Tag: coloniality

Nations and Post-Colonialism in Central Asia: Twenty Years Later

By Sergei Abashin

The collapse of the USSR and the appearance instead of some 15 new states, not counting several territories declaring themselves to be states, has raised the inevitable question of how this space might now be reconfigured for analytical purposes. Should it, as used to be the case, be considered as an indivisible whole (as post-Soviet countries for example, or as Eurasia)? Or would it be better divided into separate parts, each correlated with other, wider delineations (North/South, West/East, the Christian/Islamic worlds etc.)? Both solutions have their reasons and goals, and, naturally, their pros and cons. In the first case, there is the risk of ascribing certain unique and uniform features to this space, while ignoring, on the one hand, its internal complexity and, on the other, its interaction with the rest of the world. In the second case, the opposite danger arises: of ignoring shared historical experiences and essentializing the borders, first and foremost the cultural borders, between the various communities that inhabit the space in question. Evidently, then, any strategy for analysis must be developed around the possibility of combining and aligning these two perspectives.

In this chapter, Abashin analyzes the new Central Asian states through the lens of three categories: nation, post-coloniality, and post-Sovietness. These terms are studied in how they are used to describe societies of Central Asia as well as models, similarities and differences, and what further questions these classifications prompt.

Read this chapter here.

Because its power remains naturalized: introducing the settler colonial determinants of health

By Bram Wispelwey, Osama Tanous, Yara Asi, Weeam Hammoudeh, and David Mills

Indigenous people suffer earlier death and more frequent and severe disease than their settler counterparts, a remarkably persistent reality over time, across settler colonized geographies, and despite their ongoing resistance to elimination. Although these health inequities are well-known, they have been impervious to comprehensive and convincing explication, let alone remediation. Settler colonial studies, a fast-growing multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary field, is a promising candidate to rectify this impasse. Settler colonialism’s relationship to health inequity is at once obvious and incompletely described, a paradox arising from epistemic coloniality and perceived analytic challenges that we address here in three parts. First, in considering settler colonialism an enduring structure rather than a past event, and by wedding this fundamental insight to the ascendant structural paradigm for understanding health inequities, a picture emerges in which this system of power serves as a foundational and ongoing configuration determining social and political mechanisms that impose on human health. Second, because modern racialization has served to solidify and maintain the hierarchies of colonial relations, settler colonialism adds explanatory power to racism’s health impacts and potential amelioration by historicizing this process for differentially racialized groups. Finally, advances in structural racism methodologies and the work of a few visionary scholars have already begun to elucidate the possibilities for a body of literature linking settler colonialism and health, illuminating future research opportunities and pathways toward the decolonization required for health equity.

Read the article here.

The unbearable heaviness of climate coloniality

By Farhana Sultana

The extremely uneven and inequitable impacts of climate change mean that differently-located people experience, respond to, and cope with the climate crisis and related vulnerabilities in radically different ways. The coloniality of climate seeps through everyday life across space and time, weighing down and curtailing opportunities and possibilities through global racial capitalism, colonial dispossessions, and climate debts. Decolonizing climate needs to address the complexities of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, international development, and geopolitics that contribute to the reproduction of ongoing colonialities through existing global governance structures, discursive framings, imagined solutions, and interventions. This requires addressing both epistemic violences and material outcomes. By weaving through such mediations, I offer an understanding of climate coloniality that is theorized and grounded in lived experiences.

Read more here.

Colonizing the Body

State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India

By David Arnold

In this innovative analysis of medicine and disease in colonial India, David Arnold explores the vital role of the state in medical and public health activities, arguing that Western medicine became a critical battleground between the colonized and the colonizers.

Focusing on three major epidemic diseases—smallpox, cholera, and plague—Arnold analyzes the impact of medical interventionism. He demonstrates that Western medicine as practiced in India was not simply transferred from West to East, but was also fashioned in response to local needs and Indian conditions.

By emphasizing this colonial dimension of medicine, Arnold highlights the centrality of the body to political authority in British India and shows how medicine both influenced and articulated the intrinsic contradictions of colonial rule.

Read more here.

Coloniality of Power and Coloniality of Gender: Sentipensar the Struggles of Indigenous Women in Abya Yala from Worlds in Relation

By Carmen Cariño and Alejandro Montelongo González

In this work I reflect, from the concepts of coloniality of power (Quijano 2007a) and coloniality of gender (Lugones 2008), key elements to sentipensar,2 the struggles of Indigenous women on the continent in defense of life in their territories. It is not new for Indigenous women to mobilize together with their peoples to defend the land-territory-life, but in recent years their participation has become more visible to the extent that the threat to the territories also involves fundamental elements for the reproduction of life that previously had not been of interest to capital. In this context my interest is focused on the ways in which the women of the territories create and resist from other ontologies in defense of life.

Thinking the reality of our countries from the coloniality of power and the coloniality of gender implies, among other things, taking as a baseline the existence of structures of domination, exploitation, and extermination that have been reproduced over the last five centuries in Abya Yala, and that have led to the imposition of a world classification that denies the existence of other worlds that inhabit these territories, and that have been persecuted, massacred, made invisible, but that exist and re-exist (Albán 2013).

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Upholding “Colonial Unknowing” Through the IRB: Reframing Institutional Research Ethics

By Sheeva Sabati

This article considers the institutionalization of research ethics as a site of “colonial unknowing” in which the racial colonial entanglements of academic research and institutions are obscured. She examines the origin stories situating Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) as a response to cases of exceptional violence, most notably the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, within an otherwise neutral history of research. She then considers how the 2018 revisions to the Common Rule extend “colonial unknowing” by decontextualizing the forms of risk involved in social and behavioral research. She situates these complicities as necessary starting points toward anticolonial research ethics of “answerability.”

Read more here.

Stages of colonialism in Africa: From occupation of land to occupation of being

By Hussein A. Bulhan

This paper draws on the author’s scholarship, supplemented by the limited academic resources available in the “peripheries” of the world where the author lives and works (namely, Somali society and Darfur, Sudan), to consider the relationship between colonialism and psychology.

It takes into consideration the history of psychology in justifying and bolstering oppression and colonialism. Then considers the ongoing intersection of colonialism and psychology in the form of metacolonialism (or coloniality). To decolonize psychological science, it is necessary to transform its focus from promotion of individual happiness to cultivation of collective well-being, from a concern with instinct to promotion of human needs, from prescriptions for adjustment to affordances for empowerment, from treatment of passive victims to creation of self-determining actors, and from globalizing, top-down approaches to context-sensitive, bottom-up approaches. Only then will the field realize its potential to advance Frantz Fanon’s call for humane and just social order.

Read the article here.

Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America

By Aníbal Quijano

The globalization of the world is, in the first place, the culmination of a process that began with the constitution of America and world capitalism as a Euro-centered colonial/modern world power. One of the foundations of that pattern of power was the social classification of the world population upon the base of the idea of race, a mental construct that expresses colonial experience and that pervades the most important dimensions of world power, including its specific rationality: Eurocentrism. This article discusses some implications of that coloniality of power in Latin American history.

Read more here.

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