Colonialism and Postcolonialism

Much of Ofelia Schutte's work has been focused on the question of liberation, especially for women and for colonized peoples. In this paper I discuss some of the important contributions she has made toward understanding the difficulty of dialogue across differences of culture and power, and toward thinking through the relationships of culture, identity, and social justice. Although I generally agree with Schutte's positions, I try here to initiate a dialogue about some conflicting tendencies I see in her positions. Specifically, (...) I challenge her reliance on Nietzsche in developing a general approach to the question of liberation. (shrink)

Colonialism and Its Legacy brings together essays by leading scholars in both the fields of political theory and the history of political thought about European colonialism and its legacies, and postcolonial social and political theory. The essays explore the ways in which European colonial projects structured and shaped much of modern political theory, how concepts from political philosophy affected and were realized in colonial and imperial practice, and how we can understand the intellectual and social world left behind by a (...) half-millennium of European empires. (shrink)

This paper examines the impact of the introduction of Western (European) technical civilization on regional cultures in Nigeria, using Igboland in South-EasternNigeria as a test case. It begins with a discussion of some general features of Western technical civilization whose evolution has been profoundly influenced by technological advances in Europe and her cultural colonies in North America and elsewhere. Consequences of the contact between Western technical civilization and traditional Igbo culture are also examined. The paper concludes by discussing the challenging (...) problem of Africa’s contribution to technical civilization. (shrink)

This bold argument is at the center of this book that challenges the widespread assumption that environmentalism reflects a radical departure from modernity.

This book considers the context of the colonial policies of Britain, Locke's contribution to them, and the importance of these ideas in his theory of property. It also reconsiders the debate about John Locke's influence in America. The book argues that Locke's theory of property must be understood in connection with the philosopher's political concerns, as part of his endeavour to justify the colonialist policies of Lord Shaftesbury's cabinet, with which he was personally associated. The author maintains that traditional scholarship (...) has failed to do justice to Locke by ignoring the implications of contemporary British imperial policy for the interpretation of his political thought. (shrink)

This article has been on ways by which developing countries can go back to the basics of project management as a means for developmental goals. Project management has proven to be an effective and flexible management approach, which has the potential of being of great value to developing countries. There is a need for a stronger emphasis on project implementation as a training mechanism for developing indigenous skills. Improved planning, administrative and technical capacity must be defined as project outputs. The (...) need for highly trained development administrators, especially those with project management skills, is a recurring theme of international assistance evaluation reports. Developing countries require two types of trained project administrators: those who can plan and coordinate the entire project cycle as an integrated process and those who can manage the project as an organizational entity once it is selected and approved (Rondinelli, 1976). (shrink)

Recent scholarship on John Stuart Mill has illuminated his arguments about the normative legitimacy of imperial rule. However, it has tended to ignore or downplay his extensive writings on settler colonialism: the attempt to create permanent "civilized" communities, mainly in North America and the South Pacific. Mill defended colonization throughout his life, although his arguments about its character and justification shifted over time. While initially he regarded it as a solution to the "social problem" in Britain, he increasingly came to (...) argue that its legitimacy resided in the universal benefits—civilization, peace, and prosperity—it generated for humanity. In the final years of his life Mill seemed to lose faith in the project. Finally recognizing the prevalence of colonial violence and the difficulty of realizing his grand ambitions, yet refusing to give up on colonization altogether, his colonial romance gave way to a form of melancholia. (shrink)

In my reply to Pogge's critique of Rawls's international relations theory, I will try to show two things: (1) that Pogge's account of the public criterion of domestic social justice endorsed by Rawls is a partial one and (2) that this leads him to wrongly postulate a significant asymmetry between Rawls's domestic and international theories of justice. In the end, I hope to show that the domestic and international accounts are characterized by a significant degree of symmetry ? that both (...) accounts are motivated by Rawls's fundamental concern with self-respect. In other words, a more expansive, complete account of the domestic public criterion of social justice necessarily leads us (contra Pogge) to affirm a significant degree of continuity between the domestic and international accounts. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to extend the Leszek Nowak's theory of socialist empire by introducing weaker forms of intersocial relation, e. gr. unsuccessful attempt at conquest and subordination. In the light of concretization of the model of socialist empire some facts from history of Soviet Union (intervention of the Entente and World War II) and socialist countries (autonomy of Albania and Romania in socialist bloc) are explained.

Imagine that you are a farmer living in Kenya. Though you work hard to sell your produce to foreign markets you find yourself unable to do so because affluent countries subsidize their own farmers and erect barriers to trade, like tariffs, thereby undercutting you in the marketplace. As a consequence of their actions you languish in poverty despite your very best efforts. Or, imagine that you are a peasant whose livelihood depends on working in the fields in Indonesia and you (...) are forcibly displaced from your land by a biofuels company because corrupt government officials have stolen the land and sold it to the company. Or, suppose that you work on the coast of Bangladesh but find that increasingly you are unable to cope with salination resulting from sealevel rise – a product of anthropogenic climate change. These, I believe, are cases of global injustice. My question is: What are those who bear the brunt of global injustice entitled to do to secure their, and other people’s, entitlements? Often people focus on the duties of the affluent to respect and uphold the rights of the disadvantaged. This is understandable. But there is a striking omission. Rarely do people analyze, or even mention, what those who lack their entitlements are entitled to do to secure their own rights. This is my focus in this paper. More specifically, I examine what agents are entitled to do to change the underlying social, economic and political practices and structures in a more just direction. (shrink)

In this chapter, I explore the role of violence in colonial rule and its role in decolonization struggle by posing the question, “what is alive in Fanon’s thought?” What can Fanon tell us about white settler state power and Fourth World decolonization struggles? I explore the relevance of Fanon’s account to the ongoing colonial situation on the northern part of Anówara Kawennote (Turtle Island), occupied by Canada. In this analysis, I am informed by Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) political philosopher Taiaiake Alfred. I (...) juxtapose Alfred’s theory of “nonviolent militancy” with Fanon’s concept of “violence in action.” I perform a reading of Fanon and Alfred to glean an understanding of the phenomenality of colonial state power. (shrink)

This piece discusses the account of contested territories and of corrective justice Moore offers in A Political Theory of Territory. In Chapter 6, Moore offers an occupancy account of boundary-drawing. My discussion focuses on the status of Moore's occupancy account compared to the statist and nationalist accounts it aims to replace. Specifically, I consider whether these other accounts are as unsuccessful as Moore suggests, and whether Moore's account is as distinct from these accounts as she suggests. In Chapter 7, Moore (...) offers a distinction between three different types of rights violations involved in the unjust taking of territory, and considers potential remedies for each. My discussion focuses on the arguments Moore offers to justify the presence or absence of certain remedies, in particular the right of return and the redistribution of land. I conclude that the territorial claims of historically wronged groups are too quickly dismissed, and I suggest that this is problematic from the point of view of Moore's own account. (shrink)

This is the first draft of a paper presented in an international conference in West Bengal.

This is a very brief paper on subaltern songs.

Malhotra is generally portrayed by American and European philosophers as a theologian and he is relegated to the backwaters of Hindutva. This review makes a strong case for Malhotra's scholarship and contextualizes him within the domains of philosophy and even Liberation theology. Malhotra's scholarship has been non-pejoratively assessed in this review.

This article approaches contemporary European debates on the subject of realism through the lenses offered by two decolonial thinkers: Fanon and Dussel. Whereas both share with realism a fundamental emphasis on reality as the starting point for theory – an assumption shared by much decolonial thought – they nevertheless provide another layer of specificity in their consideration of the colonial condition, diagnosing a fundamental absence of reciprocity that dictates the course of decolonization as a transformation of reality. Reconsidering the debates (...) on realism in light of these insights therefore provides a powerful basis for both formulating a specifically decolonial realism and for engaging in comparative political theorizing more generally. (shrink)

A white lecturer reflects on the ethics of how to respond to the charge of racism from a black student.

This article responds to Terry Eagleton's claim that Spivak's latest book, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, works against the intent of postcolonial criticism. Reading the work as a search for a just representational strategy, we explore the implications of Spivak's engagement with philosophy - Kant, Hegel, and Marx. As a disciplinary machine, philosophy produces Western subjects who are engendered by simultaneously including and excluding the other. Working through this production of the double location of the 'other' we suggest that systematic (...) thought is inhabited by an absence that is present within, a disturbing otherness that ultimately questions authority and stability, and opens up the question of politics and representation. Drawing Spivak into the representational problematic opened up by Lyotard, we suggest that a responsible postcolonial intervention can be performed in the difficult exergue between representability and unrepresentability. In this account, representation is open to invention, to finding new idioms for articulating otherness. (shrink)

Defenders of the Enlightenment highlight the long neglected anticolonial writings of thinkers like Immanuel Kant, which serve as a corrective to the misrepresentation of the Enlightenment's epistemological investment in imperialism. One of the most pervasive repercussions of the claim that the Enlightenment was always already anti-imperial is that postcolonial critique is rendered redundant, and the project of decolonizing European philosophy becomes unnecessary. Contesting the exoneration of Enlightenment philosophers of racism and sexism, this article debunks the claim that Kantian cosmopolitanism was (...) an antidote to colonialism. Addressing the ambivalent legacies of the European Enlightenment for the postcolonial world, with special focus on the “Syrian refugee crisis,” the article examines the enduring normative violence exerted by Enlightenment principles of cosmopolitanism and outlines the contested terrains that inflect current geopolitics of knowledge-production. Given that the normative idea of philosophy, as defined during the Enlightenment, continues to delegitimize non-European perspectives, the integration of previously marginalized knowledges into the philosophical canon is insufficient; rather, in order to desubalternize non-Western epistemologies, it is imperative to undo the uneven distribution of epistemic agency globally. Drawing on Gayatri Spivak's ideas of transnational literacy and planetary ethics, the article concludes by underscoring the contribution of postcolonial-feminist critique in imagining postimperial philosophy in a global age. (shrink)

One of the best-known aspects of José Carlos Mariátegui’s philosophy is his concept of a revolutionary myth. What does this revolutionary myth entail, how and why did Mariátegui develop this idea? The following article situates Mariátegui’s thought in both the historical and intellectual context of the 1920’s in order to answer these questions. This is relevant because Mariátegui’s philosophy and his revolutionary myth have influenced several Latin American revolutionaries such as Ernesto Che Guevara and Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path). Mariátegui’s ideas (...) have thus changed the lives and history of Latin Americans and it is important that we neither demonize nor idolize Mariátegui’s intellectual work without first attempting to understand it. (shrink)

The relationship between power, law and consent is a key feature of the Western debate on criminal law. On the one side, defining the legitimate ways of exercising the punitive power has been a critical question since the Enlightenment thought onwards and especially as to the rule of law doctrine. On the other side, the role played by public punishment in shaping consent and its communicative potential have been crucial questions for critical, as well as non-critical approaches to criminal law (...) in contemporary thought. These questions gain in strength and radicalism when it comes to international criminal law (ICL). In this case the filter of the state is not present anymore to mediate between power, law and consent, and the power to punish individuals is directly exercised by international institutions. This means, on the one hand, that traditional justifications of the power to punish and which are elaborated on in the domestic sphere are not useful anymore in legitimating international punishment. International criminal norms are not framed by an international democratically elected parliament, and their exercise is not controlled by the complex system of checks and balances typical of the rule of law. On the other hand, having not being created by a sovereign, international criminal law cannot be conceived as an instrument to build or consolidate consent around the sovereign. A double-sided dilemma therefore arises: traditional explanations are no longer apt to answer the question whether ICL is legitimate, while ICL itself can no longer be considered an instrument to build consent around the traditional power exercising it, namely the state. Although I consider both sides of the dilemma equally interesting and stimulating, I will focus here only on one side of the coin: the ability to build consent of the ICL institutions, and in particular the International Criminal Court (ICC). In other words, instead of asking whether the consent around the ICC is broad enough for the Court to be considered legitimate, I shall ask whether the ICC is able to build consent around the world order it embodies. (shrink)

For the economic and political processes being brought about in the name of the current wave of globalization to be ethical, they must avoid recapitulating the processes of the previous wave of globalization: colonialism. The paper discusses the logic of colonialism and a minimum requirement that the current globalization would have to fulfill in order to finally and definitively overcome the colonial structures inherited from the previous globalization: it must be democratic. It is argued that supranational democratic structures are, thus, (...) key to definitively overcoming colonialism, and a necessary condition fornon-neocolonial globalization; without such structures, globalization is neocolonial and, therefore, unethical. (shrink)

This thesis argues that Western feminist theoretical models of identity can be productively complicated by the insights of postcolonial feminisms. In particular, it explores ways that Western feminist theory might more adequately sustain a focus on 'women' while keeping open a space for differences such as race and nation. Part One identifies a number of themes that emerge from recent Indian feminist scholarship on the intersections of sex, gender, race, nation and community identities. Part Two uses these insights to look (...) critically at the work of four Western theorists, Rosi Braidotti, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway and Luce Irigaray. I argue that strategies which privilege sexual difference as primary cannot deal adequately with differences such as race and nation. But I also argue that strategies which privilege destabilizing identity can be equally constrained by the logic of dualisms which has made it so difficult for feminists to sustain a focus on women and their differences. Part Three discusses how the insights to be drawn from Indian ferninisms might be taken on board by Western ferninisms in order to develop more complex models of power, identity and the self. Throughout the thesis I draw on a Foucauldian understanding of power as productive, and on Foucault's insight that subjects and identities emerge, not through the imperatives of a single symbolic system, but through the intersection of multiple networks of discourses, material practices and institutions. I argue that, by attending to women's complex location within intersecting landscapes of gender, nation, race and other community identities, feminist models of identity can dispense with a logic of dualisms in order to redefine, and not only destabilize 'women' as the subject of/for feminism. This requires working against purity on three levels. First, it requires a model of power that gives up on the search for pure, power-free zones and works instead with the instabilities power produces as it both enables and constrains women. Second, it requires seeing 'women' as a complex, impure category that bleeds across the apparently coherent borders of identity categories such as gender, race and nation, and contesting discursive constructs of 'Woman' as the pure space of origin upon which these apparently discrete categories stand. Third, it requires the development of alternative models of the self that take these complex, impure spaces as a valid and valorised position from which to act and to speak. (shrink)

The impetus for this paper was the attack on the shack dweller movement in South Africa in September 2009. One question that emerged from the attack is what can committed intellectuals do to create active solidarity with movements of "the damned of the earth" in times of crisis. Thinldng of Fanon's critique of middle class anticolonial intellectual in The Wretched of the Earth and of Abahlali's insistence that their thinldng counts, the paper considers Fanon concept of political education rejecting the (...) idea that it is something that a vanguard party, an avant garde artist, a self-appointed leader, the military or even a community educator provides. Instead, the paper advocates a radical ethical move toward a constant dialogue that encourages and appreciates the reason of those so often excluded from decision making. But while an ethical shift toward lived experience is a usefiil foundation, intellectual labor applies itself to a search for new beginnings through developing an intellectual space of action where, potentially, the reflecting "consciousness full of contradictions" can help articulate itsphilosophical principles and realize its notion in fiercely democratic grassroots movements which Abahlali's president, S'bu Zikode, calls a "living communism."One may recall that China and the tables began to dance when the rest of the world appeared to be standing still—pour encourager les autres.Marx, Capital (1977: 164). (shrink)

In this essay, I undertake an examination of how Christian missionary societies facilitated the spread of European ideals and belief systems within an African community, and how this spread both prepared and weakened the African polities for increasing contact with colonial authorities. I specifically explore the role missionaries took in everyday functioning of African chiefdoms and kingdoms through their roles as interpreters and diplomats. Missionaries played a role in shaping the day-to-day existence of the polities in which they were based, (...) as they saw themselves fighting in the “war for souls” in Africa. I examine the effects of this contact in syncretising African and European beliefs, focusing on the especially tragic example of the Xhosa cattle killing. Life on the frontier shaped a deterministic “Christian” identity amongst white settlers along the fringes of colonial life, a distance which in turn led to these fringe groups being seen as un-Christian by their own churches. (shrink)

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This article considers whether the international legal human rights system founded on liberal individualism, as endorsed by liberal theorists, can function as a fair universal legal regime. This question is examined in relation to the collective right to self-determination demanded by indigenous peoples, who are paradigmatic decent nonliberal peoples. Indigenous peoples’ collective right to self-determination has been internationally recognized in the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which was adopted by the United Nations in 2007. This historic event may (...) seem to exemplify the international legal human rights system’s ability to function as a truly global legal regime applicable cross-culturally to all well-ordered societies, whether liberal or nonliberal. The article argues, however, that the collective right to self-determination advocated by indigenous peoples for the sake of cultural integrity is inconsistent with the international legal human rights system founded on liberal individualism. By showing the plausibility of indigenous peoples’ defense of their cultural integrity, this article suggests that the international legal human rights system ought to be reconceptualized to reflect a genuine international consensus on human rights among all well-ordered societies if it is to function as a just mechanism for global governance. (shrink)

Although nonliberal nationalism has played a prominent role in previously and currently colonized nations of the Third World, its assessment by liberal political theorists has been less than favorable. These theorists believe that nonliberal nationalisms are bound to be oppressive to marginalized members, since they view nonliberal cultures, which such movements aim to protect and maintain, to be essentialist and static monoliths that do not recognize the fundamental value of individual rights. In this article, I defend nonliberal nationalisms of previously (...) or currently colonized nations—what I call nonliberal polycentric nationalisms—by arguing that they can be morally justified, provided that they are democratic. This argument is supported by communitarian constructions of moral agency and culture, which show that nonliberal cultures hold emancipatory potential for the insiders who actively participate in the reconstruction of their national culture. (shrink)