Colonial Logics Research Articles

Anti-colonial raced capitalism in Malaysia: Contested logics, gendered repertoires

Abstract This paper offers a non-Eurocentric account of raced capitalism in Malaysia, articulated as a developmental state project that has navigated the contested racial logics of British colonialism and Japanese imperialism. By historicising Malaysia’s experience, I provide a reading of the Malaysian developmental state as a project that has taken the form of anti-colonial raced capitalism. This is not meant to valorise raced capitalism as anti-colonial, but to suggest that decolonisation must also confront hegemonic elements engraved on the anti-colonial register of nationalised raced capitalism. In bringing a feminist critique to anti-colonial projects that leave capitalist relations uncontested, the paper makes three contributions. First, it recentres race and colonialism in its analysis of the developmental state, offering anti-colonial raced capitalism as a language that speaks to similar projects that enable, legitimise, and obscure new forms of racial/gender domination with counter-hegemonic frames. Second, it brings back politics to anti-colonialism, reestablishing it as a political space with competing visions, imaginations, and agendas, shaped by the geopolitics of empires. Third, it features gender, social reproduction, and the household as key sites to ground the politics of anti-colonialism, enacting the scaffolding for gendered understandings of raced capitalist development on the periphery of the global economy.

Propositions for anticolonial belonging in Canadian early childhood environmental education

This article puts forward modes of belonging that hold potential for enacting environmental education for socio-ecological justice. The focus is on orientations that can shift the experiences of young, racialized immigrant children living and learning in settler colonial Canada, where neoliberal multiculturalism has a strong hold on early childhood education. As an antidote, three interconnected pedagogical orientations towards belonging are offered: anticolonial place relations, multispecies flourishing, and affective micropolitics. The article concludes on both the challenges and liberatory possibilities of shifting environmental education for young, racialized immigrant children away from neoliberal multicultural inclusion and its reinforcement of settler colonial logics.

Stigmatisation as settler colonialism: designating humanitarian and civic society organisations in Palestine as security threats

ABSTRACT Since Hamas’s 7th October attacks on southern Israel, the Palestinian population living in the Gaza Strip has been subjected to an unprecedented level of destruction that has decimated every aspect of Palestinian life. The ongoing Israeli military invasion has been considered a ‘plausible case of genocide’, and the humanitarian catastrophe has been compounded by major restrictions on access to humanitarian aid. Accusations of supporting ‘terror’ have been levied against UNRWA, the major provider of humanitarian services in Gaza, leading to an initial suspension of donor support to the organisation by many western governments. In this article, we consider the Israeli government’s tactics used to delegitimise those involved in providing humanitarian and lifesaving support for the Palestinian population, concluding that the construction and dissemination of narratives that depict them as being ‘terroristic’ or having ‘terrorist’ connections is a sophisticated additional layer of the settler colonial logic of elimination and erasure.

Settler Midwifery: A Colonial Tool in Canada's Reproductive Healthcare System.

The land we call Canada is a settler colonial country where reproductive healthcare is used as a mechanism to control, subjugate, and erase Indigenous people and to advance the White settler state. Healthcare providers play an integral role in the healthcare system and contribute to Canada's colonization. In this piece, we critically analyze how settler midwifery is complicit with colonialism in reproductive healthcare by exploring the history of midwifery in Canada, midwifery education, and contemporary settler midwifery. European settlers omitted the history of Indigenous midwifery in Canada and to justify their erasure, they conceptualized Indigenous Peoples as uncivilized and their birthing practices as substandard. To establish a colonial healthcare system, settler midwives replaced traditional Indigenous birth attendants. When midwifery became regulated, midwives were required to train in formal post-secondary institutions that sustain colonial logics, systems, and practices. Midwifery education programs maintain colonialism by reinforcing medicalized Western practices and sustaining barriers to the growth of Indigenous midwifery. As a result, Western birthing practices are widespread among settler midwives and Indigenous Peoples face barriers to comprehensive and culturally sensitive care. To decolonize Canadian midwifery, we must dismantle stereotypes about Indigenous Peoples and their birthing practices in historical narratives, implement an anti-colonial approach to midwifery education, support Indigenous midwives in returning birth home, and improve the provision of culturally sensitive care. Settler midwifery in Canada is complicit in colonialism; building anti-colonial alliances can help support Indigenous midwives in leading a decolonial future for reproduction and birthing.

A thousand tiny theories: The colonized subject, postcolonial literature, and decolonial epistemologies

AbstractPsychoanalysis has, from its origins, made a claim to superior interpretative knowledge of literature than literary studies itself, often using its knowledge of literature to affirm and reaffirm its own colonial logics. In this paper, I examine how this colonial epistemological position is reaffirmed in literary interpretations of postcolonial and decolonial writing, even as psychosocial studies works to decolonize the psy disciplines. Through discussion of Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions trilogy, I argue instead that postcolonial writing offers its own autotheory of the colonized mind which opens a pathway to decolonizing the authority of the psy disciplines.

Representation, Settler Colonialism and ‘the Aboriginal Child’: a Politics of Subalternity?

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak famously thematised the question ‘can the subaltern speak?’ through the dual meanings of ‘representation,’ as both depiction and political proxy. This paper draws on Spivak’s analysis to question the capacity of the settler-colonial Australian imagination to represent (or recognise) the sovereignty of Aboriginal peoples – and especially of children, as infants (in-fans, literally speechless). The former sense of representation (depiction) bears implications for the second, as Indigenous sovereignty is displaced by settler representations of indigeneity – and particularly of Indigenous ‘childhood’ and ‘children’ as neglected ‘piccaninnies,’ without parentage or inheritance. Such portrayals, in this light, may even be read as continuous with colonial logics of elimination, as strategies to sever the connection to land that undergirds Indigenous conceptions of sovereignty and to thwart Indigenous futures. The article interrogates settler colonial investments in representing Aboriginal childhood in the context of recent public discourse about the constitutional recognition of First Peoples, and a political imperative to re-present the Australian ‘nation’ as post- (rather than currently) colonial. The questions that animate this inquiry include: what, if anything, can a settler-Australian politics of recognition offer First Peoples? Is it possible to represent (or recognise) Blak sovereignty through modifications to the settler constitution? And how does the settler image repertoire of Aboriginal children speak to this possibility? If that fabricated ‘Aboriginal child’ could speak, what would this ultimate ‘subaltern’ say?

The Capitalist and Colonial Logics of Rowland Hill’s Postal Reforms: Terra Nullius , Uniform Pricing, and “Conveyance at the Lowest Rate”

Le pamphlet Post Office Reform publié par Rowland Hill en 1837 est considéré comme ayant influencé la loi britannique sur la poste de 1839, qui a introduit une tarification uniforme et peu élevée ainsi que l’affranchissement du courrier par l’expéditeur. Ces réformes ont à leur tour ensuite induit le Traité de Berne de 1874. Post Office Reform a été rédigé alors qu’Hill était secrétaire de la Commission pour la colonisation de l’Australie du Sud. Ce contexte nous permet de mieux comprendre les logiques à la fois coloniale et capitaliste qui sous-tendent les réformes postales de Hill, influencées en particulier par le plan de colonisation d’Edward Gibbon Wakefield.

Indigenous Cultural Landscapes: Decolonizing Landscape Within Settler Colonial Societies

Geographic scholarship on landscape and colonialism has not substantially engaged with the specific logics of settler colonialism, propelling recent calls to “unlearn” and “decolonize” landscape studies. This article highlights the Indigenous cultural landscape (ICL), a policy tool used since the 1990s to protect aboriginal landscapes globally, as a vital resource for geographers interested in decolonizing both material landscapes and landscape studies. I analyze six ICL studies conducted by the Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail, a unit of the U.S. National Park Service, in robust partnership with Indigenous nations, academics, and conservationists between 2013 and 2022. In their approaches to scale, mobility, temporality, visuality, and modes of relationship, the ICLs documented and mapped in these collaborative studies fundamentally challenge settler colonial histories and conceptions of landscape. These conceptual distinctions have clear material impacts, as I demonstrate: In Virginia, the Rappahannock River ICL study facilitated the return of land along Fones Cliffs to the Rappahannock Tribe. Considering the processes, conceptual interventions, and material impacts of the Chesapeake ICL studies together, I argue that the ICL concept can generate and expand Indigenous relational space amid ongoing settler occupation, despite the tensions and limitations of working with the settler state to do so.

Ontological agility and infrastructure: Palestinian liberation's praxis in the corridor between Ramallah and East Jerusalem

ABSTRACT This ethnographic study examines how Palestinians navigate bureaucracies along the corridor between Ramallah and East Jerusalem, a fragmented border zone between the Palestinian Authority and Israeli Authorities. The central research questions are as follows. First, how do Palestinian users cultivate mobility, subsistence, and relatedness practices within and against the bureaucratic infrastructures and regimes of enclosure imposed since the Oslo Accords? Second, how might these grounded modes of agency unsettle the prevailing theoretical paradigms related to resistance, futurity, and liberating praxis? Interviews with 25 Palestinian commuters reveal their use of “ontological agility,” “performative ambiguity,” and subvert the built environments to traverse jurisdictions, access rights, and enable survival. However, these tactics remain ambivalent and potentially reinforce oppressive structures. The corridor represents a space where Palestinian experiences are caught between sovereignty, fracturing stable meanings and generating new cultural expressions beyond traditional decolonization. By embracing these lived ambiguities, the study demonstrates how everyday Palestinian practices constitute a form of spatial and political liberating praxis that cannot be fully captured by rational actor models or rights-based approaches to political struggle. Instead, these practices reveal the potential for a more nuanced, contextual form of agency that operates within and against settler colonial logics.

Disrupting Durabilities of Colonial Logics in the Field of Special Education: Toward Abolitionist Futures

Background: The field of special education (SPED) has struggled with persistent equity problems in providing meaningful learning opportunities for students of color. These inequities are experienced by students navigating the intersection of race and disability, marginalizing and harming them. Critical scholars urge SPED to carefully consider its epistemic investments when attempting to address these injustices. Purpose: This essay demonstrates the connections between persistent equity issues in SPED and the colonial logics of placement and sorting. By drawing parallels between the epistemes that organize SPED and colonial logics, this essay argues that addressing equity issues in SPED must seriously consider its entanglements with colonial durabilities. Recommendations: This essay urges SPED to consider abolitionist praxis as a way of disrupting the persistent inequities faced by multiply marginalized students of color. Abolitionist praxis provides the necessary tools for dismantling the durability of colonial logics.

Decolonising politics curricula: Exploring the experiences and views of racially minoritised students

Through an exploration of the experiences and narratives of racially minoritised students, in this article, I argue that Politics curricula in the United Kingdom can largely be defined as epistemologically ignorant as a result of whiteness and Western-centrism. While there is a growing body of scholarship that has drawn attention to the whiteness and coloniality of Politics curricula, little, if any, has considered this from the perspective of racially minoritised students of Politics. This article addresses this gap in the literature and serves to prompt the Politics disciplines to look inwards and interrogate how whiteness and colonial logics continue to shape the study of Politics while also offering recommendations for curricula change based on students’ lived experiences. After briefly defining ‘the curriculum’, I outline the ways in which racially minoritised students defined Politics curricula as white and/or Western-centric and epistemologically ignorant. I then consider the role of teaching staff in curricula design and delivery and the potential for teaching practices to challenge curricula. Finally, before concluding, I explore what decolonising or ‘widening’ Politics curricula entails from the perspective of students.

Envisioning ecopolitical futures: Reading climate fiction as political theory

Scholarship on how speculative knowledges can contribute to envisioning sustainable futures is thriving. There is less attention to the specific ways in which political theory as speculative knowledge is relevant to these scholarly discussions. This article fosters this link by suggesting reading climate fiction as political theory. The article follows a four-step analysis. First, it clarifies the importance of pluralising and decolonising the knowledges through which climate change is engaged politically. Second, it introduces the concept of ecopolitical imaginary to capture collective visions for sustainable futures, showing the relevance of the theorising endeavour. Third, it elucidates the idea that placing political theory and climate fiction in dialogue can help envisage alternative ecopolitical imaginaries for future world ordering. Finally, it reads Robinson’s Ministry for the Future as an experiment in political thinking: an ecopolitical imaginary that helps to think through the challenges involved in countering the colonial logic of global climate governance and the Eurocentric universalism underpinning it. The overarching argument is that reading climate fiction as political theory offers insight into envisioning just sustainable futures.

‘Let’s not be afraid to sort them out’: analysing Australia’s carceral representations of RAMSI

ABSTRACT The Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) was an Australian-led and largely Australian-funded state-building project, which included the strengthening of the police force and state bureaucracy and which took place over a 14-year window from 24 July 2003 to 30 June 2017. A few months beforehand, former Foreign Minister Alexander Downer argued that the deployment of Australian troops to the Solomon Islands would be unjustifiable to Australian taxpayers and likely resented in the region. In this article, I argue that RAMSI became thinkable and legitimate through representations of Solomon Islands in Australian political discourse and media during the mission’s early years (2003–2007) which depended on carceral and colonial logics of containment, control and intervention. The credibility of RAMSI depended on the existence of a perpetrator of violence to be contained and innocents to be saved. These representations reproduce colonial constructs of the dangerous, racialised Other and depend on the carceral assumption that criminality is an individual aberration or failure, rather than one which is socially, culturally and historically produced. These discourses have carceral effects as they contribute to the naturalisation of policing and (neo)colonial control as solutions to social and economic problems.

Seeking asylum during a pandemic: A postcolonial media discourse analysis

The beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 saw an increase in people seeking asylum in the UK via small boats across the English Channel. The small boat arrivals reported in the news were analyzed using critical discourse analysis to investigate how different outlets framed people seeking sanctuary both visually and linguistically, as well as how postcolonial theory assists an understanding of such discourses. This research conceptualizes common findings in the literature of forced migrants as dehumanized and “othered,” arguing that humanitarian securitization is not an oxymoron but an extension of colonial logic in post-Brexit Britain. The article ends with recommendations for critical reporting of forced migration and for representing people seeking sanctuary in more humanizing ways.

A Global Phenomenology of Whiteness: Turkey, Europe and Institutional Global Racism

AbstractContemporary international institutions are often discussed as part of a new liberal international order and a departure from colonial logics of the nineteenth century. While some have discussed the ongoing dynamics of race within international institutions, few have explored whiteness as the positionality embedded in such institutions. This article argues that the racial logics embedded in most international institutions, throughout the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty‐first centuries, are developed in relation to the structures of experience and consciousness of whiteness that circumscribe notions of 'universality' and 'normalcy'. This renders whiteness as an invisible characteristic, or background knowledge and practice, to which racialisation occurs. Using the case of the Ottoman Empire's attempt to accede to the European group of 'civilised nations' and subsequent Turkish attempts to gain membership to the European Union, this article explores how a phenomenology of whiteness is historically produced and embedded as an orientating mechanism in international institutions.

Challenging colonial logics of habit in Australiaʼs economic statecraft with Pacific Islands

Challenging colonial logics of habit in Australiaʼs economic statecraft with Pacific Islands

What is race? Epistemic ambiguity and liberal international order

Abstract There is increasing interest in how anticolonial actors advanced a norm of racial equality in mid-century formations of liberal international order (LIO). Less attention, however, is afforded to simultaneous epistemic conflicts over the scientific object of ‘race’ and their political effects. During postwar order-building and alongside political struggles for racial equality, there was wide and deep scientific debate on the analytical utility of race as a means to categorize human diversity. Race, I demonstrate, was rendered as epistemically ambiguous, caught between social scientists and philosophers who understood it as a social construct akin to ethnicity and natural scientists who maintained a biological basis. This split was not confined to academic debate but shaped political and normative struggles over the institutionalization of racial equality in LIO. Adopting an object-oriented approach, I argue that the epistemic ambiguity of race generated political effects, at once permitting the reproduction of colonial logics in LIO as well as providing latitude for strategies of resistance. Rather than a linear causal effect, I empirically map the work that epistemic ambiguity performed in the creation of mid-century international order.

Beyond the big tent: recontextualizing settler colonial studies

ABSTRACT This reflection on the field of Settler Colonial Studies uses the “big tent” metaphor to ask what is seen to be encompassed in the field; who is left out and how attached its practitioners are not just to teleology but to the dialectic logics of colonialism itself. Drawing on Burton's 30 years of work in the field of colonial and imperial history, it queries some of the premises of settler colonial studies' remit asks how attention to gender and sexuality impacts the direction of the field and posits the dialectic alongside telos as a site of critical tension for thinking about approaches to subject and method.

Poetic Injustice: Blank-Verse Abolitionism and Cowper’s The Task

ABSTRACT The rise of abolitionist verse in the late 1780s coincided with the end of the period of dominance of the heroic couplet, which had by then been the preeminent literary form for the best part of 150 years. Taking as a case study William Cowper’s The Task of 1785—the poem of Cowper’s that gained him the attention of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787—this essay considers some of the reasons why heroic couplets came to be treated with suspicion by politicized poets at the end of the eighteenth century, and thinks through some of the affordances of blank verse, in particular, that marked it out as attractive to abolitionists like Cowper. Blank verse, I argue, served to fold the distance between “here” and “there” (between, for instance, a Britain free of enslavement and the centrality of enslavement in its colonies); it produced disordered images that undermined the ordering logic of colonialism; and it reflected the fundamental difference Cowper came to discern between social connections and what he came to call “incorporation”—the unnatural grouping together of men under the banners of commercial entities and enterprises.

Ho‘ailona

This article asks what it means for conservation scientists to label a member of an endangered, endemic species homeless. By considering the boundary-crossing figure of Ho‘ailona, a partially blind Hawaiian monk seal who was declared homeless and translocated six times between 2008 and 2009, the article argues that the language of home points to the ongoing operations of colonialism in Western conservation. Reading the discourse of homelessness offers a methodology for tracing the histories and manifestations of colonial logics as they circulate in conservation science. At the same time, the article considers how Kānaka Maoli articulated a contrapuntal claim to home that positioned Ho‘ailona as belonging in his natal waters and among a multispecies community of caregivers. Bringing together critical homelessness studies and settler colonial studies, the essay examines how settler societies and institutions use endangered marine species to make specific claims to home and, by extension, erase Indigenous claims to place.