Colonial Logics Research Articles

“to stop the earthquake”: Palestine and the Settler Colonial Logic of Fragmentation

AbstractFragmentation is a key colonial strategy to which Palestinians enact resistance, evident most prominently in the 2021 Unity Intifada. In this article, I take inspiration from such Palestinian resistance to theorise fragmentation as a central logic of Zionist/Israeli settler colonialism. I make three related points. First, I employ the metaphor of the earthquake to consider the fractality of settler colonial fragmentation across the dimensions of land, time, and bodies. Second, understanding the settler colonial logic of elimination as ultimately attempting to extinguish a Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty, I argue that the logic of fragmentation drives towards elimination. Finally, I demonstrate that, in fragmenting Palestine, Zionism seeks to render Israel a coherent entity. Ultimately then, the Zionist project works to fragment Palestine to eliminate Palestinian bodies from land and time, to render Israel a seamless nation across these dimensions. However, Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty is not something that can be broken or extinguished.

Political inclusion without social justice: South Africa and the pitfalls of partial decolonisation

The increasing social and political instability in South Africa and an emergent view that links it to the negotiated political settlement invite for a critical review of the ‘South African political miracle’. A central question such a review should attempt to address is whether the political settlement dealt fundamentally with the legacy of colonialism and apartheid, which came to define so much of social, economic and political life in South Africa. This article attempts such a review. Unlike critics of the negotiated settlement who tend to dismiss it totally, I contend, following on Mamdani's Neither Settler nor Native ( 2021 ), that its major achievement was establishing an inclusive political order in which civil and political rights were extended to all South Africans. The article begins by providing a broad outline of the colonial and apartheid orders in South Africa. While Mamdani (2021) details the political dimensions of these two exclusionary political orders, especially the divisive political identities they fostered and enforced, this article summarises the social and economic dimensions, focusing in particular on land and cattle dispossession. By highlighting these two dimensions, the article seeks to demonstrate the limitations of the negotiated settlement and the risk these limitations pose to the sustainability of inclusive democracy in South Africa. The article then examines what Mamdani calls the ‘South African moment’, which was marked by a challenge to the logic of apartheid and colonialism and the transformation of the political identities those orders had imposed. The third section of the article discusses the promise and limitations of the negotiated settlement. Overall, the article questions the desirability of the ‘South African model’ where social justice is compromised to achieve political inclusion.

Multispecies collaboratories: reconfiguring children’s more-than-human entanglement with colonization, urban development and climate change

ABSTRACT This paper shows how multispecies collaboratories work to complexify understandings of shared space with more-than-human others through collective inquiry and experimentation. Recognizing tensions produced through engaging childhood geographies research on stolen land, it proposes multispecies collaboratories as inextricably situated within the uneven flows of colonization, urban sprawl, and climate change. The authors present six collaboratory sticking points – the politics of green, confronted by the unexpected, bearing witness, boundary bursting, root problems, and troubling entanglement – to highlight possibilities and incommensurabilities inherent within. Sharing moments on Anishnaabe, Attawandaron, Lūnaapéewak, and Haudenosaunee territories in London, Ontario, and lək̓ʷəŋən and WSÁNEĆ territories in Victoria, British Columbia, they take a common worlding approach to reconsidering young children’s multispecies relations as always and already political, multifarious world-making forces. They argue for multispecies collaboratories as small but significant sites for unhinging children’s geographies from neoliberal, colonial logics, asking: What kinds of experimentation make it possible to activate a collective sense of relationality and reciprocity with the myriad of creatures with whom children share space? What is required of us to do so without retooling the colonial logics that contribute to the erasure of Indigenous peoples, more-than-human kinships, and connections to place?

Secularism, decoloniality and the veil: Kutlug Ataman and Cigdem Aydemir on hair and veiling

ABSTRACT This article looks at the selected works by two artists, Kutlug Ataman and Cigdem Aydemir, whose works are tackling hair, with a particular commentary on veiled Muslim women in secular spaces. The article argues that the current discussions on the topic, as well as the artistic responses, are often shaped by the narrative that logic of coloniality produced, but rarely attempt to delink from this narrative to change the terms of the conversation – which is a decolonial praxis. The discussion contextualizes the works by unpacking the Turkish case, on which both artists comment, discussing the positioning of Muslim women in Western(ized) public spaces and the resulting dehumanizing hypervisibility. I argue that while Ataman makes an important intervention on the topic with, Aydemir goes further, rejecting dehumanizing classifications and delinking from the existing narrative.

Holy Communion and Holy Relics

In this essay, I show how Gloria Anzaldúa transforms the Roman Catholic concepts of Holy Communion and the veneration of relics as part of the Chicana lesbian aesthetic that characterizes her decolonial project. Reading two poems from her watershed 1987 book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, (hereafter Borderlands) “The Cannibal’s Canción” and “Holy Relics,” along with an extended metaphorical conceit about corn within the book’s final prose chapter, “La conciencia de la mestiza/ Towards a New Consciousness,” I show how Anzaldúa critiques the colonial logic of gendered exploitation by repurposing Roman Catholic concepts into stylistic devices that imagine a queer Chicana erotic of mutual consumption. Specifically, this paper considers the way Anzaldúa engages with Catholic rituals that rely on dismemberment, redistribution, and consumption of human bodies for worship and veneration to reexamine Anzaldúa’s transformation of Catholicism through her poetics. By incorporating some context about how she understands the moon goddess, Coyolxauhqui, I show how Anzaldúa understands dismemberment and reconstitution as a healing, reparative project, and I then connect this notion of dismemberment with the Catholic rituals of Holy Communion and veneration of relics to suggest that Anzaldúa was able to find continuity within as well as more obvious points of departure from Catholic ritual.

Archives, Decolonization, and the Politics of Tribal Sovereignty: An Examination of Accessibility Barriers to Indigenous Federal Recognition Research in the United States

ABSTRACT While decolonizing accessibility and access to research materials in archives is emerging as an emphasis of scholarship, it is unclear to what extent existing decolonial frameworks operationalize Indigenous sovereignty. The primary goals of tribes and Indigenous communities revolve around sovereignty and self-determination. In the United States, decolonial approaches to archives often prioritize accessibility of collections, rather than contemplating if the accessible changes have tangible positive impacts on Indigenous user needs. In this research, the authors examine whether the intentions underlying decolonial archival work articulated in the literature contribute to a nexus of inaccessibility for Indigenous researchers seeking to assert sovereignty and/or federal acknowledgement. Federal acknowledgment is a socio-anthropological political procedure for recognition as a sovereign nation and a method for tribes to gain access to federal services. This process entangles archives in ongoing settler colonial practices antithetical to professional decolonial ethos. Through an overview of the recognition process, this research centers the politics of sovereignty as a framework to uncover the confluence of colonial logics within accessibility and archival research services. Recognition research elucidates areas of decolonial thinking that continue to remake settler colonial structures rather than enhancing accessibility for Indigenous communities of all statuses.

Theorizing the Adivasi’s absence in partition histories: indigenes, refugees, and the settler state in Dandakaranya forest

ABSTRACT This research article examines the contest between indigenous forest-dwelling communities and settler colonial policy in post-Partition central India. According to official estimates, from 1961–71 the population of indigenous communities declined by nearly 50% in Dandakaranya within central India even as overall the population grew by a large margin during the same period. Despite perceptions of India as a post-colony committed to decolonization, this article examines how this state project, one of the earliest acts of governmentality, was deeply implicated in a settler colonial logic of elimination. Following the mass migration of Partition refugees in 1947 across newly demarcated borders, the Indian government earmarked Dandakaranya Forest as the site of a refugee resettlement project for lower-caste Partition refugees from East Bengal (now Bangladesh). Drawing on Lorenzo Veracini’s notion of ‘probationary settlers’ as exogenous others without prior claims to land, refugees are understood within this argument as probationary settlers reliant on the state for their survival. Rather than narrating the biography of the state through its various experts and institutions, this paper foregrounds the perspective of the marginalized on their environment: displaced forest-dwelling indigenous communities and lower-caste (Dalit) refugees.

Decolonising EU Trade Relations with the Global Souths?

That the European Union’s common commercial relations with ex-colonies and more broadly the ‘tiers monde’ now rest variously on benevolence, depoliticised practices, equal partnerships and values fuels reigning foundational myths about the EU in global politics. Efforts to disrupt these received presuppositions have come from interpretivist, postcolonial, post-development, post-structuralist and other heterodox research traditions. Yet the academy has been largely impervious to knowledges that genuinely question and subvert, in both theory and praxis, Eurocentric ways of seeing the world and understanding the EU as a ‘benevolent’ trade actor on the world stage. In dialogue with existing heterodox approaches, this article asks how we might puncture the coloniality of dominant knowledge regimes about EU trade relations vis-à-vis the global souths, i.e., peoples and places that the EU deems peripheral and, as such, in need of trade-related interventions in the name of development. To this end, we propose different ‘subject-positions’ with which to unthink and rethink our ways of knowing EU trade policy and the Eurocentrism lurking behind it by turning to decolonial thought. We borrow heavily from the work of Meera Sabaratnam whose ‘decolonising strategies’ in studying world politics we attempt to exemplify through a critical interrogation of the canonical scholarship around three distinct ‘policy worlds’ of EU external trade relations: Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs), Generalised Scheme of Preferences (GSP) and Trade and Sustainable Development (TSD) chapters in free trade agreements. Finally, we think reflexively about the decolonial option and the ruptures it triggers as to what EU trade policy is and the colonial logics sustaining ‘normative’ and ‘geopolitical’ narratives on/by the EU as a trade power.

Re/Assembling the Imaginary: Counter-Narratives of Haiti’s Transnational Textile Industry

Since the 1970s, Haiti’s zòn franch (dislocated sites where garments are assembled and processed for export to the North), have reconstructed bonds of coloniality through structural violence. Despite over two hundred years of Haitian independence from French colonial rule, and over 80 years since the US occupation of Haiti, these “ports,” exempt from tax and duties, are often viewed locally as self-contained non-independent islands that reproduce a colonial logic of transnational wealth extraction. Mixing voices from ethnographic fieldwork and literature, this article examines the creative resistance of Black women garment workers in Northern Haiti. It sees their opposition to a precarious local textiles industry, to substandard labor conditions in the zòn franch and to increased climate vulnerability as a legacy of Black Haitian women’s continuous resistance to plantation slavery. I conceptualize the combination of informal livelihood strategies the women deploy as a form of what Haitian anthropologist and artist Gina Athena Ulysse calls rasanblaj (2015), or the re/assembly or regrouping of ideas, things, people. For Black women workers viewed as disposable by outsiders and a wealthy elite, self-organized textile-based initiatives not only tackle ecological issues such as waste management, but also extend social and educational benefits to the local community.

Divide and the Rules: A Study on the Colonial Inheritance of Digital Games

The current article is an exploration into the colonial inheritance of digital games. It argues that the pervasiveness and persistence of discursive practices, like imagining the play world as the otherworld and valuing the play world for its pedagogical potential, are tied to the colonial logic of exclusion, extraction and exploitation. Perpetuation of these colonial conceptualizations in the discourse surrounding digital games makes attempts at decolonization ineffective. The essay seeks to explicate the colonial in these discursive formulations.

Drawing African Diasporic women anthropologists in dialogue: Decolonizing the canon

AbstractInspired by the use of naming and portraiture together in the Black artivism–such as that protesting the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor–this paper reflects on the use of portrait drawing as a practice of genealogy. While working on a project to raise the visibility of scholars and their works in the African Diaspora, specifically Francophone women anthropologists, I felt compelled to draw their portraits. Drawing African Diasporic women into dialogue from the archive attends to temporality, vision, and listening, elements centered within anthropological practice, but also implicated in the attachment of the discipline to colonial logics, particularly of allochronism, objectification and silencing. The multisensory, embodied and slow practice of drawing alongside reading scholars' works allows for diasporic time‐travel, shifting the gaze, and constructing a decolonizing “listening genre”.

Refusing “Endangered Languages” Narratives

Abstract Indigenous language endangerment is a global crisis, and in response, a normative “endangered languages” narrative about the crisis has developed. Though seemingly beneficent and accurate in many of its points, this narrative can also cause harm to language communities by furthering colonial logics that repurpose Indigenous languages as objects for wider society's consumption, while deemphasizing or even outright omitting the extreme injustices that beget language endangerment. The objective of this essay is to promote social justice praxis first by detailing how language shift results from major injustices, and then by offering possible interventions that are accountable to the communities whose languages are endangered. Drawing from my experiences as a member of a Native American community whose language was wrongly labeled “extinct” within this narrative, I begin with an overview of how language endangerment is described to general audiences in the United States and critique the way it is framed and shared. From there, I shift to an alternative that draws from Indigenous ways of knowing to promote social justice through language reclamation.

Calling for critical interrogations of white supremacy and settler colonialism in mathematics education research

In this essay, we contextualize a call for strengthening equity and social justice research in mathematics education by inserting the mathematics education enterprise into two world events of 2020: the global COVID-19 pandemic and the global resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. We do so to underscore how white colonialism is forever present everywhere in structures and institutions around the globe, including those of the mathematics education enterprise. We briefly describe the logics of white supremacy and settler colonialism and then combined them into a compounding scheme of colonizing white supremacist logics. Next, we feature recent USA-based mathematics education research to illustrate some different possibilities when equity and social justice research is indeed strengthened through critical interrogations of white supremacy and settler colonialism. We conclude the essay with a justification for getting in good trouble, necessary trouble.

What Can We Learn about Migration and Migrants from Southern Scholars? A Brief Discussion

Within the United States, there is a dominant focus on international migration and international migrants' assimilation and integration efforts, along with separate conversations on intersecting structures that marginalize non‐white migrants and citizens. Trafficking and refugee studies are relatively small and distinct fields that mostly remain outside dominant scholarly conversations on migration, especially in sociology. This essay presents one strand of conversation by scholars in the global South who center forced migration and conceptualize all migrants, internal to international, as part of one model. The discussions by the Calcutta Research group open up complex histories, social inequalities, and the need to discard the colonial logics embedded in the study of migration and migrants.

Labor Recruitment and Coloniality in the Agricultural Sector: On Plantation Archives, Underclassing, and Postcolonial Masculinities in Switzerland

This study provides insights into mechanisms of underclassing in modern society based on interviews with recruiters of agricultural workers in Switzerland. I show that narratives that racialize and ethnicize workers are nurtured by colonial legacies. This reveals that plantation practices and discourses have shaped Switzerland and remain as powerful means of enforcing agricultural racial capitalism. Furthermore, I argue that postcolonial masculinities drive these intersubjective relations. Tracing and situating these postcolonial subject formations on farms allows one to see how caring narratives entangle with a dehumanizing grammar and how this colonial logic is incorporated into social consensus on extractive labor practices. Finally, this reveals how coloniality operates in a postcolonial country that claims political neutrality.

'C’est comme ça qu’on fabrique des automobiles': Race, work, and colonial afterlives in Robert Linhart's L’Établi

Robert Linhart's L’Établi recounts the author's experience of ‘établissement’ as a young Maoist militant in the months immediately following May ‘68. Ten years after leaving the École normale supérieure to work and politically organize at the Citroën automobile factory in Choisy, Linhart reflects on his experiences on the assembly line, and his attempts to organize an ultimately unsuccessful wildcat strike from within the factory. This article revisits L'Établi alongside Linhart's littlestudied critical writings on racism, imperialism, and capitalist production in order to foreground two interwoven, yet under-appreciated facets of the work, and Linhart's corpus more broadly: first, Linhart's critique of a dense racial and colonial logic which undergirded the division of labor and maintenance of orderly production in the factory despite the purported demise of the French Empire. And second, the his innovation as not just a political memoirist, but as an inventive literary strategist. To this end, this article focuses on the surprising movements of poetic effervescence which appear throughout L'Établi, which reveal themselves to be thoroughly interwoven with Linhart's anti-imperial, anti-capitalist project.

Radical Critical Policy Studies: Situating Racialized Personhood within Decolonizing Policy, Knowledge Production, Self-Reflexivity & Positionality/Social-Location

ABSTRACT This article addresses weaknesses in critical policy studies (CPS), by proposing we move toward adopting radical critical policy studies (RCPS) theory and empirical methodological approaches. This moves away from the euro-centric colonized/colonizer dichotomy, decentering whiteness/white gaze and situates racialized personhood at the center of decolonizing knowledge production. RCPS’ intervention forces racialized academics/researchers to be cognizant of how although we navigate our own oppression/colonization within colonial institutions (academia, the state) we are not immune to reproducing this same system of harm we wish to dismantle by using Colonial Logics (the colonizers tool of whiteness, performative colonialism, systemic oppression and harmful practices) and engaging in Colonial by Proxy (see Diagram 5). We expand on RCPS with the concept of Decolonizing Self-Reflexivity and Positionality/Social-Location (Diagram 3, Decolonizing Self-Reflexivity and Positionality & Social-Location Checklist tool) with the aim to hold ourselves accountable to higher standards, to be more critically self-aware of the complex duality of our privileged social-location/positionality, while de-colonizing our self-reflexivity with an active duty to prevent the reproduction of systemic performative colonialism throughout policy-making (as policy-makers) or in academia.

The Suppression and Othering of Black Lives Matter Protests Through Tear Gas

Following its formation in 2013, Black Lives Matter (BLM) has evolved into an important social and political movement. However, the organization’s efforts to oppose racial inequality and police brutality through protest routinely have been met with a violent response by law enforcement, including the employment of various “less-lethal” weapons. This article aims to explore and analyze the ways in which tear gas has been used to discipline BLM protesters between 2014 and 2020. Drawing upon themes of race, empire, identity, war, and biopower as they coalesce within metropolitan protest sites, this article argues that colonial logics, power structures, and hierarchies inform the deployment of tear gas on BLM protesters today. While the eras of slavery and Jim Crow may have formally ended, their legacies and exclusionary structures continue to influence the way movements for Black advancement are suppressed using tear gas.

Squaring the circle: Settler colonialism, the international law of occupation and the separation barrier

The Israeli High Court of Justice (HCJ) is highly invested in maintaining a façade of adherence to International Law (IL) in Israel's continuous occupation of the West Bank, and in mitigating the contradictions and complexities in Israel's implementation of this law. Our paper proposes a unique legal-geographical perspective to the analysis of this dynamic, while anchoring the critique of the HCJ's work within an understanding of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank as a settler colonial project. Empirically, we focus on the Court's evolving jurisprudence in relation to the inclusion of expansion plans for the Jewish settlements in the routing of the separation barrier. Through a close reading of the legal texts, we demonstrate how the Court strove to subject the settler colonial logic of permanent spatial transformation and settlement expansion into the IL's imperatives of temporality and conservation. Through this case-study we propose a nuanced empirical and methodological approach to the study of contemporary settler colonial legalities. This approach focuses on the intertwinement of everyday professional practices of space and law in order to unravel the weaving of settler colonial logics into contemporary imperatives.

It’s Complicated: Canadian Education Policymaking in the Pandemic Era

Education policymaking is crucial in preparing children to meet future societal challenges. However, policymaking is never straightforward. And the educational policymaking landscape in post-pandemic Canada includes complexities that make evidence-based decision-making particularly difficult. These factors include: the baseline systemic oppression embedded in Canada’s education systems; the tension between the importance of public opinion and the public’s imagined expertise; the inter-disciplinary nature of the field of education research; the challenge of quantifying education outcomes and the simple messages numbers can carry; and the long time-horizons in education payoffs compared to myopic tendencies in politics. Added to these factors is the rise of conspiracy theories and anti-truth sentiment, which undermines trust in expertise, and this sentiment often carries logics of white supremacy and colonialism. This paper identifies these factors in the hopes that policymakers and researchers do not underestimate the difficulty or importance of bringing about evidence-based policy in education settings.