Politics Of Decolonization Research Articles

Outsourcing Patriarchy To and Within India: Intersectional and Decolonial Gender Politics Across Scales

AbstractYoung caste‐class privileged gender justice workers in Delhi navigate several relations of power—with Euro‐American feminisms, and with less privileged feminisms and recipients of development work within India. Their experiences reveal that decolonial politics in India cannot be conceptualised without consideration of other axes of inequality including caste and religion. There is thus a need to broaden decolonial and intersectional analyses to include multiple spatial scales, from the transnational to the most granular interpretations of the local. By bringing intersectional analyses into greater dialogue with postcolonial feminist theory, this paper demonstrates that patterns of “outsourcing patriarchy” are observable at many scales, and that these patterns at different scales are co‐produced, each in turn shaping the other. Such a framework also explains how young caste‐class privileged gender justice workers outsource patriarchy and reproduce “mainstream” feminisms even as they seek to avoid doing so.

Bricolage Within the Imperial Divide: Introduction to Iftikhar Dadi and Elizabeth Dadi's Jugaad

Jugaad continues Iftikhar and Elizabeth Dadi's extended artistic investigation of informality in the Global South, which arguably constitutes the majority experience of this vast region. Development became a central problematic for Africa and Asia in the wake of political decolonization of the mid twentieth century, encompassing the ambition for formal planning of large-scale infrastructure and state intervention in human development. But this project was always incomplete and resonated in complex ways with the tenacious growth of informal living and working arrangements whose legacies can be traced back to the colonial era. Informality is amplified in contemporary globalization that is often understood as a process in which transnational brands and lifestyles replace their local analogs. But this view overlooks globalization's shadows—the largely invisible processes of labor, production, and consumption that transpire in the vast informality of the Global South. This is a realm of exploitation, but also one of immense productive capacities, in which branding and intellectual property regimes are constantly challenged by those who seek to fashion and animate a world from affordable materials and inventive rubrics.

Jugaad

Jugaad continues Iftikhar and Elizabeth Dadi's extended artistic investigation of informality in the Global South, which arguably constitutes the majority experience of this vast region. Development became a central problematic for Africa and Asia in the wake of political decolonization of the mid twentieth century, encompassing the ambition for formal planning of large-scale infrastructure and state intervention in human development. But this project was always incomplete and resonated in complex ways with the tenacious growth of informal living and working arrangements whose legacies can be traced back to the colonial era. Informality is amplified in contemporary globalization that is often understood as a process in which transnational brands and lifestyles replace their local analogs. But this view overlooks globalization's shadows—the largely invisible processes of labor, production, and consumption that transpire in the vast informality of the Global South. This is a realm of exploitation, but also one of immense productive capacities, in which branding and intellectual property regimes are constantly challenged by those who seek to fashion and animate a world from affordable materials and inventive rubrics.

Colonising ‘Free’ Will

While colonialism, in general, is a contested concept, as are the conditions that constitute its negation, political decolonisation seems to be a relatively settled argument. Where such decolonisation occurred, political independence, and its attendant democratic system and the undergirding of the rule of law, signify the self-evidentiality of such political decolonisation. This article rethinks this self-evidentiality of political independence as necessarily a decolonial political accomplishment in Ghana. This critical enterprise opens the documents that founded the newly independent state to alternative reading to demonstrate how the colonial folded itself into the dictate of freedom.

Is This Is Not an Atlas an Atlas? On the Pitfalls of Editing a Global Collection of Counter-Cartographies

As part of kollektiv orangotango+, we co-edited an international collection of activist, academic, and artistic “counter- mappings.” Because counter-mapping is historically closely connected with, and indebted to, anti-colonial struggles and decolonial politics, we hoped to locate our work within the wider debates about decolonial cartography and the decolonizing of the map. At the same time, preparing, producing, and distributing this publication posed a number of questions and problems. We use this short article as an opportunity to reflect on the editing, publication, and dissemination of This Is Not an Atlas, as well as to trace possible ways beyond the book for Not-an-Atlas as an ongoing project.

The Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics of Migration in Contemporary Art from Angola and Its Diaspora

The Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics of Migration in Contemporary Art from Angola and Its Diaspora

Christen Gemeinde, Bürgergemeinden, Migranten, Aktiengesellschaften, Finanzmärkte …

The thesis of this article is that the arrival and non-arrival of African migrants fractures the pseudo innocence of Western Europe exposing its colonial entanglements hence challenging the church to develop a decolonial theological politics. The article develops such a politics by re-examining and reconfiguring elements of Barth’s theological politics. It draws on his understanding of the “lordless powers” and of God taking the side of the poor and rereads them in the light of a counter imperial reading of the New Testament. This forms the basis for a reconfiguring of themes from his Christian Community and Civil Community.

Decolonizing religion and the practice of peace: Two case studies from the postcolonial world

Based on extensive field work focused on interreligious peacebuilding practices in Kenya and the Philippines, this article argues that decolonial accounts of peacebuilding, in line with decolonial interventions in the study of religion, remain captive to the task of epistemological undoing and thus insufficiently relevant to the precarious lives of many invisibalized people in the global South. The question is whether decolonial thinking in the study of religion and theology should concern itself with such pertinence. I first examine the colonial legacy of “peace” and key features of decolonial interventions in the modernist, civilizational, and developmentalist discourses within which “peace” is embedded. Next, I analyze how interreligious peacebuilding practices both entrench coloniality while improving the lives of people who engage in such practices and how such practices rely on thin or “sticky notes” religiosity, deeply inconsistent with decolonial theologies and religiosity. Finally, I show how, on the ground, mere existence and overcoming hate reside along a spectrum of decolonial politics.

Contemporary Discourse and the Oblique Narrative of Avant-gardism in Twentieth-Century Nigerian Art

The history of Twentieth Century Nigerian art is characterized by ambiguities that impede understanding of the underlying modernist philosophies that inspired modern art from the 1900s. In the past five decades, scholars have framed the discourse of Contemporary Nigerian Art to analyze art created during that period in Africa starting with Nigeria in order to differentiate it from that of Europe and America. However, this quest for differentiation has led to a mono-narrative which only partially analyze modernist tendencies in modern Nigerian art, thus, reducing its impact locally and globally. Adopting Content Analysis and Modernism as methodologies, this research subjected literature on Twentieth Century Nigerian art to critical analysis to reveal its grey areas, as well as draw upon recent theories by Chika Okeke-Agulu, Sylvester Ogbechie, Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor to articulate the occurrence of a unique Nigerian avant-gardism blurred by the widely acclaimed discourse of contemporary Nigerian art. Findings reveal that the current discourse unwittingly frames Twentieth Century Nigerian art as a time-lag reactionary mimesis of Euro-American modernism. This research contends that such narrative blocks strong evidences of avant-garde tendencies identified in the works of Aina Onabolu, Ben Enwonwu, Uche Okeke and others, which exhibited intellectual use of the subversive powers of art for institutional/societal interrogation. Drawing upon modernist theories as a compass for analyzing the works of the aforementioned, this paper concludes that rather than being a mundane product of contemporaneity, Twentieth Century Nigerian art was inspired by decolonization politics and constituted a culture-specific avant-gardism in which art was used to enforce change. Thus, a new modern art discourse is proposed that will reconstruct Twentieth Century Nigerian art as an expression of modernism parallel to Euro-American modernism.

Can Dogs be Racist? The Colonial Legacies of Racialized Dogs in Kenya and Zambia

Abstract Can dogs be racist? Posing this question may seem odd and at worst, unhelpfully provocative at a time when the discourse of ‘colour-blindness’ is so pervasive. Yet the idea of ‘racist dogs’ remains salient within the post-settler societies of eastern and southern Africa, where dogs have been an integral if overlooked tool of colonial practices of racialization. This article traces the colonial demarcation of ‘native dogs’ – juxtaposed to white settlers’ ‘pet’ dogs – to understand how racial categories were imposed on domesticated animals, and how these racialized animals were then colonized through rabies legislation. Although the formal racialization of dogs ended with the dawn of political decolonization in the early 1960s, dogs continued to be co-opted for postcolonial racial discourse. Dogs were in a prominent position in postcolonial society due to their prevalence in the security arrangements of white homes as well as in the security forces of white supremacist Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa. The intensity of the relationship between white minorities, their canine pets and the surrounding African population points toward the uncomfortable conclusion that in the heightened racial environments of decolonizing settler Africa, dogs could be made to be racist.

Walk in India and South Africa: notes towards a decolonial and transnational feminist politics

The essay discusses Maya Rao's Walk and The Mothertongue Project's Walk: South Africa to explore the languages of transnational and embodied feminist politics that these performances conjure. The two performances are instances of artistic responses to sexualized violence in India and South Africa as they engage with the politics of walking in the city. Working with Chandra Talpade Mohanty's formulation of feminist solidarity (2013) and Boaventura de Sousa Santos's translation-as-dialogue (2014), I discuss the radical forms of feminist methodological imaginations attempted and nurtured by them. This essay examines the political and aesthetic potential of translatability of performance in the world of global asymmetries and the implications it holds for intersectional feminist conversations in the global South.

After the Hurricane: Afro-Latina Decolonial Feminisms andDestierro

The first version of this piece was written for the opening panel of the 2017 Conference of the Association for Feminist Ethics and Social Theory (FEAST) in Florida. The panel, “Decolonial Feminism: Theories and Praxis,” offered the opportunity for Black and Latinx feminist philosophers and decolonial scholars to consider their arrival to decolonial feminisms, their various points of emergence, and the utility of decolonial politics for liberation movements and organizing. I was prepared to discuss some genealogies of US Latina decolonial feminisms with a focus on the relationship of decolonial feminisms to other feminist articulations—for example, a consideration of the relation and divergence between decolonial and postcolonial feminism. I was particularly interested in examining some of the “decolonizing constellations of resistance and love” created by Black, Indigenous, Latinx feminisms (Simpson 2014b). I wanted to track the intergenerational labor of relationality as a part of women of color politics and to discuss how these politics unseat coloniality in its variant iterations.

The Decolonising Camera: Street Photography and the Bandung Myth

This article examines the visual archive of the 1955 Asian-African Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia. Better known as the Bandung Conference or simply Bandung, this diplomatic meeting hosted 29 delegations from countries in Africa and Asia to address questions of sovereignty and development facing the emergent postcolonial world. A number of well-known leaders attended, including Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Zhou Enlai of China, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, and Sukarno of the host country, Indonesia. Given its importance, the meeting was documented extensively by photojournalists. The argument of this article is that the visual archive that resulted has contributed to the enduring symbolism and mythology of Bandung as a moment of Third World solidarity. More specifically, the street photography style of many images - with leaders walking down the streets of Bandung surrounded by adoring crowds - depicted an informality and intimacy that conveyed an accessible, anti-hierarchical view of the leaders who were present. These qualities of conviviality and optimism can also be seen in images of conference dinners, airport arrivals, delegate speeches, and working groups. Drawing upon the critical work of scholars of southern Africa and Southeast Asia, this article summarily positions the concept of the 'decolonising camera' to describe both the act of documenting political decolonisation as well as the ways in which visual archives produced during decolonisation can contribute to new iconographies of the political, which are both factual and mythic at once.

Place, Land, and the Decolonization of the Settler Soul

ABSTRACTMy aim in this essay is to wonder where in the world I am now as a scholar of place and a lover of places, and to give some shape to where I have been. I begin by reflecting on how I came to discover that “place” matters—at a historical moment (the 1990s) in which academic interest in place surged. Next, I address some of the controversies and silences that surround critical pedagogies of place. Much of this discussion is inspired by diverse perspectives toward the difficult and contested work of “decolonization,” one of the primary aims of critical place study. Finally, I delve into my own uncertainties and hopes around decolonization: what I discuss here as the lifelong, generational project of cosmological homecoming—the cultivation of the soul. I hope to show that the politics of decolonization must be spacious enough for white settlers like myself to examine and cultivate our own interior worlds. Whatever its prospects, decolonization depends on human beings who know who and where they are, who and where they come from, and how to negotiate the interplay between the soul and the polis.

Introduction: Trade Union Networks and the Politics of Expertise in an Age of Afro-Asian Solidarity

Abstract Across 1950s Afro-Asia, the ongoing process of political decolonization occurred in tandem with increased connection between the local, the regional, and the global. A variety of internationalist movements emerged, much more polyphonic than the voices of the political leaders who had gathered at the Bandung Conference. Trade union networks played a particularly important role not just in organizing labor but in connecting local unions to regional and global ones. These networks were held together by exchanges between local African and Asian trade unions and large international federations such as the World Federation of Trade Unions and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. But they were held together at least as much by more horizontal connections in pursuit of Afro-Asian solidarity. Many of the latter built on anti-imperialist alliances, revived or reconstituted, dating back to the interwar years. A focus on the trade-union internationalism of the period can recover a “chronology of possibility” in early Cold War Afro-Asia that has since become obscured by the internationalist failings of the 1960s. It also demonstrates the limited analytical value of the term “non-alignment” for the broader Afro-Asian moment during the early years of the Cold War. Instead, it recasts the 1950s as a global moment for Afro-Asia, in which internationalists built networks that were elastic enough to encompass a wide variety of actors and ideas and resistant enough to withstand the pressure of bodies larger and more powerful.

African Youth on the Move in Postwar Greater France: Experiential Knowledge and Decolonial Politics at the End of the Empire

African Youth on the Move in Postwar Greater France: Experiential Knowledge and Decolonial Politics at the End of the Empire

The celebritization of indigenous activism: Tame Iti as media figure

In recent years, a number of indigenous activists have gained celebrity status in ways that carry interesting implications for contemporary cultural politics. This article focuses on the celebrification of Tame Iti, arguably Aotearoa/New Zealand’s best-known Māori activist, within a wider cultural context characterized by intensifying media convergence, an expanding politics of decolonization, and the continuing elaboration of global indigenous mediascapes, including the Māori Television Service. We draw on forms of conjunctural analysis to explore how wider historical forces and social dynamics come to be embodied in particular flesh and blood individuals, who are thereby constituted as resonant media figures, who operate as both objects and agents of struggle, and who at once intervene in and shape, while also being shaped by, key terrains of contemporary discourse and cultural politics.

Affective registers of postcolonial crisis: the Kampala Tank Hill party

AbstractA drinking party in 1963 precipitated a crisis over newly independent Uganda's sovereignty and the respectability of a new postcolonial ruling elite. Under Kampala's multiracial veneer in the early 1960s lurked bawdy British youth culture and radical African youth politics. When Europeans at a party in the elite suburb of Tank Hill allegedly mocked African aspirations for urban respectability and political sovereignty, UPC (Uganda Peoples Congress) Youth Wing activists used the affair to elicit public expressions of anger at the collusion of conservative politicians and racist former colonizers. Prime Minister Milton Obote attempted to channel that anger into nationalist unity but soon found common cause with British diplomats in expelling intemperate youth from Uganda's governing bureaucracy. The affair points to both the power and the limits of the affective politics of decolonization as well as the relationship between youth wings and the politics of respectability in early postcolonial Africa.

OPÓR NATURALNY. AMEREIDA JAKO NIEHEROICZNA WYPRAWA I UNIWERSYTET BEZWARUNKOWY

Przez metaforyczne wyrażenie „opór naturalny” autorka wskazuje na wciąż aktualne przekonanie o konieczności odkrywania „morza wewnętrznego” Ameryki Łacińskiej, nieustającego wysiłku „obmyślania Ameryki na nowo” (M.L. Pratt). Przypomina złożone, ambiwalentne, konsekwencje opisów natury A. von Humboldta dla tożsamości i historii Nowego Świata (wzmożenie kulturowych efektów kolonizacji a zarazem wpływ na polityczną dekolonizację kontynentu). Ten historyczny kontekst jest istotny dla rozumienia projektu dekolonizacyjnego zwanego Amereida, w którym wykorzystano „słabe”, tj. poetyckie, artystyczne narzędzia oporu. Barbaruk przedstawia zrealizowaną w 1965 r. przez architektów, poetów i artystów związanych z Universidad Católica de Valparaíso wyprawę (travesía) z Ziemi Ognistej do Santa Cruz de la Sierra (Boliwia) oraz założone przez nich Miasto Otwarte (1970), w którym połączyli pracę, życie i edukację studentów. Podporządkowanie architektury poezji stanowi według autorki praktykę dekonstrukcyjną, która ma na celu realizację przypisanego uniwersytetowi oporu wobec świata zewnętrznego. Miasto Otwarte stanowić może model „uniwersytetu bezwarunkowego” (J. Derrida), ale też latourowskiego „przedmiotu opornego” (problem odcięcia się grupy od rzeczywistości społeczno politycznej za czasów dyktatury A. Pinocheta).

The Place of Students and Workers Activism in Politics: A Historical Reflection

History has revealed that overtime Students and Workers through their activism have played a significant role in politics as they have acted as checks in any political dispensation that is against the common interest. This is because while the proletariats (workers) produce the wealth plundered by those in authority, the students form the literati, on whose shoulders rest the conscience of the society. It was in line with this mandate that in the 19thCentury, Russian students were at the forefront of the struggle against the Czars’ exploitative and dictatorial social system. Similarly, Chinese students constituted the most active groups in the fight against feudalism and Japanese colonization. In the 1960s, students took up arms in opposition to inhumane Western consumer societies and their exploitation and repression of the poor, black and yellow races. Also, American students were actively involved in the civil right movements, especially in the Southern parts. Under the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) they created a climate of opinion about the Vietnam War which the American people could not ignore. In Africa, outbursts in Mali, Zaire, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria and South Africa have shown students and workers as an important factor in decolonization politics. This is because the oppressive policies of the state have most often further impoverish them both physically and psychologically. However, with the attainment of Independence, this role has been crippled by the forces which they paper intends to interrogate. Data obtained from primary and secondary sources were deployed to carry out the study with an analytical and narrative historical method. Findings indicate that oppressive politics has been the major factor that stimulated their role in politics especially during the decolonization process and that in the neocolonial state, emerging forces and policies of the government are directed at destroying this role. Keywords: Workers, Students, Governance, Politics