The Freedom Charter: the contested South African land issue

The Freedom Charter represents a desire to create a society that is based on common citizenship and democracy in a society divided in all aspects of its life. This paper problematises and interrogates the Charter’s theoretical and philosophical claim on land. It uses the methodology of Afrocentricity and Africana critical theory to dispute the theoretical and philosophical basis of the Freedom Charter. The paper argues that the understanding, desire and vision of the Freedom Charter are irreconcilable. It concludes that the Charter reconciles the dispossessed with their dispossession, reflecting coloniality and white domination in South Africa.     

近十年来国内东南亚殖民主义史研究述评

自上个世纪90年代以来,我国的东南亚殖民主义史研究取得了新进展,推出了几部很有影响的著作,获得了对复杂历史问题的深层认识,标志着我国东南亚殖民主义史研究进入了全面总结与成熟阶段.认真研究殖民主义兴衰,有助于把握东南亚历史发展进程,也有助于对当前东南亚问题的思考.     

How America disguises its violence: colonialism,mass incarceration,and the need for resistant imagination

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how a delusive social imaginary of criminal-justice has underpinned contemporary U.S. mass incarceration and encouraged widespread indifference to its violence. I trace the complicity of this criminal-justice imaginary with state-organized violence by comparing it to an imaginary that supported colonial violence. I conclude by discussing how those of us outside of prison can begin to resist the entrenched images and institutions of mass incarceration by engaging the work and imagining the perspective of incarcerated people.     

The horror of ‘horrorism’: laundering metropolitan killings

Abstract

Modern colonialism carries many names. But ‘horror’ is not one of them. How and why is this? Why does the slaughter of the ‘native’, the ‘Indian’ and the ‘slave’ not register as crime or horror? This essay explores these questions though a close reading of philosopher Adriana Cavarero’s Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence. Horrorism has become an increasingly influential source for critical international scholarship concerned with broadening the frames of violence beyond those offered by strategic and legalistic lenses. Its focus on the dismemberment of the body and discovery of a new form of ontological violence offer a fruitful avenue of inquiry for theorising the wounding and violation wrought by practices of terror and counter-terror. This essay cautions against such a supposition. A close reading of the key claims and conditions of possibility of horrorism reveals it to be constituted through the erasure of colonial violence. Tracing the lineaments of this erasure shows that horrorism functions not as a sign of newness but of Western revanchism in a time of crisis. However, this does not make horrorism redundant, for it offers valuable insights for understanding the pervasive failure to consider the horrors perpetrated by the West against non-Western others.     

Colonization with Chinese characteristics: politics of (in)security in Xinjiang and Tibet

ABSTRACT

China as a victim rather than a proponent of modern colonialism is an essential myth that animates Chinese nationalism. The Chinese statist project of occupying, minoritizing and securitizing different ethno-national peoples of Central Asia, such as Uyghurs and Tibetans, with their own claims to homelands, is a colonial project. Focusing on China’s securitized and militarized rule in Xinjiang and Tibet, the article will argue that the most appropriate lens through which this can be understood is neither nation-building nor internal colonialism but modern colonialism. It argues that the representation of Uyghurs and Tibetans as sources of insecurity not only legitimizes state violence as a securitizing practice but also serves contemporary Chinese colonial goals.     

试论塞西尔·罗得斯与南部非洲政治格局的形成

塞西尔·罗得斯是19世纪中后期在南部非洲疯狂推行殖民扩张政策的英国殖民主义代表人物之一,其殖民行径在客观上对于南部非洲政治格局和政治版图的形成具有一定影响。在南非联邦的建立问题上,他提出通过加强与布尔人的经济关系和交通联系,以及向布尔人让渡部分权力的办法,换取布尔人的支持,用和平、渐进的新路径推动了两个白人民族和解和南非联邦的建立。另外,罗得斯及其领导下的英国南非公司的殖民行为还推动了津巴布韦和赞比亚两国政治地理版图的形成,并引进比较科学的行政管理模式,从而在客观上对当地无意识地起到了一些"建设性"的作用。但这全然不能掩饰殖民主义在人类文明史上的罪恶和破坏作用的本质。     

Pliant and Compliant: Colonial Indian Art and Postcolonial Cinema

Walter Benjamin's signature hypothesis of 'dialectics at a standstill' rehearsed in his 'Theoretics of Knowledge, Theories of Progress' permits visual images to be elasticized from a then condition in history and culture to a now site of contemporary reality in order to be critiqued in their entirety. Putting this hypothesis to the test, Rajan juxtaposes two late eighteenth-century works of art by East India Company Painters with two late twentieth-century films by Mira Nair and Deepa Mehta to trace trajectories of orientalized desire and unspeakable pleasure as relayed along a woman's body. In all four instances, the central image of woman continues to be an insistent signifier that embodies social values, cultural prejudices and artistic ideals, which, in turn, provide critical, valuable insights into constructions of gendered, aestheticized and sexualized femininity. The image of woman , thus dialectically read, reveals that it is not simply the male colonizer who is always already the oppressor, as is the common assumption, but rather that woman as an abject signifier can be merchandised even by enlightened, postcolonial women. Such a ravaged image of woman remains, therefore, a fixed trope in the hands of male and female artists, traversing coloniality and postcoloniality, and crossing over from art to cinema, with little chance of emancipation. One strategy to grant woman full agency requires the contemporary, feminist viewer to take responsibility and couple aesthetics with an ethical tenor. According to Benjamin, ethics thus defined is a matter of personalized aesthetics. This means that each one of us is entrusted with the responsibility of demanding accountability in the creation of visual culture such that images that demean femininity, disembody female subjectivity, objectify female pleasure and delegitimize desire be judged inappropriate, as incorrect or unappealing visual images and as unavailable for appropriation.     

Immigration,intermarriage and the changing face of Europe in the post war period

In this article we compare the propensity to intermarry of various migrant groups and their children who settled in Germany, France, England, Belgium and the Netherlands in the post-war period, using a wide range of available statistical data. We try to explain different intermarriage patterns within the framework of Alba and Nee's assimilation theory and pay special attention to the role of religion, colour and colonial background. We therefore compare colonial with non colonial migrants and within these categories between groups with ‘European’ (Christian) and non-European (Islam, Hinduism) religions. First of all, religion appears to be an important variable. Migrants whose faith has no tradition in Western Europe intermarry at a much lower rate than those whose religious backgrounds correspond with those that are common in the country of settlement. The rate of ethnic endogamous marriages in Western Europe are highest in Hindu and Muslim communities, often regardless if they came as guest workers or colonial migrants. Whereas differences in religion diminish the propensity to intermarry, colour or ‘racial’ differences on the other hand seem to be less important. This is largely explained by the pre-migration socialisation. Furthermore, the paper argues that the attention to institutions, as rightly advocated by Richard Alba and Victor Nee, needs a more refined and layered elaboration. Institutions, often as barriers to intermarriage, do not only emanate from the receiving society, but also—be it less formalized—within migrant communities. Especially religions and family systems, but also organized nationalist feelings, can have a profound influence on how migrants think about endogamy. Finally, strong pressures to assimilate, often through institutionalized forms of discrimination and stigmatization, not only produce isolation and frustrate assimilation (with resulting low intermarriage rates), but can also stimulate assimilation by 'passing' mechanisms. These factors, together with a more comparative perspective, are not completely ignored in the new assimilation theory, but—as this study of Western European intermarriage patterns stresses—deserve to be included more systematically in historical and social scientist analyses.     

Sino‐American relations post‐Tiananmen

This essay analyses some of the political, economic and social challenges of East Timor's transition to independence. It scrutinizes the ethical dimensions of building peace in a territory devastated by the combined effect of Indonesia's colonial occupation and the violent militia attacks of September 1999. The most difficult task ahead does not lie in the physical rebuilding of the territory - gargantuan as it may be - but in the more intricate and long-term rehabilitation of a traumatized society. The latter involves competing Timorese factions as well as a range of international actors, including the United Nations Transitional Authority, foreign governments, business institutions and various multilateral and bilateral donors, each having their own organizational leitmotifs and policy priorities. If not managed carefully, the reconstruction process could further exacerbate existing societal tensions and complicate the search for peace and reconciliation. The essay identifies a number of crucial components necessary to counter such risks, including the need to promote popular participation in the rebuilding process. Without the legitimacy created by strong community involvement and grassroots participation in decision making, the task of national reconstruction may well become overwhelmed by conflict.