The limits of environmental remediation protocols for environmental justice cases: lessons from Vieques,Puerto Rico

The United States Federal Government has repeatedly put the people of Vieques, Puerto Rico in harm’s way due to the injurious after-effects of air-to-ground weapons testing. Most of the harm happened during the Navy’s 70 years on the island. Yet, the harm continues today considering that aspects of the cleanup count as continued acts of environmental injustice, viewed within the context of the island’s colonial history. Usually, this harm deals with public health issues, but the remediation protocols do not account for considerations such as cultural identity and heritage. This paper shows how the procedures for environmental remediation in Vieques qualify as a case of environmental injustice according to Robert M. Figueroa’s ‘environmental justice paradigm.’ The aim of employing this kind of approach is to pinpoint the underlying reasons why this is a case of environmental injustice.     

THE SEXUAL SUBALTERN IN CONVERSATIONS “SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN”: LAW AND THE OLD POLITICS OF COLONIALISM

Ratna Kapur’s recent book entitled Erotic Justice proposes a new politics of postcolonialism whereby the sexual subaltern disrupts the normative principles of the universal, liberal, legal domain. Kapur traces legal strategies regarding censorship, sex-work, homosexuality, sexual harassment, trafficking and migration which travel a treacherous path, countering allegations of ‘unIndian’ and Western practice with cultural histories of ‘authentic’ sexual legitimacies, towards a new politics of desire. Kapur frames her analysis through postcolonial feminist theory as providing a tool for feminist struggle, yet distinct from and disruptive of a liberal project of global sisterhood. This review deeply values the role of the sexual subaltern which disrupts the tenets of a linear, progressive liberalism. Drawing upon Indian feminist and Western feminist perspectives, the review considers how the distinct position of the postcolonial sexual subaltern subject informs the generic role of law as a tool constructing relations of domination regarding gender, sexuality, caste, property and religion. Kapur observes that both the West and the Hindu Right have engaged with liberal legal principles. This engagement, I argue, exposes and informs law as a historical and contemporary tool of gendered legal colonialism, for sisters to disrupt across the Western and Eastern terrains.Review of Ratna Kapur’s Erotic Justice, Law and the New Politics of Postcolonialism, London: Glasshouse Press, 2005, 219 pp., ￡26, ISBN 1-90438-524-9     

Towards a Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law

This article revisits an infamous incident in colonial India -- the Amritsar massacre of 1919 -- in order to explore larger questions of the place of martial law and emergency in jurisprudence. By focusing on modes of power in the colonial realm, and the productive role of the colonies in the conception of modern law, it tests the claims of a rule of law and declarations of emergency. The argument tries to show how these two terms are, in fact, relational in theories of colonial discourse and of legal positivism. As such, it reads H.L.A. Hart’s, The Concept of Law and instances from the colonial archive against one another. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Articulating language oppression: colonialism,coloniality and the erasure of Tibet’s minority languages

ABSTRACT

Roche’s article discusses ‘language oppression’ as a form of domination that is coherent with other forms of oppression along the lines of ‘race’, nation, colour and ethnicity. Scholars have defined language oppression as the ‘enforcement of language loss by physical, mental, social and spiritual coercion’. It is part of an evolving suite of concepts from linguistics, sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology that examines issues of language discrimination, or ‘linguicism’. Roche explores one aspect of linguicism—language erasure—and how it relates to language oppression, focusing on Tibetans in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). He examines how language oppression is produced through practices of erasure: the ways in which certain populations and their languages are systematically rendered discursively invisible. He argues that the erasure of certain languages in the Tibetan context is systematically reproduced by two otherwise opposed political projects: the colonial project of the PRC state; and the international Tibet movement that seeks to resist it. He refers to the contingent cooperation between these two opposed projects as ‘articulated oppression’. In concluding the article he examines how the disarticulation of this oppression is a necessary condition for the emancipation of Tibet’s minority languages, and discusses the broader significance of this study for understanding language oppression, and its relation to other forms of oppression.     

Imagining modernity: the language and genealogy of modernity in nineteenth-century Arabic

This article employs the methodology of conceptual history to contest two of the most common theoretical approaches dominating our understanding of modernity in the field of Middle Eastern studies. The first approach relies on the assumption of incompatibility between modernity and Islam and captures Arab modernity using concepts such as ‘adoption’. The second understands Arab modernity through concepts such as ‘imitation’, contending that it is a legacy of Western imperialism. This article challenges both theories by examining the genealogy of tamaddun (civilization, being civilized), a pivotal concept used in nineteenth-century Arabic to imagine modernity. The genealogy of tamaddun elucidates that medieval paradigms derived from the concept of madina (polity) were rediscovered, reimagined, and reused in the context of the rise of the nation-state and the challenge of Western imperialism. The article suggests understanding Arab modernity and its critique from within, rather than outside of, the temporality of the historical condition.     

Recreating the Third World Project: possibilities through the Fourth World

Abstract

In this paper, we make a theoretical argument that the Third World be returned to its political origins to inspire an updated Third World Project (TWP), revived as a global movement for progressive, anti-imperialist forces, through the Fourth World movement, which highlights internal colonialism. Both the TWP and the United Nations recognise only nation states as full members. We examine how a Third World strategy that brings in the Fourth World, or indigenous, minority and/or stateless groups, can help oppressed groups gain more autonomy and rights through a transnational solidarity rooted in empathy. We trace the intellectual roots and history of the TWP and consider obstacles in bringing together the TWP and the Fourth World movement. A Fourth World strategy corrects the TWP’s implicit approval of an underlying imperialism, and the TWP provides the Fourth World movement a model to accomplish its goal of resisting uncritical modernity.     

Race,Nature and History in Ensayo sobre las revoluciones políticas and El Español de Ambos Mundos

This article revisits the Ensayo sobre las revoluciones políticas published in Paris by Colombian intellectual José María Samper in 1861. It does so by positioning it in the context of the newspaper in which it was initially published in instalments: El Español de Ambos Mundos. Hitherto both this newspaper and its close conceptual connection to the Ensayo have been overlooked. The simultaneous reading of EAM and the Ensayo also serves to signal similarities and differences in racial thinking on both sides of the Atlantic, while contributing to the increasing interest among scholars in studying how miscegenation was endowed with different meanings according to the context in which it was considered.     

Between man,woman and dog: Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm

The dog in Schreiner’s novel is represented both as an individualized human companion and as a figure of the social outcast. This split signification is homologous with other such instances in the novel – the anomaly of a “failed” bildungsroman, the narrative division between the real and the dreamlike, the aporia of human consciousness in the face of nature, the entanglements of gender, the problematics of race. Focusing on Waldo, Lyndall, and the dog Doss, the paper tracks the way in which the dog refracts not only the relation between human and animal but also a range of other relations in the novel, social and metaphysical. Reading the novel and its late nineteenth-century contexts of thought from the retrospective standpoint of the present – a hermeneutic position that is itself the site of a split signification – the paper considers the dog good to think with.     

Orientalism,otherness, and the Soviet empire: travelogues by Latvian writers of the Soviet period

ABSTRACT

The development of travel writing in a national literature is closely related to the geographical and mental cartography that characterizes that territory. This article investigates Latvian travelogues of the Soviet era as encounters with other nations within the Soviet empire in order to analyze the role of Latvian travel writings in shaping a feeling of belonging to the empire. In addition to fostering obedience and a sense of belonging to the Soviet empire during the first 15 oppressive years of the Soviet regime, Latvian travelogues of the later years represented the Soviet empire as a conflictual site of the destruction of traditional values and landscapes.     

Ian Turner’s The Australian Dream and Australia’s “settler transition”

Focusing on radical labour historian Ian Turner’s The Australian Dream (1968), this article reflects on the evolution of Australia’s settler colonial imagination. During a few crucial decades in the nineteenth century, colonial traditions were overcome by settler colonial ones. The former espoused a system where British rulers would paternally manage a colonial environment and all its populations (pastoralists, free settlers, convicts, emancipated convicts, and Indigenous peoples); the latter advocated the establishment of self-reliant agricultural communities of free settlers. In Replenishing the Earth (2009), James Belich distinguished between settler “transition” and settler “revolution”, and emphasised the imaginative elements that underpin and precede the shift to settler self-government. As the global settler transition took hold, locales usually associated with the perception and expectation of degenerative processes were reconfigured as propitious sites for experimenting in sociopolitical regeneration. Following and expanding on Belich’s framework, this article links Australia’s settler transition with its historiography.