Category: Book

Decolonize Museums

By Shimrit Lee

The idealized Western museum, as typified by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, and the Museum of Natural History, has remained much the same for over a century: a rarified space of cool stone, providing an experience of leisure and education for the general public while carefully preserving fragile artifacts from distant lands. As questions about representation and ethics have increasingly arisen, these institutions have proclaimed their interest in diversity and responsible conservation, asserting both their adaptability and their immovably essential role in a flourishing society.

With Decolonize Museums, Shimrit Lee punctures this fantasy, tracing the colonial origins of the concept of the museum. White Europeans’ atrocities were reimagined through narratives of benign curiosity and abundant respect for the occupied or annihilated culture, and these racist narratives, Lee argues, remain integral to the authority—and even the aesthetics—of the contemporary museum.

Read more here.

Pluriverse A Post-Development Dictionary

Edited by Ashish Kothari, Ariel Salleh, Arturo Escobar, Federico Demaria, and Alberto Acosta

Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary contains over one hundred essays on transformative initiatives and alternatives to the currently dominant processes of globalized development, including its structural roots in modernity, capitalism, state domination, and masculinist values. It offers critical essays on mainstream solutions that ‘greenwash’ development and presents radically different worldviews and practices from around the world that point to an ecologically wise and socially just world.

Read more here.

‘When spider webs unite they can tie up a lion´

Anti-racism, decolonial options and theories from the South

By Amber Murrey

This chapter focuses on two discrete but interrelated intellectual projects: Southern theory and decolonial options. With a focus on race-aware and anti-racist critiques of Southern theories, Murrey argues that assertions of the need to focus more centrally on Southern theory are not equivalent with assertions of the need to end, unequivocally, the coloniality of knowledge. Some of the critical and celebrated scholarship critiquing the (ongoing) hegemony of Eurocentric theory and knowing – broadly, theories from the South – has failed to systematically engage with the racialisation of actors within the university and racial inequality in knowledge making. In such paradigms, Southern theories are importantly recognised as valuable for shifting the gaze while, at the same time, there remains a certain blindness to the colonial racial hierarchies that create and sustain the invisibilisation(s) and destructions of them. Situated in the context of coloniality, such projects risk reiterating the global knowledge hierarchy. Murrey sketches an alternative: a feminist decolonial orientation founded on an open assessment of racial and geographical inequalities within the university along with a critical feminist attention to the politics of the mundane in the academy (authorship, citation, language, promotion and impromptu encounters in classrooms and corridors).

Read more here.

Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies

Edited by Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln and Linda Tuhiwai Smith

    The Handbook of Critical Methodologies covers everything from the history of critical and indigenous theory and how it came to inform and impact qualitative research and indigenous peoples to the critical constructs themselves, including race/diversity, gender representation (queer theory, feminism), culture, and politics to the meaning of “critical” concepts within specific disciplines (critical psychology, critical communication/mass communication, media studies, cultural studies, political economy, education, sociology, anthropology, history, etc. – all in an effort to define emancipatory research and explore what critical qualitative research can do for social change and social justice.

    Read more here.

    Can the subaltern speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea

    Edited by Rosalind Morris

    Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s original essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” transformed the analysis of colonialism through an eloquent and uncompromising argument that affirmed the contemporary relevance of Marxism while using deconstructionist methods to explore the international division of labor and capitalism’s “worlding” of the world. Spivak’s essay hones in on the historical and ideological factors that obstruct the possibility of being heard for those who inhabit the periphery. It is a probing interrogation of what it means to have political subjectivity, to be able to access the state, and to suffer the burden of difference in a capitalist system that promises equality yet withholds it at every turn.

    Eight scholars take stock of the effects and response to Spivak’s work. They begin by contextualizing the piece within the development of subaltern and postcolonial studies and the quest for human rights. Then, through the lens of Spivak’s essay, they rethink historical problems of subalternity, voicing, and death. A final section situates “Can the Subaltern Speak?” within contemporary issues, particularly new international divisions of labor and the politics of silence among indigenous women of Guatemala and Mexico.

    Read more here.

    Orientalism

    By Edward W. Said

    In this highly-acclaimed work, Edward Said surveys the history and nature of Western attitudes towards the East, considering orientalism as a powerful European ideological creation – a way for writers, philosophers and colonial administrators to deal with the ‘otherness’ of eastern culture, customs and beliefs. He traces this view through the writings of Homer, Nerval and Flaubert, Disraeli and Kipling, whose imaginative depictions have greatly contributed to the West’s romantic and exotic picture of the Orient. Drawing on his own experiences as an Arab Palestinian living in the West, Said examines how these ideas can be a reflection of European imperialism and racism.

    Race matters in mental health: A view from inside mental health practice

    By Suman Fernando

    Institutional Racism in Psychiatry and Clinical Psychology is a book that explores race matters in mental health

    Both ‘mental illness’ and ‘race’ are problematic concepts seriously challenged by sociological and historical study across cultures and continents. The nature of services for human beings provided under the umbrella of ‘mental health care’ is about lives of real people in real personal and social trouble partly, if not entirely, because of stigma, discrimination and oppressions. Ethnic minorities in Western societies, especially black people, are notoriously over-represented among people referred to mental health services underpinned by psychiatry and clinical psychology (the ‘psy’ disciplines).  But are the problems they face best seen as medical or even psychological problems?  And why are minorities seen as racial groups so seriously disadvantaged when they get caught up in the mental health system? 

    Read more here.

    Pedadogy of the oppresed

    By Paulo Freire

    “While the problem of humanization has always, from an axiological point of view, been humankind’s central problem, it now takes on the character of an inescapable concern. Concern for humanization leads at once to the recognition of dehumanization, not only as an ontological possibility but as an historical reality…”

    View the full book here

    0

    Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

    Up ↑