The current debate on why colonialism is wrong overlooks what is arguably the most discernible aspect of this particular historical injustice: its exreme violence. Through a critical analysis of the recent contributions by Lea Ypi, Margaret Moore and Laura Valentini, this article argues that the violence inflicted on the victims and survivors of colonialism reveals far more about the nature of this historical injustice than generally assumed. It is the arbitrary nature of the power relations between colonizers (...) and the colonized which is at the heart of the injustice of colonization, and violence was the way arbitrariness and domination was cemented. The example of colonialism in the Caribbean during the 16th and 17th centuries is used to expose the full extent of this historical injustice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reconquest Colonialism and Andalusī Narrative Practice in the Conde LucanorDavid A Wacks (bio)In the tenth century, when Cordova was the richest and most populous city in Europe, and the Umayyad Caliphate was setting the standard for cultural florescence in the Islamic world, a group of Christian nobles in the rocky precincts of northernmost Spain sought to expand their territorial holdings southward, into al-Andalus. Their aim was to unseat (...) Islamic political power on the Iberian Peninsula, and they sought to authorize this project by discrediting Muslim leaders as the usurpers of lands to which the Christians were rightful heirs. In their view, Christian conquests of al-Andalus were the recuperation of lands that, in the eyes of God himself, belonged to them.Spanish culture as we know it today is the product of this medieval frontier society, in which Christians and Muslims—during a span of some 700 years—continuously negotiated a political border that was culturally quite porous. By the middle of the thirteenth century, Christian rulers had gained control of the large majority of the Iberian Peninsula, including the populous and important cities of Cordova and Seville in the south. The Christians who populated these newly conquered lands found themselves in close contact with a sizeable population of Andalusī Muslims (and Jews and Christians) who had remained. The conquering Christians were great consumers of Andalusī culture in general, especially arts and sciences, and even literature. At the same time, they viewed Islam, the dominant religion of al-Andalus, as a purely illegitimate basis for political power and social organization. If the official narrative of Reconquest argues for tidy cultural purity and conformity, the reality on the ground is, in contrast, a messy and emergent pluralism, one that resonates with early modern and modern colonial experiences.1While medievalists have been slower to embrace postcolonial theoretical approaches than their colleagues working on modern and contemporary texts, they have begun to adapt the ideas of thinkers such as Fanon, Memmi, Bhabha, Spivak, and others to medieval European perceptions of and experience in the East.2 However, it is curious [End Page 87] that Hispanists (with what may be the sole exception of David Hanlon) have completely avoided reading the Christian conquest of al-Andalus as a colonial project. Despite the substantial differences between medieval and modern colonialisms as regards political reality, public discourse, and the construction of subjectivity, one may safely argue that the Christian conquests of al-Andalus were a colonial endeavor, one of several studied by historians of medieval Europe.3 The case of medieval Christian Iberian colonialism was distinct from other medieval colonialisms (such as French and English crusading in the Middle East) in that it contributed fundamentally to the formation of a Spanish national identity, and served as a domestic proving ground for the conquest of Spanish territories in the Americas.Don Juan Manuel, author of the Conde Lucanor (1340) [CL],4 was the most powerful nobleman of his time. He held extensive lands in Murcia, which retained a far higher proportion of its preconquest Muslim population than did neighboring Castile and Leon [O’Callaghan, History 459]. While his military and political career depended on eradicating Islam from the Iberian Peninsula, he earned his literary renown—in part—by imitating and incorporating Andalusī narrative tradition and history into his own writings. In Juan Manuel’s adaptation of the frametale genre, the CL, this dissonance between the religious and political agendas of the Reconquest manifests in narrative. If the CL shows us the ideology of the Reconquest, it also offers the reader a reflection of the more complicated and nuanced reality of daily life and human behavior characteristic of Reconquest-era Castile-Leon [Linehan, “At the Spanish Frontier” 53]. In it, Juan Manuel distills the political realities, religious discourse, and cultural interaction of the time into the first original frametale in any European vernacular.5Juan Manuel’s religious agenda and frontier political philosophy come across quite clearly in the 50 exemplos of the CL. The idea of the Christian nobleman’s duty to wage war against Islam permeates the work, most starkly in these words of the Count’s advisor Patronio: “... Dios vos poblo... (shrink)

As critical research on religion, the study of colonialism and religion directs attention to religious creativity within the asymmetrical power relations of contact zones, intercultural relations, and diasporic circulations. Taking the imperial ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics as a point of departure, this article recalls how the drama of the colonizing Prospero and the colonized Caliban has been a template for analyzing religion under colonial conditions. Like Shakespeare’s enchanted isle, colonizing and colonized religion have been shaped by (...) oceans, with the Mediterranean, Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific worlds emerging as crucial units of analysis. As a contribution to a symposium on critical approaches to the study of religion, this article indicates some of the important landmarks, sea changes, and analytical possibilities in the study of colonialism and religion. (shrink)

Contemporary scholars routinely argue colonialism and imperialism are indistinguishable. In this essay, I challenge this argument. While it is true the “colonial” and “imperial” overlap and intersect historically, I argue there is a central thread of modern colonialism as an ideology that can be traced from the seventeenth century to mid-twentieth century that was not only distinct from—but often championed in explicit opposition to—imperialism. I advance my argument in four parts. First, I identify key ways in which the (...) colonial can be distinguished from the imperial, including most importantly the specific kind of productive power inherent in colonialism. Second, I examine how colonialism and imperialism evolve in meaning and are redefined by both champions and critics, in relation to each other in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries. Third, I examine the historical moment when colonialism and imperialism fully conflate after WWII through the UN process of decolonization as the “salt water thesis” delimits colonialism to mean foreign racialized domination, and it thus becomes synonymous with imperialism. I conclude with an analysis of why the distinction still matters in both theory and practice. (shrink)

1. Empire, Colonialism, and Globalization -- 2. Consumerism and Overconsumption -- 3. Nature and "Han" -- 4. Transformative Power of the Spirit -- Conclusion.

In this article, I explore a possible ‘conversation’ between a leading African political sociologist, Peter P. Ekeh, in his theory of ‘two publics’, and the late French philosopher, historian and social theorist, Michel Foucault, in his theory of governmentality. I examine the ‘lingering effects of colonialism’ and point to how Ekeh’s insight and its usefulness for examining the politico-cultural consequences of colonialism in terms of the conduct of conduct in the public realm can be further enriched by relating (...) it to the deeply penetrating insight on the nature of power and domination articulated through the concept of governmentality and sovereign power. The paper concludes that Ekeh’s thesis is particularly suitable for interrogating governmentality and its useful insights for understanding public life in Africa because, like Foucault’s theory of governmentality, it is grounded on a historical account of contemporary processes of socio-political and economic configuration. (shrink)

In this paper I apply Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of European morality to the Western colonial context. I specifically focus attention on his notions of ressentiment and slave morality, and how his critique implicates these as being exported and imposed upon the people Western powers colonized. However, the process of colonization reveals that the imposed morality is transformed into a distinct type of ressentiment that Nietzsche does not to consider. I call this type of ressentiment “colonial ressentiment” in distinction to Nietzsche’s (...) slave morality. To provide the content to clearly distinguish colonial ressentiment from that of slave morality, I utilize Frantz Fanon’s description of the colonial drama to help illuminate their differences. To conclude the paper, I discuss some of the upshots of colonial ressentiment and their relation to present day struggles. (shrink)

Foucault’s analysis of the relation of power and the economy in the lectures given at the Collège de France between 1975 and 1979 opens up modern societies for a radically different interrogation of the relations of force inscribed in historically heterogeneous forms of wealth creation and distribution, but more specifically within the period of liberal capitalism. Its vast scope clears the ground for genealogies of power, political economy and race that demonstrate their intertwinement, yet he underplays several elements (...) which have been central for the institution of the political economy of liberal capitalism, particularly regarding colonial expansion and subjugation, the prior existence of trade and other networks operating on a world scale, and politico-economic and technical developments, such as banking and finance, that acted as conditions of possibility. By redressing the balance, this article outlines a different genealogy of the emergence of biopolitics and the mechanisms supporting global capitalism, making visible the constitutive role of colonialism. It suggests elements for a more fundamental critique of inequality, one that relays the Foucaldian themes of economy, territory, security, population and race according to a longer periodization that reveals most economies to have been zero-sum games of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. Transcending this situation requires a radically different, transcolonial and transindividual understanding of the essentially collaborative and co-implicate character of the production of all life. The implications mean the rejection of ontologies that support not only neoliberalism but other forms of dispossession and pauperization, often allied to the hierarchization of difference, opening the way for a different history of the present and for imagining new economies and socialities. (shrink)

This article examines shifts in the image of Iceland created for international tourism. It argues that at the beginning of the 21st century the more traditional spotlight on the country’s natural attractions was altered, giving an additional, new focus on the nation’s beautiful, and apparently sexually promiscuous, women. Such a development deserves further comment for a variety of reasons. First, an examination of the importance of women to Iceland’s national marketing, especially their depiction visually, underlines the need to reconsider the (...) substantial role of gender and imagery representation in tourism studies, two themes that have been underexamined by scholars working in the discipline. Second, as a Nordic nation with a reputation for gender equality, this focus on women as sexual objects readily available for male tourist consumption raises a serious contradiction. Last but not least, the use of sexually alluring female images by a developed nation has intriguing implications for postcolonial scholars interested in representations of ‘the Other’. While shying away from implying that ideologies of ‘race’ are not important to discussions of international sex tourism, this article suggests that gender should be considered an equally important contributing factor in such analyses. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that indigenous men in the Pacific engage in gender practices that historically have had widely different consequences for their positions of power or marginality. I focus my analysis on the production of modern Polynesian masculinities in Hawai'i and Aotearoa (New Zealand), highlighting the importance of the intersection of European and American colonialism(s) with indigenous forms of social organization. I look specifically at the participation of indigenous men in the military and sports, two of (...) the most important sites for the production of masculinities where indigenous men contend with hegemonic ideologies of gender and culture. I end with some critical reflections on the possibilities and limitations of reviving traditional indigenous masculinities in decolonization movements in Hawai'i and Aotearoa. (shrink)

This article highlights the impasses of anti-racist struggles that understand racism as an opinion or a prejudice and use education as their only means for addressing it. Racism should rather be understood as a socio-historical subjective structure rooted in the process of constitution of the division of labour on a global scale through colonialism, a process that was crucial to the institution of capitalism. This is why we will put forth the importance of rejecting the narrations that camouflage colonization (...) with the idea of civilization, and the necessity to produce decolonial counter-histories. We will thus claim that such an endeavor should start from the struggles of racialized peoples against the different forms of coloniality—that is, from the refusal by racialized peoples of the representations that are imposed on them, and from their repositioning on the basis of their alterity. Only the position of a powerful alterity can in fact make possible a real equality.Cet article met en évidence les impasses des luttes antiracistes qui conçoivent le racisme comme une opinion ou un préjugé et utilisent l’éducation comme le seul moyen d’y remédier. Le racisme devrait plutôt être compris comme une structure socio-historique subjective qui s’enracine dans le procès de constitution de la division mondiale du travail par le colonialisme, un procès qui a été décisif pour l’institution du capitalisme. C’est pourquoi nous mettrons en avant le caractère problématique des récits qui recouvrent la colonisation de l’idée de civilisation et la nécessité de produire des contre-histoires décoloniales. Il s’agira alors de montrer que, pour ce faire, il faut partir des luttes des racisés contre les différentes formes de colonialité—c’est-à-dire du refus par les racisés des représentations qui leur sont adressées et de leur repositionnement à partir de leur altérité. Seule la position d’une altérité puissante peut, en effet, rendre possible une égalité réelle. (shrink)

This article is a meditation on the overlaps between environmentalism, post-colonial theory, and the practice of history. It takes as a case study the writings of the explorer-scientist-abolitionist Alexander von Humboldt , the founder of a humane, socially conscious ecology. The post-colonial critique has provided a necessary corrective to the global environmental movement, by focusing it on enduring colonialist power dynamics, but at the same time it has crippled the field of environmental history, by dooming us to a model (...) of the past in which all Euro-American elites, devoid of personal agency, are always already in an exploitative relationship with the people and natural resources of the developing world. A close reading of Humboldt’s work, however, suggests that it could provide the basis for a healthy post-colonial environmentalism, if only post-colonial critics were willing to see beyond Humboldt’s complicity in colonial structures. In particular, this article attempts to rehabilitate Humboldt’s reputation in the face of Mary Louise Pratt’s canonical post-colonial study, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Humboldt’s efforts to inspire communion with Nature while simultaneously recognizing Nature’s “otherness” can be seen as radical both in his day and in ours. In addition his analysis of the link between the exploitation of natural resources and the exploitation of certain social groups anticipates the global environmental justice movement. (shrink)

Nature and Colonialism: A Reader provides students with a collection of classic texts on environmental thought and invites them to analyze the texts alongside the often contrarian ideas of expansion, development, and human exceptionalism. Readers are encouraged to consider early perspectives on the hierarchical power relationships between political/economic entities and nature/peoples, and whether foundational views of environmentalism supported the proliferation of colonial ideology. The collection begins with a piece by Zitkala-Sa, a Dakota Sioux activist and writer, and highlights (...) a voice of resistance against the redefinition and reimagining of nature via colonialist thought. Students read seminal works related to nature by Charles Darwin, George Perkins Marsh, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Gifford Pinchot. They are challenged to engage in sociocultural inquiry to better understand how views of the relationship between humans and nature have developed over time, as well as how they continue to shape modern thought and perspectives regarding environmentalism. Designed to stimulate critical thought and inquiry, Nature and Colonialism is an ideal supplementary textbook for courses in environmental science or philosophy, especially those with emphasis on the relationship between humans and their environment." -- Provided by publisher. (shrink)

It is commonly accepted that former European colonising states ought to make reparations for the many harmful legacies of colonialism. I defend an undertheorised case for migration as reparation for one harmful legacy of colonialism in particular, that of exploitation. Making reparations for the harmful legacy of colonial exploitation requires, among other measures, a redistribution of wealth from former colonising states to their former colonies, and for former colonising states to make symbolic reparations, acknowledging the wrong of exploitation. (...) Often it is assumed that the reparative redistribution can occur through in situ monetary transfers, and that symbolic reparations can involve measures such as apologies. But I highlight an overlooked additional option that should be added to the reparative package: migration rights. Firstly, migration would constitute material reparations, as it is well established that migration from poorer to richer states is an effective mechanism of redistributing wealth, both to the individuals who migrate, but also to those who choose not to migrate through remittances. Secondly, offering postcolonial migrants not only the right to work in their former colonising states, but substantive rights, including immediate access to public funds, would be a powerful means of making symbolic reparations, of former colonising states acknowledging that their key institutions are funded with colonially extracted wealth. (shrink)

This chapter explores the anti-colonial narrative potential of certain works of cinema taking Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Caché as a case in point. To do so, this chapter first and mainly draws upon the theoretical and normative lens put forward by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on the representation of the colonized other and her resulting political and intellectual call for self-reflection on one's privileged Western intellectual positioning. This lens has many normative implications for the ways in which the colonized (...) subject and colonial history are discussed and represented. The partial lack of representation of the colonized other in Aguirre, the Wrath of God leaves the subjectivity of the colonizer in crisis and madness. Second, the narrative of Caché is explored and it is suggested that it resembles the rhetoric of Foucauldian disciplinary power of surveillance turned upside-down thus enforcing the complicit of colonialism to question her privilege. (shrink)

This essay intervenes in the on-going debate over the power-knowledge entanglements of classifying emic Indigenous resurgence accounts of the past as “therapeutic history”. We refer to how “therapeutic history” was defined by Ronald Niezen in his 2009 book, The Rediscovered Self. We argue that despite the important refinement of the concept made by Rafael Verbuyst in his application of the term in his work on Khoisan resurgence in South Africa, we believe it to be a problematic category, especially in (...) Western knowledge production about Indigenous people. Our reasons are that the term conflates the use of history with its recovery, unfairly maligns Indigenous knowledge keepers as self-serving and uninterested in the truth, and introduces an insidious binary which has unwelcome discursive effects, in that longer chains of equivalence ultimately place Indigenous storying and knowledge keeping on the other side of an epistemological divide from “proper” history-writing. (shrink)

New institutions of indigenous governance will be the product of negotiations, negotiations that will take place against a background of colonial structures and relationships. Having examined the challenges of structuring a negotiation process that takes due account of pre-existing cultural and power differences between the parties, the author analyzes the significance of their choice of negotiation strategy on the negotiation process and outcome. In particular, this paper reflects on the promise and limitations of the parties’ adopting interest-based, or “integrative”, (...) negotiation strategies and the potential for fruitful entanglements between those strategies and indigenous diplomatic traditions. (shrink)

This chapter examines two basic philosophical challenges for the idea of reparations for past injustices (using colonialism as the focal point). The first challenge is that requiring people today to make reparations for an injustice they themselves did not commit is unfair. The second is that if reparative claims are invoked because of lingering injustices, then recalling the past is in fact normatively redundant if lingering present injustices can be handled by forward-looking principles. In response to the first challenge, (...) I argue that the unfairness worry is deflected if we adopt a collectivist-model of responsibility, ie, one that holds states instead of individuals to be the responsible actor. Against the redundancy objection, I suggest that reparative arguments can supplement and reinforce forward-looking distributive principles. (shrink)

A range of important ethical issues emerges from a consideration of the past interaction between colonizing and colonized peoples. This article first seeks to describe the key characteristics of colonialism as a system of domination and subjugation, before considering the legitimacy of contemporary judgments on the morality of historical colonialism. It then examines how the particular character of colonialism complicates arguments relating to the rectification of injustice. It concludes by asking what lessons those interested in ethics can (...) learn from the diverse body of work produced by writers in the postcolonial tradition. (shrink)

I argue that if we claim colonialism is per se wrong, then we face a dilemma that stems from the fact that many states today are a result of past colonialism. We believe that postcolonial states have a right to self-determination such that it is wrong to colonize them. But this entails that there is a process that can turn a colonial state into a rightful state, and so we admit that there is a way to carry out (...) colonialism that is not wrongful. To avoid this conclusion, we must accept that the wrongness of colonialism has been superseded or remedied. These options either entail instrumentalism, which admits that colonialism is not per se wrong, or they are implausible. (shrink)

Pekka Hämäläinen’s The Comanche Empire reflects critical historiographical turns—indigenous power, responses to settler colonialism, and a reorientation of perspective—while uncovering new directions in American Indian history. Moreover, his four-part framework for understanding power—spatial control, economic control, assimilation, and influence over neighbors—provides a useful model for analyzing indigenous polities in other places and times. However, by not explicitly framing the narrative of the Comanche empire within notions of sovereignty, Hämäläinen leaves open opportunities for other scholars of the Comanche (...) and of Native North America. Future historical studies of Native sovereignty, though, should include tribally specific notions of sovereignty and ways of knowing and remembering the past. (shrink)

This article examines the controversy that has arisen concerning the interpretation of Immanuel Kant's account of European colonialism. One the one hand there are those interpreters such as Robert Bernasconi who see Kant's account as all of a piece with his earlier views on race which demonstrate a certain narrow mindedness in relation to black and coloured people and, on the other hand, there are those such as Pauline Kleingeld and Allen Wood who argue that the earlier writings on (...) race are not wholly typical of Kant's approach and suggest that Kant's later discussions of colonialism in Perpetual Peace and the Metaphysics of Morals provide a better indication of Kant's progressive views on the treatment of non-European societies. The article draws attention to the very strong evidence of Kant's dislike for the pattern of European expansion to other parts of the globe and indicates that within Kant's writings there are the seeds of a wholly unconventional critical understanding of western colonialism that have yet to be developed fully. The article suggests that this critical understanding surpasses the unsystematic objections made to colonialism in post - modernist thought and also the critique proffered by the determinist Marxist account. (shrink)

In ‘What’s Wrong with Colonialism,’ Lea Ypi argues that the wrong of colonialism can be expressed as procedural wrongs, not as wronging territorial rights. On her view, colonial practices went wrong in two ways: they forced residents into political associations, and the terms of the political association were not established through equal and reciprocal negotiations. I argue that because Ypi’s account successfully side-lines all but essential claims to territory, her theory ends up being vulnerable to an objection it (...) means to avoid. Historical residents may be subject to unequal treatment under newly formed political associations because their historical patterns of land use are not considered to have any independent moral weight. My analysis does not rely on any appeal to property or territorial rights. Instead, I appeal to pre-existing obligations holding between residents. (shrink)

This paper, rather than providing a comprehensive discussion around Paulo Freire’s ideas, focuses on one aspect of his body of work: colonialism. The emphasis is on the ‘oppressor consciousness’ and cultural invasion (seen in its broadest context to include institutional colonialism with special reference to the traditional, modernizing and prophetic church. It also deals with the complex issue of language in postcolonial contexts, with special reference to education in Guinea Bissau and its implications for other colonial contexts.

_Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism_ is a classic critique of France's policies in Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s and inspired much subsequent writing on colonialism, post-colonialism, politics, and literature. It includes Sartre's celebrated preface to Fanon's classic _Wretched_ _of the Earth. Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism _ had a profound impact on French intellectual life, inspiring many other influential French thinkers and critics of colonialism such as Jean-Francois Lyotard, Frantz Fanon, Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Derrida.

In this article Mushaf printings and their relation to international politics have been studied. Using historical materials like archive documents and newspapers, the article shows the role of Mushaf printings in the conflict among World powers, Europe and the Ottoman Empire. This study thereby focuses on three cases: The first case is the Mushaf-printings in Europe particularly in 1787 in Russia right after the Crimean War and in 1798 after the occupation of Egypt and in the 1830s during the invasions (...) of Africa by France. Russia and France, as two European colonialist powers thereby tried to establish itself as the new patron for the colonised Muslims. The second case is the Mushaf-printing in Iran. Meanwhile printing of the Mushaf was printed by Iranians, Ottomans considers issue as that time must be defended the Qur'an from corruptions and changes by the hands of Non-Muslim and Non-Sunni communities. The most significant case is the third one: the British black propaganda against the Caliphate, Abdulhamid The Second, to trigger an uprising in British-colonised territories, like India. Ottomans made some policies against these printings by establishing print houses and control mechanism to make clear that they themselves are the real leaders of Muslims. As a conclusion, the article demonstrates how Mushaf printings were used to gain power and authority over Muslims during the clash among the Ottoman Empire, European powers and Iran. (shrink)

Strategies for combating climate change which advocate for human population limitation have recently been understandably criticised on the grounds that they embody a form of 'climate colonialism': a moral wrong that involves disproportionally shifting the burdens of climate change onto developing, historically exploited nations (which have low per capita emissions but high fertility rates) in order to offset burdens in affluent nations (which have high per capita emissions but low fertility rates). This article argues that once the relevance of (...) population growth to climate change has been correctly understood as working in tandem with consumption levels, this objection fails as a general criticism. Moreover, even if population could be ignored as a variable, the climate colonialism charge would re-emerge in a different form, since, at present population sizes, it would be environmentally catastrophic for developing nations to reach production ambitions which see their per capita emissions massively increase. Even if emission reductions in affluent nations are (rightly) prioritised, there are good reasons to prevent enormous growth of emissions in developing nations. Those environmental risks become much greater given those nations' projected population increases in the coming century. The article then explores how the necessary radical environmental policies pertaining to fertility rates might be enacted in non-coercive ways, reducing the sting of the ‘climate colonialism’ charge. The article ends by considering some reasons to be moderately sceptical about such policies. (shrink)

This essay examines the relationship between African American internal colonialism and democracy, highlighting the complexities of democracy that make it both susceptible to oppressive violence at home and abroad, as well as a potential resource for emancipation and equality. I understand “internal colonialism” here to encompass various terms used by African Americans beginning in the 1830s, including semi-colonialism, domestic colonialism, and a nation within a nation. Much political philosophy assumes that society is “nearly just” or “generally (...) just,” or that oppression and injustice are found in societies that we nonetheless deem legitimate. Centering the complexities and possibilities of democracy instead shifts the focus to how democracy is compatible with violence and injustice, as well as their overcoming. Such a focus leads to a consideration of abolition democracy and the question of what the process of overcoming internal colonialism demands. (shrink)

There is a growing body of literature which argues that the two major theories of liberal citizenship (those of John Locke and J.S. Mill) were deeply enmeshed with both colonization (the processes by which the imperial state takes over the land and/or sovereignty of another country) and colonialism (the theoretical framework by which colonization is justified). This article, builds upon this literature but asks whether the existence of hundreds of domestic colonies within (as opposed to outside) the borders of (...) Britain and British settler states for citizens (as opposed to foreigners) at the turn of the twentieth century challenges the scope and definition of 'colonialism' in previous literature. Liberal colonialism, it is argued, seeks to transform those deemed to be 'idle', 'irrational' and/or custom bound, both at home and abroad, into 'industrious and rational' citizens. Domestically this meant housing the idle poor and mentally ill/disabled in labour and farm colonies, respectively in order to break them free through segregation from their bad customs/habits and teaching them, through education and agrarian labour, to become proper citizens. Ultimately, it is hoped that this analysis will help to explain how liberal states could come to embrace rather than reject within their own borders such deeply illiberal practises as segregation and assimilation against 'internal' others well into the twentieth century. (shrink)

This book presents the first full exploration of Kant's position on colonialism. Leading experts in both political thought and normative theory place Kant's thoughts on the subject in historical context, examine the tensions that colonialism produces in his work, and evaluate the relevance of these reflections for current debates on global justice.

Both The Ferment of Knowledge and Geoffrey Cantor’s essay review defined the “eighteenth-century problem” in terms of the lack of a totalizing vision. Forty years on, the problem has shifted to the appropriation of eighteenth-century science by both the political left and the right. As historians grapple with the legacies of slavery and colonialism, an emerging theme is material culture and its “entanglements.” The subject of this essay, collections and collecting, is central to this new historiography. Collections included antiq­uities, (...) natural history, anatomy, and ethnographic objects. My focus will be on human skeletal collections. Historians who have considered skeletal collec­tions have focused mainly on the later eighteenth century and on developing concepts of race and geological time. But their significance is much broader. Collecting entailed entanglements both of cultures and of genres. Such collections could be medical, geological, aesthetic, taxonomic, or all or none of these. Case studies of collections of human bones, skeletons, and skulls reveal a different eighteenth century from that which the historians of 1980 envisaged, and bring questions of value and values to the centre of our reading of history. (shrink)

Abstract:This article defends the idea that colonialism still has a grasp on a valuable tool in the construction of our reality: memory. Developments in cognitive neuroscience and interdisciplinary memory studies propose that memory is far more creative and tied to one's imaginal capacities than we used to believe, suggesting that remembering is not simply a reproductive process, but a complex reconstructive process. Drawing on the psychiatric works of Frantz Fanon, in Alienation & Freedom; Black Skin, White Masks; and Wretched (...) of the Earth, this article seeks to illustrate the ways in which colonialism continues to be involved in this reconstructive memory process. Colonialism has affected both episodic memories, the kind we have as individuals regarding our own past, and collective memories, the intersubjective shared narratives we possess in our societies. I argue that dominant collective memories ought to be rejected as a means of self-preservation for racialized individuals because these memories do not do justice to the violence of colonialism. Nevertheless, rejection of dominant collective memories comes at a significant personal cost in our societies, as it creates a traumatic loop for racialized individuals. I propose that psychiatry itself plays an instrumental role in the alienation experienced by racialized individuals because psychiatry has not yet appreciated the ways in which colonialism continues to have a hold on memory. Piecing together a theory of remembering in Fanon's texts, this article suggests that this cycle of alienation can be broken, if psychiatrists incorporate Fanon's insights regarding memory into their practice. (shrink)

Dussel’s complex work calls into question the standard history of philosophy, reveals a counter-history at work beneath the official history that gives voice to the victims of capitalism and colonialism, and systematically develops a novel ‘material ethics’ grounded in an unqualified, universal affirmation of life as the foundation of liberatory values. The Ethics of Liberation brings together the major problems explored in Dussel’s prolific body of earlier work: the relationship between Western philosophy and the expansion of European society; the (...) relationship between centre and periphery in global political economy, considered as both a philosophical and an ethical problem; the ethical interpretation of Marxism; the politics of liberation in the colonial context; the defence of universal foundations of ethical norms; and the distinction between formal and critical ethics. (shrink)

This article aims to shed light on Hegel's conception of colonialism and its implications for the postcolonial reception of Hegel. Drawing on the abundant literature on the topic, it begins by engaging with Hegel's understanding of colonialism through a close reading of relevant passages of his works, in particular the Heidelberg Vorlesungen über Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft (1817–18), the Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (1821), the Vorlesungen über die Philosophie des Rechts (1819/20, 1821/22, 1822/23, 1824/25) and the Vorlesungen über (...) die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte (1822/23, 1830). Having mapped and reconstructed Hegel's conception of colonialism through his writings and lectures, the article argues that his account of Europe's modern colonial expansion is based primarily on economic considerations, rather than on civilizational assumptions proclaiming the spiritual superiority of European peoples—to which Hegel nevertheless subscribes. The conclusion explores distinct and divergent postcolonial perspectives for engaging with the contemporary legacy of Hegelianism. It addresses, on the one hand, Tibebu's critical reading of Hegel's philosophical enterprise as ‘the coldest rationalisation of genocidal murder and carnage’ based on ‘paradigmatic apartheid’ and, on the other, Brennan's redemptive reading of Hegel, which values his theoretical contribution to the shaping of 20th century anticolonial thought. After contrasting these two interpretations, the article argues in favour of postcolonial strategies for critical reappropriation and sabotage of the legacy of Hegel's philosophy. (shrink)

Widely regarded as one of the most important and influential sports books of all time, C. L. R. James's _Beyond a Boundary_ is—among other things—a pioneering study of popular culture, an analysis of resistance to empire and racism, and a personal reflection on the history of colonialism and its effects in the Caribbean. More than fifty years after the publication of James's classic text, the contributors to _Marxism, Colonialism, and Cricket_ investigate _Beyond a Boundary_'s production and reception and (...) its implication for debates about sports, gender, aesthetics, race, popular culture, politics, imperialism, and English and Caribbean identity. Including a previously unseen first draft of _Beyond a Boundary_'s conclusion alongside contributions from James's key collaborator Selma James and from Michael Brearley, former captain of the English Test cricket team, _Marxism, Colonialism, and Cricket_ provides a thorough and nuanced examination of James's groundbreaking work and its lasting impact. Contributors. Anima Adjepong, David Austin, Hilary McD. Beckles, Michael Brearley, Selwyn R. Cudjoe, David Featherstone, Christopher Gair, Paget Henry, Christian Høgsbjerg, C. L. R. James, Selma James, Roy McCree, Minkah Makalani, Clem Seecharan, Andrew Smith, Neil Washbourne, Claire Westall. (shrink)