Decolonization

10 Key excerpts on "Decolonization"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  Decolonization

  A Short History

  • Jan C. Jansen, Jürgen Osterhammel, Jeremiah Riemer, Jeremiah Riemer(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  1

  Decolonization AS MOMENT AND PROCESS

  “Decolonization” is a technical and rather undramatic term for one of the most dramatic processes in modern history: the disappearance of empire as a political form, and the end of racial hierarchy as a widely accepted political ideology and structuring principle of world order. One can pin down this historical process by using a dual definition that, instead of keeping the process chronologically vague, anchors it unequivocally in the history of the twentieth century. Accordingly, Decolonization is

  (1) the simultaneous dissolution of several intercontinental empires and the creation of nation-states throughout the global South within a short time span of roughly three postwar decades (1945–75), linked with

  (2) the historically unique and, in all likelihood, irreversible delegitimization of any kind of political rule that is experienced as a relationship of subjugation to a power elite considered by a broad majority of the population as alien occupants.1

  Decolonization designates a specific world-historical moment, yet it also stands for a many-faceted process that played out in each region and country shaking off colonial rule. Alternative attempts at a definition accentuate this second dimension. The historian and sinologist Prasenjit Duara, for example, puts less emphasis on the breakdown of empires and more on local power shifts in specific colonies when he defines Decolonization as “the process whereby colonial powers transferred institutional and legal control over their territories and dependencies to indigenously based, formally sovereign, nation-states.” He, too, adds a normative aspect: the replacement of political orders was embedded in a global shift in values. This dissolution signifies a counterproject to imperialism in the name of “moral justice and political solidarity.”2

  It is equally possible to ask, quite concretely and pragmatically, when the Decolonization of a specific territory was completed. A simple answer would be: when a locally formed government assumed official duties, when formalities under international law and of a symbolic nature were carried out, and when the new state was admitted (usually within a matter of months) into the United Nations. A more complex (and less easily generalizable) answer would weave these trajectories toward state independence into more comprehensive and intricate processes of ending colonial rule and extending political, economic, and cultural sovereignty.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Decolonisation

  Revolution and Evolution

  • David Boucher, Ayesha Omar, Christopher Allsobrook, Camilla Boisen, Ndumiso Dladla, Sule Emmanuel Egya, Michael Elliott, Steven Friedman, Amber Murrey, Paul Patton, Chris Saunders, Ian S Spears, David Boucher, Ayesha Omar, David Boucher, Ayesha Omar(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Wits University Press

    (Publisher)

  INTRODUCTION

  Decolonisation: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

  David Boucher and Ayesha Omar

  A global history of the contemporary world is marked by the  displacement, dispossession and domination forged by the colonial and imperial encounter. Colonialism and imperialism have been widely accepted as systems of exploitation, dependent upon the devaluation of the languages, cultures and control of colonised subjects systematically cast as ontologically inferior. Colonialism, constitutive of modernity, as Jean-Paul Sartre argues, was not the accumulation of individual undertakings and chance occurrences, but instead an elaborate system that emerged around the mid-nineteenth century, representing moments of rise and decline (2001, 38). As Mahmood Mamdani contends, colonialism forcibly inscribed law, custom, education, language and community, citing the dichotomies of primitive versus civilised and the division of people along tribal, ethnic and racial lines (2020, 2–3). Yet, the second half of the twentieth century is instantiated by powerful acts of resistance, with the challenge to, and decline of, colonialism. During this period, colonial subjects rejected the coloniser, prompting waves of decolonisation in many parts of the world. While modern colonialism and imperialism have been extensively examined in terms of their economic, military and political motivations, decolonisation requires further and more nuanced study.

  Decolonisation as a conceptual term relates to more than just a set of historical processes signalling the demise of colonialism. While definitionally it is associated with the historical process of political independence of former colonies – events locatable in time, geography and political praxis – in recent times it has become a floating signifier for a range of contemporary struggles against injustice. Decolonisation can thus at once be construed as a normative idea, a political and economic ideal, or an epistemic project, demonstrating the unsettled nature of its use. The task of this book is to think productively, through various sites and contexts, about the uses and meanings of the term decolonisation, so as to provide complexity to our contemporary understanding. As such, it is interested in exploring the multiplicity of ways in which decolonisation has evolved and the various modes of its articulation. The book proceeds from an interdisciplinary vantage point, drawing together a series of arguments in social and political thought, intellectual and economic history, literary studies, political theory and development studies. These interdisciplinary approaches, as the book demonstrates, conceive of decolonisation from a range of perspectives: as a historical or empirical political process, a problem of political and philosophical theory, and through the lens of epistemic justice. The chapters in the book are thus generative, providing a myriad of lenses on the revolution and evolution of decolonisation in contemporary discourse.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Trajectories

  Inter-Asia Cultural Studies

  • Kuan-Hsing Chen, Kuan-Hsing Chen(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  To reformulate Hage's theoretical articulation at a general level: if the cultural basis of colonialism is racism, and its cultural strategy, assimilation, which generates an identification with the aggressor/colonizer, then can one say that the cultural basis of neocolonialism is multiculturalism (which recognizes differences but covers its dominant ethnic position as the nodal point of divide), and its cultural strategy, peaceful coexistence, and which generates an identification with the self in the form of nativism, civilizationalism and identity politics. The direction of an incomplete project of Decolonization is then to interiorize others in a highly self-conscious manner; here ‘others’ are not simply racial, ethnic and national categories, but also class, sex/gender and geographical positionings; the highly structured hierarchy of differences has to be transcended through interaction, understanding and changes of objective conditions.

  Colonialism is an imposed structure. From 1492 onward for four centuries, it radically transformed the world. The political epistemology of colonialism builds itself on a rigid ‘inside/outside’ distinction, and the main axes have been race and ethnicity: color, language, accent, religion, etc., mark the divide between the colonizer and the colonized; these are also cultural categories which mark hierarchies and unequal power relations. Sex, age and class in colonial relations were often metaphorized: colonizers are male adults with higher class positions, while the colonized were seen as women, and/or children with lower class status. Decolonization movements have deepened the understanding that an inversion of colonialism, a continuation of imposed colonial modes of thinking and categories turned upside down, would not answer. The political epistemology of Decolonization could no longer put priority on race and ethnicity under which sexual, age and class differences are subsumed. Recognition of differences, erasing the hierarchical structure of differences, and interiorizing differences are the principle of its political ethics. To put it simply, Decolonization is a permanent struggle against any form of domination.

  Ghassan Hage's insight pushes us to question the structural enunciative positions of the state apparatus, the power bloc, and the dominant culture in their handling of the problems of identity crisis: one might have good intentions but still generate the next wave of (neo)colonial domination. If that is the case, where can subaltern subjects go?

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  India after the 1857 Revolt

  Decolonising the Mind

  • M. Christhu Doss(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  18

  Culture, Power and Decolonization

  Colonialism and Decolonization are comprehensive and constantly changing movements that have aroused a great deal of attention in postcolonial studies.19 Colonialism as a cultural conquest provided colonizers power and wealth through its forms of knowledge, plunder and expropriation.20 Countries across the globe continue to struggle to decolonize the mind through ‘a real control’ of all the means of self-determination in time and space.21 The history of Decolonization in India as an ideology still remains a subject of concern to historians and political scientists.22 The German scholar Moritz Julius Bonn, who coined the term ‘Decolonization’ in the 1930s, uses the phrase to refer to ‘counter-colonization’ and to indicate how the conquered people were leading a series of movements against the colonizers to put an end to exploitation, dominance and control.23

  The term ‘Decolonization’ is often used in social sciences to indicate disappearance of empire as a political form, and erosion of ‘racial hierarchy’ in the twentieth century. Nevertheless, a plethora of cultural conflicts, ambiguities, competing narratives and contestations seem to suggest that the seized ‘subjects’ continued to challenge the supposedly superior culture of the British colonists during eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Decolonization of mind is not essentially about attaining political independence in the first place as it was closely linked to the question of cultural self-determination as well. In most of the cases, the very idea of Decolonization of mind is tied to colonialism as a cultural project, power and oppression.24

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Political Geography

  A Critical Introduction

  • Sara Smith(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Reproduced with permission of HelenSTB. https://www.flickr.com/photos/104328095@N04/17105110632

  Keywords

  Decolonization 

  An active and ongoing process of struggling for sovereignty, rights, and land, under ongoing conditions of settler colonialism and imperialism.

  Decolonial feminist geopolitics 

  A geopolitics that incorporates analysis of coloniality into its understanding of geopolitics and sovereignty.

  Extractive model of research 

  Research that extracts knowledge from a place for use elsewhere.

  Femicide 

  Killing of women based on their gender.

  God‐Trick 

  The pretense of objectivity and omniscience in research.

  Imperial ruination 

  Term indicating that after the formal end to empire the consequences of that encounter continued to unfold, whether in the economic processes of development that have unevenly benefited specific segments of society in formerly colonized places, or the continued environmental effects, or the perpetuation of ethnic and racial divisions that originated in or were reconfigured and strengthened during the time of European colonization.

  Indigenization 

  Process through which settlers work to seem to themselves and others as the natural and rightful occupants of a place they have settled through violence and dispossession.

  Methodologies 

  The set of methods and accompanying logics that are used to create knowledge.

  Further Reading

  Colonialism and racialization

  1. Fanon, F. 1963.
     The Wretched of the Earth
     . New York: Grove Press.
  2. Fanon, F. 2008.
     Black Skin, White Masks
     . New York: Grove Press.
  3. Leroux, D. 2018. “We’ve Been Here for 2,000 Years”: White Settlers, Native American DNA and the Phenomenon of Indigenization.
     Social Studies of Science
     48(1): 80–100.
  4. Lowery, M.M. 2010.
     Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation
     . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
  5. McClintock, A. 1995.
     Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest
     . New York: Routledge.
  6. Simpson, A. 2009. Captivating Eunice: Membership, Colonialism, and Gendered Citizenships of Grief.
     Wicazo Sa Review

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Decolonising the Study of Religion

  Who Owns Buddhism?

  • Jørn Borup(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Since then, the process of bringing transformations in international politics and values has been a major concern for engaged thinkers and actors, sometimes under the term ‘decolonisation’, a term still semantically evolving. That colonisation does not end by flag independence is a truism. Colonisation has lasting effects long after the end of empires with continuing structural inequalities and dependency on relations with the former colonial powers. In that way, the term decolonisation can be historicised as “a bundle of processes encompassing post-colonialism, second wave Decolonization, re-colonization 7 and decolonialization” (Thomas and Thomson 2018, 7). Frederick Cooper and Roger Brubaker identify a renewed interest in colonialism from 1980s with a” growing awareness that colonial societies could not be seen as ‘out there’ [and] a large portion of the world’s population via colonization profoundly shaped European as well as Afro-Asian history” (Cooper 2005, 34). The growing dissatisfaction amongst intellectuals’ own lack of possibilities of making social change further sparked interests in postcolonial orientation, not least in academia (ibid, 34–35). With the turn of the millennium, the accelerated communication networks with the internet spread globally, and the global village became more than a metaphor relativising the West as the centre of the world. The globalising effects related to transnational and -cultural circulation after the Fall of the Berlin Wall furthermore have triggered renewed discussions of decolonisation, as “globalization conditioned decolonisation, just as decolonisation shaped globalization” (ibid, 4). The experienced inequalities of lasting colonial effects – sometimes termed ‘coloniality’ – and lacking persuasions of the globalised world’s seductive narratives have been met with both glocal adjustments and post-global resistance, questioning the universality of global imaginaries. Figure 2.1 Imperial division

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  SUNY series, Philosophy and Race

  • Corey McCall, Phillip McReynolds, Corey McCall, Phillip McReynolds(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  27

  Scholars of Anishinaabe traditions over the last fifty years, including LaDuke, Gerald Vizenor, Deborah McGregor, Grace Dhillon, and Larry Gross have argued for the ways in which Decolonization of knowledge, culture, and self-determination are tied to land-based conceptions of indigenous futurity.28 For McGregor, for example, she writes that “we often find ourselves in the position of reacting to the colonizers, and we spend too much precious time and energy deconstructing their intents, labels, and activities. Maybe we need to spend more time being proactive in our communities.”29 McGregor goes on to share that “I believe it is a welcome and exciting prospect that we can learn indigenous knowledge from our children and those yet to be born. There is hope, and that must count for something. It is true that indigenous knowledge comes from our ancestors, but it will also come from our future.”30

  Lee Maracle’s work on Decolonization in the 1980s and 1990s connected rematriation and land. She writes, “The expropriation of the accumulated knowledge of Native peoples is one legacy of colonization. Decolonization will require the repatriation and the rematriation of that knowledge by Native peoples themselves.”31 More recently, Decolonization for Tuck and Yang is fundamentally a rematriation project in which land and life are returned to dispossessed Indigenous communities (of Turtle Island, in Tuck and Yang’s example) and must be analyzed through the particularities of imposed settler conceptions of “sexuality, legality, raciality, language, religion and property.”32 As referenced earlier, it is important to note that Tuck and Yang’s work is significantly tied to dialogue with African diasporic peoples on the nature of land-based coalition building. To grasp the implications of a term like “life,” we encourage readers to think about the conceptions of land offered in the second section. Qwo-Li Driskill defines “Decolonization” as the “ongoing, radical resistance against colonialism that includes struggles for land redress, self-determination, healing historical trauma, cultural continuance, and reconciliation” and emphasizes that although Decolonization is impossible to define broadly for all communities and contexts, imagining Indigenous futures is the strongest component.33

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Pedagogies of Difference

  Rethinking Education for Social Justice

  • Peter Pericles Trifonas, Peter Pericles Trifonas(Authors)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1

  Toward a Decolonizing Pedagogy: Social Justice Reconsidered

  CARLOS TEJEDA, MANUEL ESPINOZA, AND KRIS GUTIERREZ

  Colonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a pro-gram of complete disorder. But it cannot come about as a result of magical prac-tices, nor of a natural shock, nor of a friendly understanding. Decolonization, as we know, is a historical process: That is to say it cannot be understood, it cannot become intelligible, nor clear to itself except in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give it historical form and content. (Fanon 1963:36)

  I cannot be a teacher if I do not perceive with even greater clarity that my prac-tice demands of me a definition of where I stand. A break with what is not right ethically. I must choose between one thing and another thing. I cannot be a teacher and be in favor of everyone and everything. I cannot be in favor merely of people, humanity, vague phrases far from the concrete nature of educative prac-tice. Mass hunger and unemployment, side by side with opulence, are not the result of destiny. (Freire 1998:93)

  In the contemporary contexts of what many refer to as the United States, working-class indigenous and nonwhite peoples are often reduced to ontological foreigners in the very space and time they occupy. In these contexts, people are assaulted by multiple and mutually constitutive forms of violence in the various dimensions—the economic, the cultural, the political, the linguistic, the sexual, the spatial, the psychological, and epistemological—of their daily lives. Defining violence as “any relation, process, or condition by which an individual or group violates the physical, social, and/or psychological integrity of another person or group,” Bulhan (1981:53) explains that violence inhibits human growth, negates inherent potential, limits productive living, and causes death. We contend that one cannot ignore this violence when calling for social justice, and that it is necessary to define explicitly one’s particular understanding of the term—in other words, the meaning of social justice that grounds one’s politics and projects. Meanings are never neutral; they are always situated socially, culturally, and historically, and they operate within the logic of differing ideologies that imply differing sets of social practices. These practices, in turn, serve and sustain particular sets of interests, while they simultaneously work against others. Hence, we argue that any notion of social justice should be interrogated with the following questions: What ideologies underlie particular notions of social justice? Who benefits from the instantiation of those notions? At whose expense are those notions instantiated?

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Coloniality and Decolonisation in the Nordic Region

  • Adrián Groglopo, Julia Suárez-Krabbe, Adrián Groglopo, Julia Suárez-Krabbe, Adrián Groglopo, Julia Suárez-Krabbe(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In Walter Mignolo’s words it was “a response from the underside to the enforced homogeneity of neoliberal modernity and to the realization that the state cannot be democratized or decolonized” (Walsh and Mignolo 2018, 106). The latter part of this comment throws light at the initial deep decolonial disenchantment with the state as an institution, in both its post/neo-colonial and, indirectly, in its socialist versions. It also reflects an effort to transfer the struggle into the knowledge production and distribution area and later to aesthesis. These two related areas of decolonial application are the areas where it is still possible to resist even in the harsh political context of neoliberal totality. Importantly they do not directly address economics, the tactics of seizing and transferring political power. They do not prepare for a close revolution or a fight for independence with some clear positive result in mind, but rather connect and work with peoplès consciousness, aiming for a slow changing of the way they think and see the world and themselves. The latter is a much longer and subtler process, but its results are evident today, 30 years after the emergence of decolonial thinking. At the same time, in these 30 years certain kinds of academic decolonialism have drifted further and further away from the actual ongoing local struggles for land, languages, and the autonomy. As a result, globally there is a growing gap between decolonial thinking and praxis 2 which is contradicting the basic decolonial premise and opens the door for the appropriation, trivialisation, and depoliticisation of decolonial discourses by various status quo and mainstream intellectual groups and research schools

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Folds of Past, Present and Future

  Reconfiguring Contemporary Histories of Education

  • Sarah Van Ruyskensvelde, Geert Thyssen, Frederik Herman, Angelo Van Gorp, Pieter Verstraete, Sarah Van Ruyskensvelde, Geert Thyssen, Frederik Herman, Angelo Van Gorp, Pieter Verstraete(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Oldenbourg

    (Publisher)

  We cannot continue to ignore this situation and we must seek to find solutions.” 46 It is clear that the restitution of cultural property cannot be seen in isolation, as an editorial in The Guardian newspaper stated last year: They must be taken together with an understanding that the imperial past is not dead but is a set of narratives that are still alive, still unresolved, and still bringing real-world consequences. 47 In this context “to speak of restitution” is, as Sarr and Savoy conclude, “to simultaneously reopen the old colonial machine as well as the file containing the erased memories of both the Europeans and the Africans”, with the Europeans having “no idea how to continue to maintain their prestigious museums” while Africans find themselves “struggling to recover the thread of an interrupted memory”. 48 Student led-movements such as Rhodes Must Fall, Why is my curriculum white? Why isn’t my professor Black?, Rhodes Must Fall Oxford, and Decolonising our Mind are symptomatic of this struggle against memory and a rejection of mainstream Western epistemic knowledge in favor of diverse forms of knowledge and diverse concepts of what counts as knowledge, where “Knowledge-as-intervention-in-reality” triumphs over “Knowledge-as-a-representation-of-reality”. 49 In short, Decolonization is about engaging with “epistemic disobedience” 50 and accepting “other ways of being, thinking, knowing, sensing, feeling, doing and. living”. 51 It is a challenge to Western knowledge and its “organizing principles of progress, possession, universalism, certainty, and neutralization of difference either through incorporation, erasure, or elimination.” 52 In other words, it is a challenge to those institutions in the contemporary world where the practice of preserving and producing certain types of knowledge is institutionalized, namely the Western University

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book