Colonial Logics Research Articles

Examining Hegemonic and Monoglossic Language Ideologies, Policies, and Practices Within Bilingual Education in Colombia

From the lens of coloniality, monoglossic and hegemonic language ideologies and policies exist within public and private bilingual education in Colombia which oppress students’ and teachers’ diverse linguistic identities and languaging practices.This article draws on critical scholarship which recognizes the need to decolonize language education. As such, it includes a review of key literature from the fields of language ideologies, language policy, and classroom languaging practicesto consider alternative approaches to bilingual education from a heteroglossic stance, including translanguaging and critical multilingual language awareness.The literature review suggests that within the Colombian context, hegemonic and monoglossic ideologies and practices are present within international private bilingual schools and through the National Bilingual Program. In addition, anunderlying logic of coloniality exists in both public and private language education as both contexts hold foreign languages, expertise, and relationships as more valuable than their local equivalents. However, recent classroom-based research in Colombia indicates promising new heteroglossic approaches which not only acknowledgethe benefits, but also support diverse linguistic identities and practices.

Reframing Corporate Subjectivity: Systemic Inequality and the Company at the Intersection of Race, Gender and Poverty

AbstractIn this paper I use South Africa as a reference point to discuss the company as a juristic person and its relationship to natural persons through the concepts of subjectivity and personhood. I do this in an attempt to reveal that granting of juristic personality as ‘the company’ is not a neutral, organic or inevitable product of the law and economy but a construct symbiotically bound to the colonial state. Underlying this juristic personhood is colonial ideology which perpetuates racialized and gendered poverty and inequality as systemic oppression, in order to deliberately facilitate and maintain conditions of domination and exploitation. Rather than taking the conventional business and human rights starting point that accepts the corporate structure without critique, it is argued that by reorienting away from juristic personality as purportedly ‘neutral’ and reframing the construct, the powers of the company might be curtailed, thereby interrupting these continuing colonial logics.

Occupied labour: dispossession through incorporation among Palestinian workers in Israel

ABSTRACT Promoting the employment of indigenous peoples has been a key strategy of economic development in settler colonial states. Israel’s framing of occupied Palestinian labour in its economy has mirrored this approach, with an implicit claim that it contributes prosperity to the Palestinians. What this false promise hides is how employment and the economic incorporation of indigenous people can become a source of ongoing dispossession in and of itself: a kind of dispossession that is driven by workers’ economic inclusion rather than being remedied through it. Based on ethnographic research among Palestinians from the occupied West Bank who work in Israel, this article explores the multiple dispossessions that result from such labour. The article explains how a neoliberal settler economy utilizes a meritocratic regime of indigenous employment to execute a colonial logic of domination. As access to jobs in the settler economy is made conditional on workers’ political docility and their continued absence from communal life, the labour regime aims to turn Palestinian livelihood and Palestinian nationhood into mutually exclusive aspirations: it strives to undermine the Palestinians’ capacity for social reproduction and anticolonial resistance.

The nexus of (im)mobilities: hyper, compelled, and forced mobile subjects

ABSTRACT This essay theorizes three types of mobile subjects: the hyper mobile (those who are allowed, and encouraged to, travel for work or leisure), the compelled mobile (those compelled, by design of the global economy, to move for work) and the forced mobile (those who move for survival but often end up contained, incarcerated or detained). I explore how these travelling subjects are simultaneously intimate, enmeshed, and disconnected. Theorizing the relationships between mobile subjects, which I term the nexus of (im)mobility, illuminates how settler colonial logics, racial hierarchies and capitalist accumulation produce mobility today. Bringing Black and Indigenous theories together with mobilities studies, I present case studies to investigate the ways that structures of private property, nation-states and their borders, tourism, and concepts of whiteness/Westernity as superior work together to normalize categories of (im)mobility.

Claiming their right to possess: the Guich Oudaya tribe’s resistance to land grabbing

ABSTRACT In February 2014, at the heart of an upscale neighborhood in Rabat, police forces forcefully destroyed the homes of Douar Ouled Dlim’s inhabitants – descendants of the Guich Oudaya tribe. Refusing to leave their land, the inhabitants have since continued to live in makeshift camps made of plastic tarp, protesting their dispossession. Ultimately, they all wonder ‘wach hna maghrba – are we still Moroccan citizens?’ The Guich lands, which have been relinquished at nominal prices to private developers linked to the ruling elite, have been used since the 1980s to extend the city of Rabat and, particularly, to erect one of its most exclusive neighborhoods, Hay Ryad. Despite the various struggles that shaped the resistance led by the Guich Oudaya tribe, today their lands have been consumed by concrete, erasing any trace of the existence of this peri-urban agricultural community. By analysing the mechanisms of dispossession put in place by the State, this paper seeks to show how the colonial logic – reconfigured through the discourse of modernity – has implemented a dichotomy between ‘progress’ and ‘nature’. Finally, the paper argues that this dichotomy continues to contribute to and legitimise the destruction of communal agricultural spaces and the consolidation of urban inequality in contemporary Morocco.

Governable Stacks against Digital Colonialism

Critics have been converging around the logic of colonialism to describe the Internet economy. If we are serious about the laden language of the colonial, we should be ready to learn from struggles against pre-digital empires and colonial regimes. Although acts of insurrection may attract more attention, one thing leaders and theorists of anticolonial resistance have stressed persistently is the centrality of self-governance in everyday life as both a means and end of their movements. But the dominant platforms for online communities are not well-suited for durable self-governing. Resistance often relies on the same colonial firms it opposes. What would community-governed technologies look like? This paper introduces the concept of “governable stacks”, a framework for self-governing as resistance to digital colonialism.

Accounting for which violent past? transitional justice, epistemic violence, and colonial durabilities in Burundi

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in Burundi has been mandated to account for colonial and post-colonial violence. To examine such accountability efforts, I deploy a decolonial and legal anthropological approach. Through fieldwork in Burundi, I examine the entanglements between violence, accountability, and coloniality; how specific dynamics of violence and hegemonized norms operate within transitional justice (TJ) practices; and by implication how colonial durabilities reproduce themselves. I document three key findings. First, TJ professionals consolidate hegemonic but contested norms to articulate TJ agendas; norms that then gradually ‘slip’, i.e. the gradual weakening of normative commitments moving the burden of accountability from the State to alleged beneficiaries. Second, regular TJ activities reproduce hierarchies of knowledges marked by the epistemic supremacy of Western legalism and power asymmetries; while side-lining political struggles fought through accountability efforts. Third, criticisms of colonialism have been instrumentalised by the ruling regime through the work of the TRC itself, while violence continues to be used to repress political opponents. Overall, I argue that due to the durable effects of colonialism, the Burundian TRC simultaneously accounts for and inflicts violence. Specifically, as TJ professionals adopt texts and run activities that consolidate hegemonized norms, reproduce colonial tropes and take part in strengthening authoritarianism, colonial logics inform whose norms and knowledge matter, thus inflicting epistemic violence.

Towards a decolonial feminist fashion design reading list

Although reading lists are an important part of curricula and play an essential role in decolonizing education, the work to diversify them can often neglect intersectional approaches that consider both racialized and gendered dimensions of knowledge construction. The consequence can be an additive approach in which black authors and authors of colour are included to diversify reading lists, reproducing racist and sexist biases. This paper examines how reading lists are constructed in curricula and presents an alternative decolonial feminist approach to creating a reading list in fashion design. The value of decolonial feminism lies in addressing the gaps in thinking by using a racializedandgendered framework. The Decolonizing the Curriculum Toolkit project at Westminster University, UK is introduced to which the author contributed a Decolonising Fashion Design Reading List, as an example of counter-hegemonic curricula which aimed to reveal the unequal power dynamics that support colonial logics in fashion design education. Exposing hegemonic distinctions in fashion that represent Western fashion as modern and non-Western fashion as traditional can then allow marginalized and excluded fashion narratives to become centred. Such an approach can then provide a key tool towards building a more pluralised and de-hierarchised set of fashion design resources.

Healing Wið and Against: The Conversion of Charm into Prayer in the Lacnunga and Cambridge Corpus Christi College MS 41

Informed by the epistemic shift and anticolonial project of critical Indigenous Studies, this study reframes the narratives of progress and assimilation that have been told about the healing practices on display in the Lacnunga (BL MS Harley 585) and CCCC MS 41. Recent scholarship has highlighted the scientific efficacy of the Old English charms and oriented them within a Latinate tradition in an effort to challenge previous characterizations of these texts as relics of a primitive pagan past. Drawing on Indigenous scholars’ theorizations of healing practices that address other-than-humans, this article positions the “Nine Herbs Charm” within a poetic-scientific tradition distinct from the materialisms of Insular grammatica and modern Western science. This reading suggests that Solomon’s lesson in prayer (in Solomon and Saturn I) enacts a colonial logic, in that it assimilates the charm’s theory but overwrites its practice of respecting the memories of other-than-human beings. By appealing to the convenient notion that health can be catalyzed by a singular mechanism, Solomon turns the charm into a practice that celebrates the objectification and domination of people unlike himself. Finally, the article posits that the colonial narrative of progress that underwrites nineteenth- and twentieth-century readings of the charms also structures the rhetoric on effective healing practices delivered by figures of the Benedictine Reform, such as Solomon and Ælfric.

Looting the archive

Since African nation-states began to gain their independence in the mid-twentieth century, they have fought for the repatriation of cultural artifacts and human remains as an integral part of continental processes of decolonization. Using the concept of the “afterlife of genocide” as a method for understanding transformed but still ongoing processes of genocidal dispossession, this paper engages the relationship between the organizing colonial logics of the 1904-1908 German genocide of Ovaherero and Nama people in South West Africa and the continued presence of Ovaherero and Nama skulls in Euroamerican museum institutions.

De-Linking the Elementary Curriculum from the Colonizing Forces of Ableism

Abstract What does it mean to teach and learn about becoming human amidst disability and race in the elementary school classroom? This broad question guides my conceptual paper here in a manner that focuses on the fruitful possibilities at the intersections between the fields of disability studies and decolonial studies. The first part of this paper intends to explore how the concepts of “dysconscious racism” (King, 1991, p. 133) and “dysconscious ableism” (Broderick and Lalvani, 2017, p. 894) are useful tools through which to conduct an analysis of how our education system remains rooted in the practices of exclusion and/or conditional inclusion that continue to valorize a subjective self steeped in western colonial logics. Through decolonial studies and Global South disability studies, the second portion of this paper seeks to question the limits of strategies of resistance that reinforce western-centric conceptions of the self while also making a case for interdependence.

Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, Public Land, and the Spaces of Whiteness

In this essay, I examine the 2016 takeover of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. The principal instigators of this occupation, the Bundy family of Nevada, pointed to federally owned public lands as the primary reason for their takeover, citing the allegedly unconstitutional government ownership of these lands. I contend that the Bundys’ arguments about public lands exemplify rhetorical strategies that further one of the primary ends of settler colonialism; the remaking of land into property to better support white settlers’ claims to that land. I hold that the Bundys remake land by defining the land’s meanings following the logics of settler colonialism in three specific ways: privatization, racialization, and erasure. First, I examine the family’s arguments about the constitutionality of federal land ownership to show how the Bundys define public lands as rightfully private property. Second, I examine the ways that the Bundys racialize land ownership and how, in conjunction with arguments about property rights, the family articulates land as the domain of white settlers. Third, I discuss how the Bundys further colonial logics of Native erasure. That is, the family defines land in ways that portray Native Americans as having never been on the land, and as not currently using the land. I argue that these three processes render meanings of land––as private property, colonized, and terra nullius––that rhetorically further the operation of settler colonialism.

"Esa Segunda Nacíon": The Colonial Logic of Galdós's Dońa Perfecta

This article will analyze the role of colonialism in Benito Perez Galdos’ novel Dona Perfecta by putting it into dialogue with the work of Jose Rizal. By examining the two writers side by side, we will see how the logic of colonialism manifested itself in the formal aspects of their work. Galdos will show us how the internal contradictions of metropolitan Spain during the Carlist Wars obeyed the same logic as the governing of the remaining overseas empire. Meanwhile, Rizal’s first novel, Noli me tangere, reveals how those same contradictions were equally complicit in the colonial project. Colonialism, while not explicitly mentioned by Galdos, manifests itself in the formal aspects of the novel, revealing a logic shared by internal as well as colonial contradictions. Noli me tangere, while thematically similar to Dona Perfecta, goes farther than Galdos in problematizing the Spanish liberal position, especially towards colonialism. While the realist novels of Galdos are an important window into 19th century Spain, Rizal’s work pushes those contradictions, thus revealing more fully the cultural logic of late imperial Spain.

Out of Place, Out of Mind: Min(d)ing Race in Mad Studies Through a Metaphor of Spatiality


 
 
 This article examines the racial politics of Mad Studies in Canada through a metaphor of spatiality, underscoring the urgency of an antiracist Mad Studies paradigm. Drawing on critical race scholarship which situates “madness” as reliant on and informed by white supremacist and colonial logics of rationality and reason (Bruce 2017), I foreground claims made by critical race scholars of racialized madness as contingent on and informed by histories of slavery, genocide, and everyday realities of racism and racial violence which an anti-racist Mad Studies project must contend with. By locating the racialization of Mad Studies within a metaphor of spatiality, I heuristically problematize the “space” available for racialized subjects to re/claim madness within contemporary Mad Studies paradigms. I conclude that in failing to rigorously unpack the relations of race which undergird understandings of madness, and to challenge the presence of white supremacy in the Mad Studies discipline, scholars potentially perpetuate a colonial project of “othering” and consequentially maintain the systems of psychiatric violence they seek to undo. Centralizing race in Mad Studies exposes the workings of white supremacy in logics of violence against Mad people more broadly and is thus necessary to an anti-racist and anti- oppressive Mad Studies project.
 
 

Opening Act: Neocolonial Urban Education Reform and the Detroit Public Schools

Background/Context: Urban educational systems have garnered focused examination as bastions of educational inequity, particularly along race and class cleavages. These systems are often cited as inefficient bureaucratic institutions plagued by financial mismanagement and political corruption that produce dismal achievement outcomes. Contemporary educational research demonstrates that neoliberal education reforms exacerbate racialized inequity, but we are less clear on the terms of this racialized inequity. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This article explores how we may deepen our conception of ghettoization, as espoused by Jean Anyon and others, and expand what is termed the social context of education to include a broader colonial history of the underdevelopment and control of educational institutions. This article examines the 1999 state-legislated intervention of the Detroit Public Schools (DPS) district, also known as Michigan Public Act 10. The reform transformed the district’s governance structure, which dissolved local elected control over the school system and centralized educative power in the city’s mayor and state governor. The key research question animating this analysis centers understanding the political economic impetus and effects of this educational reform. Engaging an internal colonial analytical framework, this article is a theory-driven analysis of the underlying dynamics that made the state-legislated reform possible. This analysis of the Detroit reform motivates a critical engagement of the colonial logics that have shaped the ontological position of colonial subjects, while conducting research that examines neoliberal urban education reform.

The Arts of Coexistence: A View From Anthropology

In this perspectives essay, I propose some ways in which current thinking in anthropology might inform the emergent cross-disciplinary field of coexistence studies1. I do so following recent calls from within the conservation science community (including this special issue), acknowledging that understanding human-wildlife coexistence in the fractured landscapes of the Anthropocene2requires being open to alternative approaches beyond conventional frameworks of conservation science and management (see for instance; Carter and Linnell,2016; Pooley,2016; Chapron and López-Bao,2019; Pooley et al.,2020). The essay suggests that relational (non-dualist) ways of thinking3in anthropology, often building on Indigenous philosophy and expertise, may help ground coexistence studies beyond Euro-Western modernist conceptual frameworks—frameworks that perpetuate exploitative and colonial logics that many scholars from across academia view as being at the heart of our current ecological crisis (e.g., Lestel,2013; van Dooren,2014; Tsing,2015; Todd,2016; Bluwstein et al.,2021; Schroer et al.,2021). By proposing “relations” rather than objectified “Nature” or “wildlife” as the more adequate subject of understanding and facilitating coexistence in shared landscapes, I understand coexistence and its study first and foremost as anethicalandpoliticalendeavor. Rather than offering any conclusive ideas, the essay's intention is to contribute some questions and thoughts to the developing conversations of coexistence studies scholars and practitioners. It does so by inviting conservation scientists to collaborate with anthropologists and take on board some of the current thinking in the discipline. Amongst other things, I suggest that this will help overcome a somewhat dated notion of cultural relativism—understood as many particular, cultural views on one true objective Nature (only known by Science), a perspective that explicitly and implicitly seems to inform some conservation science approaches to issues of culture or the “human dimensions” of conservation issues. Ultimately, the paper seeks to make a conceptual contribution by imagining coexistence as a dynamic bundle of relations in which the biological, ecological, historical, cultural, and social dimensions cannot be thought apart and have to be studied together.

Genetic syncretism: Latin American forensics and global indigenous organizing

In the 1970s, Latin America became a global laboratory for military interventions, the cultivation of terror, and ideological and economic transformation. In response, family groups and young scientists forged a new activist forensics focused on human rights, victim-centered justice, and state accountability, inaugurating new forms of forensic practice. We examine how this new form of forensic practice centered in forensic genetics has led to a critical engagement with Indigeneity both within and outside the lab. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with human rights activists and forensic scientists in Argentina, Guatemala and Mexico, this paper examines the relationship between forensic genetics, Indigenous organizing, and human rights practice. We offer the concept of ‘genetic syncretism’ to attend to spaces where multiple and competing beliefs about genetics, justice, and Indigenous identity are worked out through (1) coming together in care, (2) incorporation, and (3) ritual. Helping to unpack the uneasy and incomplete alliance of Indigenous interests and forensic genetic practice in Latin American, genetic syncretism offers a theoretical lens that is attentive to how differentials of power embedded in colonial logics and scientific practice are brokered through the coming together of seemingly incompatible beliefs and practices.

Towards a (re)imagined posture on (im)migration

AbstractThe hegemonic production of knowledge on (im)migration from the geopolitical and epistemic location of the United States has made legible and knowable a particular conception of (im)migration shaping in turn how (im)migrant subjects are made and remade. As a corpus these dominant conceptions of (im)migration are legible through a dominant discourse that has, in the particular case of the U.S., contributed to a racialized (im)migrant personhood and to the study ofoutsiders coming in to settle. In a two-pronged approach the piece (a) shows the settler colonial logics embedded in (im)migration discourse while (b) simultaneously enacting work of (re)imagining by putting in conversation the work on discourse and racialization within the contexts of (im)migration with Indigenous scholars’ work on borders, settlement, and sovereignty. As such the goals are to disrupt the naturalized ways whereby the racialized (im)migrant and (im)migration are conceptualized within the U.S. context and to offer an aperture for a (re)imagined posture on (im)migration. These initial and fragmentary dialogic exchanges offer a potential path towards a (re)imagined posture on (im)migration that does not reproduce settler colonial logics while sustaining the coexistence of antagonisms and tensions in our quotidian interactions needed to live with the discomfort of contradictions.

Laborer Identification and Monitoring System: Dactyloscopy on the Plantations of East Sumatra, 1926-1980

This study aims to explore and discuss laborer identification and monitoring systems on East Sumatran plantations during 1926-1980. It is focused on the implementation of dactyloscopy, archives that have never been researched it all, which had replaced the anthropometric identification system as the reference to determine the criminal justice system. The data used is the dactyloscopy archive in the office of the Sumatra Plantation Company Cooperation Agency and the Indonesian Plantation Museum in Medan City. Data were analyzed using a historiographic approach. The study found that dactyloscopy was part of the modernization of the administrative and bureaucratic systems in plantations. The novelty of the study that the implementation of dactyloscopy in plantation communities is in line with the high crime of labor against employers. Therefore, there is a major distinction in the implementation of dactyloscopy before and after the independence which has been influenced by the logic of colonialism and independence. During the colonialism period, dactyloscopy was used to identify and monitor taming laborersin plantations, while post-independence and nationalization it was used as a modern labor control system.

Citizenship and settler colonialism in Brazil: The toré ritual as a decolonial indigenous practice in the Northeast Region

ABSTRACT This article argues that settler colonialism structures Indigenous rights in Brazil and shows how Indigenous peoples have also engaged Indigenous rights to interrupt settler colonialism. To this end, it turns to the 20th century (re-)emergence of officially extinct Indigenous peoples in Brazil’s Northeast Region and the central role of the toré ritual in this process. While the toré reversed the settler colonial logic of Indigenous elimination and dispossession, the Indigenous (re-)emergences also operated within the possibilities of settler policy. Lingering in the tense gap between citizenship’s limits and possibilities under settler colonialism, the article argues that the toré, by mobilizing bodies, land, culture, and memory, underscores the performative aspect of citizenship and the role of embodied practices in decolonization. Stressing the imbrication of the performative, the material, and the political, the paper offers a Brazilian perspective on debates on Indigenous refusal and the politics of recognition, challenging their simplistic dichotomization.