Postcolonial Power Research Articles

Politics of HIV Vaccine Research from International to Global Health

Paradoxically, the absence of HIV vaccine has been very structuring for global vaccine logics, and, more broadly, “global health” research. HIV vaccine research has oscillated between optimism and pessimism and has been central to the humanist justification for research in the South. From the attempt by the World Health Organization’s Vaccine Development Unit (VAD) on AIDS to become the centre of an “international” coordination effort to the diplomatic work involved with Thailand’s HIV research, I describe political contexts, and postcolonial power relations connected to HIV vaccine research. I argue that the failure of “international” coordination has paved the way for another politicization of global HIV vaccine research which led to a shift away from inter-state diplomacy to a “stateless” situation where the global vaccine logics contribute to the development of an experimental regime that relies on the capture of public resources and the availability of depoliticized biological subjects for the purposes of private valorization.

Tangent Cultural Interaction and Postcolonial Hybrid Societal Edifice in Hanief Kureshi’s “My Son The Fanatic”

This study set out to identify the types of hybridity that arise from postcolonial cultural interaction with colonial formation. The depictions of Parvez and Ali from Hanif Kureshi's short story My Son the Fanatic are hybrids, according to researchers. The Homi K. Bhabha concept of hybridity was used in this study, which followed a post-colonialist strategy. Bhabha's viewpoint (1994), it is the result of a tangential interaction in distinct cultures. In this instance, hybridity is understood to be the result of the dominance of colonial power dynamics which involves not only the merging of cultures but also cultural objects that are situated in social as well as historical space as a result of post-colonialism. Due to its significance in analyzing descriptive text in predetermined literary works, the qualitative descriptive approach was employed in this research. According to the research's findings, there are two different ways that hybridity is represented in this research. First, because of the content creation that was created, mimicry has a character that is ambiguous and contradictory in the context of cultural fidelity. Parvez, an individual in the narrative, serves as a metaphor for mimicry. Second, Ali, his son, represented ambivalence in the story. Ali resisted the construction because he understood how colonialism discriminated against his culture, but he was confused about what identity he should adopt. The short story "My Son the Fanatic" by Hanif Kureishi depicts cultural hybridity through the characters Parvez and Ali, who represent mimicry and ambivalence resulting from the dynamics of colonial and postcolonial power.

Khat-Chewing, Adiaphorisation and Morality: Rethinking Ethics in the Age of the Synopticon

In June 2014, the UK Government made khat (Catha edulis) a Class C drug under the UK Misuse of Drugs Act. Based on limited evidence, this decision went against the Government's own Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs and has divided members of the British–Somali diaspora, where khat is a popular form of recreation. The Government’s decision to ban khat highlights broader questions regarding how ethical legislation is implemented within post-industrial societies, exposing postcolonial power systems that ‘Other’ migrant groups through synoptic control. Based on qualitative interviews with members of the Somali diaspora and external agencies in Northern England, the research explores how this system fails to consider khat's complex moral position while framing users and those living within the diaspora as deviant.

Toward a new relationship between history and global mental health

This paper explores the relationship between historical research and the field of global mental health. It identifies a gap in the current literature, and argues that an in-depth historical approach is critical for understanding and overcoming current challenges and controversies in global mental health. The authors propose that a thick historical analysis has the capacity to broaden and diversify the discussion about the core concepts in global mental health (such as illness, suffering, care or culture), and to nuance our understanding of the field’s development and impact in specific political and social contexts. The paper analyzes how a systematic historical approach is crucial for understanding colonial and post-colonial power relations embedded in the field of global mental health, and encourages researchers and practitioners to view history as a source of imagination, and of alternative ideas and initiatives in mental health that go beyond existing psychiatric frames of representations, and towards truly radical and egalitarian projects and relations. This exercise in alternative historical imagination does not need to interfere with nor disrupt the urgency of mental health practice today; on the contrary, it is meant to improve the effectiveness of interventions. It can provide practitioners with a new and enriched language to resolve long-standing clinical dilemmas (e.g. related to patient adherence or limited success of certain cultural adaptations), which could not be properly addressed previously

Vernacular Animalities: Reading Multispecies Ethics in Hasan Azizul Haque’s Short Stories

This essay foregrounds new vernacular aesthetics of multispecies ethics through close readings of two short stories – “Shokun” (“Vulture”) and “Amrityu Ajibon” (“Till Death, Through Life”) – by Bengali writer Hasan Azizul Haque (1939–2021). Postcolonial literary criticism has predominantly focused on Haque’s incisive portrayal of the consequences of the Partition of India and Bangladesh Liberation War on affected minorities, but his depictions of other-than-human subjects and interspecies relationalities implicated in postcolonial power dynamics have not received the critical attention that they merit. This essay draws on the analytical frameworks offered by interdisciplinary animal studies to demonstrate the agential roles of animals in Haque’s stories. Through literary speculations on animal alterities and entangled human–animal vulnerabilities, the short stories studied in this essay articulate the impact of feudal economic structures and inter-class hierarchies on landless peasants and debt-bonded labourers in post-Partition Bengal. They elaborate the mechanisms through which vernacular knowledges about human–animal coexistence, communication, and co-constitution provide textual corollaries for subaltern consciousness, resistance, and moral upliftment. I argue that the material and semiotic dimensions of literary animal figures in the stories produce unique narrative instances of recuperative animal agencies through sustained attention to the corporeal dynamics and affective logics of interspecies interactions. I also argue that while the material aspects of interspecies relationships are manifested through embodied affect, their symbolic aspects become conspicuous through the textual preeminence of metonymic animals over their metaphoric configurations. I show that through different textual iterations of transspecies relatedness stemming from (but not limited to) two kinds of physical contiguity – a vulture’s peck and a snake’s bite – Haque’s short stories critique both uncritical consolidation and outright disavowal of interspecies difference.

Decolonising Southern knowledge(s) in Aidland

ABSTRACT South–South Co-operation (SSC) has become increasingly important in international development policy and practice as both alternative and complementary to North–South Co-operation. Crafted through the acceptance, appropriation, and instrumentalisation of a colonialist idea of an underdeveloped world, SSC has been historically defined as an expression of Southern solidarity, through which developing countries collaborate to achieve progress, modernity, and development. It is often claimed to involve mutually beneficial, horizontal exchange of resources between developing countries – particularly knowledge – and to foster decolonising practices. In this paper, I argue that while one of the starting points for SSC was opposition to North–South knowledge hierarchies, its legitimisation has been constructed through postcolonial power inequalities and new forms of authoritative knowledge that reiterate old hierarchies. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research conducted as part of my doctoral studies, I show how the building and international legitimatisation of Brazilian ‘best practices’ – in the gender equality field – has produced a political economy of opportunities and mobility for these professionals; their professional pathways to Mozambique are indicative of the processes of production of Southern expertise and new knowledge hierarchies. I also discuss Brazilian development workers’ discourses about the relevance of Brazilian experiences to Mozambique. Theoretically, the paper is inspired by critical development theory with a feminist and postcolonial approach. It uses postcolonial literature, usually applied to relations between colonisers and former colonies, to look at how colonial discourses and discourses about Africa, the ‘Third World’, and the West historically intervened in the encounters between people from former colonies and continue to be activated. Specifically, I analyse imaginaries of ‘Southern’ and ‘developing country’ identity embedded in expertise claims.

Adaptations in the transformation of cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz; Euphorbiaceae) for consumption in the dietary management of diabetes: the case of Palikur, or Parikwene People, from French Guiana.

In the French overseas department of French Guiana, in South America, nutrition therapy for the management of diabetes is based on French guidelines. However, this region is demographically diverse and includes several populations of Indigenous Peoples, Parikwene among others, also called Palikur. Due to socio-economical, cultural, and geographical differences, along with distinctions in the local food system, dietary recommendations, which many consider in the context of post-colonial power dynamics, are not well suited to local populations. In the absence of suitable recommendations, it is hypothesized that local populations will adapt their dietary practices considering diabetes as an emerging health problem. Seventy-five interviews were conducted with community members and Elders, as well as healthcare professionals and administrators providing services to the Parikwene population of Macouria and Saint-Georges de l'Oyapock communes. Data regarding the representation of cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz) consumption and diabetes were collected via semi-structured interviews and participant observation (i.e., observation and participation in community activities), namely via participating in activities related to the transformation of cassava tubers at swidden and fallow fields. Parikwene have adapted the transformation of cassava tubers for their consumption in the management of diabetes.The importance of cassava tubers as a staple and core food to the Parikwene food system was established by identifying it as a cultural keystone species. Narratives illustrated conflicting perceptions regarding the implication of cassava consumption in the development of diabetes. Adaptations to the operational sequence involved in the transformation of cassava tubers led to the production of distinct cassava roasted semolina (i.e., couac), based on organoleptic properties (i.e., sweet, and acidic couac). Preferences for the consumption of acidic couac were grounded in the Parikwene knowledge system, as well as attention to diabetes related symptoms and glucometer readings. These results provide important insights related to knowledge, attitudes, and practices in developing locally and culturally adapted approaches to providing dietary recommendations in the treatment of diabetes.

« Ramasser ses mots parmi les détritus » : l’écriture de l’abjection dans Za de Raharimanana et La Vie de Joséphin le fou d’Ananda Devi

Partant du postulat que l’écriture de l’abjection produit chez le lecteur un vertige, voire un choc, tout à fait particulier, notre article s’intéresse à la façon dont celle-ci constitue dans les romans La Vie de Joséphin le fou d’Ananda Devi (2003) et Za de Raharimanana (2008) une formidable puissance de remise en question des normes et des limites qui fondent ce qu’on peut appeler avec Julia Kristeva « l’ordre social et symbolique ». Il s’agit en d’autres termes d’explorer la puissance propre à l’abjection qui permet au récit de dépasser à la fois la simple satire socio-politique et la jubilation de l’obscène, au profit de représentations plus ambivalentes, mouvantes et dérangeantes, qui touchent aux fondements mêmes de notre humanité. Nous nous efforcerons ainsi de dépasser la sidération dans laquelle plonge la violence parfois difficilement soutenable de l’écriture pour envisager la façon dont l’abject, la pourriture et le grouillant apparaissent en creux comme le terreau fertile d’un contre-pouvoir sur les plans aussi bien éthique qu’esthétique. Parce que ces bas-fonds abjects sont aussi le lieu d’une vie proliférante, multiple et anarchique, la parole qui s’y ancre et s’en revendique peut en effet être comprise comme une poche de résistance face à la menace de la tyrannie de l’Un, du vide et de la pétrification qui caractérisent le pouvoir postcolonial.

Of Ants and Men

Of Ants and Men

Review: Gastropolitics and the Specter of Race: Stories of Capital, Culture, and Coloniality in Peru, by María Elena García

Review: <i>Gastropolitics and the Specter of Race: Stories of Capital, Culture, and Coloniality in Peru</i>, by María Elena García

Paradigms of Power in Postcolonial Translation

This essay examines Mohammad Rabie’s Otared (Arabic 2014; English 2016) and Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (Arabic 2013; English 2018) with an emphasis on the transformation of dystopia. I argue that Rabie and Saadawi have constructed their dystopian novels under the influence of Western literature while being directly affected by the dire political situations that they find themselves in. Rabie engages with the Arab Spring and the far-reaching impact of colonialism, whereas Saadawi deals with Iraq’s sombre realities against the backdrop of the American-led invasion in 2003. Their respective accounts are not merely a recycling of Western genres but are also profoundly impacted by the prevailing circumstances while being portrayed on the global stage via translation. In this way, they manifest a powerful insight into the translation of Arabic dystopian fiction, which is shaped by colonial and postcolonial power relations. In the proliferation of Arabic dystopian fiction, translation acts as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, translation specifies how colonialist forces impose Western influence upon the Arabic culture. On the other hand, it becomes a powerful tool to expose Western readers to the Arab people’s harrowing postcolonial and post-revolutionary experiences.

Artful Decoloniality: The Politics of Fashion as Art in 20th and 21st Century Vietnam

Drawing on two case studies of designers whose work centered on the Vietnamese aó dài, one from the 1930s and the other the 2010s–2020s, this article considers how desires to construe fashion as art and the designer as fine artist have been implicated in transnational circuits of symbolic and material value, as well as colonial and postcolonial power relations. While decolonial scholarship on fashion has called for attention to diverse dress practices that are external to modernity and coloniality, this article argues that artist-designers’ demands for recognition of Vietnamese dress within universalizing systems of fashion and art can also constitute a decolonial move because they highlight the plurality at the heart of fashion’s aesthetic and material regime. At the same time, the designers’ creative processes often grapple with internalized discourses of essentialized Vietnamese identities that have emerged within a patriarchal context and have tended to deploy the clothed bodies of women. In simultaneously positioning their fashion as art and asserting an essentialized national identity, Vietnamese designers in different temporal contexts have both constituted and challenged the ideological and material contours of the raced, gendered, and classed hierarchies of modernity, coloniality, and fashion.

Participation of young women in sexual and reproductive health decision-making in Malawi: Local realities versus global rhetoric.

Despite the global prioritization of addressing adolescent girls' and young women's sexual and reproductive health (SRH) and participatory rights, little research has examined their lived experiences in shaping their engagement in SRH decision-making processes in the global South. Further, few studies have explored how structural and societal factors influence their agency and participation. This critical and focused ethnography, informed by postcolonial feminist and difference-centred citizenship theories, conducted in Malawi (2017-2018) elicited perspectives of youth and key informants to help address these knowledge gaps. Our findings show that the effective implementation and uptake of global discourse on participation and gender equity is hindered by inadequate consideration of girls' and young women's local political, cultural and social realities. Many girls and young women demonstrate passion to participate in SRH policymaking as agents of change. However, patriarchal and gerontocratic political and social structures/institutions, and gendered and adultist norms and practices limit their active and meaningful participation in SRH decision-making. In addition, donors' roles in SRH policymaking and their prioritization of the "girl child" highlight an enduring postcolonial power over agenda-setting processes. Understanding young people's experiences of gendered participation and scrutinizing underlying systemic forces are critical steps toward realizing young women's SRH and participatory rights.

Layers and limits of power and resistance in multinational subsidiaries: The interaction of micro-politics and postcolonial power at Reuters India

This study analyses how the mutual imbrication of organizational and postcolonial power along with the micro-embedding of actors’ shape and structure power struggles in multinational corporations. Drawing on the case of news agency Reuters’ internationalization and centralization approach at its Indian subsidiaries in Mumbai and Bangalore, our research explores how subsidiaries mobilize resources to pursue their interests in a landscape shaped by clashing professional institutional logics and organizational control systems reflected in quality control and performance assessment. Our findings shows that the power struggle and (professional) identity position of both subsidiary staff differs as they face different organizational, institutional and (neo)colonial pressures and are othered in different ways. We argue that as a site of “value production,” both subsidiaries are qualified and disadvantaged in distinct ways. Our study emphasizes the importance of understanding diverse colonial experiences and the mainstreaming of postcolonial insights in the analysis of power in MNCs.

Postcolonial mobility and keywords of migration: the Portuguese in Luanda

This article explores the workings of some familiar keywords when applied in a context where migration patterns diverge from conventional expectations in public debate and research. It focuses on the Portuguese seeking a better future in Angola, and it analyses emerging configurations of keywords of migration in this postcolonial setting. By focusing on this unconventional case, the article illuminates some of the stereotypical notions linked to central keywords of migration. Departing from the concepts “migrant”, “expatriate”, “returnee” and “integration”, it explores emic constructions of the Portuguese mobile subjects’ identities, incorporation processes in Angola and shifting postcolonial power positions. Moreover, it uses the emic viewpoints to discuss some globalised connotations of the four keywords. The analysis will make clear that the context-specific workings of these concepts are influenced not only by the particularities of this case but also by powerful international discourses on human mobility. On a conceptual level, the article argues for using keywords as a tool for social analysis. Arguably, ethnographic explorations of the usage and understanding of purportedly simple words can open up profound insights into shifting social values.

The Transformative Potential of Feminist Foreign Policy: The Case of Sweden

ABSTRACT Sweden describes its feminist foreign policy (FFP) as strategically illuminating structures of gender inequality by incorporating a feminist perspective in all areas of foreign policy, analytically and practically. This study scrutinizes the transformative potential of Sweden’s FFP discourse. Feminist scholarship argues for recognizing interrelations between gender and postcolonial structures; stressing gender hierarchies as contextual and contingent on various power structures. Using critical discourse analysis, we analyze documents, statements and speeches produced within the Swedish FFP in relation to postcolonial feminist theory. We find that a large part of the Swedish FFP discourse reproduces essentialist discourse informed by colonial legacies, but with a new feminist label. There are, however, signs of an emerging reformed discourse that strives to transform postcolonial power structures, taking intersectionality into account. This emerging discourse contributes to an understanding of how a feminist foreign policy could be articulated and practiced to become truly transformative.

Archiving the Algerian Revolution in Zineb Sedira's Gardiennes d'images

Archiving the Algerian Revolution in Zineb Sedira's <i>Gardiennes d'images</i>

Customary Rights and Freshwater Ecology in Pluralistic Societies on the Monsoonal Island of Sumba (Eastern Indonesia)

This article evaluates the ways water is made and unmade on Sumba Island when subjected to tensions between Indigenous and off-island political ecologies. Located in the eastern Indian Ocean, Sumba has a semi-arid, monsoonal climate with an uplifted coral reef geological structure where a spatially and temporally dynamic hydrological system shapes people’s access to freshwater. Customary adat societies on the island have histories of struggling to maintain the integrity of their own political ecologies, further increasing the precarity of their access to freshwater. The topic of the research reported on in this paper was determined through collaboration with members of the Kodi community in western Sumba who urged the author to study the problem of water. This article highlights ongoing threats to the further degradation of local societies’ rights to control their customary territories and freshwater within them by summarizing the phenomena of water grabbing in Indonesia. Zooming in on three projects that manifest as water grabs, this article finds, respectively, that water grabbing occurs under the guise of forest protection and production, behind the veil of philanthropy, and for economic development with military backing. In all three cases, water grabs take place in the context of a decentralizing nation-state where the ways adat is understood and the ways laws regarding it have been interpreted and enacted have changed through time and have varied between communities, partly in relation to the societies’ proximity to centers of colonial and postcolonial power as well as the development of activities in their territories. On Sumba the content of adat and relationships among distinct adat societies evolves on a bioculturally diverse island that is home to numerous Indigenous ethnolinguistic communities. Consequently, people’s responses to interventions into their political ecologies vary. More broadly, the context for this study is the intersections of water grabbing and social change during the Reformasi, the post-Suharto era of decentralization in Indonesia.

Tariq Ramadan: A Voice for Decoloniality in France and in Morocco

Abstract The dominance of social media has made religious authority temporary and fragmentised. Tariq Ramadan’s rise to fame in Morocco cannot be disconnected from the particular position he had in France as a controversial figure who spoke up for Muslims in many heated debates. Fieldwork in Morocco shows that the religious practices and points of view of fans of Tariq Ramadan bear similarities to those of youngsters in other countries. Although Islam is a shared interest, politics and postcoloniality play an important role in his popularity. The article demonstrates the importance of engagement with social, cultural and political issues as an indispensable constituent of authority, and argues that Moroccan fans of Ramadan are sensitive to the manner in which he criticises postcolonial power structures. The need to deconstruct neo-colonial structures and discourses is felt by French and Moroccan Muslims alike.

Arms intervention: Weimar Germany, post-imperial influence and weapons trafficking in warlord China

The Treaty of Versailles aimed to strip Germany of both its colonial empire and the global reach of its arms industry. Yet the conflicts in warlord-era China led to the reestablishment of German influence on the other side of the world via the arms trade. Weimar Germany had declared a policy of neutrality and refused to take sides in the Chinese civil war in an effort to demonstrate that as a post-colonial power, it could now act as an honest broker. From below, however, traffickers based in Germany and German merchants in China worked to evade Versailles restrictions and an international arms embargo to supply warlords with weapons of war. Although the German state officially aimed to remain neutral, criminal elements, rogue diplomats, black marketeers and eventually military adventurers re-established German influence in the region by becoming key advisors and suppliers to the victorious Guomindang. Illicit actors in Germany and China proved to be crucial in linking the two countries and in eventually overturning the arms control regimes that were imposed in the wake of World War I.