Colonial Practices Research Articles

Creative Writing and Decolonizing Intersectional Feminist Critical Reflexivity: Challenging Neoliberal, Gendered, White, Colonial Practice Norms in the COVID-19 Pandemic

Creative writing during the COVID-19 pandemic can serve as a decolonizing intersectional feminist method for critical self-reflexivity. We share responses to the prompt: “If my therapeutic practice came with a warning label in COVID-19, what would it say?” and provide an analysis of the neoliberalism, whiteness, and colonialism embedded in our creative writing and practice. Engaging in critical self-reflexivity through metaphor carries potential for revealing hidden gendered, racialized, colonial, and neoliberal biases and norms related to social work practice, particularly when done in a collaborative, dialogic manner. We conclude by providing possible creative writing prompts that might be used in social work practice, supervision, and teaching to advance existing practices of self-reflexivity in social work both during and beyond the pandemic.

Yehuda Bauer, the Concepts of Holocaust and Genocide, and the Issue of Settler Colonialism

ABSTRACT This article examines Yehuda Bauer's treatment of the concepts of Holocaust and genocide as well as Raphael Lemkin's understanding of the relationship between genocide and settler colonialism. “Intent” has been central to the concept of genocide (both in Lemkin's definition and in the UN Convention) but difficult to locate and identify in the historical practice of settler colonialism, despite the destruction of groups as such that the latter has caused. This article argues for two concepts of genocide: systematic and systemic. The former, based on the Holocaust paradigm, focuses on intent, while the latter, based on settler colonialism, focuses on outcome.

Internet.org and the rhetoric of connectivity

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the discursive construction of Facebook’s goal to build Internet connectivity in India through its “internet.org” project. I argue that the rhetoric of connectivity emergent in this project uses the language of empowerment and innovation to operationalize a mode of entrepreneurial philanthropy amenable to millennial development that in reality reflects notions of progress reminiscent of colonial modernization practices. I also contend that this case demonstrates the need to understand the particular technopolitics of everyday encounters with infrastructures that cannot be reduced to any single vision of connectivity or singular understanding of digital contexts.

Reinventing the Humanities

The humanities are currently under pressure from vocational studies and electronic technologies. The more education is mechanized and corporatized, the less room there is often thought to be for the Bildung that the modern humanities aimed to impart. At the same time, radical critiques of the neoliberal university have appeared, implicating it in colonial practices, racism, and the promotion of casteism, hierarchy, and inequality. Currently there are major schisms between defenders of the traditional humanities and advocates of technologically based higher education, advocates of radically politicized higher education, and advocates of entirely vocational training, which dispenses with the humanities altogether.

“To guard this Paradise from any second violation”: Ysabinda and the Eastern female body as contested territory in Dryden’s Amboyna (1673)

This article focuses on John Dryden’s 1673 play Amboyna, or the Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants, and more particularly on the figure of Ysabinda, and the island she represents, as contested territory. This article demonstrates that Ysabinda’s relationship with her English fiancé Towerson comes to politically stand for the fantasized absorption of the Spice Islands into Britain’s imperial project. Through a rhetoric of trade and ownership, Dryden stages Ysabinda’s commodification and ultimate rape as a way to fuel anti-Dutch sentiment while at the same time justifying Britain’s colonial practices. However, this literary endeavor is only sustainable through the erasure of the ruling power around the Indian Ocean at the time, the Mughal Empire, as well as through the distortion of the real-life figure behind Ysabinda’s character: the Armenian Indian Mariam Khan.

A Collaborative Multi-Method Approach to Evaluating Indigenous Land-Based Learning With Men

In Canada, a vast majority of urban Indigenous people face distinct challenges accessing and connecting to Indigenous cultural practices. Research has found that colonial policies and practices continue to disrupt and fracture traditional methods of passing down cultural teachings, including dispossession from traditional lands in which cultural practices are rooted. This disruption continues to affect the availability of educational programming by and with Indigenous people and in Indigenous languages. This research involves a multi-method approach to observe and engage with a land-based traditional drum-making program for Indigenous men in an urban center in Southwestern Manitoba. By participating, watching, and listening to the men within the workshops through unstructured observation, Sharing Circles, individual interviews, and photovoice, we aim to understand the impacts of land-based learning on Indigenous men’s well-being. The study is designed in accordance with University and Tri-Agency ethical guidelines, integrating ownership, control, access and possession (OCAP), as well as the principles of respect, relevance, reciprocity, and responsibility within all phases of the research. The research is co-created by the university researchers, community collaborators, and other relevant stakeholders.

Mexican student-teachers’ “English” language praxicum: Decolonizing attempts

The teaching of English in Mexican elementary schools is emblematic of colonial practices. Counteracting this trend, this paper presents results of an “English” teaching praxicum which, allowing for decolonizing subjectivities, was conducted by two of the authors of this paper (Jatziri and Gerardo), Mexican student teachers in a low-socio-economic elementary school in Oaxaca, Mexico. Utilizing decolonizing pedagogies as a theoretical framework and critical ethnography as methodology, this paper presents the childhood life stories of Jatziri and Gerardo, and their decolonizing attempts during their language teaching praxicum through their dialogue with a student. Findings suggest these student teachers developed acute awareness of the diversity in the classroom through reflexive teaching. Hence, language education programs with decolonizing agendas should include reflexive teaching.

Beyond Biontology? Bringing Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s Geontologies to Life-Centred Design

The concept of “design for life” has been rapidly picking up steam in the last few years. While the discourse around life-centred design leaves the concept of “life” unproblematised, it uses this term to signify an expansion of the sites and stakeholders of design beyond the human. I therefore define life-centred design as mobilising more-than-human approaches with the explicit aim of intervening in (the debate about) what planetary life is and should become. What purposes might life-centred design fulfil by differentiating between life/nonlife and favouring only the former? This article explores how Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s magisterial Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (2016) can contribute to thinking through the ethical implications of life-centred design. I start by discussing three of Geontologies’ key concepts: the carbon imaginary, geontopower, and geontology. I then brief ly experiment with activating those concepts to think about how three life-centred design practices configure life/nonlife and how those configurations might be involved in tactics of control. I then discuss how life-centred design tends to reproduce a modern Western belief in biontology (the equivalence of life with being) and as such risks teproducing (neo-)colonial practices of control. In conclusion, I both consider some of the ethical implications of life-centred design and speculate on those of a hypothetical post-biontological life-centred design.

Rethinking the everyday domestic sphere: Palestinian women as environmentalist and anti-colonial warriors

Abstract This paper examines the role of rural Palestinian women in the South Hebron Hills (SHH) in fighting back against both Israeli settler colonial practices and environmental destruction resulting from such practices. We contend that Israel is waging a war on the environment as a tool to deprive Palestinians in Area ‘C’ of what sustains life, land and natural resources. Through their everyday practices of defiance, we argue that, rural women wielding an indigenous lifestyle of farming in the SHH create an agro-ecological structure of sumud, or steadfastness through their domestic everyday practices, where they strengthen their attachment to the land and regenerate the environment.

Confinement and beyond: space, mobility, and connections in two Mau Mau detention memoirs

This contribution analyzes two detention diaries, by J. M. Kariuki (Mau Mau Detainee: The Account by a Kenya African of His Experiences in the Detention Camps 1953–1960. Oxford University Press, 1963) and Gakaara wa Wanjaũ (Mwandĩki wa Mau Mau Ithaamĩrio-Inĩ. Heinemann, 1983), that interpret life in the colonial camps in Kenya in the 1950s. Focusing on aspects of movement, camp landscapes, sociability, bodily degradation, writing and the mobility of materials, the article shows that colonial policy aimed at a process of reducing prisoners to “bare persons,” while detainees attempted to stay as close to their social networks and themselves as possible. In the constant struggle and negotiation over mobility, connections and communication, camp personnel and prisoners do not appear as homogeneous groups. Clearly Mau Mau’s detention camps were horrible places with often extremely violent conditions. Yet, a simplified, dichotomous analysis stands in the way of understanding the capricious nature of colonial practice, and reduces the detainees to their status as detainees, while they aimed precisely to overcome the spatial and bodily restrictions imposed, attempting to connect beyond the camps.

Bonnard and the Folding Screen: Toward a Theory of Ornamentalism

Abstract Bonnard’s folding screens are generally understood as part of the phenomenon of japonisme, a widespread fascination with Japanese culture in Europe that emerged during the second half of the nineteenth century. When they begin to appear and then alter the representation of space in Bonnard’s painting, however, japonisme no longer provides an adequate framework for understanding their role in his art. I endeavor to account for the continued life of the non-Western object in the Western context by highlighting the folding screen’s capacity to disrupt and engender change even as it disappears from Bonnard’s late paintings. After an overview of the artist’s folding screens and their relation to japonisme, I trace their migration into Bonnard’s paintings, where the limits of this Western construct become more apparent. I propose an alternate framework—ornamentalism—within which to interpret their integration into the compositional structure of the late paintings. Ornamentalism views the ornamental object as a subject whose power to act is tied to its own degradation under imperialist and colonialist practices. Through it, I consider how the evolution of the folding screen in Bonnard’s art can help us think differently about the dynamics between Western artists and non-Western objects.

Historicizing translation as (de)colonial practices: China’s 1867 debate on learning western sciences as an example

ABSTRACT This paper examines translation as a political-textual-epistemological battlefield of colonialism-coloniality and counter wise, which construes and constructs day-to-day communications/confrontations between people both within and across empires. It examines the Tongwen Guan 1867 debate on calling on prospective Confucian scholars to learn Western sciences as an eventful site of such translational practices. Reading into the Qing memorial texts and foreign ministers’ dispatch reports, this paper historicizes the ways in which the epistemic debate translingually entangles Sino-West power (dis)ordering, Qing China’s inner confrontations among the literati officials, and the colonial expansion of Missionary gospels. Situated within the historical and epistemic contexts, the analysis explicates a dao-qi episteme that trans-orders Chinese and western sciences, a yi/barbarian framework that trans-orders (un)worthy teachers, and a ‘China origin’ trope that ultimately endorses western learning in modern China. As a case study, this paper provides implications for explicating cultural-epistemic differences through translingual practices as a de-colonial gesture.

MEDIA DAN TAFSIR MASKULINITAS: SUATU TINJAUAN ATAS CULTURAL IMPERIALISM

Masculinity is a topic that has attracted the attention of many researchers. They examine causes, patterns of change, and impacts. This article attempts to understand masculinity in the perspective of cultural imperialism. Through the perspective of cultural imperialism, we find evidence that masculinity is not born from the womb of the local community's culture, but rather as a result of the practice of colonialism and imperialism. In the era of media globalization, cultural imperialism places more emphasis on the psychological aspect where advertisements and television shows set a new standard of masculinity for men. This paper will discuss the influence of cultural imperialism and media hegemony on the construction of masculinity in society.

Law and Order, the Rule of Law, and the Legitimation of the Colonial Presence in Late British Burma

AbstractIn Britain's empire across Asia and Africa from the mid-nineteenth century, two political-legal principles were central to colonial modernity, law and order, and the rule of law. These two principles secured the legitimation of colonial rule, in the eyes of those who ruled. It is striking then to see that in late colonial Burma, in the 1920s and 1930s, the colonial government struggled to maintain law and order and to embed the rule of law. Violent crime soared while the criminal justice system failed hopelessly for serious offences. This article seeks to explore the ways in which senior British officials in Burma navigated the disjuncture between the imperial principles that were central to colonial justification and Burma's reality. Perhaps most notably, they did so by putting blame for the soaring crime rates and the failures of the criminal justice system firmly on the Burmese. In the early 1940s, however, with the end of colonial rule clearly imminent, the legitimation of the colonial presence became of less pressing importance, and the failure of colonial practice to live up to its ideological rhetoric could now be more openly faced.

London and Cloisterham as an Imperial ‘Heart of Darkness’ in Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Abstract The article examines Dickens’s last novel in the context of British imperialism, contraband opium trade in nineteenth-century China under the armed protection of the British government, and the Opium Wars (1839–1842 and 1856–1860). Although Dickens has often been discussed as one of the authors who approved of his country’s imperial domination, his last novel foregrounds a critique of colonial practices. The atavistic character of imperialism takes its moral and psychological toll not merely somewhere in the dominions, colonies, protectorates, and other territories but also ‘at home’ on the domestic ground. In The Mystery of Edwin Drood London has the face of a dingy and dark opium den or the ominous headquarters of the Heaven of Philanthropy with the professing philanthropists in suits of black. Moreover, the article seeks to discuss deep-rooted evil and darkness associated in the novel with an ecclesiastical town in connection with Protestant missionaries’ close collaboration with opium traders in the Celestial Empire. Portraying John Jasper’s moral degradation enhanced by the drug and the corruption of the ecclesiastical town, Dickens gothicises opium, and by implication, opium trade pointing to its double-edged sword effect: sullying and debasing both the addict and the trafficker. The symbolic darkness of the opium den and the churchly Cloisterham reflects the inherent evil latent in any unbridled colonial expansion and Dickens’s anti-colonial purpose.

Carcerality and the legacies of settler colonial punishment in Nairobi

From the beginning of its colonial settlement in Kenya, the British administration criminalized Kenyans. Even now, colonial modes of punishment, incarceration, closure, interrogation, curfew, confiscation, separation, displacement, and detention without trial are deeply embedded in the spatial and ideological arrangements of post-colonial Kenya. Initially assumed to herald a rupture from colonial modes of criminalization and punishment, the post-colonial period instead normalized them. Through ethnographic, scholarly, and visual encounters, the paper engages five interconnecting structures that engendered the legacy of a seamless system of control, containment, and punishment evident in the ‘afterlives’ of empire. These are settler colonialism, violence, racism, colonial corporeality, and capitalism. The paper attends to the violence and brutality that endures in the very geographies that were the urban targets of colonial siege and links the carceral practices of settler colonialism and the everyday post-colonial governance of Nairobi’s poor neighbourhoods, encounters with the debris and ruination of empire found in the material and spatial fabric of Mathare. We take up a critical encounter with colonial files to both discern the continuity and lineage of carceral practices and to disrupt the authorial totality and continuity the colonial archive files assembled. The paper includes archival and authored photographs:

Past and Present Colonialist Practices: Violence in Indigenous Communities

Violence and Indigenous Communities: Confronting the Past and Engaging the Present is an interdisciplinary collection of fifteen essays in which the authors raise awareness of past and current colonialist practices that continue to impact and shape Indigenous communities across the world. The editors of this volume thematically organized the essays into five sections to guide and expose the reader to different representations of violence within and against Indigenous communities. Trustworthy historic and academic sources serve as the foundation of each essay, as the authors deepen into topics that include captivity, enslavement, displacement, sexual violence, and death. This collection of essays highlights existing curricular and social gaps that have prevented the general community from understanding Indigenous communities’ crucial role and invites the reader to explore and inquire about perspectives that go beyond patriarchal ideologies and a Eurocentric mindset.

Heterosexism and Homophobia in the Caribbean Dancehall Context

This paper explores how dancehall lyrics reproduce heterosexist and homophobic discourses in the LGBTQ community within a Caribbean dancehall context. It advances notable scholarship (Chunnu 2021, Hope, 2021) on dancehall lyrics by drawing on standard parallels of the colonial same-sex practices used to denigrate enslaved Africans and the Eurocentric religious ideal that LGBTQ customs contravene Judeo-Christian doctrine. Dancehall music originated in Jamaica within the neo-colonial period (since the 1980s) coming out of reggae. Dancehall is the musical expression of the working-class black masses used to protest the criminogenic continuities of colonial history. Although dancehall acted as a form of protest against the colonially entangled inequalities, heterosexism prevailed and continued to shape the checkered reality of coloniality within Jamaica and T&T societies. As such, this study explores the present-day identities of the LGBTQIA community expressed through the dancehall lyrics created within the 1990-2010 period utilising autobiography, critical discourse analysis by Fairclough and gender performativity theory by Judith Butler. In doing so, the researcher connected dancehall lyrics to heterosexism through an analysis of discourses within religion, sex and sexuality. Such discourses contributed to advancing the understanding of stigmatisation, criminalisation and dehumanisation of the LGBTQ community in a cross-cultural Caribbean context.

Genetic syncretism: Latin American forensics and global indigenous organizing

In the 1970s, Latin America became a global laboratory for military interventions, the cultivation of terror, and ideological and economic transformation. In response, family groups and young scientists forged a new activist forensics focused on human rights, victim-centered justice, and state accountability, inaugurating new forms of forensic practice. We examine how this new form of forensic practice centered in forensic genetics has led to a critical engagement with Indigeneity both within and outside the lab. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with human rights activists and forensic scientists in Argentina, Guatemala and Mexico, this paper examines the relationship between forensic genetics, Indigenous organizing, and human rights practice. We offer the concept of ‘genetic syncretism’ to attend to spaces where multiple and competing beliefs about genetics, justice, and Indigenous identity are worked out through (1) coming together in care, (2) incorporation, and (3) ritual. Helping to unpack the uneasy and incomplete alliance of Indigenous interests and forensic genetic practice in Latin American, genetic syncretism offers a theoretical lens that is attentive to how differentials of power embedded in colonial logics and scientific practice are brokered through the coming together of seemingly incompatible beliefs and practices.

From Headhunting to Head Taxes

Abstract This article investigates Dutch colonial practices on the Moluccan island of Seram in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Seram’s mountainous interior was the domain of ungoverned, peripatetic Alfurs who engaged in headhunting. For a long time, they were rendered untouched by colonialism and administered through coastal intermediaries. After 1900, renewed imperial-civilizational vigour demanded the direct incorporation and ‘civilization’ of Seram’s stateless spaces. A series of expeditions subjected the Alfurs to registration, categorization, and taxation, which this article argues were seen as pivotal, moralizing tools of colonial social-engineering, used to inscribe subjected people into the state and instil compliant and ‘productive’ behaviour. However, rather than a replacement of indigenous orders with European modernity, colonization produced a hybrid fusion of colonial strategies of domination with indigenous cultural practices of state-evasion. This article demonstrates that colonial governance was a site of interaction, in which colonial developmentalism and modernity were actively negotiated and challenged.