Decolonization Struggles Research Articles

Labour and the Decolonization Struggle in Trinidad and Tobago by Jerome Teelucksingh

<i>Labour and the Decolonization Struggle in Trinidad and Tobago</i> by Jerome Teelucksingh

Plural Diplomacies Between Indian Termination and the Cold War: Contemporary American Indian Paintings in the ‘Near East’, 1964–66

Abstract From 1964 to 1966, the United States Information Agency toured an exhibition of modern artworks titled Contemporary American Indian Paintings to Greece, Turkey, Iran, Algeria and Israel. Among other exhibitions of Native American art sent abroad during the Cold War, the paintings were intended to counter Soviet critiques of US colonization with a message of benevolent modernization, while deflecting international attention away from Indigenous decolonization struggles. This article positions the tour between federal Indian termination policy and Cold War propaganda, considering how Contemporary American Indian Paintings quietly slipped Native American diplomatic concerns into a global arena shaped by imperialism.

Participatory Parity and Indigenous Decolonization Struggles

Participatory Parity and Indigenous Decolonization Struggles

Beyond and Against White Settler Colonialism in Palestine

This article theorizes the fugitive futurities of decolonization, seeking futures beyond colonial constructions of the possible and the sensible. To do this, I engage with a close reading of Palestinian writer Amir Nizar Zuabi’s short story, “The Underground City of Gaza,” as an example of a fugitive trajectory that refuses inclusion into the colonial state through recognition, instead, re-centering modes of fugitive flight within the land itself—highlighting the necessary interplay between the re-routing and re-rooting of decolonization. In doing so, Zuabi demonstrates how decolonial futures evacuate colonial definitions of humanity, as well as colonial relationships with land and body that are based on property ownership. Working from Indigenous and radical Black theorization of land and fugitivity, my theorizing of fugitive futurity learns from Zuabi’s centering of land in imagining routes of flight, demonstrating how epistemologies of land both challenge colonial relations and also resurge alternative futures; re-rooting decolonial struggle in the land is also an act of re-routing toward decolonial futures.

Transatlantic Knowledge Politics of Sexuality

AbstractContestations over the rights of sexual minorities and gender-nonconforming people in Africa are profoundly shaped by two discourses that both emerge from polarized domestic political debates in the United States: a human rights–centered discourse of “LGBT*I” identity politics that promotes visibility and equal protections and privileges for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, and intersex individuals; and a Christonormative “family values” agenda that promotes the heterosexual nuclear family as the foundation of civilization. Analysis considers these contemporary discourses in relation to entangled colonial constructions of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy used to justify the conquest and exploitation of Africa. This article takes particular interest in the power relations that are (re)constituted through these discourses so as to uncover the underlying interests at stake within them. Through consultation with critiques advanced within critical race and critical queer theory, and critical philosophical arguments on the epistemic dimensions of racialized, sexed, and gendered oppressions, it is argued that these discourses advance U.S. hegemonic interests and reinscribe Western hegemony. It is concluded that struggles for equality among sexual minorities and gender-nonconforming people must be approached as part-and-parcel of decolonial struggles to dismantle white supremacist and Western structures of oppression.

Transatlantic Knowledge Politics of Sexuality

Abstract Contestations over the rights of sexual minorities and gender-nonconforming people in Africa are profoundly shaped by two discourses that both emerge from polarized domestic political debates in the United States: a human rights–centered discourse of “LGBT*I” identity politics that promotes visibility and equal protections and privileges for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, and intersex individuals; and a Christonormative “family values” agenda that promotes the heterosexual nuclear family as the foundation of civilization. Analysis considers these contemporary discourses in relation to entangled colonial constructions of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy used to justify the conquest and exploitation of Africa. This article takes particular interest in the power relations that are (re)constituted through these discourses so as to uncover the underlying interests at stake within them. Through consultation with critiques advanced within critical race and critical queer theory, and critical philosophical arguments on the epistemic dimensions of racialized, sexed, and gendered oppressions, it is argued that these discourses advance U.S. hegemonic interests and reinscribe Western hegemony. It is concluded that struggles for equality among sexual minorities and gender-nonconforming people must be approached as part-and-parcel of decolonial struggles to dismantle white supremacist and Western structures of oppression.

NOVOS ATORES EM CENA NA ANTROPOLOGIA

Nas lutas empreendidas pelos povos indígenas, a descolonização dos “espaços acadêmicos” tem adquirido relevância para os movimentos indígenas e aliados nas últimas décadas. No âmbito da academia, a luta pela descolonização implica na possibilidade do diálogo entre saberes e na valorização da perspectiva do “outro”, superando a sobreposição de conhecimentos. Sendo assim, as inúmeras pesquisas, trabalhos e reflexões desenvolvidas por indígenas no âmbito da academia, constituem novas estratégias de enfrentamento. Partindo de minha trajetória de vida e estudantil, pretendo mostrar os caminhos percorridos para alcançar o ensino superior, os desafios e as dificuldades enfrentadas num ambiente hostil, a importância das ações afirmativas e as possibilidades de organização política nestes espaços. Também exponho sobre a experiência de oito anos de trabalho junto aos povos indígenas e populações tradicionais no estado do Pará, fundamentais para formação pessoal, política e acadêmica. Procuro demonstrar como a formação de indígenas em nível superior pode proporcionar o alcance de diálogos entre os diferentes saberes de forma que não se sobreponham, além da vivência da interculturalidade, vencendo resistências e barreiras instituídas em tempos imemoriais.

Currículo, historia y justicia social. Estudio comparativo en América Latina

This article makes a comparative study of the historical narratives about the processes of conquest and colonization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in current curricular programs for compulsory education in Chile, Mexico, Bolivia and Ecuador. The analysis is grounded in Nancy Fraser’s concepts of affirmative and transformative strategies in political philosophy. The aim is to observe the deconstructive potential of symbolic power relations in historical narratives and analyze how each educational project responds to subaltern groups’ demands for recognition, as part of the struggle for social justice in these four Latin American countries. The results show that Chile and Mexico have an affirmative curriculum project based on principles of justice arising from social liberalism. Conversely Ecuador and, especially, Bolivia have potentially transformative curricula based on decolonial struggles for social justice. This is a qualitative, comparative and documentary study.

‘Les lendemains de révolution avortée’: Nathalie Etoke's bipolar narratives of doomed national romance

Nathalie Etoke’s novels Un amour sans papiers (1999) and Je vois du soleil dans tes yeux (2008) deal with the hardships of the African postcolonial condition in the global era through the trope of doomed romance. In these novels, the plight of the postcolonial nation-state drives people to emigrate in a search for more viable prospects. While the mobility theme addressed in her novels is typical of third-generation African literatures in general, Etoke’s vision simultaneously struggles against the postnationalist currents informing this literary paradigm. Indeed, Etoke’s novels are quite loud and didactic in their articulations of political commitment towards the nation and the continent. Etoke holds on to the anticolonial romance narrative, but at the same time cannot ignore its inevitable failures in the present. This leads to a tension that marks her work by giving it a bipolar character, one that manifests itself in the constant oscillation between utopianism and disillusionment. The bipolar quality of the texts betrays a discomfort that the narratives’ promotion of an anticolonial struggle for nationhood and decolonisation generate in a postcolonial era that keeps witnessing the failures of these romantic discourses to realise themselves. A close reading of the novels reveals that this discomfort finds its articulation in the narrative fabric of the texts.Keywords: anticolonial romance narrative, bipolar narratives, Nathalie Etoke, postcolonial condition

Rethinking Land Struggle in the Postindustrial City

AbstractThe racial and cultural politics of land and property are central to urban struggle, but have received relatively little attention in geography. This paper analyzes land struggles in Detroit where over 100,000 parcels of land are classified as “vacant”. Since 2010, planners and government officials have been developing controversial plans to ruralize Detroit's “vacant” neighborhoods as part of a program of fiscal austerity, reigniting old questions of racialized dispossession, sovereignty, and struggles for liberation. This paper analyzes these contentious politics by examining disputes over a white businessman's proposal to build the world's largest urban forest in the center of a Black majority city. I focus on how residents, urban farmers, and community activists resisted the project by making counterclaims to vacant land as an urban commons. They argued that the land is inhabited not empty and that it belonged to those who labored upon and suffered for it. Combining community‐based ethnography with insights from critical property theory, critical race studies, and postcolonial theory, I argue that land struggles in Detroit are more than distributional conflicts over resources. They are inextricable from debates over notions of race, property, and citizenship that undergird modern liberal democracies and ongoing struggles for decolonization.

Nathalie Etoke's bipolar narratives of doomed national romance

Nathalie Etoke's novels Un amour sans papiers (1999) and Je vois du soleil dans tes yeux (2008) deal with the hardships of the African postcolonial condition in the global era through the trope of doomed romance. In these novels, the plight of the postcolonial nation-state drives people to emigrate in a search for more viable prospects. While the mobility theme addressed in her novels is typical of third-generation African literatures in general, Etoke's vision simultaneously struggles against the postnationalist currents informing this literary paradigm. Indeed, Etoke's novels are quite loud and didactic in their articulations of political commitment towards the nation and the continent. Etoke holds on to the anticolonial romance narrative, but at the same time cannot ignore its inevitable failures in the present. This leads to a tension that marks her work by giving it a bipolar character, one that manifests itself in the constant oscillation between utopianism and disillusionment. The bipolar quality of the texts betrays a discomfort that the narratives' promotion of an anticolonial struggle for nationhood and decolonisation generate in a postcolonial era that keeps witnessing the failures of these romantic discourses to realise themselves. A close reading of the novels reveals that this discomfort finds its articulation in the narrative fabric of the texts.

Iran days in Egypt: Mosaddeq's Visit to Cairo in 1951

During Mohammad Mosaddeq’s tenure as the Iranian Prime Minister, the struggles for de-colonization took shape vis-à-vis the old superpowers, Britain and France, in Iran and the rest of the Middle East. Following the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, Mohammad Mosaddeq became the first Middle Eastern Muslim leader that overcame Britain, albeit temporarily. Mosaddeq paid a price, overthrown in 1953 in an American and British-backed coup, but his struggle aroused interest around the world and received different interpretations, depending on the location. This article examines the way Mosaddeq was perceived in Egypt, where he visited in November 1951 for a highly significant four-day visit. The article examines the evolution of the anti-colonial struggle in Egypt and the emergence of a new vernacular framing of the struggles in the Middle East in one context.

Decolonizing Liberation: Toward a Transnational Feminist Psychology

This paper engages the theme of “decolonizing psychological science” in the context of a perspective on psychological theory and research—namely, feminist psychology—that shares an emphasis on broad liberation. Although conceived as a universal theory and practice of liberation, scholars across diverse sites have suggested that feminism—perhaps especially as it manifests in psychological science—is not always compatible with and at times is even contradictory to global struggles for decolonization. The liberatory impulse of feminist psychology falls short of its potential not only because of its grounding in neocolonial legacies of hegemonic feminisms, but also because of its complicity with neocolonial tendencies of hegemonic psychological science. In response to these concerns, we draw upon on perspectives of transnational feminisms and cultural psychology as tools to decolonize (feminist) psychology. We then propose the possibility of a (transnational) feminist psychology that takes the epistemological position of people in various marginalized majority-world settings as a resource to rethink conventional scientific wisdom and liberate “liberation”. Rather than freeing some women to better participate in global domination, a transnational feminist psychology illuminates sustainable ways of being that are consistent with broader liberation of humanity in general.

Political Literacy: Gender, Nationalism, and Visibility in African Literary History

Political Literacy: Gender, Nationalism, and Visibility in African Literary History

A Politics Not Yet Known: Imagining Relationality within Solidarity

A Politics Not Yet Known: Imagining Relationality within Solidarity Scott L. Morgensen (bio) Recalling ASA’s momentous support for the Palestinian call for an academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions, Lisa Duggan queerly articulates this moment with the sudden loss of our colleague José Esteban Muñoz. In so doing she centers the furious fun that Muñoz read within queer creative and utopian practices when she addresses the arrival of queer studies in American studies. Duggan argues that, like many interventions before it, queer studies has become “integral rather than marginal” to American studies because its “refusal of identitarian logics” offers a “deep critical challenge . . . [to] conventional presumptions about who needs to know what, who should read whom, and where a given critical lens is relevant.” Duggan here frames queer studies as a crucial diagnostic of power as such, as well as of the specific forms of power addressed in American studies. In other words, having disturbed identitarianism, queer studies puts in question any presumption that “queer” refers first, or only, to sexuality or gender, which then forces us to ask, what is the power that queer studies calls us to confront? Perhaps a queer way to address this question would be to leave it entirely open—a point to which I return below. But first I want to think about José Muñoz in relation to a movement of scholars, artists, and activists who exhorted queer studies to interrogate racialized sexuality and the violences of colonial modernity. In 1997 Muñoz wrote, with Philip Brian Harper, Anne McClintock, and Trish Rosen, that “‘queer critique,’ conceived as a means of traversing and creatively transforming conceptual boundaries . . . illuminates how various dimensions of social experience—race, sexuality, ethnicity, diaspora, gender—can cut across or transect one another.”1 And in 2005 he joined David Eng and Judith Halberstam in calling for “a renewed queer studies ever vigilant to the fact that sexuality is intersectional, not extraneous to other modes of difference, and calibrated to a firm understanding of queer as a political metaphor with no fixed referent.”2 Today, our thickly stacked bookshelves of queer of color, queer diaspora, and queer Indigenous critiques model the interrogation of modernity and its coloniality as conditions of queer possibility. Both the [End Page 309] power we perceive as queer and our queer interrogations of it arise not externally to racial and colonial violence but in intimate articulation with them. Cathy Cohen in 1997 explained the whiteness of queer politics by highlighting the underlying queering of blackness by white supremacy: a sexualized antiblackness through and against which black queer life and challenges to violence emanate.3 Today, emergent Indigenous feminist and queer works collected by Joanne Barker are recentering Indigenous theories of colonialism and empire to illuminate our responsibilities (to land, all beings, and one another) as well as the relationships among decolonial struggles. With such works in mind, I want to sustain Duggan’s invocation of queer studies’ arrival by asking how the meaning of “queer” in American studies might hinge on questions of coloniality and decoloniality: questions made all the more imperative by calls for solidarity with Palestine. In this moment of engaging solidarity, thinking queerly can highlight how our acts articulate many forms of coloniality—those named, and those left unnamed—even as questioning identitarianism can return our critical attention to the relationships across differences that solidarity demands. The politics of Palestine within the ASA thus compels me to seek deeply connective theories of power and methods that can ground such theories within praxes of ethical interrelationship. When I look for queer accounts of relational lives that deepen my knowledge of and commitment to struggle, I am provoked by queer ethnographers who interrogate the violences of modernity from within deeply reflexive accounts of interrelationship. In her rendering of gendered and racialized national culture in Venezuela, Marcia Ochoa presents “queer diasporic ethnography” as a method that can address how “the process of modernity extinguishes humanity but creates other possibilities for existence.”4 For Ochoa, “queer diasporic ethnography is not necessarily about queer diasporic subjects” because it “questions the boundedness of the ‘native informant’ as a point of entry.”5 Writing from her own...

1968/2008: Reflections on Social Movements in an Age of Permanent War

1968 represents a crossroads of sorts, whose alternative political trajectories continue to influence the present in often confusing and contradictory ways. We have an increasingly exhaustive historical narrative detailing the long Black freedom struggle against white supremacist monopolizations of power and resources in the era before the Montgomery bus boycott. From the heroic mobilizations of Reconstruction-era Black politics in the face of white terror, through two great migrations, the mobilizations of Black labor, a new Black urbanism, and forms of worldly engagement in an era of global wars and decolonization struggles, the Black freedom movement simultaneously carried and deepened a demand for racial democracy. It is ironic, however, that even as aspects of this past become clarified, the more immediate history and political meaning of this long struggle have grown murky. I am specifically thinking about the foreclosure of Black freedom imperatives in the United States, particularly in the late 1960s and early 1970s, for which the year 1968 retains an iconic significance. Here the story often bifurcates, becoming a tale either of teleological fulfillment and narrative closure, or of violent fragmentation and ragged endings. These different trajectories lead us in turn to starkly different eventualities: the election of Barack Obama and the symbolic validation of the promise of Black politics, or the increasingly global US war-prison complex, where the tattered ends of our social contract once again meet the unforgiving cut of racialized governance. In this context, the searching question asked by Martin Luther King in his fateful final year—“Where Do We Go from Here?”—remains as relevant as ever.

José Mariátegui's East-South Decolonial Experiment

Common notions of comparative philosophy tend to be strongly configured by the East-West axis. This essay suggests ways of seeing Latin American liberation philosophy as a form of comparative philosophy and an important Latin American thinker as being relevant for East-West political philosophy. The essay focuses on the Peruvian activist and intellectual, José Mariátegui, who is widely regarded to have been a leading Marxist, liberatory, and decolonial figure in 20th century Latin America. Like many “Third World” intellectuals of the interwar years, Mariátegui had an interest in decolonization struggles in Asia and wrote with some consistency on this subject and in ways that bear significantly upon key themes in his political theory. Since very little of this has received commentary, this essay begins a discussion of Mariátegui's decolonial experimentation with ideas about Asia, decolonization, and indigenous cultural forms, like those of the Incas and Confucians. After some preliminary discussion of Eurocentrism, postcolonial thought, and decolonial thought, attention is focused on Mariátegui's East-South geography of liberation, heuristic use of Chinese revolutionary politics, and Sinified hermeneutic for conceptualizing the consciousness of the Peruvian indigenous, a central element of his political theory.

American Labor’s Global Ambassadors: The International History of the AFL–CIO during the Cold War, by Robert Anthony Waters Jr. and Geert van Goethem, eds.

Robert Anthony Waters Jr. and Geert van Goethem, eds. American Labor's Global Ambassadors: The International History of the AFL-CIO during the Cold War New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 316 pp., $1 15.00 (cloth) ISBN 9781 137360212The foreign policy of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations, particularly with regard to the rebuilding of postwar Western Europe, the Cold War, and the decolonization struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, is often overlooked. Its omission from the historiography on these subjects is surprising given the prominent and often controversial role that the AFL-CIO played. Historians' neglect of the AFL-CIO's international role has been typical of the treatment of many national or international labour organizations. However, the situation is starting to improve. There are now a number of excellent studies that examine the history of international labour organizations, including the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions and the International Labour Organization.1 Arguably the emergence of these studies is indicative of a broader trend within the historiography of the twentieth century, with historians paying increasing attention to the role of international organizations, the emergence of ideas and discourses relating to global governance and human rights, and the harnessing of technical expertise to development initiatives.2American Labor's Global Ambassadors, a collection of essays edited by Robert Anthony Waters Jr. and Geert van Goethem, is a welcome addition to this literature. Based on a series of papers presented at a workshop in October 2011, the essays are meticulously researched, drawing on a range of archival sources, including the George Meany Memorial Archives, the International Institute for Social History, and the National Archives and Record Administration, College Park. The book is divided into five parts. Three of the parts are geographic in focus, examining the AFL-CIO's involvement in (part II), Latin America and the Caribbean (part III), and Africa and Asia (part IV), while the remaining sections (parts I and V) analyze the AFL-CIO's international role from a more general, global perspective.In part I, Geert van Goetham's article, From dollars to deeds, investigates the origins of the AFL's international activism. According to van Goetham, the AFL's engagement with international affairs was very haphazard during the first half of the twentieth century, veering between short bouts of intense activity and sustained periods of international isolation (10). The 1930s, he argues, marked a turning point in the AFL's international policy, when the United States' decision to join the ILO and fears of being usurped by its erstwhile domestic rival, the CIO, forced the AFL to take greater interest in international affairs (12). As well changing domestic and international factors, van Goetham documents how the most militant US unions, which often included Jewish and Italian immigrants, exploited ethnic networks in both the US and to collect funds in order to support refugees, distribute anti-fascist propaganda, and provide material assistance to those oppressed by authoritarian regimes in (12-13). As subsequent chapters in the volume demonstrate, this desire to fight totalitarianism among US labour leaders is critical to understanding the direction of AFL-CIO foreign policy, with many within the organization regarding postwar efforts to contain the global spread of communism simply an extension of the struggle against fascism during the 1930s and 1940s.In part II, essays by Barrett Dower and Alessandro Brogi examine the American labour movement's attempts to combat communist influence in postwar France and Italy, respectively. In both cases the American labour movement did not serve as a mere corollary to US plans of political and economic stabilization in Europe (Brogi, 60). US trade unions actually acted ahead of the State Department, recognizing that the labour movement would constitute a key Cold War battleground. …

Rethinking Knowledge Production and Circulation in Comparative and International Education: Southern Theory, Postcolonial Perspectives, and Alternative Epistemologies

Rethinking Knowledge Production and Circulation in Comparative and International Education: Southern Theory, Postcolonial Perspectives, and Alternative Epistemologies

Resonance and reach: discussions on racism between the UK and Germany from the late 1970s

In this paper I investigate the resonance of the volume The Empire Strikes Back within the debates on racism in Germany since the late 1970s. I am interested in this long-term intellectual exchange in light of the current need to conceptualize racism in a European framework and thereby reflect upon the characteristics, concepts and possibilities of such a framework. I begin by situating the debate at that time within the context of the New Left. What connected both situations, in Germany and the UK, was an inscription of the then-ongoing anti-colonial and decolonial struggles of the South in the North, not least through the ‘retaliatory effect’ of migration movements and struggles of migration arriving in Europe. I argue that the understandings of racism and anti-racism are grounded in a materialist framework and that the concept of articulation helped and continues to help thinking the complexity and heterogeneity of the social.