efforts to assign the power to pardon to the legislature rather than the executive. Later in the century, social scientists and modern reformers also challenged the pardon power, saying that this old, irrational form of mercy contradicted both democracy and modern understandings of justice. Critiquing pardons as anti-modern and irrational should have found broad support in New York. Policymakers there were heralded as leaders in prison reform, dating back to the establishment of Auburn State Prison in 1819, a model institution that was imitated across the world. New York also pioneered indeterminate sentencing and promoted the idea of punishment as a means to reform. New York was also among the first states to embrace a new form of discretionary justice and establish a system of parole. Whereas pardons simply terminate punishment, parole is a contingent termination, usually resulting from good behavior. The idea was simple. Good behavior in prison was indicative of a reformed character and would lead to early release. Further proof of reform would come if the individual continued to avoid criminal behavior. Re-offending demonstrated that the reform had failed and would result in re-incarceration. New York established a parole board, made up of experts who would interview applicants and consider evidence from prison officials in determining whether to grant parole. Strange points out what might appear to many as a paradox. As New York established some of the most innovative prison policies in the nation, including parole, it kept the old tradition of pardons. From the perspective of those who sought to bring scientific processes to prisons, whereby...

Wars for Empire: Apaches, the United States, and the Southwest Borderlands

Wars for Empire employs the framework of settler colonialism to argue that war and violence in the American Southwest unfolded as expressions of culture and convention. For the Apache people, existing in numerous bands dispersed over a wide area from western Arizona, New Mexico, Sonora, Chihuahua, to West Texas, raiding and warfare met the needs of subsistence and provided a mechanism to obtain power and status in competition with other borderland peoples. For the United States, the war functioned as an expression of white, Anglo-Saxon dominance far out of proportion to the benefits accruing from the conquest of this remote, foreboding region.

Ch. Didier Gondola. Tropical Cowboys: Westerns, Violence, and Masculinity in Kinshasa.

Ch. Didier Gondola’s Tropical Cowboys: Westerns, Violence, and Masculinity in Kinshasa is a book with a long history: Gondola’s fieldwork on “the Bills” in the townships of Kinshasa (Congo) and their flamboyant imitation of American cowboys started in the early 1990s. But this long process of maturation has proved to be profitable. It allowed the author to develop his analysis in terms of poverty and delinquency while increasing his emphasis on performativity and the efforts of these young men to create their own identity and culture outside the colonial framework. In creative interaction with cultural studies and recent debates on masculinity, Gondola highlights the Bills’ consistent effort to develop a new identity beyond the traditional-modern opposition in which the colonials tried to encapsulate local society. Developing their own slang (Indoubill), sporting cowboy hats and checkered shirts, celebrating their bicycle as their “horse” and their own forms of violence as an imitation of trigger-happy cowboys, the Bills clearly opted for a modern identity, outside tradition but also against the colonial notion of the educated évolué.

Legitimizing the invented Congolese space: The gaze from within in early Congolese fiction

Postcolonial discourses describe colonization as a process of invention to impose the will of a conquering West on “backward” societies. The will to power conjugated with the need for raw materials served as the main catalysts. They put side by side a hegemonic intruder bent on duplicating itself, and a powerless and compliant native unable to react to the blitz of transformations. Hence, the master/slave or father/child relationships that describe the colonial framework. The task is to interrogate these generally accepted assumptions and binary oppositions. Although marginalized, the Congolese native was unwilling to become an object for the colonizer’s gaze. In fact, the inability to expel the “invader” did not prevent the creation of legitimacies out of what was precipitously brought in. This mechanism of transformation is perceptible in Paul Lomami Tchibamba’s novel Ngando (1948), the object of this study. Ngando’s imagined colonial city stands out as a site of contrasts and contradictions. However, the duplicated model shows the “transformability” of the new space into “normalcy” by a subversive native.

Neo-settler colonialism and the re-formation of territory: Privatization and nationalization in Israel

In this article we critically analyse the production of Israeli territory vis a vis the ongoing transformation of land and planning policies from ones based on pure nationalism to those purporting neo-liberal logic. Unlike the existing literature − including the most recent critical body of knowledge on planning, resource management and public policy in Israel − we contend that this transformation must be understood within the framework of settler colonialism. Our main argument is that the growing dominance of neo-liberal policies, expressed in the form of new public management, privatization of space, planning and territorial management, is bound up with Israel’s settler-colonial politics. Based on our detailed study of the dynamics of the privatization of space in Israel, we conceptualize the interplay between centralistic-national territorial management and new public management, free market-driven, privatization-prone, liberal planning and land policies as neo-settler colonialism. This concept focuses on the symbiotic relationships between these two vectors, with the latter providing a new mechanism of colonial control.

Charting the development of knowledge on Soviet and post-Soviet education through the pages of comparative and international education journals

ABSTRACTThis paper examines 126 research articles from three comparative education journals to chart the development of knowledge within comparative education on the Soviet Union and post-Soviet countries. Thematic, theoretical, discursive, and methodological aspects of scholarship are linked with changing geopolitical realities in a systematic analysis of scholarship published since the late 1950s. A new framework of multi-layered colonialism is introduced to explore different features of the double disadvantage that comparative education knowledge production on post-Soviet countries has faced – Russian imperialism and Western academic colonialism. The paper contributes to comparative education knowledge creation by historicising our understanding of Western academic output and outlining a potential future direction in the development of knowledge on post-Soviet systems, policies, and practices of education.

To Shake the Hand of Happiness: Luiz Ruffato's Inferno Provisório

To Shake the Hand of Happiness:Luiz Ruffato's Inferno Provisório Marguerite Itamar Harrison To shake the hand of happiness, as Seu Sebastião's family does at the beginning of "O Ataque," is always a short-lived accomplishment in Luiz Ruffato's hellish world. In Inferno Provisório, the sense of marginality, of living life on the periphery, derives from the author's decision to register in panoramic, five-volume form a raw and heart-rending history of the working class in Brazil in the second half of the twentieth century. Correspondingly, his narrative lens captures factory workers who strive for upward mobility and get entangled in consumerist cravings. Yet he also portrays the lowly lower classes, the truly down and out: the unemployed, the sick, the unstable, the suicidal, the insignificant, misfits living in makeshift quarters, those excluded, exploited and discarded by society. This essay addresses this extremely marginalized sector of the populace in Ruffato's Inferno Provisório. I focus in particular on several stories on its third segment, Vista parcial da noite, set in the 1960s and 70s during the Brazilian dictatorship. Luiz Ruffato's attention to marginality paradoxically takes aim at the center, at that which is most sacrosanct in the stories Brazil tells about itself: the nation and the family. He uses fiction to point to Brazilian society's pervasive flaws, mostly by way of intimate vignettes of families on the outer fringes. In Marilena Chaui's "Comemorar?" from Brazil: Mito fundador e sociedade autoritária (89-95), she aptly draws correlations between Brazil's colonial framework and its post-colonial makeup as an authoritarian society, linking public and private spheres. In Chaui's mapping of Brazil's authoritarian profile, she stresses an overall societal arc within which political totalitarianism manifests itself (90). Within what Chaui terms "social authoritarianism," inequalities abound, rooted in a colonial pattern of socioeconomic imbalance. With a landholding master in command through the privilege and power of racial, gender and class "superiority," "naturally" inferior beings such as women, [End Page 377] blacks, indigenous peoples, and immigrants become unremittingly relegated to the role of servitude (92). In similar fashion, Luiz Ruffato's fiction addresses these same structural parallels in Brazil's society: its hierarchical, top-down sociopolitical composition and the economic ramifications that historically and unremittingly polarize the country into "haves" and "have-nots." Within the family, this draconian configuration forces the disenfranchised into desperate, dog-eatdog situations that often reproduce the same oppressive model on an intimate scale. In Inferno Provisório, therefore, to fight for legitimacy or entitlement is an uphill battle that pits subaltern individuals–even family members or bosom buddies–against each other, in a cutthroat race for survival that often ends in defeat. Ruffato's work thus portrays alienated human beings, cut off from citizenship and lineage. Violent mechanisms of exclusion In Chapter One of Citizenship and Crisis in Contemporary Brazilian Literature (23-71), scholar Leila Lehnen expertly examines Inferno Provisório in light of the quest for citizenship, or civic entitlement, many times seemingly within reach, yet rarely attainable. According to Lehnen, the stories in Vista parcial da noite (originally published by Record in 2006, and to which "O Ataque" belongs) point to an inequitable society that is incapable of incorporating a downtrodden class of individuals into its fold. Within the five-tome set (subsequently published by Companhia das Letras as a single volume in 2016),1 Vista parcial da noite, set in the 1960s and 70s, contains elements of sociopolitical critique grounded in its timeframe. In other words, in keeping with Chaui's analysis, Ruffato's narrative thread in Vista parcial da noite registers a palpable undercurrent of oppression, stemming from several interrelated axes of power: political, of course, in its underlying representation of the dictatorship period, yet also economic, social and familial. Leila Lehnen's analysis confirms these multiple layers of coexistent oppression or, in her words, "modalities of violence" (25), found within both [End Page 378] "internal and external frameworks" (47). According to Lehnen, Ruffato's work points to "violent mechanisms of exclusion that permeate the Brazilian social fabric" (25), which she probes by examining specific stories and characters...

Uprooting the Pumpkin: Neo‐Colonial Therapeutic Interventions with Formerly Abducted Young People in northern Uganda

The impact of colonisation affects a number of formerly colonised societies. This paper addresses how therapeutic interventions in northern Uganda align with a colonial framework. It explores connections between the English invasion of northern Uganda in the mid‐1800s and therapeutic approaches to young people affected by armed conflict. Two case examples of treatment for young people at major reception centres are provided: (i) World Vision and (ii) Gulu Support the Children Organisation. Both draw on Western mental health interventions as the approach of choice rather than prioritising traditional Acholi values. This conceptual paper explores new directions for Western helping professional in the Global South.

Solidarity with the People: Organizing to Disrupt Teacher Alienation

ABSTRACTAlthough research on teacher alienation and isolation has demonstrated the importance of developing collegial relationships, mentoring, and induction programs, there is limited research examining the ways to support critical educators with combatting their feelings of alienation and isolation as it relates to the larger sociopolitical dynamics they must endure. Within teacher education and teacher in-service development we must engage in research and approaches to learning that acknowledge the possibilities and potential of teachers to lead their development toward becoming critical and culturally relevant practitioners. Using an internal colonial framework where schooling is articulated as an extension of the colonial project, this article explores the reflections of ten educators, from the elementary to high school level, as they worked to create spaces for learning within a teacher-led, community based organization. Drawing from participant observations and interviews with organization members, this article explores the ways participation in a community based organization supported teachers with enduring the social and psychological consequences of the alienation they experienced in their schools. The data explore the ways in which participants worked to develop teaching practices drawing from anti-colonial perspectives and through their process developed a sense of solidarity with other teachers, which is discussed as three subthemes: shared beliefs, community, and commitment.