Colonial History Research Articles

The Terminator in the goldfields: speculative affects in an extractive frontier in Colombia

AbstractThis article analyses the relationships among speculative rumour, everyday storytelling, and financial speculation that impact small‐scale gold mining towns in Colombia. By following the stories surrounding the visit of Arnold Schwarzenegger to Marmato, a mining town in central Colombia, and its consequences, I explore how people speculate about such ‘speculative’ visits so as to reframe the events as part of wider colonial histories. I aim to comprehend the affective constellation of lives criss‐crossed by financial speculation and the political openings created by rumour, storytelling, and fabulation. I argue that people locate the Schwarzenegger visit as part of a crisis‐ridden history that counters the narratives of modern and responsible mining. The argument contributes to the conceptualization of speculation in anthropology, as well as to questions of history, temporality, and politics of extractive frontiers. The article is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2016 and 2019 in the central Andes of Colombia and with governmental and corporate representatives.

How Finance Colonised Aotearoa: A Concise Counter-History


 This paper intervenes in orthodox under-standings of Aotearoa New Zealand’s colonial history to elucidate another history that is not widely recognised. This is a financial history of colonisation which, while implicit in existing accounts, is peripheral and often incidental to the central narrative. Undertaking to reread Aotearoa New Zealand’s early colonial history from 1839 to 1850, this paper seeks to render finance, financial instruments, and financial institutions explicit in their capacity as central agents of colonisation. In doing so, it offers a response to the relative inattention paid to finance as compared with the state in material practices of colonisation. The counter-history that this paper begins to elicit contains important lessons for counter-futures. For, beyond its implications for knowledge, the persistent and violent role of finance in the colonisation of Aotearoa has concrete implications for decolonial and anti-capitalist politics today.

Barriers and Facilitators Associated with the History of Colonization on the Vaccination Process of COVID-19 among Indigenous Peoples in Canada

Barriers and Facilitators Associated with the History of Colonization on the Vaccination Process of COVID-19 among Indigenous Peoples in Canada

CONSTRUCTION, DEMOLITION, EXTIRPATION? THE PALAST DER REPUBLIK AND THE CONFLICTING DESIRES OF GERMAN UNIFICATION

ABSTRACTOpened in 1976, East Berlin's Palast der Republik stood until its demolition in 2003 among and against the other buildings on Berlin's Museumsinsel. This article examines the circumstances surrounding the construction and demolition of the GDR's prestige construction and its storied location, now the site of the Stadtschloss and Humboldt Forum. This narrative analysis acknowledges recent vigorous debates concerning Germany's colonial history but focuses in particular on the East German past. In examining the iconoclastic impulse and the corresponding resistance to extirpation in the period since unification, the article questions the social power of the buildings at that site, their political symbolism and what the acts of demolition and reconstruction tell us about political desires and especially about Germany's unsteady handling of history since unification. Had the Palast remained, it is suggested, its awkward presence (whether as renovated structure or as ruin) might have better served the future as a reminder of uncomfortable pasts, a historical monument and a catalyst for ongoing, necessarily difficult discussions about history and heritage rather than an attempt to side‐step East German history.

Exploring the Paradox of Hope and Ambivalence in Short-lived Japanese Colonialism in Indonesia

Unlike the European colonial powers that sought long-term political control and resource exploitation, Japan's colonial ambitions in Southeast Asia primarily emerged during the period of World War II driven by its imperial expansionist goals. The unique nature of Japan's colonial history in Southeast Asia deserves further in-depth research and analysis. This paper explores Japan's colonial policies, highlighting the exploitative nature of its colonial economy and its imperialistic character. While Japan portrayed itself as a liberator and unifier of Asia, opposing Western imperialism, its colonial rule in Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, often involved varying degrees of exploitation, coercion, and brutal repression. Furthermore, this paper argues for an understanding of the complex role that this colonial process played in shaping Indonesia's development trajectory. The analysis explores the impact of Japanese colonialism on Indonesia from various angles, including national consciousness, economy, and cultural dissemination. Additionally, it examines the intricate interactions between Japanese colonial authorities and the Indonesian government, people, and democratic activists, which eventually fueled the independence movement in Indonesia.

Rehumanizing Ainu

Abstract This article argues that many contemporary female Ainu performance-activists from the Ainu community of Japan, including a performance scene led by Ainu huci (female elders) at an Ainu cultural education center in Sapporo, Japan, engage in performance of desubjectification, which emphasizes the sameness of their humanity with the dominant Japanese rather than arguing for Ainu ethnic difference or their colonial history. At first glance, their performance and iterations seem detached from the discourse of Indigenous resistance. However, this article demonstrates how such iteration of singularity—sameness—derives from a particular Ainu colonial history and argues that their performance critically eschews colonial and imperial ideas of authenticity, ethnic difference, and the universal human. In doing so, the Ainu performance scene in this article presents itself as a theoretical performance activism against the Western (and Japanese imperial) notion of Indigenous peoples as less-than-human. By using bodies, sound, and sensations, these performers define Ainu Indigeneity in their own terms, and achieve an Ainu Indigenous critique of the “human,” the concept that is built on exclusion and marginalization of ethnic minorities and colonized subjects.

Black Latina Passages through Colonial Ecologies of Illness and the Art of Composting Aesthetics

Drawing from Black Latinx and feminist thought to place Latinx Studies and medical/health humanities in conversation, this project asks, what are the medical and colonial histories, personal and collective, that inform patients’ perceptions of illness and Western biomedicine? What happens in cases when Latinx patients have internalized historical forms of medical violence, and what are the means by which Latinx patients construct their healing through narrative? These questions are grounded in material conditions with special concerns for the well-being of Latinx patients, but they are explored via a historically and culturally informed literary analysis of Jasminne Méndez’s Night-Blooming Jasmin(n)e (Night-Blooming), a personal illness narrative composed of poems and lyrical essays that portrays, among other health conditions, Méndez’s life with Scleroderma, Lupus, and Raynaud’s disease. Offering a close reading of Night-Blooming’s biomedical critiques alongside the ecological language, metaphors, and formal structure she employs to describe her illness, the author argues that narratives such as Night-Blooming require us to travel into the colonial ecologies of illness, environmental characteristics, practices, and rhetoric in medical settings that evoke colonial encounters from within and beyond the strict boundaries of healthcare facilities. This essay also follows in the passages of Méndez’s figurative travels to the island of Hispaniola as she works to recover her language, health, and Black roots. Acknowledging the ways Méndez’s chronic illness and biomedicine distort her (textual) body, psychiatric health, and language becomes necessary to appreciate Méndez’s composting aesthetics of illness, healing work that involves a struggle to recover that which is painful and deteriorating for life-affirming and life-sustaining purposes. I suggest that by enacting an aestheticization of illness alongside experiences of pain, Méndez uses Night-Blooming as a conduit to theorize about the potential for transforming human suffering from chronic illness into a means toward cultivating life.

History of Science and the History of Catholicism and Colonization - Sacred Habitat: Nature and Catholicism in the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic. By Ran Segev. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2023. Pp. 213. $129.95 cloth.

History of Science and the History of Catholicism and Colonization - Sacred Habitat: Nature and Catholicism in the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic. By Ran Segev. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2023. Pp. 213. $129.95 cloth.

Early Colonial Urban History - A Tale of Two Granadas. Custom, Community, and Citizenship in the Spanish Empire, 1568–1668. By Max Deardoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Pp. 373. $130 cloth, $130 e-book.

Early Colonial Urban History - A Tale of Two Granadas. Custom, Community, and Citizenship in the Spanish Empire, 1568<i>–</i>1668. By Max Deardoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Pp. 373. $130 cloth, $130 e-book.

Crisis as Method: Politics, Temporality, and Agency

This special issue demonstrates how theorizing the present in terms of crisis generates insights into contradictory experiences of historical time. The core questions addressed are these: What are the temporal forms through which crisis is expressed today, and what are the political implications? The contributors pay close attention to the nonsynchronicity and the discordance of times that constitute the present. The contributors ask how contemporary crisis can be better understood with reference to long-term and ongoing colonial and racial histories. This article functions as both an introduction to the special issue as well as a development of some of the key theoretical coordinates, first thinking through the relationship between crisis and everyday politics, disentangling crisis theory from its association with determinism, and then showing how crisis theory challenges conventional understandings of political agency. Recent work in Black studies offers significant ways of understanding how subaltern actors improvise and forge unfamiliar forms of agency in times of brutal constraint. With reference to this work, the article argues that understanding crisis not only as an “object” of study but as a “method” has generative implications for theorizing the present.

Pláticas on challenges and possibilities of teaching migration/mobility and displacement otherwise

ABSTRACT In this article we seek to delve into our teaching experiences as educators in a higher education space within the settler colonial context of Australia. We critically and pedagogically self-reflect our pedagogical roles of transforming educational practices in our classroom with the focus of positionality, self-reflexivity and embracing other ways of creating knowledge. By using pláticas as a method, we propose a humanize-sensing/thinking pedagogy, which praxis recognizes the historical differences and the specificity of cultural oppressions by un/learning, when we are teaching. As sentipensantes educators, in this article platicamos our fears, discomfort, un/learning of our teaching, attitudes, embodiment, and we ask: how our lessons might recognize and teach different colonial histories, geographical, ethnic, local/global, cultural, and epistemic frameworks? What does it look and feel like in practice in our classroom? We confirm that teaching in-between many worlds with a de/colonial lens provides a space for possibilities as well as limitations.

The Roots of Ethnic Conflict in Post-World War II Myanmar, Malaysia, and the Philippines

The impacts of colonial history on present-day ethnic relations in Southeast Asia, a region known for its cultural and ethnic diversity, remain significant in understanding the sociopolitical developments within the countries of the region. This paper examines the historical origins and contemporary implications of long-standing ethnic conflicts in Southeast Asia, focusing on Myanmar, Malaysia, and the Philippines. I argue that these conflicts stemmed from colonial legacies and can be traced back to each country’s respective colonial periods, which took place at different points in history. From the imposition of territorial boundaries to racial classification and differential treatment, colonial policies resulted in enduring tensions between ethnic populations, which continue to shape ethnic relations in these countries today. British colonial rule in Myanmar fostered tensions between the Bamar majority and non-Bamar minorities, while in Malaysia, disparities between Malays and ethnic Chinese were fueled by British migration policies. In the Philippines, conflicts involving the Muslim minority in Mindanao originated from attempts by the Spanish at Christianization and subjugation, further exacerbated by American imperialism. Despite variations in colonial experiences and timelines, ethnic conflicts underscore the lasting impact of colonization on these countries’ present-day social and political dynamics.

Qingdao Modern Church Contrast and Analyzing Based on Religious Influences Perspective: Examples from Qingdao Catholic Church and Qingdao Christian Church

Qingdao, as a city with a colonial history, has numerous architectures that combine traditional Chinese architectural style and Western architectural style. One of the most distinctive types of architecture is the church. Churches have significant mental support functions as well as their function as shelters. They are symbols of the city, and valuable for the city to present its architectural scene. This article wishes to state the backgrounds and history of Catholicism and Protestantism; compare the differences in external spaces, internal spaces, decorations, and volume of Qingdao catholic church and Qingdao Christian church to analyze the architectural differences based on different religious backgrounds; emphasize the characteristics and connotations for churches. Studying church architecture can reveal the creativity and technical proficiency of ancient architects and craftsmen. Church architecture encompasses knowledge and skills from various fields, including structural engineering, sculpture, painting, and decoration. Such research contributes to the advancement of architectural design and engineering technology. Church architecture is a reflection of human creativity and cultural traditions, and it holds significant importance for the study and preservation of cultural heritage.

Talk the talk and walk the walk: a novel training for medical students to promote decoloniality in global health

To date, the history of colonialism has permeated nearly every aspect of our conceptions, structures, and practices of global health; yet, there are no published medical school curricula aimed at promoting decoloniality in global health. We developed a pilot course for medical students to examine the history of colonialism, power, and positionality; promote self-reflection; and teach strategies for dismantling coloniality in global health. This five-part course was offered to students completing a scholarly project in global health with a mixed in-person/virtual format and online pre-session preparation materials. A pre-course survey on prior experiences in global health and self-efficacy was administered, and a reflection piece was analyzed for themes. After completion of the course, the students again completed the self-efficacy questionnaire, a course feedback survey and a semi-structured interview that was analyzed for themes. On average, the students felt that the course was relevant to their global health scholarly project and that the course met their learning objectives. There was a trend toward increased self-efficacy in decoloniality knowledge and skills following the course. In the post-course structured interviews, students raised issues reflected in the course materials including local project leadership; how identity, privilege and positionality influence relationships and the ability to attain mutual trust; project sustainability; and power dynamics. Undergraduate medical education in global health equity and decoloniality can play an important role in teaching future generations to dismantle the colonialism ingrained in global health and reimagine a global health practice based on equitable partnerships, community needs, and local leadership.

Early Mālikī Manuscripts: A Retrospective

Abstract In this review article, I offer an overview of research undertaken thus far on early Mālikī Manuscripts, primarily the collection from Kairouan, Tunisia. Modern attention to this collection dates from the early twentieth century, as the collection itself moved from Kairouan to Tunis and back again. While access to Qurān manuscripts has been highly restricted, select scholars had been allowed to study and make copies of a limited number of legal manuscripts, primarily from the Mālikī school of Islamic law. These limitations had an effect on scholarship, making some forms of codicological and paleographic analysis difficult at best. The last part of the article addresses very recent scholarship and work that remains to be done, including network analysis and other ways of placing these manuscripts within broader social and historical contexts. I close with a reflection on the colonial history of research into these manuscripts and the responsibilities of researchers to reflect on the ethical implications of their activities into the future.

Insufficient and inadequate democracy? Exploring coloniality and possibilities for the teaching of slavery in Europe

In the context of calls to decolonise education in European contexts, this paper draws on coloniality-based critiques of Eurocentric modernity to take up the links between democracy, slavery, and colonialism in education. Starting from the position that modernity requires epistemological support to sustain racism and white supremacy in European democracies, we read coloniality-based critiques of democracy with empirical literature about the teaching of slavery. We consider possibilities for revised critical engagements with democracy and with the history of European colonialism and slavery. The paper builds on and contributes to recent decolonial critiques of democracy in education by explicitly engaging a tension raised around the possibility of disentangling democracy from its colonial roots.

By What Jurisdiction? Law, Settler Colonialism, and the Geographical Assumptions of IR Theory

Abstract In this article, I consider critical writings on territory in International Relations, focusing on recent work on U.S. practices of extraterritorial jurisdiction. I suggest that, while such work has importantly traced the multiple ways in which U.S. authority often exceeds the supposed territorial boundaries of the United States, it has nonetheless failed to reckon with the contested and uneven nature of U.S. authority within such supposed boundaries. In particular, IR scholarship has failed to engage with the ways in which U.S. authority has been, and continued to be, contested by Indigenous people and nations. This failure is the product of an assumption that lies at the heart of the discipline—the assumption that Indigenous people are internal to colonizing or settler states. I suggest that the internalization of Indigenous people and Indigenous political organization that is at play in much IR scholarship is not simply a product of a generalized “state-centrism” or a product of histories of settler colonialism, writ large. Rather, at the heart of the territorial assignations and allotments of IR scholarship are assumptions about legal authority or jurisdiction—about who has jurisdiction to define and assign land, about who does not, and what law means at all. Critiquing these assumptions and their political implications, I show the importance of asking: “by what jurisdiction”? That is, what is the legal authority that we implicitly accept and assert when we designate territory in particular ways? The question insists that there are multiple laws (including multiple international laws) at play in global politics and opens up space for critical and postcolonial IR scholars to better take responsibility for their (often implicit) choices between multiple laws.

Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Candida auris Infections: A Retrospective Analysis in an Academic Medical Center in New York City.

Candida auris (C. auris), a multidrug-resistant fungus first described in Japan in 2009, has since spread rapidly around the world. More recently, cases of C. auris have increased substantially, which may have been affected by the strain the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic placed on health care resources. We describe the epidemiology of C. auris infection and colonization at a tertiary care hospital in New York City before, during, and after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic and describe our approach to surveillance. We performed a retrospective chart review for all incident cases of C. auris, defined as a patient without a known history of infection or colonization who had a positive surveillance or clinical culture detected at our institution from 2019 through 2022. Clinical and demographic data were collected using the electronic medical record. Sixty-four incident cases of C. auris were identified. Thirty-four of these were identified by surveillance and 30 by clinical culture. There was a statistically significant increase in the number of cases identified in 2022 compared with 2019, with incidence rates of 2.6 cases per 10 000 admissions in 2019 and 7.8 cases per 10 000 admissions in 2022 (p = .002), respectively. The incidence of C. auris colonization or infection increased significantly at our institution during the COVID-19 pandemic, reflecting the potential impact the pandemic had on C. auris transmission. Targeted admission surveillance allows for the early identification of C. auris cases and can serve as a valuable tool to combat the increasing transmission of C. auris.

“I have not a word about my own sensations”: Intoxication, Trauma and Imperialism in The Moonstone

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between intoxication, trauma, and imperialism in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, exploring how altered states of consciousness recuperate and repress the shameful secrets of colonial history. Throughout the novel, the characters attempt to explicate the violence of empire by retracing the past through textual fragments, such as journals, letters, and diary-entries. However, in doing so, they succumb to quasi-narcotic states of unconscious cerebration, psychic repression, and automatic action. As such, the process of detection becomes a painful, and even traumatic, experience in which psychical information is forgotten, yet never erased. Thus, while the novel attempts to formulate a critique of the British Empire, its critical voice remains regulated by the psychosomatic logic at work, simultaneously concealing and revealing the traumas of colonial dispossession. Drawing upon the work of Judith Herman, Cathy Caruth, Jill Matus, and other contemporary trauma theorists, as well as Victorian theories of addiction, unconscious memory, and psychic shock, this article suggests that while Collins frames the imperial project as both “trauma” and “intoxication,” demonstrating how political violence creates a disturbance in memory and consciousness, the novel occupies an ideologically ambivalent space, unable to assimilate fully the horrors of British imperialism.

Education and Coloniality in the Nordics

Current research maintains that the Nordic countries, despite their contextual differences, are prone to amnesia and sanctioned ignorance in relation to their colonial histories, legacies, and structures (Eriksen, 2021; Fjellheim, 2023; Höglund &amp; Andersson, 2019; Jore, 2022; Keskinen et al., 2019; Kuokkanen, 2023; Loftsdóttir &amp; Jensen, 2012; Mikander, 2016; Pashby et al., 2020. As Quijano (2000) describes, European colonialism from the 15th century did not end with historical colonialism based on territorial occupation; enduring power and knowledge structures were installed in and through modernity, described as coloniality. Coloniality entails a specific colonial matrix of power (CMP), grounded in race as an organizing principle. CMP permeates social, political, environmental, and epistemological systems of capitalist modernity in local and context-specific ways. This special issue (SI) aims to advance critical discussions about coloniality in relation to education in the Nordic region. Education has been proven to reproduce coloniality, epistemic violence and racism, but represents at the same time potential avenues towards decolonial, socially just and sustainable futures. A decolonial conversation must give room for a diversity of voices. This is due, not least, to the harsh pushbacks experienced by researchers who raise these concerns in the Nordic context. As scholars, we see worrying signs emerging from the consequences of mainstreaming of radical right-wing politics. These include cuts to welfare and development aid and limiting rights for refugees – all aspects which have commonly been seen as intrinsic to Nordic national identities. The recent case of Tobias Hübinette, a scholar in critical race and whiteness studies, is an alarming example of how academics are being threatened. A supporter of the radical right wing enrolled in his class recorded and disrupted the lecture, attempting to silence Hübinette’s research on questions about racism in general. Despite the student being a threat to university staff and students, they were not expelled (Norheim et al., 2023). The case highlights the need for joining forces and making space for conversations across the Nordic community of researchers engaged in the issues of race, racism, whiteness, and coloniality. The first articles in this SI were written by Jore and Fagerheim Kalsås, and open with theoretical discussions concerning approaches to coloniality in Nordic education. The following contributions show the richness of the field, taking on a diversity of approaches, including poststructuralist and critical whiteness theories, post- and decolonial perspectives, and indigenous methodologies, as well as more empirically oriented and descriptive pieces. Although these methodological strands have many overlaps and are in practice often combined in research, they are also at certain points conflicting (cf. Eriksen &amp; Jore, 2023; Finbog, 2023; Groglopo &amp; Suarez-Krabbe, 2023; Keskitalo &amp; Olsen, 2021). We do, however, consider diversity as a strength. Coloniality is complex and can be considered a foundational concept that encompasses many distinct processes and structures at multiple levels (Kuokkanen, 2023). With this editorial, the aim is to provide background knowledge and an axis of navigation for the articles in this SI. We start with a brief recap on the multiple ways in which colonialism, racial violence, and white supremacy form part of the history of the Nordic countries. As this overview shows, decolonial perspectives have been surprisingly belated in the region. We then give a brief introduction to education and decolonization in the Nordic region – a subject that is much better explored in the individual contributions. Then, finally, we draw special attention to acknowledging indigenous perspectives in analyzing decoloniality in the Nordic region and intra-Nordic relations.