Neocolonial Domination Research Articles

“What did I Eat?”: Misrecognition and the Neocolonial Picaresque in Ousmane Sembène’s Mandabi and Mrinal Sen’s Interview

Abstract: While the international reach and political energy of the Third Cinema movement is widely acknowledged, its aesthetic modes and forms have received less attention. This essay hopes to provide such an understanding through a comparative analysis of two Third Cinema films—Mrinal Sen’s Interview (1971) and Ousmane Sembène’s Mandabi (1968). Using the category of the picaresque, the essay examines how neocolonial domination informs the postcolonial atmosphere in the two aforementioned works. It reflects on the economic and political aspects of Indian and Senegalese independence and then studies how the two films engage with their respective sovereign states and their colonial pasts within the affective realm of “cruel optimism.” Through an analysis of characterization, cinematography, and narrative arrangement, this essay unearths an array of similarities between these works, indicating a larger formal constellation through which Third Cinema works produced political meaning for their audiences.

The Concept of Cultural Revolution, and Its Indian Ocean Travels during the Cold War

For most of the 1960s, Kweupe served as the official printed mouthpiece of the Zanzibari Revolution. Appearing in Swahili, the newspaper repeatedly claimed the revolution would only succeed if islanders were willing to transform their thoughts, values, and routines. Through analysis of such rhetoric, this article sheds new light upon the relationship between nationalism and socialism in the Indian Ocean during the Cold War. It argues that nationalists frequently perceived in socialism a series of anchoring principles by which to obtain meaningful as opposed to illusory sovereignty. And while socialism proposed ways to resist and reshape global structures faulted for perpetuating neocolonial domination and inequality, it also presented cultural solutions to poverty and powerlessness on the world stage. Indeed, the socialist concept of cultural revolution appealed to nationalists of the 1960s because its effectiveness appeared to be indisputable—and because the concept licensed nationalists to critically evaluate inherited cultural norms in terms of their perceived conduciveness to national progress and sovereignty. Such critique was not exceptional to nationalists of the Indian Ocean searching for means by which to complete the process of decolonization. Rather, it was inherent to nationalist thought since at least the early nineteenth century and was inspired by a series of sentiments and emotions that call for further scholarly examination.

Cameroon: Problems of National Development

Cameroon: Problems of National Development

Using Deception Baked by Military Assets to Delay Transition from Western Hegemony to Multipolarity

The period of colonial and neo-colonial domination of Anglophone and a bunch of other Western Europe countries is going to its very end. The collapse of Soviet Union by 1990 made possible the development of USA hegemony and with Eastward expansion of its military brunch NATO. In spite of human capital of EU it managed to become vassal to US, grace to incompetence and corruption of its leaders. In the modern era, powered by computer revolution, the economic gap between western Caucasian race dominated states and rest of the planet shrinks, and national “Brain Power” of each nation become the driving power for progress, prosperity and obvious for a multi-polar world. Confronted to this new reality, US makes extraordinary efforts to maintain its hegemony and status quo using the entire arsenal of political, economic and military assets, with disdain for morality or fairness for effectiveness reasons. In contradiction to a reasonable approach of the problem, understanding the roots of the difference in National Brain Power , and take necessary corrections, while integrating in the new world order as a smart power, US under military industrial stake holders pressure, decided to use its military assets, in which it invested $1tn every year, and to push the world towards a path of the and destruction, at the opposite of the path of cooperation and development the new emerging powers are proposing, that for sure is prone to a bd finality, accelerating the decay of the “western civilization capitalist model.

How to Revisit the Question of Modernity? Some Propositions

Abstract Often dismissed as evolutionism and sometimes accused of maintaining neocolonial domination, the field of studies dedicated to modernity and processes of modernisation has been progressively discredited in the social sciences over the last forty years. However, for some time now, a number of historians and sociologists have sought to rehabilitate this field on new grounds. Rejecting both the miserabilist and populist approaches that have held the monopoly on studies of modernity for too long, their work outlines a research program whose coherence and main arguments are presented in this article. We show that this research program proposes a properly methodological definition of modernity – as the present of humanity – and imposes four major conditions on the study of modernity and processes of modernisation: the refusal of state-centrism; an attention to the practical foundations of different conceptions of “modernity”; an adherence to the principle of contemporaneity; and finally, a commitment to anchoring the generalising ambition of the social sciences within a rigorous search for processual analogies.

Archiving Black Diasporas

Archiving Black Diasporas

Homi K. Bhabha's Third Space Theory and Cultural Identity Today: A Critical Review

Homi K. Bhabha proposes the interstitial space of cultural encounter in which the colonizer and the colonized negotiate, producing hybridity in culture. This type of culture subverts colonial domination by deconstructing essentialist identity and binary opposition of the colonizer and colonized or the East and the West. In this case, his in-between third space resists colonial oppression largely depending on the analysis of colonial discourse and cultural identity formation of the colonized people. However, lack of concern to the political and economic exploitation of the colonizers and the material condition of unequal access to resources and opportunities make his third space a cultural project that helps for mental and psychological liberation only. Today, the First World countries and the former colonizers manipulate a negotiation in the intercultural and international third space created by World Trade Organization (WTO) and Social Media Networks (SMNs) in their favour. Thus, the main objective of this article is to review his notion of third space in relation to its limitations in resisting colonial and neocolonial domination that is caused by the exclusion of the material condition and human relationship.

“Radical Bilingualism” in Fouad Laroui’s Une année chez les Français

This article considers language practices in Une année chez les Français, a 2010 novel by the multilingual Moroccan writer Fouad Laroui, by drawing on Abdelkébir Khatibi’s concept of “radical bilingualism” and on Mikhail Bakhtin’s understanding of “polyglossia”. It focuses on ways in which French cultural and linguistic domination is both reinforced and contested by a range of textual and linguistic strategies, including relexification, code-switching, translation, neologism and word play. Laroui’s radical bilingualism will be shown to blur language borders and destabilize the notion of language purity, while creating a literary space that is playful, dynamic, plural and unstable. Radical bilingualism in this novel will be revealed as a subversive strategy that Laroui uses to engage in a “double critique” of French neo-colonial domination and privilege and of Moroccan nationalist essentialism.

Colonial and Neocolonial Domination and Alienation: Consequences and Strategies of Resistance in Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s and Mecere Githae Mugo’s the Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976)

Many African political officials have become famous for their political actions, determination, and strong commitment against colonialism, imperialism and even neo-colonialism. In Kenya, Ngugi WA Thiong’o and Mecere Githae Mugo fictionalize the story of Dedan Kimathi. The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976) retraces the life of the hero, Kimathi, who leads the Mau Mau movement against British colonizers. Kimathi is imprisoned because of his own brother Wambararia who betrays his people to become free. Whites’ collaborators and neo-colonial actors such as politicians, Business executives and the Church do not succeed to persuade Kimathi to accept the collaborationist option and stop the struggle.

Películas-voz: estéticas de no ficción decolonial en Barcelona

La investigación decolonial estudia la configuración del mundo después del final de las colonias. Las diásporas globales, las relaciones norte-sur, la pervivencia de rastros coloniales en las antiguas metrópolis y colonias, la situación de dominio neocolonial impuesta por algunas multinacionales o las luchas de liberación contra este marco político son algunos de los temas recurrentes. De manera más importante para el texto que se presenta a continuación, esta rama de estudios también abarca la representación de los conflictos urbanos vinculados al sistema de fronteras. En el caso de Barcelona han aparecido un número significativo de títulos de no ficción caracterizados por algún tipo de alianza entre personas y colectivos locales y migrantes. Tales alianzas erigen una perspectiva crítica encarnada y situada que contribuye, desde el campo de la producción audiovisual, a la protesta en contra del racismo y el régimen de fronteras dentro de la propia ciudad. La función decolonial perseguida por los títulos de no ficción que se analizarán es la circulación de materiales, algunas veces de urgencia, que sirven para contraatacar los discursos hegemónicos criminalizadores y las múltiples invisibilizaciones de colectivos humanos racializados, fruto de fronteras que son herencia de un pasado colonial que en gran parte se mantiene vigente.

Sympathy for Cecil: gender, trophy hunting, and the western environmental imaginary

This article draws from political ecology, animal ethics, and ecofeminism to examine sympathy, expressed by record-breaking donation from North Americans, for the death of Cecil the Lion. Sympathy is disclosive insofar as it reveals, relies upon, and reinforces different forms of sexual, racial, and neocolonial domination; especially when western sympathy remains ignorant of the politics and histories of the power relations that shape attitudes toward non-human animals and their status as members in a moral community. When does nature appear as something to take care of rather than take care against?Keywords: sympathy, animal ethics, ecofeminism, big-game hunting, wildlife conservation, Cecil the Lion

Visiones rizomáticas de la enseñanza de la matemática como decolonialidad

La indagación enmarcada en la línea de investigación titulada “Transepistemologías de los saberes y transmetodologías transcomplejas” analiza el imperativo de decolonizar la enseñanza de la matemática en el Sur, como posiciones transepistémicas bajo estructuras rizomáticas, que contribuirán a generar una nueva visión de la matemática: compleja, transdisciplinar, religada, solidaria y decolonizada. Se posiciona la mirada en el Sur, donde la matemática ha tenido grandes avances desde el origen de la humanidad y que han sido encubiertas con la colonización. Emergen discusiones pendientes de otra educación matemática que nos permita asumirnos como sujetos históricos y políticos que dan sentido a su existencia al romper su sujeción ideológica a los marcos epistémicos, culturales, axiológicos y ontológicos sobre los que se erigió e instituye la actual matriz de dominación neocolonial de la enseñanza de la matemática modernista.

Critiquing coloniality, ‘epistemic violence’ and western hegemony in comparative education – the dangers of ahistoricism and positionality

ABSTRACTClaims regarding Western neo-colonial domination over scholarship in Comparative and International Education (CIE) have recently commanded much attention – for example in a 2017 special issue of the journal Comparative Education Review (CER) on the theme of ‘contesting coloniality.’ Stressing their marginal ‘positionality,’ the contributors to that special issue relate their critique to a narrative of ‘epistemic violence’ seen as underpinning ‘Western’ or ‘Northern’ hegemony in the CIE field and beyond. Adopting a historical perspective, I argue here that positing a dichotomy between a colonialist ‘Western modernity’ and a uniformly victimised ‘non-West’ is empirically unsustainable, and involves its advocates in propagating just the kind of essentialism and Eurocentrism that they condemn. I also argue that the centrality of ‘positionality’ and ‘opacity’ in postcolonialist or decolonial arguments, as expounded in the CER special issue, impedes meaningful and constructive scholarly dialogue. Scholarship in this vein threatens to divide the CIE field, undermine its wider credibility and distract from analysis of the pressing problems that confront us today. Comparativists need to balance critical scholarship concerning the implications of ‘colonialism’ with greater attention to the comparative study of its history.

Interpreting Post colonialism in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road

Postcolonial theory and criticism started to gain prominence from the last two decades. It consists of the study of literature which has been formerly colonised by the imperial masters. It includes the new literatures which got affected by the colonial process. The new literatures named as “Commonwealth literature” covers the literature from the Latin America, South Asia and Africa respectively. The African Literature had the most adverse effects of the colonisation process. As a result, the natives cannot forget their painful historical past. The writers of the African literature have embedded the painful histories with the rich oral tradition. Postcolonial African Literature discusses African oral traditions, gender identities, nationalism. This paper analyses the characteristic features which Ben Okri employs in his literary text, The Famished Road. The paper aims at determining the extent to which these features reflect the postcolonial literary ideal. This paper investigates the attributes of postcolonialism like hybridity, nationalism etc. Apart from these, Okri also reflects on the themes of corruption, dispossession, colonial and neo-colonial domination, and identity crisis.

Bianca Murillo. Market Encounters: Consumer Cultures in Twentieth-Century Ghana.

Precolonial commercial networks, long-distance trade networks across ecological zones and oceans (Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans), and the “legitimate” trade that replaced the slave trade have all been studied as integral both to African economic history and in detailing the African as a producer, a laborer, and an organizer. But until barely a decade ago, who the African consumer was, and is, has not been a focal point of examination and analysis in any meaningful way. In the compelling study Market Encounters: Consumer Cultures in Twentieth Century Ghana, Bianca Murillo analyzes the importance of consumer politics in the period leading to independence and, after independence, during the time of both civilian and several military governments in twentieth-century Ghana. It provides a richly textured analysis of how colonial and neocolonial domination, wealth and its accumulation, state and political authority, and racial and gendered ideologies all help to explain the contours and dynamics of consumer markets and the conflicts that underlie access to the market in twentieth-century Ghana. The centerpiece of the work is a discussion of access to commodities and consumer markets at different times in the precolonial and postcolonial period, albeit mediated by “European managers and African market women, nationalist politicians and foreign investors, and military soldiers and chiefs” (5).

Modernism and Latin America: Transnational Networks of Literary Exchange by Patricia Novillo-Corvalán

Reviewed by: Modernism and Latin America: Transnational Networks of Literary Exchange by Patricia Novillo-Corvalán Vanessa Marie Fernández (bio) MODERNISM AND LATIN AMERICA: TRANSNATIONAL NETWORKS OF LITERARY EXCHANGE, by Patricia Novillo-Corvalán. New York: Routledge Publishers, 2018. 190 pp. $140.00 cloth, $54.95 ebook. Patricia Novillo-Corvalán's Modernism and Latin America: Transnational Networks of Literary Exchange adds to the increasing scholarship that seeks to re-articulate Anglo-Modernism by pointing to its connections with other cultural networks. In five loosely connected chapters, Novillo-Corvalán examines Latin America as an overlooked modernist geography. Each chapter explores a unique avenue in which Latin America's impact on modernism has been overlooked. Novillo-Corvalán's exhaustive research offers new readings of canonical modernist texts such as Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out, D. H. Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent, and Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano alongside new perspectives on Latin American writings by the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges and Chileans Pablo Neruda and Roberto Bolaño.1 On the one hand, her work explores Latin America's influence on canonical Anglo-Modernist writers such as Argentina's importance for Woolf and Mexico's impact on Lawrence and Lowry. On the other, Novillo-Corvalán studies Latin America's relationship with Anglo-Modernism by offering examples such as Borges's and Bolaño's appreciation of a Joycean aesthetic and its presence in their work. A line of inquiry that permeates Novillo-Corvalán's study is attention to empire's role in shaping modernism. Exploring anti-imperialism in Woolf and Neruda in her first two chapters, for instance, offers two perspectives on the topic, the former from an insider, and the latter from an outsider. In chapter 1, "Empire and Commerce in Latin America: Historicising Woolf's The Voyage Out," she points out "that Virginia Woolf puts the complex issue of Great Britain's neocolonial domination in Latin America squarely on the cultural agenda of The Voyage Out" (10). Novillo-Corvalán's analysis in this chapter is an admittedly "intertwined reading" of Woolf's novel because it relies heavily on notes taken by the novelist two years after The Voyage Out was published (21). An engrossing read nevertheless, this first chapter offers an interesting discussion of topics such as Argentina's beef export industry, the country's relationship with Britain, and the novel's critique of British economic imperialism. Novillo-Corvalán [End Page 199] makes it plain that "the prevailing view that [Woolf's] knowledge of the continent was vague, deficient, and, at its worst, non-existent" is false (23). Questioning empire's role in modernist scholarship, NovilloCorvalán's second chapter, "Anti-imperialist Commitments: Mapping Neruda's Transnational Modernist Networks," offers Neruda as an example that "challenges the notion that aesthetic innovation is the product of the West" (51). She bases her argument on the Nobel Laureate's non-Eurocentric "complex émigré status" as a diplomat assigned to South Asia and Buenos Aires (51). In Novillo-Corvalán's estimation, having bypassed "a long-standing Latin American tradition" that required "the pilgrimage to Paris" as a rite of passage for an "aesthetic journey of initiation," "Neruda 'decentres' modernism by underscoring the aesthetic production of alternative cultural centres such as Colombo and Buenos Aires" (51, 52). Juxtaposing Neruda's perspective with Leonard Woolf's "reluctant insider" opposition to British imperialism in Ceylon, this chapter further underscores Neruda's own anti-imperialist position as a "self-conscious outsider" (59). While Novillo-Corvalán's appraisal of Virginia Woolf's and Neruda's negotiation of modernism and empire is thought-provoking, her most engaging examination of the topic surfaces in chapter 3, "The Cultural Politics of World Literature: Beckett, Paz, and UNESCO." This section provides a captivating account of the publication of UNESCO's An Anthology of Mexican Poetry, edited and translated by two Nobel Laureates, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz and the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, respectively.2 Foregrounding UNESCO's narrow, imperialistic attitude towards Latin America, this chapter first delves into Paz's initial misgivings about the project and the contentious episodes surrounding the "Mexicanness" of the anthology that ensued with his...

Nationhood and Statehood: The Impact of a Conflated Discourse on African Polities and their Non-Dominant Ethnic Groups

It is now conventional to refer to post-colonial African polities as ‘nations’ or ‘nation-states’. However, in this article I argue that the conflation of nationhood and statehood has led to the violation of the rights of non-dominant ethnic groups to meaningful political participation, equitable economic opportunities, ethnic identity, and secession. Thus this conflation leads to an on-going lack of legitimacy in postcolonial African states, thereby exposing them to perpetual neocolonial domination.

Kib’eyal taq ch’ab’äl: Mayan language regimes in Guatemala

AbstractHaving survived a 36-year genocidal war, as well as 500 years of colonial and neocolonial domination, the Maya of Guatemala have developed strong and explicit strategies to maintain their languages and to define their own language communities. In this article, I explore how these language ideologies have changed over time from precontact interactions, colonial and republican eras into the early 1930s, through the violence of the civil war, into a period of paragovernmental interaction, and finally into a dichotomous era of standardization/revitalization and language shift. I explore the dynamic tensions between the national promotion of Mayan languages, through the Ministry of Education and the Academy of Mayan Languages of Guatemala, and the neoliberal regime’s emphasis on economic advancement and social simplification. These national trends are compared with more local grassroots language movements, their ideologies, and language regimes.

Spectacles in hybrid Japan: Deconstruction, semiotic excess, and obtuse meanings in Lost in Translation

ABSTRACTThis essay’s purpose is to recover Fiskean deconstructive criticism as a means of examining the complexities of texts. Specifically, we argue that Lost in Translation’s moments of spectacle reveal that even in a text that reinforces White Orientalist views of Japan, the text’s obtuse meanings subvert, though not upturn, this dominant narrative. The film’s text reifies heteronormative masculinity and femininity with the blending of the pre- and postmodern Japan, yet obtuse meanings subvert the Western gaze and present hybrid queer spaces that complicate Western neocolonial domination. Subversion cannot completely overturn those meanings, but guerrilla opportunities allow for tactical resistance.

International organizations (IOs), epistemic tools of influence, and the colonial geopolitics of knowledge production in higher education policy

While other scholars have analyzed the way that international organizations (IOs) in higher education policy may contribute to neocolonial domination, this paper illuminates not only on how IOs’ epistemic activities promulgate one-size fit all solutions, but centers the colonial structures of knowledge/power that inform the why (or logic) of these IOs’ epistemic activities and their effects. A decolonial analysis of discursive artifacts and tools such as policy reports, performance indicators, and technical assistance, of the OECD and World Bank, suggests that standardized IO policy processes and practices reproduce global inequities. In collusion with other policy actors, these IOs constitute and perpetuate coloniality in global higher education, through enacting a god-eye point of view, colonial difference, and the geopolitics of knowledge. This article proposes a set of questions that may open the possibility of ‘delinking’ from modern/colonial world systems and pushes us to decolonize our imaginaries of the landscape of global HE.