Colonial Notions Research Articles

Integrating Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation in Population-Based Administrative Data

Information regarding biological sex is collected for administrative and clinical purposes, and often is conflated with gender in clinical encounters as well as in population-based data studies. Sex is collected as either ‘male’ or ‘female’, adhering to the colonial notion of binary sex and gender identities. Meaningful information on sexual/romantic orientation is also absent from these datasets. Sex, gender, and sexual/romantic (SR) orientation are key aspects informing how people experience the world and how we interpret administrative data. SOGI-HE (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity – Health Equity) will be the first 2SLGBTQIA+ dataset at the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy by using a novel survey tool to collect information on gender identity, and SR orientation. The data from this survey will be linked into the Population Health Data Repository housed at the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy, enabling analyses that incorporate constructs of sex, gender, and SR orientation. These data will make visible the experiences of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community that have been historically absent from population-based data studies. Data equity and 2SLGBTQIA+ visibility within data play an important role in advancing the field and lays the groundwork for future data linkage projects. In this presentation we will discuss the development of SOGI-HE through community-based research principles and the implications it has on future 2SLGBTQIA+ research conducted in the province of Manitoba (Canada). Further, we will discuss the ethical implications associated with queer data sovereignty in a precarious political climate for 2SLGBTQIA+ people and their rights.

"They think we wear loincloths": Spatial stigma, coloniality, and physician migration in Puerto Rico.

Puerto Rico (PR) is facing an unprecedented healthcare crisis due to accelerating migration of physicians to the mainland United States (US), leaving residents with diminishing healthcare and excessively long provider wait times. While scholars and journalists have identified economic factors driving physician migration, our study analyzes the effects of spatial stigma within the broader context of coloniality as unexamined dimensions of physician loss. Drawing on 50 semi-structured interviews with physicians throughout PR and the US, we identified how stigmatizing meanings are attached to PR, its people, and its biomedical system, often incorporating colonial notions of the island's presumed backwardness, lagging medical technology, and lack of cutting-edge career opportunities. We conclude that in addition to economically motivated policies, efforts to curb physician migration should also address globally circulating ideas about PR, acknowledge their roots in coloniality, and valorize local responses to the crisis that are in danger of being lost to history.

The Empire’s Famine: Colonial Property and the Making of a Punitive Labour Regime in India 1803–1870

The article examines the upper Doab or what is now referred to as West U.P. from 1803 and onwards to interrogate the role of colonial property in developing a famine labour regime in the 1860s. The article shows how colonial notions of continuity and fixity in land undermine the relationship between variegated ecologies and the multiple economies (military labour, agro-pastoralism, cattle and grain trade) that depend on it. Moreover, the idiom of ‘relief’ is deployed to punitively organise the famine distressed into work sites and on large agrarian estates. This goes unnoticed in famine historiography as the literature affirmatively views ‘relief’ and ignores the relationship between proprietorial rights and the emergent famine labour regime from the 1860s and onwards.

Whiteness and Bodies Out of Place: A Critical Discussion of Early Childhood Educators’ Regulatory Language Practice in a Danish Context

This article sheds light on contemporary interconnections between colonialism, whiteness and notions of Danishness. It offers a critical perspective on the possible (side) effects of emphasising Danish language proficiency in everyday pedagogical encounters with racial-ethnic minoritised children. Taking on the notion of coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000), the article considers Denmark’s colonial complicity and its present implications in today’s social structures and, in particular, in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC). The article is based on critical ethnographic fieldwork (Madison, 2020) conducted in a Danish ECEC centre. By theorising whiteness (Ahmed, 2007) in relation to ideals of Danish language proficiency and by drawing on postcolonial theory (Fanon, 1952/2021, 1967), the article investigates how a regulatory language practice performed by ECEC educators can be understood as normative whiteness affecting a group of three 4–6-year-old racial-ethnic minoritised children with Turkish backgrounds. The analyses show how the children navigate the white space of the ECEC centre by adjusting their bodies accordingly as they are rendered bodies out of place. Conclusively, the article points to Danish ECEC institutions as critical sites in the reproduction of colonial power structures.

Legal Politics Of Criminal Responsibility In Reform Policy

<em>Law Number 1 of 1946 established the Criminal Code (KUHP), which was once a translation of Wetboek van Strafrecht and will remain in effect until the end of 2022 with all of its changes. The fundamental ideal that the entire Indonesian people strives for—liberation from all notions of colonialism—is carried out through the dialectical process of the Criminal Code in legislative actions for 60 (sixty) years. Therefore, the adoption of Law Number 1 of 2023 respecting the Criminal Code expresses the concepts of decolonization, recodification, democratization of criminal law, and adaptive harmonization. This study focuses on the legal politics of criminal responsibility from the standpoint of national criminal law reform. It seeks to address the following issues: (1) What is the legal politics of criminal responsibility in current positive criminal law?; and (2) What is the criminal responsibility law's political reform policy at the national level? This study compares criminal culpability under the old and new Criminal Codes using a comparative approach and a juridical-normative approach as its primary methodology. The primary focus of this study is secondary data, which encompasses both primary and secondary legal resources. Qualitative analysis techniques were used to analyze the data in the interim. The study's findings demonstrate that the fundamental tenet of criminal law reform—the principle of balance—is a fresh approach to the legal politics of criminal responsibility in the context of national criminal law reform. This approach is motivated by the Pancasila balance values, which are defined as Godly, Human, and Community values.</em>

Hungarian Geography between 1870 and 1920: Negotiating Empire and Coloniality on the Global Semiperiphery

Going beyond the conventional approach that locates imperial geographies at either the center or periphery of overseas colonization, this article focuses on coloniality in fin de siècle Hungary to examine the complex negotiation of the colonial project on the global semiperiphery. As a junior partner in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hungary was simultaneously both an object of Western Europe’s orientalizing gaze and an agent of its own civilizing mission on the nation’s periphery and in the Balkans. Adopting a decolonial framework, we investigate how Hungarian geographers fit themselves into the colonial paradigm and examine their shifting and ambiguous relationship to colonial notions. Beginning with the institutionalization of Hungarian geography in the 1870s and ending with the collapse of Austria-Hungary after World War I, we explore this evolving relationship in light of three factors: (1) the attitudes of Hungarian geographers toward Western imperialism in general and Austro-Hungarian imperialism in the Balkans in particular; (2) the diverse perspectives of Hungarian geographers as thinkers embedded in an epistemic community on the global semiperiphery; and (3) their perspectives on ethno-nationalist conceptualizations of national space. Offering critical insight into the history of fin de siècle Hungarian geography, our study also opens the possibility for comparative discussions regarding the semiperipheral coloniality of other broadly similar cases and the decolonizing of semiperipheral geographies and their pasts.

The wheel of history and minorities’ ‘self-sacrifice’ for the Chinese nation

ABSTRACT This article offers a theoretical intervention in new and emergent approaches to analysing China’s coercive nation-building policies under Xi Jinping. The author contends that the recent Western framing of CCP policies as genocidal or necropolitical, predicated on notions of settler colonialism and indigeneity, not only strips minority nationalities of their political agency but also prevents them from pursuing anti-colonial self-determination. By delving into the extensive scholarly work within Chinese anthropology, history, and philosophy that contributes to the reconstruction of a retrotopian Chinese nation with non-Han minority groups at its core, this article argues that the ongoing effort to build a revitalised Chinese national community requires more than merely overcoming obstacles related to minority cultures and identities. It entails actively reimagining the role and participation of minorities in ‘self-sacrifice’ for the Chinese national community, implying their voluntary relinquishment of identities and rights in order to align with the Chinese nation.

Bringing back the concept of colonial pacification in the study of preventing violent extremism (PVE) practices: the case of Tunisia

This article delves into the historical foundations of countering and preventing violent extremism (CVE-PVE) using contemporary Tunisia as a case study. While PVE emerged in the 2010s, representing a shift from stringent counterterrorism to a more holistic preventative strategy, it recalls colonial notions and practices. This work seeks to contextualize PVE, emphasizing continuities and changes across colonial, post-colonial, and neocolonial control and prevention practices. Using a genealogical and discursive methodology, the research examines contemporary policy documents, political discourse, colonial archives and transitional justice records. Central to this exploration is the French colonial notion of pacification, which refers to the action to restore order and prevent disorder in regions resisting colonial dominance. The study sheds light on the colonial origins of present-day preventative measures such as administrative control, referral, persuasion and peacebuilding. The article posits that the concept of pacification is pivotal to understanding modern PVE practices.

“Komai Nisan Dare, Akwai Wani Online”: Social Media and the Emergence of Hausa Neoproverbs

This paper interrogates the changing paradigm in the evolution of traditional African proverbs in the postcolonial setting in which Hausa youth create proverbs centered around the power of both social media and their technologies. In this context, the notion of colonized subjects, cowering under the glare of English linguistic imperialism, is challenged by the Hausa youth through newly fabricated social media proverbs that acknowledge English terms, but use social media platforms to convey what I call ‘Hausa technofolk’ philosophy. This provides insight into how contemporary African youth force a new narrative in the notion of coloniality.

Queer Mapping as Decolonial Praxis

Queer Mapping as Decolonial Praxis

Sámi Mobilities in Colonial Spaces and the Right to Make a Home

ABSTRACT This article explores Sámi mobilities and immobilities within colonial power dynamics. Discussing voluntary and involuntary Sámi mobilities across borders, it also touches on Sámi early modern material objects in motion, as well as the collecting and exchange of Sámi ancestral remains. Recent homecomings of Sámi material culture and ancestral remains – as part of cultural revitalisation, repatriation and decolonisation processes – illustrate the development of new mobilities and power dynamics. Challenging colonial notions of Sámi people as being bound to the perceived traditional Sámi domains, as well as the nationalist cartographies projected in much of earlier research, this article aims to stimulate a rethinking of Sámi mobility and agency, and the right to make a home. Acknowledging and examining the mobility and the homemaking of Sámi individuals and groups contributes to a deeper understanding of the complexities and transformations of Nordic colonialism, and ideas of borders, identities and belonging.

Tasavvuf, Dikkat ve Dijital Sömürgecilik

The contemporary world is being transformed by digitization with social life, politics and economics all in a process of flux. In this article we examine three key concepts, namely attention, the commons and digital colonialism. Attention economics argues that we have far too much information, but not enough attention. The received wisdom goes that attention has become a commodity in extremely short supply compared to the huge quantity of information available. However, the notion of digital commons allows us to imagine attention as a shared resource to be available to all, just as water or air that must be. The notion of digital colonialism allows us to imagine data and attention as resources which huge companies are extracting from human consciousness just as oil and coal are extracted from the earth. Attention is harvested and data extracted from humankind’s activities on digital media to generate profits for giant tech companies such as Meta and Google. However, the deeply rooted ‘mind and body cultivation’ practices of traditional cultures provide another perspective on attention which may not be in such short supply. Indeed, these suggest a different model of attention based on abundance and not scarcity. Foucault refers to such practices as ‘technologies of the self’. This article suggests that Sufi theory and practice can provide creative solutions to the over-solicitation of our minds by the global digital media platforms. The Sufi practice of tawajjuh (turning towards the eternal often through the intermediary form of a guide) allows us to consider the art of orientating attention spiritually as a technology beneficial to the self and others. Furthermore, Sufi practices, while active in knowledge production, are also underpinned by a theory of knowledge, ma‘rifa. An object of knowledge for the social sciences, they are very much active in the production of knowledge. From a normative point of view, the development of a dialogue between Sufism and the social sciences may allow us to imagine the generative abundance rather than an inevitable scarcity of attention. Keywords: Sufism, attention, data colonialism, commons, epistemology, technologies of the self.

Exploring the Complexities of Postcolonialism and the Dynamics of Power Relations through the Critical Analysis of Ashis Nandy's The Intimate Enemy: A Study on the Resistance, Identity, and Hybridity of Postcolonial Thought

Ashis Nandy focuses on colonialism and its effects in her book The Intimate Enemy. He mentions colonisation of both the body and the intellect. Nandy questions accepted notions of colonialism and emphasises the significance of hybridity in postcolonial thought. The book does a good job of explaining the reasons behind the British Raj's protracted rule as well as the mutual effects of coloniser and colonised. Nandy asserts that there is no unbalanced connection between colonisers and colonised people. He objects to the idea that colonisers are always "victorious" and colonised people are always "victims". The Intimate Enemy is primarily a study of the epistemic structure and intellectual capacities that continue colonialism's legacy in India under British control. According to Nandy, eradicating colonialism requires starting right there in people's minds. The downtrodden of the globe are one, and those who torture others are also complicit in this practise. In this essay, I want to concentrate on how Nandy reinterprets the idea of postcolonialism to open new vistas of thinking that lead to universalism, humanism, and self-realization. He does this by attempting to undermine the theory of the connection between colonisers and colonised.

Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West. By E Cram

“What might we do with violent inheritance?” (30) E Cram’s timely study centers on this question. Cram traces material, affective, and ideological “land lines” to engage places where sexual modernity intersects with other extractive structures including settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and petromodernity (6–7). Their analysis focuses on a loosely defined western region including Wyoming (where they grew up) but also encompassing Colorado, Idaho, Iowa (where they live), and Manitoba (where I live). Bringing together queer ecologies, the energy humanities, settler-colonial studies, communication studies, and geography, Violent Inheritance models innovative research methods for “embodied queer ecological criticism” (9)—including looking for “gasps” in the archive (79), resisting extractive research practices, and pushing queer studies beyond the individual or the subject and toward the (infra)structural. Cram’s introduction lays out an important, yet dizzying, array of terms: “sexual modernities, land lines, and [queer and anticolonial] regeneration” are identified as the main ones (emphasis in original; 9), alongside others (especially “innervation” and “enervation” [emphasis in original; 14–15], and “infrastructures of feeling” [22; 202]). The first chapter, which centers on the writings of Owen Wister, engages late-nineteenth-century theories of neurasthenia alongside a modern, energetic, colonial notion of subjectivity forged through friction with and dominance of western climates and environments. The second chapter considers the archival remains of Wyoming political economist and settler feminist Grace Raymond Hebard as both a eugenic violent inheritance and a queer archive that can be regenerated without being recuperated.

THE DATA CENTER CANNOT HOLD: DATA COLONIALISM AND THE “NIMBUS PROJECT”

Following the infrastructural turn in media studies with its focus on the material and social practices, this paper offers to reexamine contemporary data colonialism by empirically exploring some of its most crucial infrastructural artifacts – data centers. Particularly, this paper explores six data centers currently built in Israel as part of "Project Nimbus" – a $1.2 billion tender offered by the Israeli government to move its computational infrastructure "to the cloud". The tender was won by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud, and has drawn considerable attention, both due to its high-cost and technical complexity; and due to attempts by these companies' workers to curtail the tech giants' involvement in Israel/Palestine on moral grounds. Power differentials are also present within the Israeli society, as intimate governmental data will be processed and stored by foreign US companies. Based on thematic analysis of local journalistic sources, public officials’ documents, local planning authorities and the tender winners themselves, we delineate the concrete materialization of this cloud infrastructure. We show that the notion of data colonialism is complicated within project Nimbus, when lines blur in terms of whose data is colonized by whom, whose lands are used (and colonized) by these centers, and whose resources (predominantly electricity and water) will be used for their functioning. Thus, this paper offers a more granular understanding of data colonialism, and of the different actors and stakeholders involved in the creation and sustainment of this emerging global regime.

Where Is My Land?: Sand Extraction, Land Reclamation, and Artistic Imagination in Cambodia and Singapore

Abstract: When placed within the logic of extraction, sand is perceived as useful matter, but is it possible to imagine it as a site with its own temporal and spatial organising principles? Can those foreign principles offer a pathway towards recalibrating our relationship with our surroundings? This article examines issues brought about by sand dredging in Cambodia and land reclamation in Singapore by discussing the work of contemporary local filmmakers and artists such as Charles Lim, Yeo Siew Hua, Tith Kanitha, and Kalyanee Mam. Their work discloses distinctive aspects of this multifaceted dispute, often visualising what otherwise reaches us as abstract data. Whereas the works of these artists heighten the dimensionalities of experience, the works of Cambodian artist Khvay Samnang, namely Enjoy My Sand (2013–15) and Where Is My Land? (2014), offer us a dislocated glimpse into the conflicting narrative of extraction: the playful character of the former invites us to share and be comfortably complicit in the coloniser's enjoyment of Cambodian natural resources. Through a contained yet highly sensorial choreography, the visual language of the latter work transmits the devasting consequences of sand extraction. Instead of representing the conflict, or the sides of it, these works invite us to think through sand by bringing about forms and methods of engagement with non-human multiplicities that contain unique ways of embodying temporality beyond colonial notions.

Chisi Chako Masimba Mashoma/Kunzi Pakata Sandi Kunzi Ridza: Anthropological Musings on the Coloniality of Dispossession in Africa

Africans need to be careful with discourses on coloniality that avoid dealing with central aberrations of colonialism. Focusing on coloniality of power, coloniality of being, coloniality of knowledge and coloniality of gender, contemporary discourses on coloniality sidestepped a central aspect of colonialism. Motivated not by quests to merely exercise power, as is assumed in coloniality of power; and motivated not merely by quests to dominate Africans using knowledge, as is assumed in coloniality of knowledge; and motivated not ultimately by the quest for gender domination, as is assumed in the coloniality of gender, colonialists dispossessed colonized people. Reviewing literature and using the Shona (a people of Zimbabwe) proverbs chisi chako masimba mashoma/kunzi pakata sandi kunzi ridza (one should not exercise power over what one does not own/possession is not synonymous with ownership), this paper postulates the notion of coloniality of dispossession. The paper concludes that power is merely a tool to dispossess colonized people, and so decolonial scholarship must focus not only on tools used to colonize other people but on the ultimate goals of using tools, such as power.

The TWENTIETH-CENTURY Colonialism within Ukrainian Academic and Public Discourse in the Era of Independence

The article analyses the notion post-, anti- colonialism in Ukrainian political and public discourse since 1991. The author focuses on the debate about coloniality and its reflections on Ukrainian political thought in ХХ century. The first part of the article devotes to the problems of applying postcolonial theories to the Ukrainian context and the specifics of the relationship between the Soviet Union’s center and the national republics that represented the periphery. The second part analyses the influence of the legacy of Ukrainian national communists on the notion of colonialism in contemporary Ukrainian historiography, while the third part focus on the processes of decolonization represented in public discourse. Finally, the author analyses how Euromaidan launched the politics of decommunization and how it affected the post-Soviet space.

:Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures

:<i>Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures</i>

Piles of Bones

Incorporating reindeer remains into haunting art installations, with Pile o’Sápmi, Máret Ánne Sara manifests how Norwegian forced culls impact Sámi autonomy. Mobilising the notion of animal colonialism, this article places Norwegian reindeer policy in a global history of colonisation through targeting animals upon which Indigenous peoples depend. Turning the gaze toward the North, it reads Sámi art and activism with Indigenous critique to examine how colonisation in Europe itself continues today. Whereas most interpretations stop at affirming Sara’s accusation of colonialism, this article argues that her work expands our understanding of it. Pile o’Sápmi unveils the performative aspect of colonial sovereignty, whilst her insistence on centralising reindeer indicates an opportunity for postcolonial studies to decolonise its own anthropocentrism. Simultaneously, her work escapes the violence it bears witness to. Seen through the lens of Sámi aesthetics or duodji, Pile o’Sápmi tends to localised interspecies ecologies and shows the value of art in doing the work of decoloniality.