Overview
Essay Q: 1) What, if any, is the relationship between anti-colonial and decolonial forms of struggle? [2,500 word essay]
MAKE SURE TO ARGUE A SIDE/STICK TO A SIDE BUT ALSO GIVE A CRITICAL PARA + CONCLUSION.
MAIN FOCUS IS ON ANTI-COLONIAL AND DECOLONIAL FORMS OF STRUGGLE but please add/use your own sources too. Like 4 maximum.
Use key concepts from the module e.g. : Modernity = the ‘colonial-modern’, The multiverse/pluriverse or a ‘World of Many Worlds’, Cosmology (transcends modern human/nature dualism): land, and human relationship to it etc.
Question one asks you to draw on sources from across the first three weeks of the module which I have provided below. It is designed for students who want to take a broader approach to what we have studied. That said, in the week one readings, Mignolo uses the Egyptian scholar Samir Amin as an example of someone who is anti-colonial, but not decolonial, and I have included the source by Samir Amin on the reading list.
This question is really thinking about the different ways in which struggles against colonialism are more or less captured by the logics of coloniality. But in terms of understanding what coloniality means, you need to read Mignolo, Walter D. 'Delinking: The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality and the grammar of de-coloniality', Cultural Studies, 21:2, 2007, 449 - 514 which is provided below in the reading list.
It's really about teasing out the differences between, a form of resistance that ends up being captured by logics of coloniality and those that don't. Every time you make an argument, a claim, it needs to be evidenced. It needs to be based on a source or an example. Every time you make an argument, you'll be adding sources. Please use the sources below and like max 4 of your own.
- Mignolo, Walter D. 'Delinking: The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality and the grammar of de-coloniality', Cultural Studies, 21:2, 2007, 449 - 514
- Grosfoguel, Ramón. ‘Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality’, TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 2011, available at: http://dialogoglobal.com/texts/grosfoguel/Grosfoguel-Decolonizing-Pol-Econ-and-Postcolonial.pdf
- Amin, Samir. Delinking (London: Zed Books, 1990), Preface to the English edition (pp.vii-xiii) and ‘The Concept of Delinking’ (pp.62-68)
- Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. (2012) ‘Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 111(1): 95-109.
- Anuradha Gandhy, 'Fascism, Fundamentalism, and Patriarchy', 2001, https://www.marxists.org/archive/gandhy/2001/00001.htm Read at least the first two sections (up to 'The Indian Context')
- Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks : Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) Chapter 5 - Good on the tensions between a decolonial and an anti colonial form of struggle.
- Rahul Rao: Neoliberal antiracism and the British university / Radical Philosophy - Another really good source here actually would be writing on RAO. And the distinctions he's making between a decolonial form of politics and one captured by what he calls neo liberal anti racism. Where neo liberal anti racism can be thought of as sitting under the umbrella term of coloniality of knowledge and a coloniality of power.
- Thinking back to week one, and the various concepts we explored, Nandy's piece helps us to think through the distinctions between anti and decolonial forms of politics. Nandy, Ashis. The Romance of the State and the Fate of Dissent in the Tropics (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp.61-82
- Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008) - Read Chapter 12 (Fugitive Dreams)
- Kamala Kempadoo, ‘The white man’s burden revisited’, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/white-mans-burden-revisited/
- E. Tuck & K.W. Yang, ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’ Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1: 1, 2012, pp.1-40