Ongoing Legacies Research Articles

Invisible Walls: Mapping Residential Segregation In Portland

This Local History Spotlight documents Portland State University students' research on how barriers to homeownership in communities of color have influenced the concentration of wealth and inequality in Portland, Oregon. The students conducted research by using crowdsourcing efforts to obtain property deed information, and partnered with other university students and local organizations to disseminate their initial findings. The authors concluded that “by documenting racially restrictive covenants, we revealed the many ways that people of color have been denied access to property in Portland, how they navigated restrictions to purchasing homes, and the ongoing legacies of housing inequality in our community.”

The Expanding Legacy of the Enslaved Potter-Poet David Drake

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on a number of important events in the ongoing legacies of David (Dave) Drake, an African-American potter who lived and worked in Edgefield, South Carolina. Dave’s creativity was expressed in writing poetry and as a conceptual artist. His inspirations have been recognized by efforts today in advancing literacy and improving education. This study examines an array of interactive museum programs, educational initiatives, films, theater and dance productions, poetry readings, and publications for young and old readers alike that have conveyed Dave’s accomplishments to broad audiences and students. Archaeological engagements, scholarly publications, and Dave’s induction into the South Carolina Hall of Fame are also considered. His legacies are discussed in their historical contexts and in regard to their impacts on facets of our contemporary society and culture. From limited recognition decades ago to broad acclaim today, Edgefield alkaline-glazed stoneware is now seen as the genesis of an artisan tradition of Southern stoneware.

Postsocialist politics and the ends of revolution

ABSTRACTThe introduction to this special issue offers a theorization of postsocialism as an analytic that connects the ‘afters’ of the capitalist–socialist dynamic to think about how political action need not take shape in ways that are familiar as revolutionary, or oppositional. We argue that postsocialism marks a queer temporality, one that does not reproduce its social order even as its revolutionary antithesis. Resisting the revolutionary teleology of what was before, postsocialism creates space to work through ongoing legacies of socialisms in the present. Secondly, we assert the need for pluralizing postsocialisms as a method, which brings to the fore current practices, imaginaries, and actions that insist on political change at a variety of scales, including local, state, and transnational ones. Pluralizing postsocialisms as a method and considering it necessary for analysis of a global postsocialist condition can provide a crucial analytic through which to assess ongoing socialist legacies in new ethical collectivities and networks of dissent opposing state- and corporate-based military, economic, and cultural expansionism since the end of the Cold War.

“But they were never only the master’s tools”: the use of photography in de-colonial praxis

The majority of anthropological literature around photography of Indigenous peoples has privileged the actions, agency, and intent of the Western photographer. While one cannot ignore the significant colonizing influences that photographs have had on Indigenous peoples, one cannot presume that these individuals were solely the silenced subject or victim in a one-sided, inferior relationship with the camera and its operator. Recent scholarship is now re-examining the relationship Indigenous peoples have had with photography as a culturally productive technology since its development. In this article, I will address the role of photography in a global context as an object and a method of decolonization in two ways: (a) through archived collections of colonial photography and (b) in the production of contemporary photographs by peoples who experience contemporary colonialism. In both of these contexts, I will explore how various populations or communities with a colonial history use photography to confront ongoing legacies of colonialism, particularly in agendas aimed at repairing and reconfiguring relationships with self, family and kin, colonizer, community, and the natural world. Drawing on examples from several countries and locales, I will address the potentials and challenges of reframing Indigenous peoples’ experience of, and relationship with, photography within the context of de-colonial praxis.

National exceptionalism in the ‘EduCanada’ brand: unpacking the ethics of internationalization marketing in Canada

ABSTRACTCanada’s recently revamped international education brand, EduCanada, offers a rich example of developments at the intersections of higher education internationalization and marketization. In this paper, I examine the EduCanada website to consider how national exceptionalist and ‘othering’ narratives are reproduced in the recruitment of international students. From these findings I ask how internationalization relates to the overlapping and ongoing legacies of Indigenous colonization, and racialized regimes of personhood, citizenship, and immigration in Canada. Finally, I argue that the international marketization of higher education risks foreclosing critical examinations of the entanglements of empire within which we are all unevenly embedded.

Introduction to Colonial Christian Missions: Social and Cultural Impacts and Ongoing Legacies

This article provides an introduction to the Special Section on Colonial Christian missions and their social and cultural impacts. It surveys the scholarship on colonial Christian missions and argues that there is a need for more work that holds both colonies and metropoles in the same analytical frame, whilst also considering the continuities and discontinuities of mission legacies over time.

An Opportunity to put the Country on the Research Map: Place and South African Drug Discovery

This paper draws on ethnographic research that I began in 2010 at a small startup pharmaceutical company in the outskirts of Johannesburg, called iThemba Pharmaceuticals, which was founded in 2009 with the mission of finding new drugs for TB, HIV, and malaria (Pollock 2014). In this paper, I will focus how iThemba's project was articulated through multiple metaphorical and literal senses of the map. The name “iThemba” means “hope,” and although these hopes went unrealized, the company's story remains a rich one for consideration of the possibilities and challenges of innovation, transformation, and sustainability in Africa. In interviews, scientists talked about iThemba providing “an opportunity to put the country on the research map.” Moreover, for the scientific staff comprising black, white, and Asian South Africans as well as (black) Africans from neighboring countries, iThemba's mission held a promise of putting the continent of Africa “on the map.” The logo of iThemba incorporated a map of Africa. This rhetoric might be dismissed, on many grounds: South Africa is a highly problematic stand-in for the continent as a whole; iThemba's Afro-centric logo was designed in the UK; the company's scientific advisory board included European and American experts. As Achille Mbembe (2001, 242) has argued, discourses on Africa always have “their nature, their stakes, and their functions situated elsewhere.” Yet for the scientists working at iThemba, the rhetoric of hope for Africa was also real. To draw on James Ferguson's (2006) evocative phrasing, the project was understood as a way to renegotiate Africa's “place in the world.” The map is also importantly literal. In iThemba's work, the importance of space and distance was both palpable and reconfigured. South Africa shares a time zone with Europe, and the ability of European scientists to speak to South African scientists during the day was framed as a significant competitive advantage for contract chemistry work and collaboration. This capacity for virtual connection collapses some distance between north and south. Additionally, the ongoing legacies of (settler) colonial maps continue to shape South African scientific capacity. In an international science system in which “peripheries [are] defined not geographically but in terms of scientific authority and social power” (Chambers and Gillespie 2000, 231), Africa is not undifferentiated periphery. South Africa has well-regarded universities that produce many scientists, an intellectual property environment that protects producers, an effective transportation infrastructure – for industry if not for the country's population – including by air, water, and road. At the same time, South Africa's geographic isolation from concentrations of the pharmaceutical industry poses real material constraints. Intellectual property can exist in abstract forms, but in order to become drugs, it must be materialized with ingredients and processes that are unevenly distributed in space. The delays in delivery of reagents slow down South African pharmaceutical research capacity relative to other developing countries, such as India and China, with more robust pharmaceutical sectors. Challenges of securing supplies of reagents underscore the materiality of pharmaceuticals from the perspective of their developers, and the significance of material distribution in space.

Kinship across conflict: family blood, political bones, and exhumation in contemporary Spain

In post-conflict countries, caring for the dead challenges how family kinship and national history are organised. The exhumation of unmarked mass graves following decolonisation, civil war, and other forms of violence and oppression is one way by which heritage managers reconfigure kinship and history in the aftermath of conflict. Where governments fail to identify and acknowledge the dead, archaeologists and other heritage managers use exhuming to negotiate how the dead and their familial and political ties are remembered. In Spain, the exhumation of anti-Francoist guerrillas killed after the 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War serves to restore broken kinship lines and give the dead a proper burial. Yet the symbolic and material recovery of their bones obligates families – and the nation – to confront the political past and their relationship with the anti-Francoist dead. Drawing on ethnographic data from Teilán, Spain, I examine how the material presence of the anti-Francoist dead resurfaces competing kinship responsibilities and ongoing political legacies in contemporary Spain. I conclude by drawing from these lessons to reflect on the exhumation process in other countries, drawing out the inferences especially for countries across Africa.

“Tropical Allsorts”: The Transnational Flavor of British Development Policies in Africa

This article explores how postwar British development in Africa was generated, transferred, and applied in the context of a series of wider networks. It examines the methods, pathways, and limits of this transnational approach to development. In the immediate postwar period, Britain had an entrenched institutional and historic knowledge of colonial governance, as well as many highly skilled practitioners with specialist knowledge of individual colonial territories. However, Britain had to enact its colonial policy within a wider context of European reconstruction and increasing American international power, as well as a growing impetus from the colonies themselves for self-government and independence. This article explores how Britain enacted colonial development policies within this series of overlapping networks, and argues that this context often—but not always—created an effective framework for development, even though British interests were often at odds with those of the other metropolitan powers. The Organisation for European Economic Cooperation and the Anglo-American “special relationship” are highlighted as specific forums within which British colonial development policy could be enacted, performed, and challenged. The article also considers some of the ongoing legacies of this networked approach to colonial development at the end of the Second World War, especially the ways in which the voices of donor countries have been prioritized over those of aid recipients.

Between Disgust And Regeneration:

Between Disgust And Regeneration: Tiffany E. Barber (bio), Angela Naimou (bio), and Wangechi Mutu (bio) Nairobi-born, New York-based artist WANGECHI MUTU makes fantastic worlds inhabited by mythological creatures and cyborgs. In her contribution to the 2015 Venice Biennale, curated by OKWUI ENWEZOR, Mutu presented three new works across a range of media—a three-channel animated video, a sculptural installation, and a large-scale collage—in a room entirely dedicated to the artist. In the three-screen video THE END OF CARRYING ALL, a barefoot black woman wearing a head wrap and a cotton print dress trudges across a dismal landscape of grasses, the sun in the background casting the lone human figure and foreground in soft silhouette. Flocks of birds migrate low across the sky. The basket balanced on her head grows bigger as she begins to stumble under its weight. Objects including a bicycle wheel, a small house, and a satellite dish crowd the basket, and items continue to multiply and pile on top of each other fantastically of their own accord. The basket woman’s back bends, her body bowed under the Click for larger view View full resolution WANGECHI MUTU. Portrait, 2015. Photo Credit: Cynthia Edorh, Getty Images. [End Page 337] basket’s multiplying weight as she slowly approaches the edge of the world, burdened by all she carries. At the end of the video, the earth rises up and swallows her. This final act of consumption sends a ripple through the bleak landscape, as if to suggest the possibility of renewal while at the same time stopping short of animating that renewal: the video fades to black once the earth settles, and the faint sound of birds is the last thing we hear. This video plays on conventional Eurocentric representations of racialized and gendered labor in spaces designated as “Third World” while also providing a strong critique of the exploitative logics of uneven capitalist accumulation and economic development. Thus the burden she carries is both the burden of representation and the weight of superfluous material consumption and waste. In The End of carrying All, what gets accumulated is not wealth but junk. This strategy of material accumulation comes to bear in a very literal way on the sculptural installation at the Biennale, entitled She’s Got the Whole World in Her. The sculpture features a black, apparently mud-covered figure—half woman, half mermaid—peering into an earthen globe suspended before her. As Mutu notes in our interview with her, the figure is covered in pulp made from junk mail. The sculpture is positioned between the video and the collage, entitled Forbidden Fruit Picker. The subject of Forbidden Fruit Picker is also a female figure, perched atop a mound situated between a dark, foreboding tree and a pair of serpents. Instead of mud or pulp, though, the figure’s body is composed of photographic fragments of human, animal, and motorcycle parts cut from magazines. The sacred and profane come together in these works, whose titles reference a Christian song (“He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands”) and the iconography of Eve in the garden. As these Biennale works indicate, issues of race, gender, sexuality, pornography, and religion are central to Mutu’s articulations of time, futurity, blackness, and the vicissitudes of the human. In all three, the transmuted female figures are frightening, mysterious, and powerful. The worlds they inhabit are at once marked by disorder, change, and excess—from the accumulation of the dense layers of images in her collage, to the amorphous globs of putrefying matter that grow and devour their surroundings. These Biennale works also exemplify her broader aesthetic concerns with fragmented existence, ongoing legacies of colonial violence, moments of upheaval under late [End Page 338] capitalism, and the affective tension between disgust and regeneration her work evokes. Her work thus captured one aim of the Biennale, titled All the World’s Futures: Enwezor had selected artists that “bring together publics in acts of looking, listening, responding, engaging, speaking in order to make sense of the current upheaval.”1 Mutu’s three works fit this vision by offering fresh insight into the relationship between art, artists, and the pervasive...

Introduction: On the Imperative, Challenges, and Prospects of Decolonizing Comparative Methodologies

To reflect on coloniality is not to study the history of colonialism from the safety of a “postcolonial” present. Rather, it requires one to interrogate ongoing legacies of colonialism, not only in...

The Geo-Historical Legacies of Urban Security Governance and the Vancouver 2010 Olympics

International sporting events such as the Olympics and FIFA World Cup have the capacity to affect entire economies, democratic regimes, juridical structures, urban architectures, organizational forms and capacities, as well as political communities (Roche, 2000). This is particularly the case in the areas of security, surveillance and policing where vast capital expenditures catalyze a range of dramatic shifts in urban governance and security (Giulianotti and Klauser, 2011). One of these shifts involves the blending of security, policing, military, and public safety agencies through mission-based initiatives, which are distinguished by intensified interoperability across public safety institutions and the modes and jurisdictions through which they have traditionally operated. At major events, mission based initiatives have become the primary strategic-organizational means through which conventional Westphalian articulations of territorial space, borders, security and policing institutions, and the regulation of urban spaces more generally, are being rearticulated (Graham, 2010).This paper examines the institutional trajectory of the Military Liaison Unit (MLU) in the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) throughout the lifecycle of the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. Accordingly, it resituates the role of time and temporality in explaining the geo-historical and political outcomes associated with 'mission-based' policing units that are catalyzed through major events. By drawing upon historical document analysis and in-depth interviews with key informants, tracing notable path‐dependent (Pierson 2004) processes of the MLU explains the significance of ongoing legacies of militarization across jurisdictional, institutional, and by extension, spatial configurations in the context of the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. To this end, path-dependent explanations are vital in explaining accounts of continuity and change in urban geopolitical analyses of security and surveillance. This is particularly the case in much needed debates centering on the controversies and opportunities inherent in security legacies and major events, which are a key driver in the dynamic towards the securitization and militarization of Western cities.

The Three R’s of Seeking Transitional Justice: Reparation, Responsibility, and Reframing in Canada and Argentina

In Canada an officially mandated truth commission inquiring into the forced assimilation and abuse of Indigenous children in state-organized and funded residential schools raises profound and in many ways quite novel questions about transitional justice concerning Indigenous peoples in advanced capitalist societies. This article compares the Canadian case with that of a quintessential transitional justice pioneer: Argentina. Focusing on the efforts of justice-seekers in each country, it reveals similarities in their respective pursuits of what the article identifies as three important transitional justice goals: reparation, responsibility and reframing. However, the article also finds a crucial difference between the two cases. This difference is that justice seekers in Argentina have placed a heavy emphasis on social and political accountability, a goal that, in various ways, has received much less attention in the Canadian case. We conclude that this absence raises broader issues about transitional justice processes in countries marked by ongoing legacies of anti-Indigenous colonialism—issues that Canadians from the settler society, in particular, must begin urgently to address.

Hastily Arranged Marriage: Political Culture in Germany Twenty Years after Unification

Explanations for the roots and cures of the continuous divergence between East and West German political cultures tend to fall into two camps: socialization and situation. The former emphasizes the impact of socialization before and during the GDR era and ongoing (post-communist) legacies derived from Eastern Germans' previous experience, whereas the latter focuses primarily on economic difficulties after the unification that caused dissatisfaction among the population in the Eastern parts of Germany. The article argues that in order to explain the persistence and reinvigoration of an autonomous political culture during the last two decades in the new Länder, we need to synthesize the two approaches and to add a third aspect: the unification hypothesis. Although the communist period brought about a specific political culture in the GDR, the German unification process—based rather on transplantation than on adaptation—has caused it neither to diminish nor to wither away. On the contrary, the separate (post)-communist political culture was reaffirmed and reinstalled under novel circumstances.

A Feather Bed Dictionary: Colonialism and Sexuality

AbstractIn this paper I utilise ‘autoethnography’. In dialogue with my white ancestor's Dr Sidney Spencer Kachalola Broomfield's autobiography Kachalola or the Mighty Hunter (1931), I examine his representation of the black female body in Northern Rhodesia (present day Zambia). Broomfield presents the black female body as decadent, demonised and sexualised, accusing it of conquering white men regardless of education, class and religious affiliation. Firstly, I question how the black female body sexuality and reproduction became site of social, political and racial contest and entanglement and contradictorily also the site of collaboration between white and black men; secondly, I examine the ongoing legacies of Broomfield's representation.