Politics Of Decolonization Research Articles

Gender and the politics of decolonization in early 1960s French cinema

In a recent monograph, Todd Shepard has implored us to examine the ways in ‘which the Algerian War modified the form and the content of debates surrounding contemporary sexuality in France’, from the nationalist revolution spearheaded by the FLN in Algeria, to the sexual paradigm shift of May ’68 (2017: 21). An important injunction, undoubtedly. But also an injunction that, as I will show, could also be inverted to examine how, in the world of cinema, the radicalization of identity politics catalysed by decolonization found itself similarly distorted by a tendency among male directors to imagine the war through the lens of their own androcentric preoccupations, fantasies and anxieties: anxieties that, in the case of Jacques Rivette’s Paris nous appartient (1961), Louis Malle’s Le Feu Follet (1963), and Jacques Dupont’s Les Distractions (1960), ricochet erratically between masochistic and misogynistic tales of impotence and carnal retribution; anxieties that subtly twist the dynamics of the decolonial debate into strange shapes, places and meanings.

Utopian Acts 2018 Conference Report: Birkbeck, University of London, September 1, 2018

Utopian Acts 2018 Conference Report: Birkbeck, University of London, September 1, 2018

Utopian Acts 2018 Conference Report: Birkbeck, University of London, September 1, 2018

Utopian Acts 2018 Conference Report: Birkbeck, University of London, September 1, 2018

The Economic Decolonisation of Indonesia: a Bird�s-eye View

An oft-quoted statement by the Indonesian nationalist leader Haji Agus Salim runs as follows: The economic side of the Indonesian Revolution has yet to begin. (Higgins, 1957: 102, cited in Lindblad, 2008: 2). The statement was made shortly before or shortly after the transition of sovereignty from Dutch colonial rule on 27 December 1949. At long last, the Netherlands had acknowledged that Indonesia was independent, which brought the Indonesian Revolution to its logical conclusion. But, by the conditions laid down at the Round Table Conference in The Hague in late 1949, the interests of Dutch private capital were still omnipresent in the Indonesian economy. In addition, the Indonesian government was obliged to consult the Netherlands government in matters affecting the economy until the debt of the former colony to the metropolitan mother country had been repaid in full. As Haji Agus Salim rightly stressed, economic and political decolonisation did not coincide but followed different historical trajectories.This contribution offers an abridged account of the process of economic decolonisation as it unfolded between 1945 and 1959, from the proclamation of independence until the nationalisation of the vast majority of Dutch-owned companies that had retained operations in Indonesia after independence.1 Four themes serve as devices tofurther our understanding of the process of economic decolonisation. These four themes, in order of appearance, are below: the new spirit in Indonesian economic life following the transfer of sovereignty; the changing climate of economic policy-making during the 1950s; the response and accommodation by remaining Dutch companies; and, finally, the concluding phase of expropriation and nationalisation.A couple of points of departure need to be spelled out. The ideological basis of the thrust towards economic decolonisation in Indonesia was provided by a small booklet, Ekonomi Indonesia, which made a very timely appearance in 1949. Its subtitle, Dari ekonomi kolonial ke ekonomi nasional, carried an immediate appeal to contemporary public discourse, offering the briefest possible summary of what economic decolonisation in Indonesia was all about. For the remainder, the book offered very little concrete guidance (Hadinoto, 1949). A second point of departure may be traced in the international historiography on Indonesian decolonisation, notably John Sutters voluminous PhD dissertation on domestic developments up to the general election in 1955 (Sutter, 1959). Although providing a wealth of information from government sources and press material, Sutters survey offers little on the fate of private business enterprises; in addition, he did not consult Dutch-language sources. Yet another point of departure in our quest to better understand economic decolonisation in Indonesia is, of course, the wider international context of the Cold War. Decolonisation in Indonesia, whether political or economic, did not take place in a vacuum but was intrinsically linked to Indonesias efforts to position itself in the tension between the Western powers and the Soviet bloc. Just as Sukarnos young republic secured American support against the returning Dutch by heavy-handedly crushing the Communist uprising in Madiun in 1948; did increasing flirtation with the Soviet bloc during the Guided Democracy period alienate Indonesia from the internationalcommunity and bring flows of incoming foreign investment to a virtual standstill?

Climate justice, commons, and degrowth

Economic inequality reduces the political space for addressing climate change, by producing fear-based populism. Only when the safety, social status, and livelihoods of all members of society are assured will voluntary, democratic decisions be possible to reverse climate change and fairly mitigate its effects. Socio-environmental and climate justice, commoning, and decolonization are pre-conditions for participatory, responsible governance that both signals and assists the development of equitable socio-political systems. Degrowth movements, when they explicitly prioritize equity, can help to focus activism for climate justice and sustainable livelihoods.This paper overviews the theoretical grounding for these arguments, drawing from the work of ecofeminist and Indigenous writers.Indigenous (and also ecofeminist) praxis is grounded in activists' leadership for commoning and resistance to extraction, the fossil fuel economy, and commodified property rights. These movements are building a politics of decolonization, respect, solidarity, and hope rather than xenophobia and despair.

Import Control under Regionalism in Colonial Nigeria, 1954-1960

The colonization of Nigeria by the British opened a new vista in the history of the country as various ethnic groups came under the British system of administration. Parts of the colonial administrative structures included, native courts, native authorities, native treasuries and protectorates. Historians, political scientists, sociologists, economists and scholars of various disciplines have through their works, interrogated Nigeria’s colonial past. Indirect rule system, colonial infrastructure, the rise of nationalism, currency circulation, colonial system of banking, colonial system of education and exploitation of Nigeria’s resources are typical examples of Nigeria’s colonial experience. Similarly, scholars have made attempts at interrogating various aspects of the country’s colonial history. These include, colonial agricultural policies, colonial export control policies, marketing boards, trade restrictions, politics of decolonization, politics of transfer of power, constitutional developments, regionalism, nationalist movements, colonial tariff system and issues that deal with Nigeria’s economic development in the colonial period. These intellectual efforts have not beamed their searchlight on how import control in an era of regionalism was used as one of the strategies of decolonization before the country’s independence. Thus, the interrogation of a history of import control as an integral part of decolonization seems to have been neglected. It is against this backdrop that this paper interrogated import control as colonial economic policy which aided the entrenchment of regionalism in Nigeria. The paper in its conclusion argued that import control under regionalism was one of the strategies used by the colonial government in the devolution of some of its economic powers to the regions through constitutional framework.Key Words: Nigeria, Colonialism, Regionalism, Import Control

Confronting “dark” colonial pasts: a historical analysis of practices of representation in Belgian and Congolese schools, 1945–2015

ABSTRACT Over half a century since the last wave of political decolonisation, the handling of “dark” colonial histories remains topical. Influenced by the postcolonial turn, this study aims to examine, from a novel historical and comparative perspective, evolving textbook representations of Belgian colonialism and its legacy in Belgian and Congolese school history education since 1945. Its diachronic and synchronic narrative analysis identifies continuity and change, and convergences and divergences, in perspectives, emphases, and silences in textbook narratives. Pinpointing the influence of colonialism and postcolonial discourse on educational practices of representation, the study explores the sometimes contradictory influences on these practices of politics, academic historiography, popular historical culture, and processes of educationalisation. The analysis illuminates parallel shifts in the two countries from triumphalist colonialist ideologies towards more critical postcolonial perspectives. In relation to educational practices of representation, often aimed at socialising citizens into worldviews sanctioned by the political dispensation of the time, the traces of these shifts have reflected dominant societal discourses while being largely at odds with historiographical advances. These dynamics are evidence of a slow process of decolonisation of existing power structures and knowledge systems which only gradually gave way to a postcolonial world still in the making.

Maritime labour, transnational political trajectories and decolonization from below: the opposition to the 1935 British Shipping Assistance Act

AbstractThis article uses a discussion of struggles over attempts by the National Union of Seamen to exclude seafarers from the maritime labour market in the inter‐war period to contribute to debates at the intersection of maritime spaces and transnational labour geographies (cf. Balachandran 2012; Høgsbjerg 2013). By focusing on struggles engendered by the British Shipping (Assistance) Act of 1935, I explore some of the transnational dynamics through which racialized forms of trade unionism were contested. I argue that the political trajectories, solidarities and organizing spaces constructed by the alliances formed to oppose the effects of the act shaped articulations of ‘decolonization from below’ (James 2015). In this way, engaging with the political trajectories and activities of activists from organizations like the Colonial Seamen's Association can reveal new ways of understanding the spatial politics of decolonization and new accounts of who or how such processes were articulated and contested. I conclude the article by arguing that engagement with these struggles can help assert the importance of forms of subaltern agency in shaping processes of decolonization.

Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora by Sana Aiyar, and: Birth Control in the Decolonizing Caribbean: Reproductive Politics and Practice on Four Islands, 1930–1970 by Nicole C. Bourbonnais, and: A Problem of Great Importance: Population, Race, and Power in the British Empire, 1918–1973 by Karl Ittmann, and: Unreasonable Histories: Nativism, Multiracial Lives, and the Genealogical Imagination in British Africa

material culture to the commodity change and biography of things approaches. Many contributors,infact, followtheglobal storiesofmatter and making rather in ways asthey were outlined by material microhistory approaches, focusing on cultures of making and agentive material properties. Similarly, recent studies’ focus on the consequences of global trade for material innovations might have been useful references. Above all, however, it would have been worth examining the global history of luxury beyond the history of former empires. In sum, the volume is a fascinating read that reveals both the possibilities and challenges of writing global history. STEFAN HANß The University of Manchester Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora. By SANA AIYAR. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. 384 pp. $51.50 (hardcover). Birth Control in the Decolonizing Caribbean: Reproductive Politics and Practice on Four Islands, 1930–1970. By NICOLE C. BOURBONNAIS. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 272 pp. $99.99 (hardcover). A Problem of Great Importance: Population, Race, and Power in the British Empire, 1918–1973. By KARL ITTMANN. Oakland: University of California Press, 2013. 310 pp. $39.95 (paper). Unreasonable Histories: Nativism, Multiracial Lives, and the Genealogical Imagination in British Africa. By CHRISTOPHER J. LEE. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. 368 pp. $94.95 (cloth). Race and the Politics of Decolonization In 1956, amid debates regarding Kenya’s independence, K. D. Travadi claimed: “I, myself am in my 44th year in this country have had my children and my children’s children born here in this country and I call myself an African and particularly a Kenyan first and a Kenyan last” (Aiyar, p. 234). Travadi, a Nairobi lawyer and Kenya India Congress Book Reviews 293 member, was born in India, but spent his professional career in Kenya and was invested for political and familial reasons in Kenya’s future. And yet neither the colonial government of Kenya nor many “native” Kenyans accepted Travadi’s claim that an “Indian” could be “African.” In 1967, four years after independence, the state passed Africanization legislation, which restricted the mobility and economic activity of Indians, and led to the emigration of 33,000 people, for whom belonging in the nation no longer seemed possible. Travadi’s statement reveals how the tension between racial and territorial belonging shaped the politics of decolonization. The theorization of human difference has a long history, but in the era of modern empires, difference took on new salience through efforts to define, categorize, and enumerate populations in service of colonial rule.1 While historians have studied race at the level of colonial discourse, four new histories illuminate how contestations on the grounds of race shaped the trajectory of decolonization in the British Empire. In the twentieth century, racial politics fueled a new science of demography, which made visible the differential fertility rate between populations in Europe and the colonized world. Racial politics informed debates surrounding birth control and limited the possibilities for women to exercise autonomy over their bodies, reproductive lives, and families. Racial politics also limited the claims subjects could make on the colonial state and their belonging in the independent nation. Indians in Kenya and multi-racial people in southern Africa attempted to disrupt the link between territory and population that formed the basis for political legitimacy in the postcolonial era. Examination of the racial politics of decolonization provides new insight into how empire’s formal end did not bring an end to the hierarchies of colonial rule. From the late nineteenth century, imperial advocates and officials subscribed to a racialized order of things, “The White Man’s World,”2 for which new sciences of population provided more precise tools of governance. The findings of demographers, however, fueled anxieties 1 For only a few examples of texts that study the relationship between race and empire: Sadiah Qureshi, Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Catherine Hall, Civilizing Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton...

Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas

Book Review Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas, Jinah Kim. Duke University Press, 2019. 185 pages. ISBN: 9781478002796. US$23.95. With her sights narrowed onto a complex target, Jinah Kim in Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas tries to do something special. Tracing the literature, art, and films of U.S. based Asian diasporic writers, Kim looks at an understated, lost-in-development, and still grieving community. Central to everything here is the feeling of a lack of resolution, a wilful or naïve failure to address the pain of recent history. The challenge, of course, is how this continued suffering (“Melancholia”) should be defined (“Afterlives”) and understood (“transpacific subjectivities, aesthetics”); how you designate a perpetrator from complex interactions (“U.S. imperialism and militarism”), and what responsibility you insist should be owed for this (“generate transformative antiracist and decolonial politics”). It is the kind of work that implies new moral explanations, new breakthroughs in knowledge, a new understanding of the world, and our place in it. The relationship between grieving and memory, pain and history, is not a new topic—not even close. There is a worn and uncertain path here. Uncertain, due to the complexities of the human condition, the differences between individuals; and so with this the failures of singular, accurate, universalised approaches. What Kim is trying to do—it is a return to that Korean Studies © 2019 by University of Hawai‘i Press. All rights reserved. 1 “collective” element, to understand people, their motivations, their morality, and their suffering, through the groups they belong to. It doesn’t start with the events, but with the “afterlives”—the emotions. The intentions, and circumstances in history are less important than the feelings and the memories. And perhaps there is something in this—ontological versus epistemological truth—but there is also something clearly missing. Postcolonial Grief is largely a literary study, and so its philosophy might understandably be second-hand. But it is still central to the whole enterprise. Kim is not instructing her audience toward a high-brow reading list, but toward the truth she sees in those authors’ works. In any event, it’s not nearly close enough to what she is hoping to achieve. One or two selected works per chapter is helpful in partitioning her work and the readers mind, but also forces the query “what did she leave out?”, “what was the selection criteria?” Every lens here is onto an absolute—a truth that makes the reader think and doubt, but which Kim never offers a proper critical analysis of. Sentences like “The fear that prolonged and unchecked grief will lead to violence is one of the reasons grief is pathologized and surveilled by the state,” stop the reader dead in their tracks. It is laden with presuppositions—what is meant by “pathologized” and “surveilled”?—but the time is never given, and the language just moves forward. Occasionally ideas are built from the ground-up, but the language remains tautological and gimmicky: “the diagnosis of melancholia against the Algerians paradoxically authorizes violence as the sole provenance of the colonial state and now the post-colonial liberal nation-state’s domain.” Kim is consciously trying to be “intersectional” here—and as is the risk with such an approach, it comes across as scattergun. The solution? Segway to authority statements, phrases like “ . . . has argued,” “ . . . demonstrates” dominate the prose and hinge the book in new directions; but again it is also used as a way to introduce new ideas without spending the necessary time explaining or justifying them. There is a motivation, an ideological sense, behind this. Kim entertains the claim, at multiple places in the book, that the problem she faces might just be knowledge itself. That knowledge is not universal, but specific to people and places (“as endemic to U.S. knowledge production”). Yet regardless of the victim, the perpetrator here is always capitalism and modernization; as if these are only dogmas and never synonyms for freedoms, progress, and improvements. And with this, history begins to bend: the downfall of imperial Japan becomes an American aggression; a moment of ruthless opportunism...

Concerning “the Eurocentric African Problem” (Meschac Gaba)

Abstract Even as it is often eclipsed by reference to the “contemporary,” modernity is widely celebrated in European museums and galleries. When refracted through the commitments of an avowedly Black artistic agenda, how might these institutions reconceive their understanding of modernism in light of African, diasporic, or Afropean perspectives? How might concerns with African agency be enacted in these cultural spaces as they project historical narratives and produce a “public” memory in their own image? What are the implications of the fact that critical resistance to modes of cultural appropriation may, nonetheless, reproduce a discourse that attempts to immunise itself from the association of modernism with colonialism? In the formation of modernist canons, what role might an example of African conceptual art have to play, even when consigned to a museum’s storage space? This paper explores such questions through the paradoxes engaged by Mechac Gaba’s reflections on his 1997-2002 project, “Museum for Contemporary African Art,” now owned by Tate Modern. In particular, it considers the dichotomy between “modern” and “traditional” as this has been constitutive of twentieth-century art history, informing a sense of the African presence within European museums. How might reference to the “contemporary” here relate to the potentials of decolonial cultural politics within such spaces?

Maine Indigenous Education Left Behind: A Call for Anti-Racist Conviction as Political Will Toward Decolonization

Maine Indigenous Education Left Behind: A Call for Anti-Racist Conviction as Political Will Toward Decolonization

Decolonizing Dialectics by George Ciccariello-Maher

Reviewed by: Decolonizing Dialectics by George Ciccariello-Maher Ben Etherington Decolonizing Dialectics By George Ciccariello-Maher. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016. At heart, George Ciccariello-Maher's Decolonizing Dialectics is a study of political identity. The three thinkers on whom he focuses each confront the conundrum of oppressed groups that fail to recognise their political agency, or are stymied in doing so. Georges Sorel, Frantz Fanon and Enrique Dussel each conduct theoretical analyses and fashion concepts that enable these groups better to recognise themselves and their situations and so constitute themselves as radically oppositional political forces. Ciccariello-Maher begins with Sorel. Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, Sorel contended that the European working class could not wait for objective conditions to "ripen" to the point at which their deepening immiseration would inevitably lead them to act. Their identity as a class "for itself," he argues, needs to be consciously instantiated through acts of mythologizing violence against their oppressors. For Fanon, similarly, racialised colonial subjects are not in a position to sign up to a vision of political struggle as a reciprocal structure of recognition and interdependency when colonisation had denied their humanity. They first need to overcome this ontological denial and, in so doing, forge the basis for a positive political grouping. Again, this requires constituting acts of violence. Turning to Dussel, Ciccariello-Maher argues that the former's reading of Levinas on alterity gives him the basis for a politics that is oriented to that which was historically external to the coloniser's ontological and epistemological regimes. Rather than conduct politics on the basis of a one-dimensionally conceived "historical subject" (129), whether that be a subject determined by race, gender, class, Dussel conceptualises the "pueblo" as a group fused by their various exclusions. The "pueblo" is, thus, an "identity of identities" (147). Ciccariello-Maher finishes his study by discussing Chavismo in Venezuela as an example of a "Pueblo" constituting itself and successfully capturing state power. This is a study for our times, attempting in political theory what intersectional activists have been doing in practice: grafting the identity politics of the 1980s and 90s with the re-emergence of first-world socialist politics in the wake of the global financial crisis. The challenge for Ciccariello-Maher, and others who share his aspirations, is to conceptualise an "identity of identities" that is sufficiently concrete for those who act on its behalf. Are these simply rainbow coalitions that form in response to particular issues only to dissolve, or can these alliances be turned into formal groupings that pursue lasting programs? As an argument against a certain kind of stodgy dialectical materialism, Ciccariello-Maher's thesis rests on two connected claims: i) that any dialectical political theory premised on mutual recognition and dependence between classes will be ineffective where one party is treated as "sub-ontological"; ii) that such relations of non-reciprocity are endemic to the colonial situation and its aftermath. This explains the title, which promises to "decolonize" the Hegelian-Marxian tradition by critiquing the assumption that all politics is one or another manifestation of the dialectic of capital and labour. Key for Ciccariello-Maher is the notion that the dialectic of oppressor and oppressed frequently needs to be "jumpstarted" by identity-based political acts. Once jumpstarted, though, the dialectical motion seems to behave in the same manner as that dynamic negation of antitheses given an ideal account by Hegel. The philosophical presuppositions of dialectics are not really interrogated by Ciccariello-Maher, let alone "decolonized." Ciccariello-Maher takes from Fanon in particular the notion that decolonial politics continually confronts the problem of ontological denial. Is this a pattern that extends beyond the thinkers that this study considers? For instance, do the ideas of the dependency school of economic theory, which saw itself as opposing neo-colonialism, in some way respond to the problem of ontological denial? Or does non-reciprocity in meta-geopolitical relations obey a different logic? In the South Asian context, does Gandhi's program of satyagraha, built as it was on the strong assertion of precolonial Indian identity, obey a decolonised dialectic more so than that of a rationalist communist like M.N...

Mediated Intersections of Environmental and Decolonial Politics in the No Dakota Access Pipeline Movement

This article explores the politics of digital protest and emergent forms of sociality in the #NoDAPL (No Dakota Access Pipeline) movement using Elizabeth Povinelli’s concept of geontopower. I begin by situating the concept of geontopower in relation to a range of biopolitical, decolonial, and ecocritical theory in order to show its importance in conceptualizing the interconnectedness of decolonial and environmental interests. I use this theoretical framework to analyze several instances of what I call ‘digital decoloniality’ in the #NoDAPL movement, cases where the particular affordances of social media technologies and the efforts of Indigenous activists and non-Indigenous allies disrupted normative assumptions regarding the boundaries of the digital and ‘analog’ worlds and resisted the geontopolitical structuring of life and nonlife. I argue that the #NoDAPL hashtag works to enact the prerogatives of Western science-based environmentalism and Indigenous epistemological tenets in common, performatively generating new possibilities for conceptualizing social struggle and shared history.

Colin Clarke, Race, Class, and the Politics of Decolonization: Jamaica Journals, 1961 and 1968 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. xvii + 218, £68.00, hb

Colin Clarke, Race, Class, and the Politics of Decolonization: Jamaica Journals, 1961 and 1968 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. xvii + 218, £68.00, hb

Towards a Postcolonial Genealogy of International Organizations Law

AbstractThis article sketches the contours of a postcolonial genealogy of international organizations law. Contrary to conventional accounts, which remain strongly Eurocentric, the article claims that international organizations law did not emerge until the closing stages of the Second World War, and that its evolution was strongly influenced by the accelerating processes of decolonization that accompanied its birth. More specifically, the article argues that the emergence of international organizations law was spurred by a series of perceived problems regarding the adequacy of the international legal system in the aftermath of the end of formal colonial rule, in which the relations of power constructed through colonialism remained profoundly implicated. The politics of decolonization thus shaped the practice of international organizations, provided the catalyst for many of the foundational cases in international organizations law, and motivated much of its early doctrinal scholarship. Moreover, the article argues that the functionalist logic of international organizations law is deeply embedded in a postcolonial imaginary which, by supporting the division of the world into formally equivalent nation-states, ostensibly cuts against the hegemonic territorialism of colonial governance.

Liberal Ideals and the Politics of Decolonisation

The twentieth century witnessed some of the British Empire’s most creative and contradictory political manoeuvres. Creative in that it employed multiple reforms, policies and techniques to extend i...

Afterword

In this afterword, I begin by sharing a brief history of my early career as a non-Anglo-Celtic academic in an overwhelmingly Anglo-Celtic university environment in Australia. I examine how questions of non-Anglo-Celtic academic authority and accent play out in the process of teaching. I also explore the decolonizing impetus behind my early work White Nation (2000) both in terms of its conceptualization of Whiteness and Third-World-looking people and in terms of its reversal of the traditional research relations (a Lebanese analysing Anglo-Australians). I argue that despite this history there are many dimensions of the new politics of decolonization within anthropology that comes from outside my own tradition. I offer an examination of some of the features of this ‘new wave’ of decolonization and finish by looking into the decolonizing dimensions of my recent call to ‘respect anthropology’s elders’.

The Decolonial in Practice, Quilombismo, and Black Brazilian Politics in “Postneoliberal” Times

Through an examination of anti-racist and decolonial politics in education in the Brazilian and Latin American contexts, this paper outlines underlying features shaping black political-epistemological struggles and the difficulties of reform via the state in an anti-black society. The article first situates emerging anti-racist legislation and multicultural policy in the region within larger discussions of the progressive Left Turn among governments and the emergence of postneoliberalism. The paper then examines how racism and state violence against black people have persisted within this leftward postneoliberal turn, shaping the manner through which anti-racist and decolonial politics seek to both contest and mobilize within state discourses and institutions to improve the situation of black people. In the last section, the paper proposes to understand black movement struggles of decolonial orientation through Abdias do Nascimento’s black Brazilian praxis of quilombismo, a praxis that consciously reflects both the predicaments and future possibilities presented by working for political-epistemic and cultural transformation within and beyond an anti-black state. The paper demonstrates quilombismo as the decolonial in practice through an analysis of anti-racist education legislation focused on curriculum reforms.

The Politics of Decolonisation and Bi-Nationalism in Israel/Palestine

Recent years have seen a revitalisation of decolonisation as a framework of analysis in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. This article maps changes in the meanings attached to decolonisation in the Israeli Israeli–Palestinian context, paying particular attention to the one-state paradigm. One-state proposals highlight bi-national realities in historic Palestine in order to lay out a decolonising vision grounded in equal civic rights. Many one-state advocates, however, are suspicious of a prescriptive bi-national paradigm that would afford the two national groups equal collective rights, primarily because its recognition of Jewish national self-determination is seen as entrenching, rather than decolonising, colonial relations of power. We argue that a prescriptive bi-nationalism in fact offers rich resources for a decolonising project in Israel/Palestine that seeks to establish a polity based on the principles of justice and equality – come to terms with historical injustice and imagine alternative pasts, presents and futures based on Arab–Jewish relationships.