Postcolonial Scholarship Research Articles

Decolonizing Sociology Through Collaboration, Co‐Learning and Action: A Case for Participatory Action Research1

Despite important efforts by postcolonial scholars to “decolonize” sociology, this endeavor remains limited by the scaffolding of empirical research, or the institutionalized practices and beliefs embedded within data collection and researchers' relationship to research subjects. In its current form, this scaffolding excludes “subaltern” voices from critiquing and extending sociological theory, deriving benefits from the study, or informing social actions that stem from the research. This limits the field's understanding of the multi‐faceted impacts of colonialism and retrenches inequalities between scholars and participants. Participatory Action Research (PAR) offers an alternative, decolonial infrastructure. PAR acknowledges the value of knowledge from the periphery and calls for (1) the participation of marginalized research populations in each step of the research process; (2) co‐learning between researchers and participants; and (3) collaborative social action that centers the needs of marginalized research populations. Drawing on a case study of PAR in Rio de Janeiro, I demonstrate how PAR allows sociologists, in partnership with historically colonized groups, to decolonize sociology not only in theory, but in the concrete practices of empirical research.

Wilhelm Reich and Sexology from Below.

One of sexologist Wilhelm Reich's most ambitious and enduring theories claims that sexuality and sexual repression play a central role in the production and reproduction of class structures and hierarchies. From 1927-1933, Reich combined his sexological work with his communist political convictions in a movement that became known as sex-pol. Reich developed some of his most provocative and potentially emancipatory theories through this empirical work with members of working-class communities. Though they often remain anonymous in his writings, the traces of their voices remain audible throughout. In this paper, I employ a Gramscian method, developed by post-colonial scholars, to read for the trace of proletarian voices in Reich's archive. I argue that these subjects helped to theorize the role of sex in producing and reproducing class oppression. Reading for the trace of proletarian voices in the archive expands our understanding of how working-class subjects in early twentieth-century Germany and Austria helped to produce concrete sexological knowledge from below.

Frames of self-reliance: an analysis of evolving international development discourse

Self-reliance has been advanced by policy actors as an aspirational objective by and for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) with evolution in framing over time. Most recently, it has been advanced by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in an organisational strategy titled the Journey to Self-Reliance (J2SR). This paper identifies why self-reliance has evolved over time, how actors have supported its use, and implications for development practice. We identify self-reliance frames using peer-reviewed and grey literature and key informant interviews. Thematic analysis using framing theories was conducted. Self-reliance originates from a historical legacy of postcolonial scholarship, but it has been transformed from an emancipatory paradigm to a strategy championed by international donors. Three frames were identified: (1) the emancipatory frame, led by LMIC actors; (2) the reformist frame, led by donor agencies; and (3) the J2SR frame, led by USAID. We argue that while the J2SR frame is the most visible in today’s discourse, the emancipatory frame continues to influence policy and rhetoric. This phenomenon reflects the importance of strategic ambiguity and the ability of the frame sponsor to exert power through ideas. It also represents the limits of donor agencies in instrumentalising frames to meet their institutional interests.

Overrepresentation of Whiteness Is in Sign Language As Well: A Commentary on “Undoing Competence: Coloniality, Homogeneity, and the Overrepresentation of Whiteness in Applied Linguistics”

Overrepresentation of Whiteness Is in Sign Language As Well: A Commentary on “Undoing Competence: Coloniality, Homogeneity, and the Overrepresentation of Whiteness in Applied Linguistics”

‘Kresy’ as the heart of darkness: Reading Polish and Belgian colonialisms

‘Kresy’ [ borderlands/outskirts] is a sentimental term used by Poles to denote the lands of today’s Western Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania. The Polish rule in that region has rarely been discussed in terms of colonialism. In this article, I employ the framework of postcolonial theory within the context of Polish rule in ‘Kresy’. The article juxtaposes anthropologist Józef Obrębski’s ethnographic writings about Polesia region (a part of ‘Kresy’ that was polonised in the most extreme manner) with Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad – a Polish-British author born and raised in ‘Kresy’, that during his time was subjugated by Russian Empire. The figure of Conrad, whose ambivalent relationship with colonialism was pointed out by many postcolonial scholars starting with Chinua Achebe, becomes a point of departure to think about what Maria Janion describes as ‘the paradoxical Polish postcolonial mentality’: the ambivalence of being a colonised coloniser. The article is an attempt of contribution to the ongoing debate about identity and dependence in the East Central Europe region.

Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance

Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance

From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and the Third Worlds

By coincidence, it seems, the critical vocabulary and concerns that came to be known as postcolonial theory and methodology rose to be a dominant school of inquiry in the Anglo-American academy in the same years that the Soviet Union collapsed (notwithstanding that key theoretical texts by Frantz Fanon and others predated this moment by decades). Yet, oddly, postcolonialist terms were seldom applied to postsocialist and post-Soviet cases until the 2000s, and they have become more broadly utilized in these territories only in the past decade. Further, it must be admitted that few results of these applications of postcolonial tools to postsocialist cases have made much of a mark among broader circles of postcolonial scholars and thinkers. Djagalov's book may help to correct this situation. Rather than work in the mode of “application”—applying a postcolonial framework to yet one more case—Djagalov reconstructs the history of a century of socialist anti-imperialism, as it was expressed in global cultural institutions and networks, and in so doing discovers the ignored or forgotten genealogy that links contemporary postcolonial thought to writers, activists, and theoreticians of the socialist world.Djagalov's book toggles between, on the one hand, chapters of institutional history that chronicle the global cultural institutions (such as the Afro-Asian Writers Association, the Tashkent Film Festival, and the Lotus Prize) that connected the Soviet Union with decolonizing countries and, on the other hand, chapters of synthetic cultural criticism that articulate typological analyses of common narrative forms that circulated in the fiction and film of the socialist world—recurring varieties of “solidarity narratives,” as Djagalov calls them. His work reveals how central the state-socialist political imaginary was for writers and filmmakers ranging from Nâzım Hikmet to Ngūgī wa Thiong'o, and how prominent their itineraries through Soviet institutions and networks were in their biographies. Ngūgī, for instance, finished his 1977 novel Petals of Blood during a residency in the Soviet Writers House in Yalta.In recovering the lost continent of anti-imperial socialist globality that bridged the “second” and “third worlds,” Djagalov has demonstrated not how postcolonial terms can be applied to postsocialist cases but how postcolonial theory and method are themselves postsocialist phenomena. Djagalov does not attempt to rectify the state-socialist prehistory of postcolonial thought with a critique of Soviet imperial habits or of the postcolonial contexts of contemporary Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. At least, though, the challenges of thinking “postcolonial” and “postsocialist” together have now become clearer. From Internationalism to Postcolonialism leaves us with new research problems: what, for example, does it mean to be a postcolony of an anti-imperial empire?

The Insta-Gaze: investigating the endurance of stereotypes of Africa

ABSTRACT Instagram – the widely popular photo sharing app – impacts how people imagine places, making it a useful platform for cultural geographers to examine the power of representation in our contemporary era. Utilizing visual methodologies, we analyze popular images on Instagram that deal with the topic of everyday life in Africa to understand not only what gets represented but what resonates with viewers/consumers. Our analysis focuses on one of the most popular Africa-themed Instagram accounts – @everydayafrica – to interrogate the power of social media platforms on geographic imaginations. To get at user perceptions, we collected information on which images were most liked and commented on and analyzed whether these images reinforce or work against extant stereotypes of Africa to interrogate how and whether decolonial resistance in representation is possible on a digital platform dependent on sharing and liking content. We used postcolonial scholarship to identify controlling images of the continent and examined whether users were more responsive to common tropes. Overall, we found that the most-liked images reinforce existing stereotypes and in so doing replicate the colonial gaze. We contend that the way Africa is visually consumed has real, material consequences.

Navigating discipline and indulgence: the performance of contradiction on Instagram food posts in the Philippines

ABSTRACT There is a contradictory dynamic in how Instagram seems to promote both profligate consumption habits in disregard of health and unprecedented health anxieties where people micromanage every ingredient they consume. Far from inhabiting disparate social worlds, these themes often coalesce within the same image. We argue that this phenomenon reflects consumers’ attempts to navigate a neoliberal double bind that simultaneously pressures them toward both dysfunctional extremes. By emphasizing the centrality of a politics of indulgence to US ideological warfare, especially during the Green Revolution, we interrogate a key limitation of much critical food scholarship in its reductive equation of whiteness and power with food discipline and thinness. We draw on postcolonial scholarship on mestiza/o whiteness and code-switching to argue that neocolonial privilege is better understood as the mobility to code-switch between the vocabularies of discipline and indulgence without being confined to one or the other. Then, we analyze Instagram food posts taken by customers at organic restaurants in urban Philippines, reading them as innovative but never innocent contestations against the double binds of discipline/indulgence and mestiza/o whiteness while highlighting the rich historical and cultural contingency of their meaning-making.

Gender, race, and crisis-driven institutional growth: discourses of ‘migration crisis’ and the expansion of Frontex

ABSTRACT Migration movements at the EU external borders are increasingly understood and governed through a logic of crisis that draws on gendered and racialised stereotypes of migrants and colonial Self-‘Other’ representations. These narratives of ‘migration crisis’ not only shape public discourse, but also inform institutional processes within the EU border security architecture, particularly the growth of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex). Bringing critical border and migration studies in conversation with feminist postcolonial scholarship on crisis, we argue that gendering and racialisation underpin Frontex’s ‘crisis labelling’ that gives way to institutional claims for extended resources and competences. In an analysis of Frontex’s Annual Risk Analysis Reports (2010–2020), we identify four themes through which Frontex engages in crisis labelling on the basis of gendered and racialised stereotypes, dualisms, and postcolonial (self-)representations: migration as threat; the unknownness of migrants; the hierarchical creation of (non-)European spaces; and humanitarian concerns over vulnerable migrants. Through these themes, gender and race not only made migration intelligible as crisis but importantly justified demands for Frontex’s extension. These findings reveal how gender and race inform the institutional politics of defining and governing migration in ways that reproduce intersectional power relations and (post-)colonial legacies.

The Appendices of Empire: Why Writings from the Colonial Era Need to be Read in their Entirety

Among the many outcomes of the critique of Orientalism and the writings that emerged from the colonial era is the view that most, if not all, works that were published during the era of Empire are tainted by racial prejudice and Orientalist tropes and stereotypes of the non-Western Other. While this may be the case, this paper argues that there are still many reasons for postcolonial scholars to read such works today, from an informed and critical postcolonial perspective. This paper will look at three works by three colonial-era writers – Thomas Stamford Raffles’ The History of Java (1817); John Crawfurd’s Journal of an Embassy from the Governor-General of India to the Court of Ava (1829); and Henry Keppel’s The Expedition to Borneo of the HMS Dido for the Suppression of Piracy (1846) – and show how, through a deep and critical reading of the texts, we can see the contradictions, ironies and uncertainties of the imperial project; and by so doing debunk the notion that Western colonialism in Southeast Asia was a linear, organised and systematic process entirely determined by the colonial powers themselves.

Saving the YPJ, saved by the YPJ: ambivalent agency and the legitimation of intervention in Syria

ABSTRACT Feminist and postcolonial international relations scholars have demonstrated that representations of Middle Eastern women are used to legitimize wars. This article explores a recent, novel instance of this phenomenon that occurred in Syria. The article argues that Western representations of Kurdish female fighters (members of the Women’s Protection Units, or YPJ) helped to legitimize Operation Inherent Resolve. The article first uses content analysis to demonstrate that Western media reporting about the group, which rendered the YPJ hyper-visible, reflects a change in the discourse, which, I argue, made this foreign policy possible. This is followed by a discourse analysis of English-language documentaries, supported by Turkish-language sources, to show how specifically gendered and Orientalist narratives legitimized Western intervention. I find that rather than being depicted as they are typically, as passive, silent victims (requiring liberation), YPJ women are instead depicted atypically as agentic (as liberators). I then contrast this discourse with original translations of YPJ members’ counter-articulations about their identity in their own words, and show that Kurdish female militants propose radically alternative, non- and anti-Western accounts of their politics. In light of the tension between these two discourses, the article suggests that Western accounts, although endowing agency, suppress possibilities for more subversive (postcolonial) forms of agency.

The Power of the Periphery: How Norway Became an Environmental Pioneer for the World

The Power of the Periphery: How Norway Became an Environmental Pioneer for the World

Critical terrorism studies and postcolonialism: constructing ungoverned spaces in counter-terrorism discourse in Nigeria

ABSTRACT This article explores a neglected question in ongoing debates about counter-terrorism efforts in Nigeria: How is Nigeria’s counter-terrorism strategy discursively framed? The article argues, in part, that Nigeria’s counter-terrorism strategy is essentially a political activity which contributes to the production of a specific Nigerian identity by designating north-eastern Nigeria and the Lake Chad Basin as “ungoverned” spaces. This construction of identity through geography, though, has important implications for policy, identity and security in Nigeria, and beyond. This study of Nigeria, I also argue, presents an opportunity for a much-needed conversation between CTS and postcolonialism for broadening knowledge on discourses around (counter-)terrorism. Drawing upon the concept of space in postcolonial scholarship, this article demonstrates how the relationship between geography, identity and subjectivity offers a broader framework for articulating continuing, and recent, discourses of counter-terrorism. It demonstrates how Nigerian counter-terrorism discourse reproduces, and transforms, well-known Euro-centric and state-centred discourses which intersect with colonial and imperialistic ideas (and practices). In doing so, the article makes two notable contributions: first, it provides a sustained focus on official articulations of counter-terrorism in Nigeria by examining important primary data. Second, in mobilizing the concept of space in postcolonialism, it facilitates crucial theoretical reflections within (critical) terrorism studies.

Let there be Light: Engineering, Entrepreneurship and Electricity in Colonial Bengal, 1880–1945 by Suvobrata Sarkar

Buttressing the limited scholarship on techno-scientific education in colonial India, Let there be Light studies the establishment and expansion of electrical infrastructure in colonial Bengal between 1880 and 1945. Sarkar analyzes how the growing interest in technical education, particularly engineering, combined with increasing entrepreneurial experimentation to drive indigenous industrial expansion across several fields, from electricity to chemical engineering.The book has much to commend it, not least its detailed review of critical shifts in scholarly understanding of the transmission, circulation, and reception of modern science and technology. Sarkar revisits the (well-established) limits of diffusionist models that posit unidirectional flows, emanating outward from European centers. In contrast, he grounds his research within contemporary postcolonial scholarship, which emphasizes the social construction of technologies, both big and small, while demonstrating how, conceptually and materially, science and technology in India synthesized colonial and indigenous concepts “of what created the modern world” (8–9, 13–14). Sarkar’s exposition of infrastructural development thus delineates colonial spaces as innovative “localities,” where techno-scientific knowledge is co-produced in the interaction “between special communities of diverse origins” (6–7).The book weaves together three interrelated but distinct strands of discussion about the dialogue between technical education and industrial expansion. Using case studies, Chapters 1 and 2 discuss the rise of degree-level technical education and of pioneering entrepreneurs as necessary preconditions for industrial growth in India. Sketching an institutional history of two important engineering colleges in Bengal—Bengal Engineering (Sibpur) and the College of Engineering and Technology (Jadavpur)—Sarkar emphasizes the debates and struggles involved in establishing techno-scientific education, especially given the theoretically saturated nature of academic engineering and the preference by educated Bengalis for law and medicine. To demonstrates how firms owned and managed by Bengalis transformed the industrial landscape, Chapter 2 traces the professional work of Rajendra Nath Mookerjee, “the doyen of Indian engineering” (21), and Prafulla Chandra Ray, founder of Bengal Chemical and Pharmaceutical Works.Chapters 3 and 4 hone in on how Calcutta became electrified, starting from the 1880s onward. with Sarkar asking what was “unique” about the city in that it was electrified “almost simultaneously with Western industrial nations” (117). Chapters 3 follows the work of the Calcutta Electric Supply Company, tracing how electricity became integrated into the Calcutta’s civic landscape, from overhead fans in government buildings to electric tramways and electrified public displays. It simultaneously delineates the challenges that beset the process, whether the highly capital-intensive nature of this technology or the technical issues surrounding its transmission and distribution. Chapter 4 discusses how this predominantly imported technology was domesticated, whether in being used to power large-scale industry like textile mills or in its integration with allied fields such as medicine (the x-ray for example). This utility, in fact, became a locus for demands about industrial nationalization and an end to colonial monopolies—the vein in which the book concludes. Chapter 5 offers wide-ranging examples from Bengali journals in which the educated debated India’s industrial future; what emerges are sketches of several “subaltern technologists” who remained devoid of formal technological training but who articulated emerging technologies in ways that demonstrated “social ownership and cultural belonging” (191).Let there be Light is not only a valuable addition to scholarship about the history of electrification in colonial India but also a deeply researched elucidation of how technology, education, and entrepreneurship shaped India’s industrial terrain, the last of which the book’s extensive contextualization is particularly helpful in clarifying. At times, however, the book veers away from the relationship between technical education and the development of electrical infrastructure. A similar tension dogs the book’s emphasis on restoring subaltern voices—those in the “House of Unknown Fame,” as Sarkar terms it (204)—teased out from his study of Bengali sources. Such discussions are as vital to recovering the everyday life of global technologies and to understanding them in social context. However, perhaps this aspect requires even more precise discussion of the relational aspects of subalternity—that is, of the entrepreneurs and technologists who collectively populate the book. Such minor quibbles notwithstanding, Let there be Light offers a rich exposition of the social life of technologies, its relationship to entrepreneurship and industry, and its role in shaping India’s colossal infrastructure map.

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: Literary Humanism and the Question of Human Dignity

This essay celebrates the sixtieth anniversary of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart by returning to a cliché that the novel remakes African humanity. While the presumption of Achebe’s humanism has congealed into academic common sense, he does not belong to some of the brands of literary humanism developed since the ascendancy of High Theory. Examining Achebe’s literary humanism in the wake of anti-humanist French theory, which engendered defenses of literary humanism from aesthetic philosophers and postcolonial scholars, I argue that Achebe ascribes neither to propositional nor non-propositional literary humanism, but to the Saidean text-and-language-bound literary humanism by virtue of which he remakes African humanity after Europe in Things Fall Apart. I contend further that as a postcolonial writer his relationship to humanism remains nevertheless ambivalent. Achebe’s humanism in the novel is of aporetic form, “anti-humanistic humanism,” engendering an impassable paradox; qua Said, he is critical of humanism in the name of humanism. Whereas Achebe refashions the precolonial Okonkwo to humanist measure in Things Fall Apart, the figure of Okonkwo is paradoxically molded in the principle of Cartesian individualism of classical realism.

Assessing Adequate Homes and Proper Parenthood: How Gendered and Racialized Family Norms Legitimize the Deportation of Unaccompanied Minors in Belgium and the Netherlands

Abstract This article analyzes the ways in which the Belgian and Dutch governments legitimize the deportation of unaccompanied minors, by focusing on the interplay of intersectional boundary work and bordering practices. Building on the work of postcolonial feminists and scholars studying the role of identity and cultural values in migration policy, the article highlights that deportation relies on and reifies gendered, racialized, and classed representations of the family, child-rearing practices, and the roles attributed to children. A paternalistic attitude that spurs the moral necessity to protect children mediates the exclusionary potential of such boundaries for deporting states.

Writing rights: suturing Spivak’s postcolonial and de Sousa Santos’ decolonial thought

ABSTRACT Exchange between postcolonial and decolonial thought has been hampered by intellectual and political divisions despite a shared concern with decentring colonial hegemonies. Against the grain, this article brings the work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos into conversation with Gayatri C. Spivak’s, centring on one key converging issue of concern – human rights. I argue that both thinkers share what I call a ‘reluctant commitment’ to a human rights framework, while recognizing its tainted history and current instrumentalization for hegemonic imperial ends. I identify and weave together the strands that form the basis for their reluctant commitment, their critique of human rights, and their proposals for a reconfigured framework of human rights. The article maps how Spivak and de Sousa Santos aim to reconfigure a liberal human rights frame by suturing it to alternative ethical systems, including responsibility-based systems and other conceptions of dignity. It shows common patterns in their work, including their concern that binary global divisions undermine the supposed universality of the human rights framework and the risks of equating law with ethics. Tracing the deconstructive and reconstructive strategies at work in Spivak’s and de Sousa Santos’ writing helps to break down the walls between decolonial and postcolonial scholarship.

Confronting the Discomfort: A Critical Analysis of Privilege and Positionality in Development

This autoethnographic piece seeks to demonstrate the continuous reflexive journey of researchers in acknowledging and addressing their privileges. Through reflections on fieldnotes and a subsequent paper written during my own doctoral research, I will explore how my immersion within postcolonial scholarship forced me to address how my own positionality in the field has re-enacted colonial dynamics in the field of global education. Thus, the paper will argue that in the same vein that we call on learners and educators to reflect on their privileges and positionality through pedagogical practices, we too as researchers must consider how the privileges we hold impacts our epistemological and methodological approach to study.

Introduction

Introduction