Colonial Notions Research Articles

France in the Second World War: Collaboration, Resistance, Holocaust, Empire. By Chris Millington

Éric Zemmour, the rabble-rousing extreme-right candidate in the 2022 presidential elections, deliberately sparked controversy by claiming that Pétain had not killed off the Third Republic, but had secretly prepared a French revenge against Germany and had protected French Jews. Zemmour’s interventions were the latest reminder that the painful memory of France’s années noires is still a live issue some eighty years after the Liberation. Books on the Occupation may focus on a particular city or region, or may analyse a specific institution or a particular stratum of society. Or they may, as with Chris Millington’s latest book, offer an overview of the period as a whole. Millington has wisely chosen not to write yet another chronological history of Vichy; he has opted instead to organize his material under a number of themed headings. Throughout the book he fully incorporates notions of gender, colonialism, and ethnicity as he highlights the impact of events in France on the people and institutions of the French empire. In the first chapter, on the trauma of May–June 1940, Millington debunks a number of persistent myths about why France was defeated. Subsequent chapters are devoted to ‘Vichy’, ‘Collaboration’, ‘Resistance’, ‘Persecution’, and ‘Liberation’. Millington raises issues both within and between these, questioning, for example, the usefulness of the notions of ‘resistance’ and ‘collaboration’ within metropolitan and imperial contexts. Influenced by Philippe Burrin (La France à l’heure allemande, 1940–1944 (Paris: Seuil, 1995)), he prefers ‘defiance’ and ‘accommodation’ except when designating the tiny minority who were indisputably collaborators or resisters. In a final chapter, ‘History and Memory’, which precedes a short conclusion, Millington offers an excellent historiographical survey of the period from ‘Mythologizing the Resistance’ (1945–69), through a time of ‘Inconvenient Truths’ (1971–95), and concluding with ‘Diversification and Revisionism’ (2000 onwards). In making sense of Vichy, Millington rightly emphasizes the need to ‘grasp its diversity in space, time and composition’ (p. 52), which he qualifies by underscoring three important constants: Pétain remaining head of government throughout the Occupation; Vichy’s permanent quest for a peace treaty; and the exclusion and persecution of perceived enemies from the very beginning of Vichy’s existence. While few would contest that ‘The regime fully directed its energies into undoing the “damage” inflicted on France during the country’s years of democracy’, the assertion that follows — ‘Persecution was therefore Vichy’s raison d’être’ (p. 179) — is debatable. Persecution was certainly a means to an end for Vichy but not necessarily its raison d’être. Millington is to be praised for having covered the events and issues of this extremely complex historical moment in under two hundred pages without falling into the trap of oversimplification. This lively, stimulating new addition to the study of the années noires will be welcomed by the general reader, while old hands will find much to mull over in the text and are likely to discover new references in the extensive notes.

Evaluating settlement defensibility during the late classic: a geospatial approach to the study of conflict in ancient Aguascalientes, Mexico

ABSTRACT The study of conflict, warfare, and their impact on settlement patterns in the Northern Frontier of Mesoamerica during the Late Classic (500–900 CE) is hindered by colonial notions of warfare and fragmented archaeological records. This article proposes a new geospatial analytical framework to investigate conflict in ancient West Mexico. We present the results of our UAV-based aerial survey at Cerro de en medio, Aguascalientes, and using a GIS approach, this study investigates the relationship between defensiveness and conflict as a range from sporadic raids carried by small bands to Inter-polity/Interregional warfare. We found visual control was not an essential concern during this period and based on the site’s hiddenness and capacity to sustain small-scale conflict, we argue that Cerro de en medio was a refuge rather than a fortress. Thus, the evidence of sporadic or seasonal conflict in the region challenges previous interpretations and calls for renewed investigations.

Concurring Data Policy Cycles? Global Data Strategies Conference, University of Passau, 20 and 21 September 2021

Abstract Global data law is on the rise, and the competitiveness of societies is at stake. Today, the competing approaches to data law around the world are still manifold. But is it likely that these approaches will be unified by a strategic turn towards a global data strategy? The first conference of the Global Data Law Conference Series of the University of Passau Research Centre of Law and Digitalisation (FREDI) turned to this question in September 2021. The ensuing discussions led by international experts highlighted the interplay between policymakers and private corporations in shaping data strategies and protecting as well as empowering data subjects. Different data protection levels worldwide were evaluated and factored against the data-driven competitive advantages of private corporations. The range of aspects spread from prospects of a global data governance architecture, the notion of data colonialism and the European digital single market to the Chinese digital silk road.

Ernest Hemingway’s Recognition of Ideologies of White Supremacy, Colonialism, and Anti-Semitism in The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway’s creation of a vilified Jewish character in The Sun Also Rises (1926) has outed him as anti-Semitic. His negative treatment of the Jewish character Robert Cohn can be read as an unpleasant portrait of Jews. Putting theories of postcolonialism in conversation with the theory of performativity, I read The Sun Also Rises (1926) as a narrative that challenges racial stereotypes generated by colonial discourses of race and ethnicity. This study challenges any claims of Hemingway’s anti-Semitism by investigating his defiance of notions of white supremacy and colonialism as inspired by scientific racism and its reinforcement and legitimization of white dominance. I contend that Hemingway’s deployment of anti-Semitic language and representations serves to illustrate his recognition and subversion of the racial hierarchies perpetuated by colonialism and scientific racism. Hemingway’s novel tends to unveil and interrogate notions of white supremacy and colonialism rather than to racialize Jews.

Pardos’ Triumph

On September 13, 1745, the pardo (mixed-race Afro-Brazilian) brotherhood (lay Catholic association) of Nossa Senhora do Livramento (Our Lady of Emancipation) of Recife, Pernambuco, in collaboration with the pardo brotherhood of Nossa Senhora de Guadalupe (Our Lady of Guadalupe) in neighboring Olinda, enthralled Pernambuco’s largest city with a great festival in honor of Blessed Gonçalo Garcia (1556–97). Like many colonial festivals, the festivities included fireworks, artillery salvos, five triumphal carts, seventeen allegorical floats, five different dance performances, and jousting. Yet never before had such an extravagant display of material wealth been made by an Afro-Brazilian brotherhood. The pardo irmãos (brotherhood members) had two important issues they wanted to settle once and for all with this festival. One was the question of Blessed Gonçalo’s pardoness, since the would-be-saint was the son of a Portuguese man and an East Indian woman, and pardoness in Brazil had been defined as the result of white–black miscegenation. The other issue was the popular notion that mixed-race Afro-Brazilians constituted colonial Brazil’s most deviant and unruly socioracial group. In this article, I analyze how mixed-race Afro-Brazilians used the material culture of early modern festivals to publicly articulate claims about their sacro-social prestige and socio-symbolic status. I contend that material culture played a central role in the pardo irmãos’ articulation of their devotion to Blessed Gonçalo and claims of sacro-social and socio-symbolic belonging, and that they used this material culture to challenge colonial notions about their ethnic group.

Misrepresentation of Orientals in Dave Eggers’s A Hologram for The King

This study deals with the colonial perspectives in Dave Eggers’s A Hologram for The King (2012), according to the postcolonial approach. Although colonialism era is over by now, colonial perspectives remain strong in some literary works. Since its advent in the second half of the twentieth century, postcolonial theory confronts colonial attitudes and experiences as colonialism has been justified in many works of Western writers and scholars who have distorted the real image of non-Europeans and non-Westerners via different means and techniques in masquerade of orientalism. Postcolonial discourse opposes the misrepresentation of non-Europeans and argues that such falsification is driven by political, social, religious and economic motives. In the current study, the researcher aims at explaining the notions of colonialism, otherization and other falsified images of non-Westerners in A Hologram for the King. This paper mainly questions Eggers’s portrayal of the protagonist, Alan Clay, who after bankruptcy and failure at home, flies to Saudi Arabia and capitalizes on the physical and moral assets of the Orientals in this country to convert his story of failure to a success. The characterization of the oriental world and its setting show Eggers’s being biased against the Eastern world and ironically mirror clear hints of colonialism and eurocentrism.

I’m Somali and I’m Christian: A dilemma for religion and identity in the context of migration in Southern Africa

This contribution is one of a series that aimed at publishing significant findings from the research conducted for a PhD study where emerging themes were isolated and discussed. During one of the focus group conversations, Abdul (not his real name) explained how his Somali-Christian identity presented a dilemma whilst he lived with fellow Muslim Somali nationals when he was displaced during the 2015 xenophobic violence in Johannesburg. Firstly, this contribution discusses a general overview of the situation of migration and then his situation is explored from the themes, which emerged from this study from the lens of bicultural and acculturation processes of identity formation. Although this was not a representative sample of male foreign migrant experiences, analysing Abdul’s situation within a post-colonial and bicultural acculturation paradigm revealed the ‘embedded’ trajectories at the interface between religion, identity and migration in social and economic processes of transformation. Sketching Abdul’s experiences through these lenses also generated contested processes on the interface of religion and identity that reflect the significance of the role played by religion in identity constructions which are open to change (and sometimes present a dilemma), as life circumstances fluctuate with complex interactions in search of survival strategies to ward off any potential threats to a flourishing life. Such survival strategies highlight how these encounters generate hybrid identities and discourses with new boundaries, which, although fluid, volatile and situational, are reminiscent with historical and odious notions of colonialism that present African migrants as undesired foreigners whilst portraying other western and Asian migrants in cosy terms such as expatriates and tourists.Contribution: Exploring the relevance of migrant expressions within the context of identity constructions and socio-economic framework demonstrates how contested processes of socio-economic and religious transformation reflect the significance of the role played by religion on identity constructions. These constructions are articulated through fluid and complex encounters, which fluctuate to generate hybrid identities and migrant survival discourses.

Coloniality and/as Development in Kashmir: Econonationalism

This article identifies the colonial imperative of ‘we must develop them, with or without their consent’, which is used by the Indian state in order to dominate Kashmiri Muslims, and argues that this notion of development combines patriarchal silencing of the subjugated as well as a gendered fantasy of liberating oppressed Kashmiri women and minorities. While the colonial nature of Indian rule over Kashmir has been a long-term phenomenon, the focus in this article will primarily be on a specific political transformation imposed by the Indian state since August 2019, when even the pretence of autonomy and recognition was given up, and all phenomena constituting coloniality became conspicuous and acute. Adopting a feminist lens, I highlight nine features of contemporary Indian coloniality in Kashmir: denial of consent, paternalism, violence, enforced silencing, lack of accountability, arbitrariness, divide and rule, humiliation and a specious idea of development. I further argue that such a notion of coloniality as development is better understood as ‘econonationalism’ (akin to homonationalism and femonationalism), where the supposed liberatory ideas are rhetorically deployed to mask a dehumanising subjugation.

Knowledge Mobilization by Provincial Politicians: The United Front against Trafficking in Ontario, Canada

ABSTRACT In recent years, some Canadian provinces have followed the federal government’s intensification of anti-trafficking measures. Ontario is perhaps the most significant in this respect, especially with its introduction of the 2017 Anti-Human Trafficking Act. We set out to investigate debates in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario regarding the then proposed law. Our aim was to understand how politicians and others who presented at the debates mobilized knowledge, and to offer opportunities of resistance to discursive injustice for future policymaking. We engaged in a critical discourse analysis approach to examine how different types of knowledge were applied and reproduced, with a particular focus on explicit and implicit knowledge statements. Through analysis of the debate transcripts, we found a near unified front against a perceived humanitarian crisis that required an urgent punitive and securitized response, based largely in individualistic, moralistic, and colonial notions of “risk” and vulnerability. Our findings uncovered a reliance on strong beliefs and willful silences to narrate a trafficking story that displaced social conditions onto a purportedly immoral sex trade. This conceptualization was advanced through repeated invalidation of sexual labor, with invocations of childhood innocence, thereby hindering the promotion of just and inclusive societies.

An inherited animus to communal land: the mechanisms of coloniality in land reform agendas in Acholiland, Northern Uganda

Access to land for the Acholi people of northern Uganda still has much in common with understandings of the pre-colonial situation. This paper reflects on how collective landholding has faced over a century of hostile policy promoting land as private property. The notion of coloniality arises in this confrontation: the failure of communication ensuing from understanding Acholi social ordering in terms of false entities; and the foregrounding of land as object. The durability of colonial mechanisms emerges in processes such as the codification of the principles and practices of Acholi ‘customary land’. Pressure for land reform is driven by external bodies, UN agencies, donor governments and international NGOs, claiming to be seeking to protect the interest of the poor. Yet these offer no respite for the growing numbers of landless people – the colonial agenda appears to have its own momentum, serving no one’s interests. Meanwhile misunderstandings and misrepresentations of land holding groups entrenches the subaltern voicelessness of their members, isolating them from any support in dealing with the challenges of too many people on not enough land.

The Earth of the Wretched: Restoring the Vegetal Voice in Yamina Mechakra’s La Grotte éclatée

Yasmina Mechakra’s first novel, La Grotte éclatée, is a deeply moving and at times surreal testimony to the horrors of war and its aftermath. Through her use of a female, orphaned narrator, Mechakra effectively recovers voices most often lost to official History, be it colonial or national Algerian. In this article, I expand this act of recuperation beyond the human, to the vegetal realm. I show that an olive tree figures as a central protagonist in the text, allowing the author to present an Indigenous cosmology that subverts ethnocentric notions of anthropocentric hierarchy. I then read Mechakra alongside and against Frantz Fanon—specifically, The Wretched of the Earth —to show what this decentering of the human allows the reader to access anticolonial thought. While Fanon pays special attention to the land in his thought on Algeria, I show that his theory of land use reifies colonial notions of the environment. Mechakra provides a productive intertext that we may consider alongside Fanon as a means of grounding postcolonial thought in Inidigenous ontology, and recuperating the vegetal voices lost to the postcolonial field.

Lunar Dreams: Space Travel, Nostalgia, and Retrofuturism in A Space Exodus and The Lebanese Rocket Society

This paper traces how space travel, as a dream of the past, is imaged and imagined in the work of Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour and Lebanese artist and filmmakers Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. I offer close readings of individual artworks and analyze how conceptions of national belonging, individual and collective aspiration, and complex rapports with temporality are fractured, rethought, and grappled with. Drawing on Svetlana Boym's compelling conceptualization of nostalgia, I analyze notions of national belonging, individual and collective aspiration, and complex temporality as constitutive features of these artworks. Sansour uses sf tropes to articulate the Palestinian plight in A Space Exodus (2009), referencing Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Neil Armstrong's iconic moon landing, to claim the moon as Palestinian territory. Sansour's retrofuturist invocation of what Paweł Frelik has called a “future past,” is a site of both possibility and commemoration, in which notions of colonialism, home, and national trauma are echoed as much as they are troubled. In their documentary The Lebanese Rocket Society (2012), Lebanese artists Hadjithomas and Joreige are torn between nostalgia for the modern utopia promised by the 1960's Nasserist Pan-Arab dream and the struggle to represent an actual imaginary for the future. I suggest that in both films longing for what lies beyond the stars is not necessarily found in the future, but is sometimes found in the nostalgia of a future past.

Visual Culture of the Ancient Americas: Contemporary Perspectives

Written in honor of art historian Esther Pasztory, this volume celebrates her career at Columbia University through a series of fifteen scholarly essays on ancient American (pre-Columbian) visual culture contributed by former students and colleagues. Although space prevents a full description of every essay, all are of high quality, illustrating Pasztory’s influence as scholar, educator, and curator. Coeditors Andrew Finegold and Ellen Hoobler note that Pasztory’s scholarly and academic approach consistently tends toward critical examination of disciplinary methodologies and assumptions.The volume begins with Cecelia Klein’s description of Pasztory’s early years in graduate school in the late 1960s, when they both studied at Columbia University. She situates Pasztory’s approach to the material, and that of her cohort, as original and distinct from other methods employed outside halls of Columbia University. Klein masterfully articulates the historiography of the field at a time when art historians were beginning to reject notions of connoisseurship, colonialism, and primitivism. Eloquently summarizing the earlier sweep of twentieth-century connoisseurship and evolutionistic thought as “wrong-headed,” Klein sets the stage for the emergence of a historically based approach to pre-Columbian art. The critical acuity of their cohort—guided by forward-thinking scholars such as Douglas Fraser, Franz Boaz, and Meyer Schapiro—allowed the field to progress from its early biases toward the distinctly social-historical approach that characterizes much of the field today.The lasting importance of Pasztory’s work at the Mexican metropolis of Teotihuacan is reflected in several essays treating professional experiences in the field and in curatorial contexts. Leonardo Lopez Lujan, for example, points to Pasztory’s scholarly insistence on social context as the correct means by which to understand visual culture. He traces the intricate interpretive trajectories of two well-known monoliths from Teotihuacan’s Moon Plaza as case in point, asserting that objects, like human beings, have a “social life” that weaves throughout the intricate cycle of their creation, use, reuse, and destruction, clearly reflecting the times in which the interpretations are made.Subsequently, Kathleen Berrin describes collaborating with Pasztory to curate the pathbreaking exhibition Teotihuacan: City of the Gods for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (1988–93). Not only were the negotiations for loan objects from Mexico arduous and politically delicate, but arrangements related to handling a major bequest of looted mural fragments ultimately resulted in a new model for how US institutions might handle ownership and physical possession of stolen antiquities going forward.Evidence of Pasztory’s theoretical influence is seen in a chapter by Gary Urton (17–30), who builds on Pasztory’s (2010) suggestion that Andean aesthetics were underlain by conceptions of networks, invisible lines, immutable essences, and mental diagrams of the world, rather than visual reproductions of it.Pasztory’s former students are well represented, and many of their essays include stories of foundational research or formative experiences gained while at Columbia that strongly influenced their later pursuits. Authors include Cynthia Conides, Lois Martin, and Susan Milbrath, who each make valuable contributions related to the use and meaning of particular iconographic clusters in Teotihuacan and Central Mexican/Aztec imagery. Joanne Pillsbury and Ellen Hoobler in their respective essays challenge how “scientific” illustrations and popular media about ancient American materials have shifted over time. Georgia De Havenon likewise reevaluates the veracity of a foundational source, Alexander von Humboldt in his explorations of Ecuador, and Janice Robertson interrogates the European-generated concept of “picture writing” in relation to painted manuscripts and colonial Nahua language patterns. Jeff Kowalski cites Pasztory’s (1972) work on ballgame symbolism as motivational, leading him to an analysis of ball court, maize, and maize-god connections over time at various Maya sites. Jennifer von Schwerin and Fanziska Fetcher address the lack of culture history sequence in non-Maya Honduras by presenting one in this volume. Timothy King and Andrew Finegold address the relationships between material culture and social practice through analyses of specific categories of, respectively, Aztec-made gold ornaments and atlatls in Nahua art and society.The essays in the volume address vastly different regions and scholarly efforts, yet Pasztory’s broad interests, creative thinking, and encouragement of others to challenge status quo assumptions come through in terms of investigative rigor and originality.

“I’m Here and I Am Queer”. Queer Teacher Identities in ELT. A Colombian Study

There has been a significant upsurge of research regarding gender and its connection to teacher professional identity. In this paper, we adopt a decolonial stance to document how the queer identities and pedagogies of two teachers of English resist colonial notions of being and doing within the English Language Teaching (elt) setting. This study regards gender identity as a political mechanism that has been structured in terms of relations of domination. In addition, it explores these structures by employing the coloniality of being as the axe to analyse gender categories in the elt field. To do this, we used a narrative approach to voice personal constructions of gender and gendering discourses about queer identities and pedagogies. Findings suggest that queer teachers of English construct and negotiate their identities in their professional settings and their own performativities in the classroom shape their own epistemologies and teaching practices.

The Persistence of Slavery: An Economic History of Child Trafficking in Nigeria by Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine

Reviewed by: The Persistence of Slavery: An Economic History of Child Trafficking in Nigeria by Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine Christine Whyte The Persistence of Slavery: An Economic History of Child Trafficking in Nigeria. By Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2021. xiv + 238 pp. Cloth $ 90, paper $26.95. In this book, Robin Chapdelaine introduces a new conceptual framework—"the social economy of a child"—to help historians and others to understand how "children functioned as transmitters of wealth" (2–3). The book's introduction promises to detail "ongoing methods of appropriating children's bodies and their labor through the institutions of slavery, pawning, and child marriage" in the colonial period of the Bight of Biafra (2). While the focus is on the early twentieth century and the effects of British colonial rule, the first chapter sets the context in the last century of the transatlantic slave trade, using the biographies of two enslaved children, Olaudah Equiano and Peter Nicholls (27). This use of texts produced in adulthood to illuminate enslaved childhoods responds to Sánchez-Eppler's call to think through life-stage when working with slave narratives.1 This region was selected both because of the paucity of scholarship on childhood and because of the particular impact of colonial rule on politics and the economy. Colonial legislation deliberately excluded "canoe houses" (trading centers) from antislavery legislation in the early twentieth century, indirectly acknowledging the central role unfree labor played in systems of trade (37). Increasing integration into global commodity markets, exacerbated by a shift in agricultural production to the plantations of West Africa, especially for palm oil, increased labor demands (36). At the same time, new pressures of colonial rule, taxation, and the increasing corruption of provincial courts forced people to take desperate measures, including pawning their children to acquire cash. Governor-General Lugard's policies—which strengthened the powers of local courts—in tandem with the ballooning labor demands and the introduction of sterling and paper notes to replace the existing monetary system, [End Page 461] greatly increased slave-dealing in the southeastern region (57). Children were particularly vulnerable, as their parents and guardians "pawned" them to access cash to pay taxes and court fees. Pawning, once a relatively secure means of raising collateral, became increasingly risky, as pawned children were sold into slavery with relatively little hope for redress (59). The chapter on colonial policy brings out the ironies and contradictions between antislavery rhetoric and the realities of labor demands, building on and updating Lovejoy and Hogendorn's Slow Death for Slavery.2 The analysis of court case material is particularly compelling, offering both a broad view of the trends—widespread and frequent litigation over debts and contracts—and a microlens on individual cases, which show how debt, slavery, and child trafficking were intertwined (65–7). As well as the risk of being trafficked into slavery, pawned girls were sometimes retained as creditors' wives on nonpayment of a debt (80). This linkage between pawning, enslavement, and child marriage drew the attention of the successors of the Victorian prostitution abolition movement. Here the book combines the documentary evidence generated by various colonial enquiries into child pawning and marriage with oral history evidence collected in cooperation with Nigerian researchers. Discussion draws out some of the rituals and beliefs around pawning that reinforced the notion of it as a temporary state, from which parents or guardians would eventually redeem the children (95). The moral unacceptability of enslaving children, as opposed to pawning them, was emphasized by informants (97). This study of child trafficking launched from Chapdelaine's careful reading of the testimony taken after the 1929 Ogu Umunwaanyi (Women's War). In the accounts of Igbo women involved in the rebellion, the women highlighted threats to their children as a primary concern (109–10). It was these women who organized and orchestrated the revolt. The oral histories point to the initiative taken by the women, refuting prejudicial colonial notions that men must have played a leading role. Their testimonies provide rich detail on the hardships wrought by the imposition of direct taxation. Chapdelaine argues that the women of the 1929 Ogu Umunwaanyi were willing to fight...

“Where the devil should he learn our language?”: Shakespeare’s Territorial Linguistics

Abstract This article looks at how Spenser’s desire for an English national identity, rooted in a “kingdom of our own language,” is realized in Shakespeare’s works. I track the way early modern systems of power have used language as a colonial weapon and show how Shakespeare demonstrates the problematic effects of imagining language as a scaffold to hold oppressive social structures—such as class, gender, and nationality—in place. Throughout his works—comedies, tragedies, and histories alike—Shakespeare consistently plays with the notion that there is a “right” and a “wrong” way to speak, and I argue he connects these definitions with the colonial notion of a “right” and a “wrong” way to be “English”. The article examines language as space, in which “English” and “England” become synonymous. It explores language as a shared national identity in which language belongs to physical spaces as well as to peoples and a more abstract notion of nation. It explores the colonial imposition of the English language on indigenous populations that map the expansion of the known world in the early modern era, and looks at the tensions between the English and the Welsh—and their respective languages—in Shakespeare’s plays. Ultimately, shows us the inevitable victims of linguistic nationalism and draws attention to England’s long history of using language as a tool of abuse, oppression, and control.

The Namibian bioeconomy: transformation to a sustainable society?

Worldwide, bioeconomy is promoted as an ‘engine for sustainable development’. However, increasingly, the notion that ‘the bioeconomy’ will facilitate sustainable development per se is challenged. Based on the assumption that when leaving the relations between ‘nature’ and ‘society’ unquestioned, inherent inequalities are rather reproduced than overcome, we draw upon a social-ecological framework to analyse the societal relations to nature in the Namibian bioeconomy. In Namibia, with independence, an array of different benefit-sharing mechanisms have been developed to implement local participatory governance structure, which will be further streamlined under the newly introduced access and benefit-sharing law. Results show that despite efforts to facilitate a diversity-based bioeconomy, separating structures and trade-offs are persistent. Images of ‘nature’, like the ‘eternal Namibian landscape’, that draw upon colonial notions are frequently used to market indigenous natural products. Institutions to ‘nature’ that guarantee fair and equitable terms of trade are often only short-term and/or small-scale, e.g. as shown at the case of Devil’s claw, Hoodia and Namibian Myrrh. Even when perspectives cannot be assigned in a stereotypical way between user and provider, and instead, all actors refer to biodiversity and traditional knowledge as ‘welfare of the people’, ‘cultural heritage’, ‘input for R&D’, ‘community benefit’, and ‘marketing tool’, a rational-instrumental reasoning tends to be favoured of a normative-ethical one. A more diversified awareness towards the dialectics entailed in the conception, making, and management of ‘nature’ potentially inhibiting an inclusive sustainable development is relevant at any theory–practice interface, including development project-management and environmental policy-making.

Living Geographies: Urban Wixárika Places and Spaces of Knowledge

In Wixárika epistemology, Kaka+yarite/Kaka+ma (Elder ancestors) inhabit Wixárika Tsik+ri (visual representation of Wixárika land). Families connect to Elder ancestors and assure their cultural survival with pilgrimages to key locations in the Wixárika land. From El Gran Nayar to the city of Tepic, Mexico, Wixárika (Huichol) families, resist settler colonial notions of relatedness and being. In this article, I discuss how Wixárika families in urban communities 1) understand the notions of spaces and places through the relation with cultivation practices, 2) actively participate in the retracing of ancestral spaces through yearly pilgrimages, and 3) contest colonial powers by moving across colonial places and marking their salient presence in urban centers. Using theories/praxis of relatedness and being, and ongoing ethnographic fieldwork within Wixárika families in Tepic, I investigate how land in Wixárika's view reconfigures spaces and places for the exchange of Traditional Ecological Knowledge. I examine how urban Wixárika families continually reaffirm relations with ancestors through bodily practices such as cultivation. Thus, Wixárika contest settler colonization processes by the act of cultivating, maintaining kinship with Tatéi Niwetsika (Our Mother Corn), walking across spaces, making offerings, and moving from urban to rural.

‘Le Riz d’Indochine’ at the French table: representations of food, race and the Vietnamese in a colonial-era board game

ABSTRACT When the repas gastronomique des Français was deemed worthy of a place on UNESCO’s Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2010, the decision was hailed as a triumph for cultural diversity. Yet, culinary traditions in France remain persistently rooted in legacies of colonialism that are invisible to many. With this in mind, this article examines the enduring symbolic power of French cuisine alongside colonial notions of race through an analysis of the tropes and procedures of a 1932 board game doubling as an advertisement for ‘Indochinese Rice’ in France. I argue that just as French citizens learned from the game to incorporate rice into their daily eating habits, they also learned how to integrate visibly racialized Vietnamese people into the national body politic. For not only are citizens ‘buying into’ the colonial project with the help of this piece of publicity, the board game actively teaches racist colonial ideologies. Building on extant analyses of colonial ephemera, this article considers how notions of ‘race’ and racism against the Vietnamese were learned by French citizens through food, and how that racialized understanding would influence the reception and assimilation of the Vietnamese in France in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Investigating the Investigators

Three cases of re-opened murder investigations in French West Africa are at the heart of this article. My aim is to examine these cases as a lens into everyday colonial policing that was not directly linked to major anti-colonial protests. All three inquiries into low-ranking colonial officers and the way they conducted their investigations took place during the 1930s, in Mauritania, Senegal, and Dahomey. While their circumstances were different, the cases reflect the flawed and unprofessional character of colonial investigations. They also demonstrate that murder investigations—as well as criticism of them—were powered by two crucial French colonial notions: the maintenance of public order and the ideology of the civilizing mission.