Colonial Logics Research Articles

The (Dis-)Appearance of Race in the United Kingdom’s Institutionalization and Implementation of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda

Abstract In contrast to earlier, more celebratory accounts, more recent scholarship on the United Nations Security Council's Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda reveals the racial–colonial logics deeply woven into the very fabric of the agenda that contribute to reproducing hierarchies, inequalities, and exclusions. Building on this body of literature, this article investigates in more detail how race shapes the United Kingdom's engagement with and institutionalization of the WPS agenda, reinforcing particular domestic identities. Drawing from a rich body of new empirical material, including documentary sources and interview data, the analysis excavates four interlinked racial–colonial practices: (1) the erasure of Britain's imperial and colonial history; (2) the production of new geographies of empire; (3) the construction of cultural inferiority of the “other”; and (4) nation branding efforts that construct the UK as the repository of leadership and expertise. I argue that the UK serves as an illustrative case that yields significant empirical and theoretical insights regarding how race is central to the institutionalization and implementation of the WPS agenda by national governments in the Global North and how, in turn, the WPS agenda enables those governments to identify as morally and culturally superior, thereby justifying racialized hierarchies in international relations.

Defying settler colonial logics: transborder territories and Indigenous Mam Women seeking justice for gendered violence

ABSTRACT Indigenous Guatemalan refugees passing through Mexico to seek asylum in the U.S. move in the space of a larger transborder territory created over the past six decades in response to U.S. foreign policy in Central America, historical patterns of labor movement and retreat from violence in the region. I frame this larger territory within the larger settler colonial politics of dispossession and elimination as carried out by the U.S. Mexican, and the Guatemalan states, albeit in different ways and at different stages, that often result in the fragmentation of human and social bodies. I look specifically at how Mam women navigate this transborder territory to escape gendered violence and seek safety for themselves, their families, and communities, and reconstitute themselves as Maya communities in diaspora. I suggest how the bodies of Mam women who have sought redress for gender violence through the process of seeking asylum in U.S. immigration courts are fragmented into discourses, narratives and forms legible through state loci of biopolitics. Finally, I suggest how Mam women refugees seek reintegration of their human and social bodies through reconstitution in shared transborder communities.

Land-based methodologies and disrupting settler colonial legacies in parks and protected areas: lessons from Tracking Change

ABSTRACT This paper examines how land-based methodologies in parks and protected areas can serve Indigenous priorities while challenging settler colonial logics and conventional aims of Eurocentric research. We report on collaborative research with the Łutsël K’é Dene First Nation (Northwest Territories) as part of a six-year (2016–2021) international partnership project entitled Tracking Change. Focus is placed on a multi-day canoe journey along an ancestral water route within Thaidene Nene National Park Reserve. We interpret lessons learned during the canoe trip to underscore how land-based methodologies prioritize outcomes of observing change, storying land, and fostering community capacities. Accordingly, land-based methodologies focus less on accumulating knowledge or claiming truths, and more on facilitating and transmitting Indigenous knowledges, histories, relations, and practices. Incorporating land-based methodologies into parks and protected areas research can therefore amplify Indigenous contributions to management and interpretation discourses and support the critical project of decolonizing the leisure field.

The City of the Missing: Poetic Responses to the Grenfell Fire

This essay is about the representation and recognition of the victims and survivors of the Grenfell fire disaster in poetry written since June 14, 2017. It begins by arguing that the fire was caused not by a lack of knowledge, but by a refusal to acknowledge the voices of the community. It shows how this refusal of recognition was both direct and systemic, slow and immediate, situating the fire in the recent and long-term contexts of austerity and the hostile environment, the demonization of social housing, urbanization and the rise of slums, and the logics of colonialism and racial capitalism. The essay then turns a series of poetic responses to the fire, read and discussed mostly in the order of their publication. These include poems by Ben Okri, Roger Robinson, and Jay Bernard; spoken word performances by Potent Whisper; and two tracks by Lowkey. Through close and careful readings of this work, the essay identifies a hauntological politics of acknowledgment and memorialization that refuses social death and galvanizes social life.

Racial others & settler colonialism in Israel: migrant rights claims refracted through colonial logics

ABSTRACT From 2006, thousands of migrants crossed into Israel after travelling through the Sinai Desert. The majority came from Eritrea and Sudan, seeking asylum from state violence. Israel’s government classified them as ‘infiltrators’ using a law enacted in 1954 to criminalize Palestinians seeking to return to expropriated lands. Drawing on fieldwork in Israel in 2018–2019, the article examines dimensions of a process of political subjectivation among these migrants and citizens in solidarity with them. It is concerned with the performative effects of a struggle migrants waged for refugee status by contesting their construction in government discourse as infiltrators. It argues their claims became refracted through debates over contours of a fissured collective self, which challenged the limits of political community. While their claims disrupted the order’s dividing lines, the article argues the latter proved durable, that conditions of possibility for disruptive speech are mediated by overlapping structures of colonialism and racializations.

Past Conditional Subjectivities: Enacting Relationships with the Non-Human in the Work of Ana Mendieta

Inspired by what literary scholar Lisa Lowe calls “the past conditional temporality”—or the “what could have been”—this paper examines how the work of 20th-century Cuban American performance artist Ana Mendieta challenges modernist ontologies that separate the human from the non-human, simultaneously calling on older ways of being and demonstrating that they never disappeared. Many argue that the ecological crises of the Anthropocene are in large part due to the proliferation of modernist worldviews that set humans apart from the non-human world. The rise of European rationalist philosophies in the early modern period played a central role in the proliferation of instrumentalist relationships between humans and the non-human world. This paper explores how Mendieta’s Silueta and Rupestrian Sculptures series (from the 1970s and 1980s) resist the logic of European capitalism and colonialism, revealing that the relationships that rationalism sought to subdue have always existed, will continue to exist, and can proliferate. Symbolic communication is a key means of mediating and actualizing relationships between subjects, and so, if a non-instrumental relationship is possible between the human and non-human, visual art ought to be a possible means of enactment. Through Mendieta’s work, this paper considers the mechanisms by which this is possible. By considering meaning-making as a basis for life, the co-constitution of human/non-human subjectivities, and the inherent permeability of the category of the individual, this paper highlights counter-modernist visual art practices that are of special urgency in the age of the Anthropocene.

Black/African Science Fiction and the Quest for Racial Justice through Legal Knowledge: How Can We Unsettle Euro-modern Time and Temporality in Our Teaching?

This paper argues that the relationship between law, time, temporality, race and racism is vital to understanding the continuous reproduction of racial injustice and the making permanent of colonial logics. This entanglement is exemplified in the extension, recreation and adaptation of those colonial logics of the human and space-time beyond the time of both racialised enslavement and exploitative colonisation. This paper further argues that the absence of a detailed and central examination of these junctures within legal knowledge – especially in teaching but also in research – can be addressed by recourse to science fiction. A specific area of science fiction, collectively termed here Black/African Science Fiction, has made inroads into unsettling Euro-modern law’s chronopolitics. Using Octavia Butler’s Kindred as an example, this paper argues that Black/African Science Fiction can help us to reframe legal knowledge to disrupt the inevitability of our current version of the future and the question of inevitability itself.

Engaging Indigenous Language Learning Through Relational Accountability: A Commentary on “Undoing Competence: Coloniality, Homogeneity, and the Overrepresentation of Whiteness in Applied Linguistics”

Engaging Indigenous Language Learning Through Relational Accountability: A Commentary on “Undoing Competence: Coloniality, Homogeneity, and the Overrepresentation of Whiteness in Applied Linguistics”

Overrepresentation of Whiteness Is in Sign Language As Well: A Commentary on “Undoing Competence: Coloniality, Homogeneity, and the Overrepresentation of Whiteness in Applied Linguistics”

Overrepresentation of Whiteness Is in Sign Language As Well: A Commentary on “Undoing Competence: Coloniality, Homogeneity, and the Overrepresentation of Whiteness in Applied Linguistics”

Dwelling justice: locating settler relations in research and activism on stolen land

There is a general consensus now in Australia that we are in the grip of a severe housing crisis. The characteristics of spiralling housing costs and deepening precarity are unfolding in a context of the systematic managed decline of public housing as a critical social infrastructure, such that the capacity to make and find ‘home’ is thinning every day. Yet in a settler-colony, such as Australia, the struggle against housing injustice is set inside an already violent relationship of un-homing that creates the very conditions for others to make home. Reckoning with this monstrous dilemma, of the politics of dwelling justice on stolen land, is the focus of this essay, which springs from our own experience and failure to fully comprehend the ways that our housing research and activism works to reinforce settler colonial logics of dwelling on stolen land.

Young Black women's resistance to the Canadian settler colonial state apparatus: Negotiating the complexities of “being part of the system that oppresses”

AbstractYoung Black peoples encounter racism and discriminatory practices and policies through formal education and in the larger society (Creese, 2013; Dei & James, 1998; Kelly, 1998). As the experiences of the research participants—young Black women between the ages of 18 and 30—highlight, a formal education system that is structured to benefit and perpetuate the settler colonial state apparatus marginalizes Black youth, including those who are deemed “successful” through their acceptance into higher education as formal education and the labour market are structured according to the logic of settler colonialism. As such, these systems operate by imposing Euro‐Western systems of knowledge, justice, and community on racialized peoples, and in particular, Black peoples. Yet, the research also shows that while injustice is the reality for young Black people, so too is resistance through a small yet powerful contingent who are refusing to remain complicit in perpetuating settler colonialism.

Settler colonialism within the settler state: remaking the past through the built environment in Casablanca*

ABSTRACT This paper frames Morocco as a settler state in order to map how the structural logic of settler colonialism persists through the transformation of the built environment in contemporary Casablanca. Rather than focus on commonly-referenced settler states, such as Israel or America, this paper analyzes Morocco, where formal decolonization occurred through the end of the French Protectorate 1956, but there has been an ongoing settler colonial project in Western Sahara since 1975. The logic of elimination of Indigenous populations and territorial expansion of the settler polity endure through urban planning, documentation of the built environment, and architectural preservation. I argue that the structural logic of settler colonialism was produced by the convergence of French military strategy of domination during the Protectorate era was adapted through forms of knowledge and institutions shaping urban space through architectural preservation in contemporary Casablanca. I map the production of knowledge by French academics, then show how this knowledge shaped the preservation agenda that reproduced the structural logic of settler colonialism. The entanglement of institutions, forms of knowledge, and the applications of that knowledge by preservationists highlights how the structural logic of settler colonialism adapts to the changing conditions for settler colonial theory.

Constructing “Kin” Citizens: An Investigation of Canadian Kinesiology Programs’ Mission and Vision Statements

ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is to explore how social forces related to the corporatization of universities play out at the granular level of institutional mission and vision statements in the racialized context of Canadian Kinesiology. The stated aims of Canadian Kinesiology academic units (N = 36) were collected from their public-facing websites, and we conducted a critical discourses analysis of our evidence. We argue that mission and vision statements construct Kinesiology as an altruistic and impactful scholarly project and conceal the contested nature of health, scientific knowledge, and community engagement in the field. Careful analysis of the data, with particular attention paid to that which is unspoken, silenced or erased, highlights how these guiding declarations can renew the field’s underlying racial and colonial logics. To conclude, we note instances when programs use institutional statements to unsettle dominant scripts and open possibilities to work toward a more progressive and just Kinesiology.

Arguments of green colonialism: a post-dialectical reading of extractivism in the Americas

ABSTRACT Through two of the largest mining companies in the world, Rio Tinto and BHP, this article traces arguments of green colonialism that use techno-determinist environmental rhetoric for extraction purposes. Contributing to environmental communication, de/coloniality studies, and Indigenous research, I argue for a more expansive approach to argument that accounts for situated knowledge, place, and affect as ontological argumentative forces. I introduce a series of case studies on Rio Tinto’s and BHP’s resource colonialisms at different sites of extraction throughout the Americas, particularly in South America, to show how “good” arguments are determined by the modern/colonial matrix power and how decolonial actors speak back. The Argumentation Network of the Americas (ANA) is in a unique position to resist argumentative logics of resource colonialism in the Americas, but argumentation must first address its own extractive models rooted in European ideals of modernism/colonialism.

Intersectionality and/or multiple consciousness: Re-thinking the analytical tools used to conceptualise and navigate personhood

abstract Kimberley Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, read in the context of Black Feminist iterations, enables me to sift through the conflation of categories of analysis and praxis in three ways. Firstly, I analyse the purported tensions between Black Feminist theorists and decolonial feminist interpretations of intersectionality, and the attendant consequences of these. In so doing I navigate the fault-lines of the arguments articulated, and while acknowledging the merits of the critiques, I suggest that Black Feminist scholarship in conversation with decolonial feminist approaches may still yield possibilities for coalition which allow for subjectivity that breaks from colonial logics of essence and immutability. Secondly, I reflect on how intersectionality and the coloniality of gender have been taken up in legal discourse in South Africa, and in what ways the tensions and possibilities manifest and are navigated. I argue that fissures may be over-emphasised, replicating a divide and conquer mode of operation while simultaneously facilitating the, at times subtle, selective cooptation of these terms into liberal discourse. Finally, at the centre of this piece is the fact that personhood is the location from which meaning of the world is made and articulated – a question of ontology (Alcoff 2020). Despite the multiple meanings of personhood that suggest that it is both ambiguous and fluid, it has real implications in space/place and time interpersonally and/as structurally (Alcoff 2020). The law, authorised through the person of the state that it circularly authorises/legitimises into existence, holds a monopoly over legitimate force that is both physical and symbolic (Brubaker & Cooper 2020). What is unresolved is the question of who is a person.

‘More Human than Human’: Colonial Logics and the Modern Subject in Science Fiction Films

Science fiction has often been associated with colonial imaginaries, given its engagement with themes such as invasions and encounters with other civilisations. This article addresses these relations by focusing on the invasion plot subgenre and the nexus between the modern subject and colonial frameworks. It argues that conceptions of subjectivity are a site of symbolic struggle, acting not only as the bases of the reproduction of colonial logics in these narratives, but also as a locus for their disruption. It first analyses Independence Day and War of the Worlds, highlighting how categories such as disembodiment, anthropocentrism and linear progress are crucial in reproducing the modern subject and colonial hierarchies in invasion stories. It then explores Arrival and Annihilation to argue that invasion plots can also present alternative forms of encounter as they disrupt modern subjectivity and colonial frameworks by contesting ideas of disembodiment, identity, progress and the human/nonhuman divide.

Embodied Digital Ecologies: A Healing Justice Analysis of How to Survive the End of the World

Embodied Digital Ecologies: A Healing Justice Analysis of <i>How to Survive the End of the World</i>

Ruling the Periphery: Pakistan state ruling practices in Lower Dir

This article examines Pakistan State’s ruling practices in Lower Dir, a peripheral region. It argues that this peripheral region was ruled by a colonial logic of governmentality. Through a “thick” ethnography of Lower Dir, I documented the militarized and fragmented state practices that Tsing refers to as the “sticky materiality of practical encounters” of the local people with the state apparatuses. The study collected data through anthropological methods such as mobile ethnography at checkpoints, casual conversations with locals, and firsthand observations of state ruling practices in the region. This article concludes that it is the Pakistan state’s strategic interest that keeps the region out of the mainstream, and its security status is now even more important for Pakistan state following the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul in August 2021.

The Pandemic Boom of Urban Agriculture: Challenging the Role of Resiliency in Transforming our Future Urban (Food) Systems

ABSTRACT In Australia, COVID-19 has accelerated the reliance on resiliency as a tool of post-pandemic urban recovery. We draw on critical literature on resilience to examine its use in proposals for urban agriculture in cities after COVID-19. Crucially, we situate the pandemic in a longer history of settler-colonialism, and in the role of agriculture in the dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. We argue that the pandemic conditions which urban agriculture is currently operating within risks perpetuating urban colonial governmentality. This paper calls for a rethinking of urban agriculture for future cities by radically disrupting the foundational colonial logics of urban spatiality.

‘Demonstrable experience of being a Mammy or Crazy Black Bitch’ (essential). A critical race feminist approach to understanding Black women Headteachers’ experiences in English schools

ABSTRACT This paper builds on the emerging, but significant scholarship of Critical Race Feminism (CRF) in education. It adds to the literature in this area by applying the theoretical and methodological underpinnings to the British education context where such applications are vanishingly small in favour of broader critical race applications. Supported by racialised and gendered images of professional Black women in leadership roles as the analytical standpoint for understanding a Black woman Headteacher’s experiences in an English school, this paper argues that Black women’s tenure and trajectories are underpinned by the white racial colonial logics of the Mammy, Crazy Black Bitch, Superwoman and/or Feisty Sapphire. In so doing, institutional racism continues to underpin and undermine Black women Headteachers’ leadership potential, experiences and outcomes.