Colonial Politics Research Articles

Paying Up

This article describes the mechanisms by which the Puerto Rico Highways and Transportation Authority (PRHTA), a state agency created “para dar al pueblo las mejores carreteras” (to give the people the best highways), has exacerbated uneven resource distribution in Puerto Rico. The PRHTA has functioned as a conduit for regressive restructuring—the work of building financial and physical infrastructures that transfer public wealth to elites. The function of the PRHTA is emblematic of how this politics of regressive social transfer is enabled by colonial capture—the articulation of colonial structures of governance to insulate political-economic power and public institutions from grass-roots and electoral mandates. This paper’s first section offers a brief historical background of the refashioning of Puerto Rico’s colonial politics since the 2016 debt crisis and the longer durée infrastructures to which these political changes pertain. The second section argues that, prior to 2016, political officials refashioned Puerto Rico’s public highways as revenue corridors for global capital in ways that anticipated and fostered the crisis. Contracts between the PRHTA, financial institutions, and private toll road operators reshaped key transportation infrastructures as avenues for the continuing capture of public resources through service fees and payments to bondholders. The final section discusses the material resources that these “public” services effectively transfer to private interests. Compared to median income from 2012 to 2021, the data on tolling rates begin to suggest, although hardly describe in full, the inequitable economic effects of these politics.

The Case of Dutch and Japanese Colonial Political Policies on Islamic Education in Indonesia

During the colonial period, education must have been very difficult to get, because the colonizers who were in power at that time did not want education to reach the indigenous people. The Islamic education system during the Japanese occupation was basically the same as the Islamic education system in the Dutch era, namely in addition to the pesantren education system established by traditional scholars, there was also a classical education system as seen in madrasas. The Dutch have colonized Indonesia for centuries. And during the Dutch colonial period, access to Islamic education was very difficult because Dutch education was more dominant in non-Islamic education. While Japan actually gave relief to Islamic education in Indonesia, it was precisely the waiver from Japan that made Japan withdraw from Indonesia. The research method used in this study is a Literature Study that collects data from various written sources. This research aims to find out the cases of political policies related to Islamic Education in Indonesia during the Dutch and Japanese colonial periods.

From Asia to Iberia: the mobility of early modern reliquaries☆

AbstractIn his famous 1543 Treatise on Relics, Jean Calvin complained that if one were to gather all the purported pieces of the True Cross from the churches and cathedrals of Europe, it would ‘form a whole ship's cargo’. This comment not only highlights the questionable authenticity of relics, but also alludes to their inherent mobility. Indeed, as portable religious objects, relics played an essential role in the drive to export Christianity across the globe. Bound as it was to contemporary mercantile and colonial politics, Christian proselytization was imbricated with the circulation of material goods. Objects crafted in far off regions, such as Gujarat and Nagasaki, gained new life in European liturgical contexts. This essay examines imported caskets crafted from mother‐of‐pearl, tortoiseshell, and lacquer that were transformed into reliquaries on the Iberian Peninsula arguing that such reliquaries harnessed the established potency of the itinerant relic, while simultaneously inventing a new visual idiom that spoke to the precarity of the Catholic faith as it traversed great transoceanic distances. In so doing, it demonstrates the active role played by technologies of transit in the shaping of material and devotional culture in the early modern era.

Public health as critique: examining the caste of filth and disease in Katherine Mayo’s Mother India

Drawing on Dalit writer Kanwal Bharti’s 2019 translation of Katherine Mayo’s Mother India (1927), this essay argues that through the employment of a radical anti-caste reading practice, the original text yields a powerful critique of Hindu caste structures and Hindu supremacist ideologies that assume a new significance in contemporary India. An against-the-grain reading of Mayo’s emphasis on life and health as opposed to casteized purity, when unmoored from the author’s original intentions, offers a vision of public health that operates in conjunction with the social, and can be reclaimed to the advantage of the marginalized and dispossessed. In its emphasis on the impact of colonial modernity on marginalized lives in colonial India, the text finds an intriguing alignment with radical anti-caste politics. This solidarity between what is widely recognized as a colonialist critique on the one hand, and radical anti-caste thought on the other, I argue, is a reminder of the uneasy relationship between colonial politics, Hindu nationalism, and anti-caste politics that sought to use colonial rule to strategically counter Hindu supremacy.

A dynamic and critical approach to belonging as a dimension of occupation

ABSTRACT Doing, being, becoming, and belonging have been theorized as dimensions of occupation, yet belonging has received comparatively less attention from occupational scientists. The occupation-based literature tends to equate belonging with connectedness and to take a sedentarist approach in which (transnational) mobilities are considered as a challenge for occupational engagement and belonging. This paper critically examines belonging as developed through occupations and considers its constructed, dynamic, and multifaceted nature in the context of migration. Our theoretical framework is informed by transnational approaches, the mobilities paradigm, and transculturality. We draw from a cross-national comparative ethnography including 86 interviews with recent Vietnamese migrants in Vancouver, Canada, and Paris, France, as well as returning migrants in Vietnam. Our findings address participants’ belonging with regards to 1) routines, social ties, and familiarity; 2) mobile and immobile occupations; and 3) (post-)colonial politics of belonging. This study deepens understandings of the dynamic nature of occupation and belonging as well as how both are shaped by and can reproduce power dynamics. First, we contend that occupation and belonging are inherently situated, yet are not necessarily bounded to a single location. Belonging develops through routine occupations involving familiar people, objects, and amenities, which can themselves be mobile or accessible in multiple settings. Second, we emphasize how some occupations can become benchmarks for belonging, particularly in Western immigrant-receiving countries influenced by assimilationist and (post-)colonial dynamics. Lastly, we underscore individuals’ agency in employing occupations in ways to negotiate and claim belonging to their receiving and/or sending countries.

Silent Speech in Phaswane Mpe's HIV/AIDS Writing.

South African writer Phaswane Mpe (1970-2004) is often canonized and memorialized as a brave truth-teller who broke the silence on HIV/AIDS in the context of government silence and denial. And yet Mpe's writings-including poetry, short stories, a novel, and scholarly criticism-contemplate illness as a problem for truth and representation in works that linger in silence and ambiguity. This article analyses the tension between silence and speech in Mpe's creative writing in response to HIV/AIDS. Using Mpe's works as an illustrative example, I trouble the desire to read illness narratives as forms of truth-telling and silence-breaking. The desire for the transparency of speech in a global archive of illness narratives also informs a colonial politics of representation that instrumentalizes literature as ethnographic evidence. Mpe's writing on HIV/AIDS refuses a demand for authenticity by holding the embodied experience of disease at a slight remove from the reader in order to register the forms of spiritual and epistemological crisis that epidemic and social loss produce. My contention is that the political stakes of this writing lie not in Mpe's ability to render a public health crisis with verisimilitude, but in the capacity for writing to provide solace and sublimity faced with death. Through an analysis of Mpe's fiction and poetry, this article proposes a methodology for reading the politics of illness narratives across globalized space which attends to the world-building potential of creative expression as a radical practice that resists incorporative models of aesthetic intelligibility.

Indigenous Natures and the Anthropocene: Racial Capitalism, Violent Materialities, and the Colonial Politics of Representation

AbstractIndigenous Peoples are gaining renewed attention within both policy and academia, as examples of “resilience” and of non‐humanist, non‐modern ways of relating to nature, which might, it is hoped, provide tools to withstand the socio‐ecological crises associated with “the Anthropocene”. This paper argues that such representations obscure both their own colonial foundations and the ongoing forms of racialised dispossession and ecocide faced by Indigenous Peoples today. Instead, we conceptualise indigeneity and nature as deeply entangled categories that are co‐produced with capitalist modernity. Engaging anti‐colonial and Marxist scholarship, and drawing on our long‐term research with Indigenous movements in Bolivia and Colombia, we highlight how discursive and material assemblages of indigeneity and nature are dialectically linked to capitalist processes of dispossession and subaltern efforts to contest these. We further highlight how romanticised accounts of non‐modern nature‐cultures are unsettled by the violent world‐making of colonial capitalism and the unequal burdens placed on Indigenous territories and bodies. We use an ethnographic vignette from the Bolivian Chaco to illustrate the messy everyday ways in which real Indigenous people navigate, contest, endure, and make do amidst the contradictory processes of racialisation, dispossession, and conditional recognition that characterise their positioning within colonial capitalism. In doing so, we show how thinking from the sacrifice zones of extractive capitalism unsettles contemporary debates on decolonising nature in the Anthropocene.

Decolonisation agriculture: challenging colonisation through the reconstruction of agriculture in Western Kurdistan (Rojava)

This article examines the colonial homogenising policies of the Syrian Ba’ath regime and the subsequent decolonisation processes that led to the emergence of Rojava as a pluriverse. In 1963, the Ba’ath regime implemented nation-state colonialism in the predominantly Kurdish region, using agricultural modernisation as a tool for its colonisation efforts. This modernisation bolstered the central state, perpetuated the underdevelopment of the region as a periphery, and asserted control through the settlement and distribution of land to Arab families loyal to the regime. Following the regime’s collapse in Rojava in 2012, the communities that comprise the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) dismantled the colonial agricultural system. They developed a decentralised governance and agrarian development approach, referred to here as the decolonisation of agriculture. Based on interviews and fieldwork in the region, this article explores the interplay between agricultural development and colonial politics, as well as the critical role of agriculture in the broader struggle for decolonisation. We conclude that in the anti-colonial struggle, people and the rhizomatic governance structures they develop challenge colonial submission to the central state, exploring life beyond the nation-state, which is crucial for a decolonial shift.

Counter-Mapping Community: Using Inquiry-Based Curriculum to Interrogate the Politics of Place with Fifth-Grade Students

This paper reports on a qualitative participatory curriculum study where 5th graders from southeast Wisconsin investigate the concept of community through a process of counter-mapping. Framed by place-based education and spatial justice, this counter-mapping curriculum centers student collaboration and analysis, which provides a way for students to share and complicate their relations to place and implicit spatial knowledge of community. Through this curriculum students demonstrated the ability to collaboratively analyze normative assumptions embedded in the idea of community. In the process, they interrogated economic, racialized, and colonial politics of place, and started to interrogate dominant white spatial epistemologies. Counter-mapping as a curricular method not only facilitates new understanding through a shared critical spatial analysis but can also cultivate new ways of relating to and being with one another that are essential for more-just spatial imaginations.

“The Hand That Tried to Feed You”

Abstract This article offers an in-depth reading of Flora Veit-Wild’s They Called You Dambudzo: A Memoir (2020) and its contentious racial politics of representation. Through the memoir, which I contend is an apologia pro vita sua, a justification for the author’s own life and work, Veit-Wild seeks to dispel long-standing accusations that she has benefitted from Dambudzo Marechera and his legacy. As she depicts herself as a magnanimous activist and scholar, Veit-Wild reverses the script by portraying Marechera as a “galling scoundrel” who “depended on others to sustain him.” In the process, far from offering an authoritative portrait of Marechera that we can trust, the memoir dehumanises the writer. Suggesting that Veit-Wild’s relationship with Marechera was motivated more by racialised objectification than love and respect, the text reproduces a white saviour narrative that reinscribes racist tropes of representation. While it also engages other works by Veit-Wild, this article delves into They Called You Dambudzo’s (un)critical reception, its unsettling portrayal of Marechera as a spoilt, ungrateful, and mentally ill writer who “had a way of taking for granted whatever was done for him,” Veit-Wild’s self-representation as both Marechera’s victim and saviour, her misappropriation of Marechera’s thought to enforce colourblindness, and the vexed colonial politics of speaking for others that the memoir lays bare.

Beyond Colonial Politics of Identity: Being and Becoming Female Youth in Colonial Kenya

This paper draws on biographical research among the Akamba and the Luo communities in Eastern and Western Kenya, respectively. Our research explored how practices of adolescence as a process, an institution, and a performance of identity interact with colonial modernities and imaginaries in complex ways. The biographical research was carried out predominantly with women born in the late colonial period in Kenya. We provide critical reflections on the process and affordances of our embodied storytelling approach, which we position as an Africanist methodology and a decolonial research practice. This research and approach provided women with a space to narrate and perform their lived experience, potentially disrupting epistemic inequities that are embedded in the way research on growing up in the past is carried out. The discussions show how colonialism interacted with other factors, including gender and generational power, tradition, girls’ agency, and other life characteristics like poverty and family situation, in order to influence the lived experiences of women. Going beyond the narratives of victimhood that characterise coming of age in similar spaces, we present women’s emergent, incomplete, and incongruent agency. We position this agency as the diverse ways in which people come to terms with their difficult contexts. The discussion also points to the need for unsettling the settled thinking about girlhood and coming of age in specific historical spaces in the global South.

The Smoke of The Incense and The Roar of The Lion: Confucianism Under The Colonial Political System in Indonesia

<p>This article aims to provide a brief overview regarding the existence of Confucianism as a religion in the Dutch East Indies and its relationship with the colonial ruling regime during the last four decades of Dutch rule. With the overview, it is hoped that the type of colonial policy that was made towards the Chinese ethnic belief could be understood, whether in social or political aspects and also its relevance to world developments that took place at the time. To realise this goal, the method used in this paper is the historical research method which consists of four stages: data search (heuristic), source criticism, interpretation, and reconstruction as a form of final academic presentation. With this method, it is hoped that a short paper can be presented that is arranged in a reconstructive manner and is able to provide answers to research problems. As a final conclusion, this paper reveals that in principle, colonial political interests cannot be separated from the existence of religion in her colony, including Confucianism. Especially the international aspect that began to colour the existence of this religion in the Dutch East Indies colony became the main motivation for the colonial government to determine their policies. In this case, the dualistic nature of Dutch colonial policy can be recognised.</p>

Beyond Nation and Empire? Questioning the Role of Religious Missions under Portuguese Colonial Rule at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

From the beginning of European overseas expansion in the fifteenth century, religious missions occupied an important place in the internal organisation of colonial empires. Their contribution to the ideological structuring of imperialism and the interaction with local populations is undeniable. With the emergence of the new imperialism and the scramble for Africa (after the 1870s), the missions, often anticipating the colonial political and administrative presence, enhanced their role as advocates of Europe’s “civilising mission”, above all through the education of the colonised peoples. For Portuguese decision-makers, the religious missions, with a multi-century tradition, had an important role in defending territorial claims overseas and promoting the empire’s nationalisation. However, the lack of national missionaries, Christianity’s inter-confessional competition in the nineteenth century and the emergence of international legal rules protecting missionary activities hindered Portugal’s strategies. Using sources from several archives (in Lisbon, the Vatican, and elsewhere) to emphasise the role of a transnational missionary staff and the international law of missions, this text intersects these aspects, examining their convergence in the controversial case of the exit and replacement of Jesuit missionaries in Mozambique in 1910–1911, to demonstrate the need to look at the missionary issues in the Portuguese overseas domains from perspectives that go beyond nation and empire.

Sanitation is political: understanding stakeholders’ incentives in funding sanitation for the Gaza Strip, Palestine

The Gaza Strip is dependent on external aid to deliver basic services, including water and sanitation. Such services are not sustainable due to the Israeli occupation and the limited financial and technical capacities of service providers and the state. This paper examines the incentives of stakeholders in delivering sanitation services in the Gaza Strip through a qualitative institutional economics analysis of literature supplemented with qualitative key informant interviews. External aid is crucial to deliver basic services in the Gaza Strip. However, this has created a dependency that undermines the sustainability of sanitation services. Donor agencies often prioritise capital expenditure on visible infrastructure, such as wastewater treatment, without addressing its long and short-term operational needs; hence the Gaza Strip’s needs are continually addressed as an emergency response. The Palestinian Authority and Hamas de facto governments lack sovereignty over the Gaza Strip and Palestine. Therefore, they also lack the capacity and incentives to create an enabling environment for delivering safely managed sanitation. This paper contributes to development policy literature, the politics of infrastructure and wider politics of settler colonialism and siege basic services such as water and sanitation.

Cultural Pluralisms: Neo-Nollywood and Biyi Bandele’s Ẹlẹ́ṣin Ọba (2022)

ABSTRACT In Biyi Bandele’s last feature, Ẹlẹ́ṣin Ọba (2022), adapted from Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, Bandele registers an awareness for the multiple film cultures that have shaped filmmaking in Nigeria. Ẹlẹ́ṣin Ọba is structured as a homage to the legacies of Yorùbá traveling theatricalities, while retaining the visual codes of contemporary cinema, including in the ways it co-opts traits of Western and neo-Nollywood filmmaking. In this analysis of Ẹlẹ́ṣin Ọba, I map the visual awareness it establishes of the legacies of filmmaking in Nigeria, while also centering the film’s thematic registers of colonial politics, cultural abjection, and gendered representations as constitutive of the colonial world in which the story is situated. I frame Bandele’s pluralistic approach as a spirited engagement with the unstable category that colonization produces for the erstwhile colonized person. That is, it is not only the characters in Ẹlẹ́ṣin Ọba who are forced to interplay between Yorùbá and British intellectual and cultural practices; Bandele, too, is placed in this complex interrogation, as embedded in his stylistic approach.

에메 세제르 시의 장소 정체성 연구

Aimé Césaire, in opposition to France's colonial policies, vividly portrays the inner consciousness of the poetic subject resisting colonial politics through his work, Notebook of a return to My Native Land. Also embodies the place identity, which is inevitably separated from the alienation of the colony, with extreme negativity. As a result In the study of Aimé Césaire's poetry, an examination of the place identity within the poetic imaginary space serves as a crucial indicator of the Négritude poet's foundational identity, as well as playing a significant role in interpreting the poet's worldview. The poetic representational spaces depicted in Notebook of a return to My Native Land are filled with negativity, characterized by forgetfulness, anger, confinement, fear, and hunger. This study can derive meaningful research result to identify the driving force of Négritude's counter-discourse to recover Négritude's poetic identity and black identity, which is paradoxically embodied through the internality of negativity expressed by self-sacrifice and twisted self-consciousness such as plateaus, islands, moor hills, underground caves, cities, and ponds, appearing in Notebook of a return to My Native Land.

The Laws of Indiscipline: Anténor Firmin, Racial Justice, and the Case for a Humanist Anthropology

ABSTRACT Haitian intellectual Anténor Firmin is seldom recognised for his contribution to the social sciences outside of the Caribbean. Yet, as a member of the Société d'anthropologie de Paris, Firmin authored a robust critique of the discipline at a moment when it was most invested in North Atlantic racist and colonial politics. Rereading his 1885 De l'égalité des races humaines as a work of intellectual and political indiscipline, this article demonstrates how Firmin's unique engagement with anthropology has led to an enduring problem of formal and substantial illegibility, one largely responsible for its silencing in the history of the discipline.

Colonial Legacies: The American Museum of Natural History, the Theodore Roosevelt Equestrian Statue, and Public History

In November 2021, the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) announced that the Theodore Roosevelt equestrian statue would be moved from the museum’s entrance to the not yet completed Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, North Dakota. The statue depicts Roosevelt riding ahead of semi-clad walking figures of a Native American and an African man. Long the subject and site of protests, this relocation was not the museum’s first attempt to address public concerns. Activists suggested it be simply removed, but others argued that Roosevelt was a significant figure, he should not be judged by present standards, and the statue provides a chance for public education. In response to earlier protests, the AMNH created Addressing the Statue, an exhibition that explored the statue’s origins and meanings as well as alternatives to it. The exhibition was organized to create a self-contesting historical space in which the precise meaning of the past — and its commemoration — was debated and left open. This article explores the character and nature of this space. It argues that this approach failed and could not erase the politics of colonialism the statue embodied nor create a new conversation about history.

Douala–Bruyères/Vosges Mountains: Where Family Photographs Can Lead

Abstract: The study of two photographs from the 1950s, in the possession of a Cameroonian family, reveals little-noticed transnational flows of people from the geopolitical and national peripheries of the world, linked by the (post-)colonial relations and geopolitical alliances of their states. Bruyères, a small town in eastern France where these photographs were taken, turns out to be not only an unexpected and distant crossroads of French colonial politics, but also the site of decisive battles in World War II and, indirectly related, of US racial policies towards Japanese migrants in the US.

“Among the French People”: The Departmentalization of Mayotte and the Colonial Politics of Inclusion

Abstract With its 2011 change in administrative status, Mayotte, a small island colony in the Mozambique Channel, became the only contemporary French department with an indigenous African Muslim population. Mayotte's departmentalization required restructuring a colonial local legal system influenced by Islamic, Swahili, and Malagasy legal practices. By putting legislation and public discourse concerning Mayotte's status into conversation with earlier political movements within the French Empire and scholarship on French colonial governance, I show how Mahoran politicians, writers, and activists advocating for departmentalization invoked claims to racialized notions of belonging “among the French People.” These claims were joined by demands that France fulfill its Republican promise by granting juridicopolitical inclusion to a colonial population. These distinct but related political discourses illuminate central features of the mutually constitutive relationship between law, race, and citizenship in the French Republic.