This essay will critically analyse how conquest that resulted in white settler colonialism laid the foundation for epistemic violence. Epistemic violence, which took the form of the imposition of the law of the European conqueror in the wake of land dispossession in 1652 in South Africa is the fundamental problem this essay will critically engage with. We will rely on the Azanian philosophical tradition as a theoretical framework to critique this legal epistemic violence. Our (...) theoretical framework is in line with Afrikan jurisprudence, which is grounded in the culture and worldview of the Indigenous people conquered in wars of conquest. Fundamental to our argument is that the law of the European conqueror, which was imposed through conquest is a Eurocentric enterprise, which seeks to negate the Afrikan worldview and culture and reinforce historic injustice. It is important to note that epistemic violence commenced with the issuing of papal bulls, which undergirded conquest and white settler colonialism in South Africa. The thesis of the essay is that in the wake of conquest and the attendant imposition of the law of the European conqueror, white settlers used their law to technicalise issues of historic injustice such as land dispossession. It is in this sense that this essay seeks to contribute to the decolonisation of law by foregrounding the worldview and culture of the Indigenous conquered people. (shrink)

In 2001, Rie Fujii, a 23-year-old Japanese national living without legal status in Calgary, Alberta, Canada left her two infant children alone in her apartment for 10 days while visiting her out-of-town boyfriend. The children, Domenic and Gemini, died of dehydration and starvation. Charged with two counts of second-degree homicide, Fujii plead guilty to manslaughter and received an 8-year sentence. Through an analysis of the publicly available judicial documents relating to the crimes of Rie Fujii, this paper explores how the (...) law’s individualization and medicalization of crime and violence may obscure the multiple forms of everyday and structural violence that racialized women in white settler states such as Canada experience and may perpetrate. Drawing on Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois’ concept of the violence continuum, I argue that the law’s conceptualization of crime and violence conceals and thus advances the violence endemic to white settler colonialism. (shrink)

This article discusses the contemporary history of South African social science in relation to the Azanian Philosophical Tradition. It is addressed directly to white scholars, urging introspection with regard to the ethical question of epistemic justice in relation to the evolution of the social sciences in conqueror South Africa. I consider the establishment of the professional social sciences at South African universities in the early twentieth century as a central part of the epistemic project (...) of conqueror South Africa. In contrast, the Azanian Philosophical Tradition is rooted in African philosophy and articulated in resistance against the injustice of conquest and colonialism in southern Africa since the seventeenth century. It understands conquest as the fundamental historical antagonism shaping the philosophical, political, and material problem of ‘South Africa’. The tradition is silenced by and exceeds the political and epistemic strictures of the settler colonial nation state and social science. (shrink)

Boxing was arguably the most popular and controversial sport in colonial Zimbabwe. To tame the sport's violence, which was considered too extreme, colonial officials in Zimbabwe sought guidance and advice from South Africa from the mid-1930s on how best to regulate the sport. South Africa occupied a unique position in this regard, not only because of the relationship it had with colonial Zimbabwe as a neighbouring white settler colony, but also because of how sections of its (...) white settler community responded to the triumphs of Black boxers over white opponents around the world. The colony of South Africa played a significant role in shaping the control of boxing in colonial Zimbabwe. The relationship between the two colonies culminated in the passage of the Boxing and Wrestling Control Act of 1956 in colonial Zimbabwe, an identical version to a similarly named law that South Africa had passed just two years prior. (shrink)

There is a growing body of feminist scholarship and literature exploring the ways in which Western patriarchal technologies of gender differentiation and sexual violence structure the racial categorisation and dehumanisation that define South Africa’s history of slavery, colonialism and apartheid. In this article, I consider the gendered history of white Afrikaner nationalism in the context of these insights. Using the decolonial feminist lens of María Lugones, I interpret the historical and contemporary patriarchal subjugation of the white Afrikaner (...) woman as a site of the production and maintenance of colonial racial categories and hierarchies. Gaining a better understanding of how gender operated as a colonial mode of organisation in the process of forging the ethno-racialised white identity of the Afrikaner in the early nineteenth century in opposition to the black indigenous majority population helps to explain how the continued patriarchal subjugation of white Afrikaner women by Afrikaner men in postcolonial/postapartheid South Africa works to reassert and maintain colonial racial categories and inequalities that continue to plague the country. (shrink)

Literature on the radical indigenous resistance tradition, which predated the emergence of Garveyism as a form of Afrikan philosophy of liberation is scarce in South African politics and history. Robert Edgar and Robert Vinson have contributed to the literature on the influence of Garveyism in South Africa in the 1920s. However, their scholarship does not delve into the emergence of the radical indigenous resistance tradition which was a reaction to conquest since 1652 in wars of colonization in (...) South Africa. This paper seeks to remedy this gap by discussing this radical indigenous resistance tradition which we designate as the Indigenous Fundamentalist Tradition. This paper will utilize the historical analytical framework to provide a brief outline of the cause and elements of this tradition. We will rely on historical research design to discuss how, upon its arrival in the 1920s, Garveyism regalvanised this radical indigenous resistance tradition. The first objective of the paper is to foreground the convergence of the intellectual and political endeavours of people of Afrikan descent (continent and diaspora) in their struggle against global white supremacy. The second objective is to contribute to the eventual hegemony of the combined radicalism of the Indigenous Fundamentalist Tradition and Garveyism which is a marginalized issue in the literature on Afrikan nationalism and the Black Radical Tradition in South Africa. This paper will provide a brief intellectual portrait of Lembede to argue that through his political philosophy of Afrikanism he encapsulated the convergence of the Indigenous Fundamentalist Tradition and Garveyism. This is in order to lay the foundation for the foregrounding of Lembede’s idea of Afrika for the Afrikans as an alternative paradigm regarding the national question in South Africa. (shrink)

Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is tasked with facing the hundred-year history of Indian Residential Schools. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission is frequently invoked in relation to the Canadian TRC, perhaps because this is one of the few TRCs worldwide that Canadians know. Whilst the South African TRC is mainly applauded as an international success, I argue that loose analogizing is often more emotive than concise. Whilst much indeed can be drawn from the South (...) African experience, it is important to specify the Canada–South Africa analogy. In this article, I do so by focussing on the institutional approach to truth and how this relates to issues of settler/White denial. The South African experience teaches that narrow approaches to truth collude with superficial views of reconciliation that deny continuities of violence. Consequently, I argue that Indigenous–settler reconciliation requires a broad truth that locates residential schools on a continuum of violence, linking extraordinary abuses with structural injustices and historic colonization with lived relationships. (shrink)

On 27 March 2014, Loreal Tsingine, a 27-year-old Navajo woman was shot and killed by Austin Shipley, a white male police officer, also 27 years old, who said he was trying to apprehend her for a suspected shoplifting. Shipley was never charged, and the Department of Justice declined to investigate the Winslow police on the matter. This article explores Shipley’s killing of Loreal Tsingine and the police investigation of the shooting as quotidian events in settler colonial states. Police (...) shootings of Indigenous people and the legal response to police use of force (along with everyday settler violence) are a part of the racial terror that is a central part of settler colonialism. Both the shooting and the official narratives of it as a justifiable use of force reveal the psychic and material underpinnings of a settler state, a state that continually imagines and consolidates itself as a community of whites imperiled by Indians among others. White settler violence directed at those imagined as threats lives just beneath the surface of everyday settler life, and importantly, flows through institutions such as policing, embedding itself in everyday professional routines. The extractive relations that are the basis of settler colonialism require and produce white subjects for whom Indigenous lands and bodies are the resource for white identity; policing is one site where white men and women (as well as those aspiring to whiteness), can enact racial hierarchy on behalf of the colonial state with impunity. (shrink)

This article uses decolonial to critique the discourse of ‘subaltern whiteness’ by questioning some Afrikaner scholars’ morality of regarding ‘white Afrikaners as subaltern’. Subaltern designates submerged, subordinated, exploited or suppressed – those whose voices have been historically muted, their humanity stripped by those with sociopolitical and economic power. Within South Africa, this raises the question: to what extent can white Afrikaners be regarded as subaltern? The article proposes indivisibility of epistemic vulnerability and regenerative theological praxis both (...) emerging within Afrikaner theological discussion as viable response to broken bodies of those who still bear the marks or scars of apartheid and rather not to seek to hijack their voice. (shrink)

As a country with a history of settler-colonialism, the land question in South Africa remains one of the critical issues of redress that is highly contested. Furthermore, opinions on the land question tend to be divided along racial lines. This paper uses white ignorance as a theoretical framework to explain these polarised views on the land question in South Africa post-1994. The paper also uses the concept of honorary whiteness/brownness to explain how differences among ‘people of (...) colour’ serve to sustain a hierarchical racial order in which whites remain the ultimate beneficiaries. While research on white ignorance mainly focuses on the socio-psychological and material benefits of white ignorance for whites, this paper argues that those classified as honorary white or ‘brown’ also benefit, albeit minimally, from endorsing willful white ignorance of past and present racial atrocities. (shrink)

As a country with a history of settler-colonialism, the land question in South Africa remains one of the critical issues of redress that is highly contested. Furthermore, opinions on the land question tend to be divided along racial lines. This paper uses white ignorance as a theoretical framework to explain these polarised views on the land question in South Africa post-1994. The paper also uses the concept of honorary whiteness/brownness to explain how differences among ‘people of (...) colour’ serve to sustain a hierarchical racial order in which whites remain the ultimate beneficiaries. While research on white ignorance mainly focuses on the socio-psychological and material benefits of white ignorance for whites, this paper argues that those classified as honorary white or ‘brown’ also benefit, albeit minimally, from endorsing willful white ignorance of past and present racial atrocities. (shrink)

Reconciliation in South Africa is often taken to mean the creation of culturally diverse communities. In reality, though, the multicultural often turns out to be multiracial only with People of Colour being included in White-dominated spaces. Likewise, socio-economic transformation means raising people’s chances to attain a living standard more equal to that of the bulk of the White population. In both cases, the strong position of White people in sociocultural and socio-economic terms remains largely untouched. Hence (...) the calls for decolonisation which seem to render the reconciliation discourse dispensable. Vulnerability by White South Africans is proposed as an alternative response to ongoing inequalities which – it is suggested – could contribute to both decolonisation and reconciliation on an interpersonal level. Likely objections to such a proposal are considered before making a case for vulnerability as an appropriate Christian way of living, particularly in the context of former settler colonialism. (shrink)

Photo ID 279661800 © Sidewaypics|Dreamstime.com ABSTRACT Decolonization is complex, vast, and the subject of an ongoing academic debate. While the many efforts to decolonize or dismantle the vestiges of colonialism that remain are laudable, they can also reinforce what they seek to end. For decolonization to be impactful, it must be done with epistemic and cultural humility, requiring decolonial scholars, project leaders, and well-meaning people to be more sensitive to those impacted by colonization and not regularly included in the (...) discourse. INTRODUCTION Decolonization is complex. To successfully achieve decolonization, projects should incorporate the voices of those subjugated or silenced. Including such voices requires sincerely exploring who has been affected by colonialism or neocolonialism and how, as well as cultural sensitivity. In its basic use, decolonization refers to countries under colonial rule gaining independence or freedom from forms of subjugation. Additionally, scholars use the term to refer to efforts to dismantle neocolonialism and vestiges of colonialism. The process includes de-silencing subjugated voices.[1] I use decolonization in the latter way to refer to countries with technical independence. While arguably colonization ended formally with independence from colonizing powers, neocolonialism is the indirect, informal, and sometimes subtle control of the people, their economy, and political life despite formal independence from colonizing authorities. I conceptualize neocolonialism as a system that involves direct and involuntary control of another’s political, economic, or social life, impacting their worldview and ways of encountering the world. Decolonization may target actions, places, or systems like health care or AI to overcome the ills of colonialism and neocolonialism. It also may target knowledge and require rethinking how people develop their knowledge base. For example, if people grew up seeing an outside colonizer as superior, they would need to change their knowledge of superiority. Decolonization may target power, for example, changing who owns and distributes COVID-19 vaccines and who distributors exclude in the distribution of vaccines. Decolonization could require looking at those disempowered in the distribution process. Additionally, decolonization may target autonomy of persons by freeing people, ensuring human and individual rights, and respecting cultural traditions. Decolonization projects that try to de-silence by including the voices of those affected by colonialism and neocolonialism must examine inclusiveness in the context of the culture of the subrogated individuals. Examples of decolonization projects include making datasets inclusive of diverse peoples and places, returning to traditional food and eating practices, making sure hospitals in developing countries are led by locals and respectful of cultural traditions, returning unethically obtained artefacts or objects. Another project would be laying the groundwork for equality in formerly colonized countries to ensure that business ownership, education, and financial success will flow fairly to those previously victimized by colonization. Summarily, there are many strategies for decolonizing. However, it is worth asking whether the strategies have risks that undermine the goal of decolonization. I. Understanding Decolonization Discourses Many fields, from AI to politics, economics, health care, aviation, and academia, discuss decolonization. The content of the discourse on decolonization depends on the region and field discussing it. Rather than just reporting on decolonization, the discussions may be calls to action. For example, decolonization discourses reflect activism for cognitive justice, such as equal consideration of Indian or African knowledge systems in global health discourses.[2] In politics and political science, some scholars frame decolonization as an anti-western, anti-colonial movement by Africans to emancipate Africa/ns from subjugation or shift the continent to postcolonialism and post-neo-colonialism. This framing walls off non-African participants and may undermine their capacity to benefit the conversation.[3] There are other political scientists who actively support decolonization and see it as a field of activism in support of anyone and countries where colonization harmed people and development.[4] The point is that two ways of conceptualizing decolonization in politics and political science are discernible. One conceptualization is less inclusive since it alienates scholars and professionals from Western, high-income, or developed countries. The other is more inclusive. In humanitarian studies, including philosophy, some decolonization articles and conversations are efforts to end the destructive force of colonization. They focus on either the form, such as ecocide, genocide, and many others, or the geographic location, such as Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania.[5] Finally, the feelings one brings into this conversation can adversely impact how one engages in them and who they listen to or are willing to hear from. For example, anger, rage, bitterness, and hatred are emotions that are not uncommon in spaces of decolonization conversations. Decolonization conversations that originate from a place of negativity risk deepening the psychological state of victimhood and prevent people from disrupting constructively or critically engaging in the conversation.[6] II. Understanding Decolonization Strategies Decolonization strategies mainly aim to de-silence victims of domination or subjugation. People have proposed many strategies for decolonizing. These strategies may be informed by what the target is for decolonization. Decolonization can target power relations in global health. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, public health organizations noted the power imbalance in vaccine distribution. Decolonization could involve de-silencing those affected by neocolonialism to bring about a more balanced distribution of power and a more fair distribution of the vaccine. By analyzing who was adversely impacted by the distribution and who ought to wield power, those engaged in decolonizing advocated for positive change and equitable power relations. Equally, when being is the target of decolonization, the language of unlearning or relearning and mental decolonization take centre stage in the decolonization discourse. For example, the quest to decolonize colonized minds aims to demythologize African inferiority and Western superiority. Demythologizing African inferiority enables those engaged in the decolonization discourse to cultivate and foster African agency.[7] Finally, when knowledge production is the target of decolonization, scholars use inclusion and cognitive justice. For example, they try to alter the knowledge that underlies global health ethics.[8] “[D]decolonizing researchers aim to respectfully understand and integrate theory from Other(ed) perspectives, while also critically examining the underlying assumptions that inform their Western research framework.”[9] One common strategy that scholars use in decolonization is inclusion. It is worth asking, does including people who have been subrogated foster decolonization? Whether that is effective depends on whether included people are more heard or whether the strategies to include them create new forms of silencing. III. Inclusion and the Quest to Decolonize Evaluating how effective inclusion is in the quest to de-silence subjugated voices is important. First, inclusive strategies are not neutral. They are epistemically situated. This situatedness constrains meaning-making in different ways: how and what questions are asked, how social roles are constructed, organized or assigned, and who is admitted to the room where these conversations occur.[10] Inclusion strategies may reinforce (unchallenged) assumptions. For example, to address prejudices and stereotypes in global health images, Arsenii Alenichev and his colleagues[11] successfully inverted “one stereotypical global health image” by prompting a generative AI to produce “an image of a traditional Indian or African healer healing a White Child.” Although there were some problems with the image of the White child, this innovation is a significant, useful effort to de-embed or strip global health images of problematic pictures that mythologize White superiority and Black inferiority. Yet it is possible that using categories like traditional Indian or African reinforces unchallenged assumptions, raising key questions regarding how language and words create new stereotypes. It is common to define traditional as non-conventional, unorthodox, and informal. Yet studies continue to reveal that non-scientifically appraised healing approaches in India or Africa are not only effective but also real, meaningful, fundamental, and primary care-seeking behaviours in many communities in these regions.[12] Suppose inclusive strategies are not un-situated. These conversations may be had within the structures, language, and spaces built by or connected to colonialism. The spaces, language, places, and structures in which these conversations occur can limit who can participate and how they participate. Importantly, some conditions are not conducive to participation as equals. The allocated time for the discussion could also constrain how individuals express themselves. It is unclear who is ultimately heard. Furthermore, epistemic situatedness of inclusion can impact decolonization conversations when participants are beneficiaries of, products of, and trained by structures and systems they seek to dismantle. To enhance the decolonization project and its goals, a pressing task is to unveil and question how the circumstances may inhibit activism. If the vestiges of colonialism continue to structure the decolonization discourse invisibly, the vestiges may undermine decolonization. For example, a public health discussion that includes white Western doctors and Western pharmaceutical executives in Africa may have many local Africans at the table but could still effectively devalue their input based on built-in assumptions and biases that are vestiges of colonialism. Second, exclusion and inclusion are also not binary. Individuals may experience exclusion, even while included (the phenomenon called internal exclusion). In other words, inclusion can fail to be substantial or become a means of enhancing optics, “a way of (un)consciously weakening the radical claims being pursued.”[13] For example, in South Africa, many institutions have made significant efforts to diversify their faculties due to the promulgation of the Employment Equity Act 55.[14] The act requires South African institutions to implement employment equity that redresses the history of harmful discrimination in the country. The act further requires transforming departments and institutional administrations. Although many recognize and support the need to transform departments in South Africa, the rhetoric of transformation departs sharply from the lived experiences.[15] This misalignment between the plan and practice is evident in the underrepresentation of black people and females in senior management teams, professorships in many universities and health departments, and positions of power in some South African institutions. Those selected in the transformation of the departments have also complained of being overworked. The burden of extra work undermines their ability to develop agency and voice in the space they now occupy or fulfil key requirements that have implications for their career trajectory.[16] This is called the minority tax. Notably, "the minority tax… is the burden of extra responsibilities [placed] on faculty of colour to achieve diversity and inclusion and contributes to attrition and impedes academic promotion."[17] One challenge for decolonializing projects will be for decolonial scholars and those selected for decolonization objectives to have the humility to decline invitations, requests, roles, and platforms for which they are either unqualified or lack the capacity to fulfil. At its heart, decolonization strategies must empower those included rather than weaken them. Finally, inclusion can lead to a phenomenon known as elite capture.[18] Elite capture occurs when socially advantaged individuals in a group monopolize or exploit activism to their own benefit at the expense of the larger, struggling group. Elite capture weakens decolonization efforts from within, revealing that those likely to benefit from global inclusive efforts are those who fulfil globally constructed standards, those “already present in the room.” There is no better strategy to weaken decolonial movements than weakening the project from within by strategically positioning individuals who share physical properties with the victims of exclusion and silencing but intellectually, behaviourally, psychologically, and emotionally share more common ground with the colonizer. Such insiders may be unaware they are furthering neocolonial conditions rather than decolonizing. In relation to decolonization, particularly in global health, elite capture reveals that those whose voices are loudest in the room are not necessarily those more impacted by colonialism. They may benefit more from reinforcing colonialism. Opportunism weakens meaningful activism from within, preventing good initiatives and strategies from having their intended impact or taking substantive root.[19] This paper cannot do justice to elite capture, but it is worth noting its negative impacts. IV. Improving the Impact of Decolonization To end neo-colonialism, it is important to understand how it manifests and what to do at each level. Beyond the academic discourse, many tangible efforts exist to decolonize through de-silencing. Examples of these efforts include the ME2 movement that seeks to centre the concerns and experiences of sexually abused or harassed victims in the public discourse. At the funding level, many grant-awarding agencies like Wellcome Trust have dedicated huge budgets to studies that help them understand how they may have perpetrated colonialism or neocolonialism and what they can do differently going forward.[20] In South Africa, promulgating the Employment Equity Act 55 was a tangible attempt to entrench decolonization concerns in a country's regulatory framework. Yet, these decolonization efforts could fail to be substantive if they do not reflect cultural sensitivity. Two key components of cultural sensitivity are worth highlighting here: epistemic and cultural humility. Epistemic humility is an intellectual virtue described as knowing one’s limitations and the limitations of the learning methods employed. At its simplest, it is the ability to admit when one is wrong. Cultural humility includes genuine attempts to learn about and embrace other cultures. Epistemic and cultural humility are signs of academic excellence and strength. Epistemic and cultural humility seriously acknowledge how the state of our knowledge, cognitive limitations, experiences, and backgrounds, while constraining us, also invite us to listen, learn, grow, and change. The limitations-owing account of epistemic and cultural humility suggests that “a person who is aware of her cognitive limitations and owns them is much better positioned to achieve such epistemic goods as true beliefs and understanding than someone who… simply has insight into the epistemic status of her beliefs.”[21] Epistemic and cultural humility may help prevent decolonization projects that unintentionally reinforce what they seek to dismantle. Epistemic humility calls on decolonizers to defer tasks for which they are not qualified to suitably qualified persons. Beyond this, humility supports brave scholarship that imagines and reimagines how featuring the same voices, faces, and perspectives possibly introduces new forms of domination or silencing. Cultural knowledge can lead to a more intentional way of seeking out the right people or a more diverse group than those frequently featured in decolonization conversations. This would give others more opportunities to navigate these spaces and should do so in ways that are familiar to them. One ought to be more sensitive to those who would ordinarily not be included in these conversations. Unless we radically and boldly reimagine these discussions, we risk alienating those most negatively impacted by neocolonialism. CONCLUSION Decolonization conversations are complex and the subject of academic debate. The strategies employed to decolonize can harm or help the victims of neo-colonialism. Inclusion of previously silenced individuals may not be enough to overcome the vestiges of colonialism, leading to a false inclusion, where those included feel excluded or contribute in ways reflecting their own biases and circumstances. Inclusion of an elite or people who do not truly represent the subjugated can lead to elite capture. For decolonization strategies to be impactful, for example, in the context of global health, project leaders and participants must engage in conversations employing epistemic and cultural humility. In many ways, epistemic and cultural humility can help us demythologize our assumptions of any cultural superiority or cognitive authority, allowing for diverse voices, cultures, and perspectives to emerge without domination. - [1] Caesar Atuire & Olivia Rutazibwa. 2021. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization [Online]. Available from: https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/african-reading-covid-19-pandemic-and-stakes-decolonization [Accessed July 29, 2021 2021]. [2] Bridget Pratt & Jantina De Vries 2023. Where is knowledge from the Global South? An account of epistemic justice for a global bioethics. Journal of Medical Ethics, medethics-2022-108291. [3] Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh 2023. Is decolonisation Africanisation? The politics of belonging in the truly African university. Social Dynamics, 1-20. [4] Rianna Oelofsen 2015. Decolonisation of the African mind and intellectual landscape. Phronimon, 16, 130-146. [5] Caesar Atuire & Olivia Rutazibwa. 2021. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization [Online]. Available from: https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/african-reading-covid-19-pandemic-and-stakes-decolonization [Accessed July 29, 2021 2021]. [6] Pedro Alexis Tabensky 2008. The Postcolonial Heart of African Philosophy. South African Journal of Philosophy, 27, 285-295. [7] Nicholas M. Creary 2012. African Intellectuals and Decolonization, Ohio, Ohio University Press. [8] Bridget Pratt & Jantina De Vries 2023. Where is knowledge from the Global South? An account of epistemic justice for a global bioethics. Journal of Medical Ethics, medethics-2022-108291. [9] Vivetha Thambinathan & Elizabeth Anne Kinsella 2021. Decolonizing Methodologies in Qualitative Research: Creating Spaces for Transformative Praxis. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 20, 16094069211014766. [10] Abimbola Seye 2023. Knowledge from the global South is in the global South. Journal of Medical Ethics, 49, 337. [11] A. Alenichev, P. Kingori & K. P. Grietens 2023. Reflections before the storm: the AI reproduction of biased imagery in global health visuals. Lancet Glob Health. [12] Jonathan K. Burns & Andrew Tomita 2015. Traditional and religious healers in the pathway to care for people with mental disorders in Africa: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 50, 867-877. [13] Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh & Cornelius Ewuoso 2023. What type of inclusion does epistemic injustice require? Journal of Medical Ethics, jme-2023-109091. [14] 1998. Employment Equity Act. In: GOVERNMENT, S. A. (ed.) 19370. [15] Dina Zoe Belluigi & Gladman Thondhlana 2019. ‘Why mouth all the pieties?’ Black and women academics’ revelations about discourses of ‘transformation’ at an historically white South African university. Higher Education, 78, 947-963. [16] Juliet Ramohai & Khomotso Marumo 2016. Women in Senior Positions in South African Higher Education: A Reflection on Voice and Agency. 231, 135-157. [17] J. Trejo 2020. The burden of service for faculty of color to achieve diversity and inclusion: the minority tax. Mol Biol Cell, 31, 2752-2754. [18] Olufemi Taiwo 2020. Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference. The Philosopher, 108, 7. [19] Margarita Kurbatova & Elena Kagan 2016. Opportunism of University Lecturers As a Way to Adaptate the External Control Activities Strengthening. Journal of Institutional Studies, 8, 116-136. [20] Jeremy Farrar. 2022. An update on Wellcome's anti-racist programme. An update on Wellcome's anti-racist programme [Online]. Available from: https://wellcome.org/news/update-wellcomes-anti-racism-programme [Accessed August 10, 2022 2022]. [21] Katherine Dormandy 2018. Does Epistemic Humility Threaten Religious Beliefs? Journal of Psychology and Theology, 46, 292-304. (shrink)

The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been mandated to collect testimonies from survivors of the Indian Residential Schools system. The TRC demands survivors of the residential school system to share their personal narratives under the assumption that the sharing of narratives will inform the Canadian public of the residential school legacy and will motivate a transformation of settler identity. I contend, however, that the TRC provides a concrete example of how a politics of recognition fails to transform relationships (...) between Native and settler Canadians not only because it enacts an internalization of colonial recognition, but because it fails to account for what I call “settler ignorance.” Work in epistemologies of ignorance and epistemic oppression gives language to explain sustained denial and provide tools to further understand how settler denial is sustained, and how it can be made visible, and so challenged. For this task, Mills’s articulation of white ignorance should be expanded to a consideration of white settler ignorance. Over and above an account of white ignorance, such an account will have to consider the underlying logics of settler colonialism. This characterization of settler ignorance will show that the denial of past and ongoing violence against Indigenous peoples, through the reconstruction of the past to assert the primacy of settlers, is not explainable in terms of a lack of recognition but is rather structural ignorance. (shrink)

From the first days of their settlement at the southern part of Africa – from 1652 onwards – the European settlers distinguished themselves from the indigenous people groups by referring to themselves as ‘Christians’. However, this Christian mindset came along with a unique stubbornness that could often be seen as contrary to their faith. This double mindset of the people (religious and stubborn) – of which a significant part was later called the Afrikaners – became the means by which they (...) lived and operated, being called ‘unconsciously religious’. This new nation in the Cape was born Protestant, which carried in itself the notion of factional and schismatic tendencies, with different Protestant churches being formed alongside the original church that came to South Africa. Being devoted Christians on the one hand, and radical individualists on the other, they were in almost constant conflict with the people groups around them and with the government. This article explains how the two characteristics of religion and obstinacy sparked schism and influenced external conflict situations during the formation years of the nation up to the end of the 19th century. The Afrikaners portrayed a mix between their religiosity and their stubbornness, in which they ‘twisted religion to suit their purposes’. The consequences of this unholy bond are still haunting the Afrikaner nation today. (shrink)

A significant factor undermining real racial reconciliation in post-1994 South Africa is widespread resistance to shared historical responsibility amongst South Africans racialised as white. In response to the need for localised ‘white work’, this article aims to contribute to the uprooting of white denialism, specifically amongst Afrikaans-speaking Christians from Reformed backgrounds. The point of entry is two underexplored, challenging, contextualised crucifixion paintings, namely, Black Christ and Cross-Roads Jesus. Drawing on critical whiteness studies, extensive local and (...) international experience as a ‘participatory’ facilitator of conflict transformation and his particular embodiment, the author explores the creative unsettling potential of these two prophetic ‘icons’. Through this incarnational, phenomenological, diagnostic engagement with Black Christ, attention is drawn to the dynamics of family betrayal, ‘moral injury’ and idolisation underlying ‘white fragility’. ‘White fatigue’ is challenged by stressing the Biblical nature of Cross-Roads Jesus’ confrontational, ‘ugly’ portrayal of the systemic violence of apartheid and colonialism. It is also argued that a combination of Louw’s shocking portrayal of an enraged, emaciated township Jesus with the explicit depiction of white historical responsibility in Black Christ increases the counter-cultural potential of these icons to disrupt denial amongst white South African Christians. However, the realisation of this potential will require the cultivation of more capacity to work creatively with the intense emotional, moral, spiritual discomfort brought to the surface by this type of religious icon.Contribution: The article argues for a contextualised, South African engagement with the crucifixion of Christ, through an embodied interpretation of two anti-apartheid religious paintings. It makes a contribution to critical whiteness studies and practical theology and thus fits into the interdisciplinary, hermeneutical scope of HTS. (shrink)

South Africa's transition to democracy coincided and interlinked with massive global shifts, including the fall of communism and the rise of western capitalist triumphalism. Late capitalism operates through paradoxical global-local dynamics, both universalising identities and expanding local particularities. The erstwhile hegemonic identity of apartheid, 'the Afrikaner', was a product of Afrikaner nationalism. Like other identities, it was spatially organised, with Afrikaner nationalism projecting its imagined community onto a national territory. The study traces the neo-nationalist spatial permutations of 'the Afrikaner', (...) following Massey's understanding of space as political, produced through interrelations ranging from the global to micro intimacies, potentially a sphere for heterogeneous co-existence, and continuously created. Research is presented that shows a neo-nationalist revival of ethnic privileges in a defensive version of Hall's 'return to the local'. Although Afrikaner nationalism's territorial claims to a nation state were defeated, neo-nationalist remnants reclaim a purchase on white Afrikaans identities, albeit in shrunken territories. This phenomenon is, here, called Afrikaner enclave nationalism. Drawing on a global revamping of race as a category of social subjugation, a strategy is deployed that is here called 'inward migration'. These dynamics produce a privatised micro-apartheid in sites ranging from homes, to commercial and religious enterprises, to suburbs. Virtual white spaces in the form of Afrikaans media products serve as extensions of these whitened locales. The lynchpin holding it all together is the heteronormative, middle-class family, with consumption the primary mode of the generation of its white comfort zones. (shrink)

This article considers the changing perceptions, expressions and representations of violence in South Africa post-1994, with particular reference to photography. Following the evolution of the documentary tradition in its relationship to the political history of South Africa, I will suggest that since the release of Nelson Mandela and the first democratic elections in South Africa, photography has taken a new turn, particularly with regard to its representation of violence, which had been its primary iconography up to that (...) watershed moment. I will follow three arguments in my explication of the ways in which violence has both altered South African society and assumed a different place in the collective mind of South Africans living in a country that is politically free but grappling with an ever-rising wave of violent crime. (shrink)

In ‘A politics of reminding: Khoisan resurgence and environmental justice in South Africa’s Sarah Baartman district’, Burnett et al. scrutinize the memory activism of the Gamtkwa Khoisan Council, which is part of the wider ‘Khoisan resurgence’ sweeping across post-apartheid South Africa. Although the authors missed important nuances, they also pointed out flaws in the way I used Niezen’s ‘therapeutic history’ [Niezen, R. (2009). The rediscovered self: Indigenous identity and cultural justice. McGill-Queen’s Press] in my work to account for (...) why Khoisan activists turn to the past. I therefore not only respond to their criticism, but also revise aspects of my theoretical framework. Therapeutic history is not divorced from material concerns. Nor is it representative of all engagements with the past by indigenous people or simply the opposite of academic history. Instead, by drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork and theorizing alongside the Khoisan, I show how it captures emic discourses on the past that entangle notions of indigenous identity, healing, and history in order to resist settler colonialism and its oppressive etic histories. While the concept of therapeutic history has its limitations, it effectively highlights indigenous people’s agency in the face of settler colonialism in South Africa and elsewhere. (shrink)

With the rise of place-based models of education, credence needs to be given to epistemological traditions that curate individual understandings of and relations to the social world (i.e., places). The epistemological traditions that have been shared across generations of North American settler colonialists are at the center of this article. The dominant epistemology of settler society provides racialized, anthropocentric, and capitalistic understandings of places. Relations to place are cultivated through particular conceptions of nature, private property, and personhood, which (...) remain at the epistemic foundation of Western society. These conceptions are concomitant to modes of domination like white supremacy and settler colonialism, and ultimately constitute an ideal white male settler actor. This article suggests that place-based education carries the potential to offer epistemic resistance to domination, but first needs to engage in a more comprehensive understanding of settler traditions of place. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt’s account of imperialism has become an unlikely source of inspiration for scholars invested in anti-colonial and postcolonial critique. However, the role of settler colonialism in her thought has come under far less scrutiny. This essay reconstructs Arendt’s account of settler-colonization. It argues that Arendt’s republican analysis of imperialism hinges on her notion of the boomerang effect, which is absent in settler-colonial contexts. Arendt recognized some of the distinctive features of settler expansionism but reproduced many (...) of the ideologies that sustain practices of settler-colonial conquest. This interpretation sheds light on the promises and limits of contemporary retrievals of Arendt’s analysis and critique of imperialism by foregrounding the specificity of settler colonialism as an axis of ongoing colonial violence. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt’s account of imperialism has become an unlikely source of inspiration for scholars invested in anti-colonial and postcolonial critique. However, the role of settler colonialism in her thought has come under far less scrutiny. This essay reconstructs Arendt’s account of settler-colonization. It argues that Arendt’s republican analysis of imperialism hinges on her notion of the boomerang effect, which is absent in settler-colonial contexts. Arendt recognized some of the distinctive features of settler expansionism but reproduced many (...) of the ideologies that sustain practices of settler-colonial conquest. This interpretation sheds light on the promises and limits of contemporary retrievals of Arendt’s analysis and critique of imperialism by foregrounding the specificity of settler colonialism as an axis of ongoing colonial violence. (shrink)

As a site of colonial conquest, sub-Saharan Africa has experienced colonialism’s historic and continuing harms. One of the aspects of this harm is epistemic. In the analytic philosophical tradition, this harm can partly be theorised in line with the literature on epistemic injustice, although it does not fit squarely. I show this by arguing for what can be understood as a colonial state’s specific manifestation of epistemic injustice. This manifestation takes into account the historical context of colonisation (...) and the continuing coloniality of sub-Saharan African countries. From this, I argue for an approach to remediating this epistemic injustice that relies on the fair-minded pursuit of knowledge. This approach, I briefly argue, gains valuable insights from African epistemological traditions and can be beneficial to other epistemic injustice instances that result specifically from historical cases of oppression. (shrink)

This article explores the rise and fall of an Afrikaner psychological association: the Psychological Institute of the Republic of South Africa. It presents rhetorical, discursive and social analyses of presidential addresses delivered at PIRSA congresses between 1962 and 1977, identifying the emergence of a discourse of volksdiens during the 1960s that called for the ethnic-national relevance of the discipline. With the Afrikaner nation vulnerable to the triple threat of communism, capitalism and egalitarianism, PIRSA insisted that psychological research be dedicated (...) towards addressing these and other dangers. In the 1970s, however, such appeals became less prominent as discussions of South African issues slipped off the agenda. Curiously, at a time when the apartheid state was in decline, PIRSA’s psychologists were concerned with everything but the survival of Afrikanerdom. The unraveling of PIRSA’s quest for ethnic-national relevance mirrored the disintegration of the state’s apartheid rationality, which resulted from a concatenation of political, economic and cultural upheavals. (shrink)

In 1998 Ghia Van Eeden was sexually assaulted by a serial rapist who had escaped from police custody due to the negligence of the South African police authorities. Claiming that the State owed a common law duty of care to potential victims to protect them from violent crimes, Van Eeden sought damages for the harm she had suffered. In a path-breaking decision, the Supreme Court of Appeal (S.C.A.) found that a duty of care did indeed exist and that its (...) execution had to be considered in line with the constitutional requirement to protect women's right to be free from violence and the constitutional obligation to develop the common law so as to promote the spirit, purport and objects of the South African Bill of Rights. Examining the Van Eeden decision in terms of its substantial development of the circumstances in which the State may be judged liable for a wrongful omission, this note positions the S.C.A.'s decision in the context of the evolving case law of the Constitutional Court on sexual violence and ultimately questions its practical significance for addressing the prevalent abuse of women in South Africa. (shrink)

In this article, Christi van der Westhuizen's sociopolitical contribution in her publication, Sitting Pretty: White Afrikaans Women in Postapartheid South Africa, is reviewed. In light of the official end of apartheid in 1994, South Africans are attempting to define a new identity. Van der Westhuizen's publication focusses on how the identity of white Afrikaans women, as both the oppressor and the oppressed, influences and contributes to the endeavour of a search for new identity. In deconstructing and (...) re-imagining new identity, Van der Westhuizen deconstructs the 'supporting scaffolding' of Afrikaner identity and examines the impact of white patriarchal hegemony that silences the voice of women, sexual minorities and black consciousness. The review concludes with the emphasis on the transformative role of shame, that is, the willingness to expose the false sense of goodness that we had of ourselves, as pointed out by Van der Westhuizen. In this regard, the recognition of the intersectionality of people's experiences becomes a key aspect of the endeavour of a search for new identity. (shrink)

In an actual conflict situation many different factors can contribute to the view that a recourse to violence is inescapable and even desirable. Among them are natural responses to repression, encouragement from interested parties outside, and the oversimplification of the situation as it is described in the militant ideologies of the organizers of the conflict and in the moral evaluations of those who take sides in it. The reality is far more complex and the situation far less determined than it (...) seems. Taking the South African situation, the question of whether violence can be avoided can still be seen to depend on the kind of action that is taken. There is a relationship between ends and means. If the end is racial domination (by Africans in place of Afrikaners), then violence is the appropriate means. If the end is racial integration then violence must be avoided. Whether non-violence can serve this end of racial integration depends on its being consistently practiced and on the provision of the necessary outside encouragement. (shrink)

Concerns for safety and security as South Africa’s hosting of 2010 FIFA World Cup draws nearer highlight the degree to which South Africa’s reputation for a relatively peaceful transition from Apartheid has been replaced by its reputation for violent crime. Its transition, and the peacebuilding efforts that followed it, are not completely unrelated to its current high levels of violent crime. In fact, this article argues that there were a number of issues South Africa’s peacebuilding process failed (...) to address that are relevant to the country’s violent crime situation. A significant reason for this failure was an inability or unwillingness to engage the full spectrum of Apartheid’s violence with equal rigour. Apartheid inflicted structural violence, through its racially oppressive laws, as well as physical violence, through enforcing its laws and suppressing its opposition, on the people of South Africa. Peacebuilding in South Africa primarily focused on Apartheid’s physical violence. Through the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the focus was narrowed down further to physical political violence. Due to this narrow focus, it did not attend effectively to non-political violence – which includes gender-based violence, the esteem violence had attained during and due to Apartheid, disarming the country of illegal firearms, and narrowing the income gap between the country’s rich and poor. While South Africa proudly claims ownership of its conflict resolution and peacebuilding processes, it still emulated predominant models of building peace through liberal democracy and a market economy. These models have been drawn from Western success stories in diminishing interstate conflict, while South Africa is a developing country that was recovering from an intrastate conflict. Pursuing these models has had benefits for South Africa, but not in many of the ways it needed in order to effectively prevent a surge in criminal violence in the wake of Apartheid. (shrink)

Gender-based forms of administrative violence, such as reproductive violence, are the result of systems designed to enact population-level harms through the production and forcible imposition of colonial systems of gender. Settler statecraft has long relied on the strategic promotion of sexual and reproductive violence. Patterns of reproductive violence adapt and change to align with the enduring goals and evolving needs of settler colonial occupation, dispossession, and containment. The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision to end the constitutional right to (...) abortion in Dobbs v Jackson is but one instance of this larger pattern. We analyze reproductive and obstetric violence and the structural trauma they produce through the lenses of i) historical continuity and ii) the global architectures of neoliberal settler capitalism in order to connect reproductive rights rollbacks in the U.S. with the expansion of reproductive violence across a world connected by colonial globalization. (shrink)

The hypothesis that father absence during childhood, as well as other forms of childhood psychosocial stress, might influence the timing of sexual maturity and adult reproductive behaviors has been the focus of considerable research. However, the majority of studies that have examined this prediction have used samples of women of European descent living in industrialized, low-fertility nations. This paper tests the father-absence hypothesis using the Cape Area Panel Study (CAPS), which samples young adults in Cape Town, South Africa. The (...) sample contains multiple racial groups (blacks, coloureds [mixed race], and whites) and includes both males and females. Dependent variables include age at menarche, age at first sexual intercourse, and age at first pregnancy. Childhood stress is measured by father absence by age six (either never lived with father or lived with father some but not all years) and an index of childhood exposure to violence (measuring threatened or actual verbal or physical abuse). The hypothesis received no support for effect on age at menarche but was supported for age at first sex and first pregnancy. The model showed stronger support for coloureds and whites than blacks and had no predictive power at all for black males. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface This special issue provokes a conversation between decolonial and postcolonial feminisms by asking what they are, how they speak about each other, and how they can speak to each other. Read together, the articles engage and sometimes trouble the temporal and spatial distinctions drawn between decolonial and postcolonial approaches. Kiran Asher explores overlaps between decolonial and postcolonial thought by comparing the ideas of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Silvia (...) Rivera Cusicanqui on representation. Aimee Carrillo Rowe also stages a dialogue between these approaches when interrogating her family ’s Chican@ settler history. Tiara R. Na’puti and Judy Rohrer offer an account of how recent scholarship from Hawai‘i and Guåhan (Guam) has elaborated Indigenous epistemologies in settler contexts. Two articles excavate colonialism’s relationship to science: Jennifer Hamilton, Banu Subramaniam, and Angela Willey explore how two instances of population genetic research illustrate the racialized knowledge systems that undergirded colonialism, while Sandra Harding points out how the colonization of Latin America contributed to the edifice of Western science. In a related vein, Breny Mendoza centers the material role of Abya Yala (the preferred term for Latin America) in not just Spanish colonialism but British colonial expansionism and eventually the eclipsing of China. Patricia A. Schechter reflects on her trajectory as a scholar and teacher of US women’s history and the insights she has gained through 504Preface engaging decolonial scholarship. Amy Piedalue and Susmita Rishi argue for a more expansive understanding of postcolonial feminism’s reach as they review recently published titles in the field. Although Anna Tsing and Paulla Ebron’s review of feminist scholarship about the Anthropocene does not directly mention postcolonial or decolonial approaches, it nonetheless engages relevant scholarship on the environmental impact of settler modernization and capitalism. An art essay by Hyunji Kwon introduces the largely unrecognized paintings of former comfort woman Duk-kyung Kang (1929–1997) and focuses on the potential of Kang’s work to challenge Japanese colonial hierarchies. Our featured poets in this issue are Emily Zhang, Megan Kaminski, and Raina J. León. Both postcolonial and decolonial scholars have been committed to critiquing the material and epistemic legacies of colonialism. The distinctions that are frequently drawn between the two approaches, however, have been a source of disquiet to the editors of Feminist Studies, and they prompted our journal’s call for papers in 2016. A common temporal marking that concerned us was the eclipsing of postcolonialism, which was increasingly becoming viewed as passé, and a setting up of decolonial feminism as always already better in time. Decolonial approaches sometimes depicted postcolonial feminism as being only about the past, despite postcolonial feminism’s stated commitment to studying the continuing impact of colonial processes and its complex use of the prefix “post.” Our concern was, as well, with misrepresentations of postcolonial feminist priorities. The depiction of postcolonial feminism as deconstructive, abstract, elite theory confined to the ambit of modern colonial knowledge systems overlooked the important quandaries that postcolonial feminism raised about how to represent marginalized people ethically and, indeed, how to understand the very desire to represent the marginalized—whether or not we claim belonging to them. Postcolonial feminists warned against an easy embrace of alterity, noting that the desire for positioning oneself outside colonialism could naively ignore the power of colonial discourses to frame colonialism’s Other. Another set of hopes for this special issue was to dwell on the spatial markings of decolonial and postcolonial feminisms: decolonial feminism is often associated with Indigenous scholars and those from the Americas, and postcolonial feminism with scholars from South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. These regional emphases, although not always as tidy as sometimes depicted, have produced distinct intellectual Preface 505 priorities. We must heed decolonial feminism’s insistence on engaging with the genocidal history of settler colonialism, the current manifestations of the violent dispossession of land, and its constitution of gendered racial capitalism the world over. (FeministStudies will soon publish a special issue on Indigenous Feminisms). Yet, if postcolonial feminism is circumscribed geographically to only South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, we risk ignoring its powerful transcontinental mapping of imperial gender formations and its scrupulous attention to the ethics of representing... (shrink)

South Africa is a country that is still in the transitioning process of providing an equal, equitable and just society for its previously disadvantaged people. The country faces several socio-economic developmental challenges, ranging from inadequate housing, high crime rates, violence against women and children, ineffectual health facilities, a slowing economy and high youth unemployment, which invariably affect the business community. If South Africa is to achieve sustainable economic transformation, the business community along with other stakeholders must participate in (...) ensuring social justice and socio-economic development for its previously disadvantaged people. This article contributed to the discourse on the assertion that social justice and socio-economic development are central for sustainable development in any society. The article called for the assistance and participation of other stakeholders, particularly the business community, to help build a just, healthy and robust environment, which translates into a strong community and portends a sustainable environment for businesses. Contribution: This article assessed the effectiveness of legislating social justice and corporate social responsibility. The article adopted the European Union’s Better Regulation evaluation methods to evaluate the effectiveness of the country’s social justice and corporate social responsibility legislation and the influence of the legislations on the socio-economic developmental challenges affecting the country. (shrink)

As European colonies in Asia and Africa became independent nations, as the United States engaged in war in Southeast Asia and in covert operations in South America, anthropologists questioned their interactions with their subjects and worried about the political consequences of government-supported research. By 1970, some spoke of anthropology as “the child of Western imperialism” and as “scientific colonialism.” Ironically, as the link between anthropology and colonialism became more widely accepted within the discipline, serious interest in examining the history (...) of anthropology in colonial contexts diminished. This volume is an effort to initiate a critical historical consideration of the varying “colonial situations” in which (and out of which) ethnographic knowledge essential to anthropology has been produced. The essays comment on ethnographic work from the middle of the nineteenth century to nearly the end of the twentieth, in regions from Oceania through southeast Asia, the Andaman Islands, and southern Africa to North and South America. The “colonial situations” also cover a broad range, from first contact through the establishment of colonial power, from District Officer administrations through white settler regimes, from internal colonialism to international mandates, from early “pacification” to wars of colonial liberation, from the expropriation of land to the defense of ecology. The motivations and responses of the anthropologists discussed are equally varied: the romantic resistance of Maclay and the complicity of Kubary in early colonialism; Malinowski’s salesmanship of academic anthropology; Speck’s advocacy of Indian land rights; Schneider’s grappling with the ambiguities of rapport; and Turner’s facilitation of Kaiapo cinematic activism. “Provides fresh insights for those who care about the history of science in general and that of anthropology in particular, and a valuable reference for professionals and graduate students.”—Choice “Among the most distinguished publications in anthropology, as well as in the history of social sciences.”—George Marcus, Anthropologica. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 47, no. 2. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 419 Paul Amar Insurgent African Intimacies in Pandemic Times: Deimperial Queer Logics of China’s New Global Family inWolf Warrior 2 This essay offers a new paradigm of “deimperial queer analysis” that reveals the tension between the People’s Republic of China’s extractive expansionism in Africa and its claim to solidarity with Africans against white supremacy and Northern imperialism. (...) China has been labeled an “anti-imperial empire” that forcefully challenges previous Euro-American imperial legacies—all while it verges on reenacting them.1 A critical way it resolves this geopolitical tension is through the articulation of a mission for global China, and since 2017, the heroic filmic fictional figure of the “Wolf Warrior” anchors such an approach. The Wolf Warrior is a gorgeous, muscled, Chinese male rogue soldier in exile who adventures through the archipelago of the PRC’s shipping, mining, and medical projects across the Global South to battle white mercenaries, corrupt Asian businessmen, and local pirates—all while saving Africa from a ravaging pandemic. Extending a hugely popular film series, the release in 2017 of the blockbuster Wolf Warrior 2 (abbreviated below as Wolf 2) unleashed a worldwide social media frenzy as well as a revolution in diplomatic tone and protocol for China. In these ways, Wolf Warrior 2 came to mark the debut of the global PRC as a hegemonic structure 1. David Armitage, “The Anti-Imperial Empire?” Times Literary Supplement, no. 6018, August 3, 2018, https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-anti-imperialempire -american. 420 Paul Amar of feeling with an attendant popular cultural logic, launching a cast of military characters, humanitarian imaginaries, and gendered rebranding initiatives. These fused into a global cultural megaproject with the PRC presenting itself as a leader in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic in the Global South—a time the PRC has officially branded as its “Rejuvenation Era” of “Stepping Out into the World.” This essay shows how exactly this Wolf Warrior imagination has legitimized a new global regime, but I also reveal how, paradoxically, the Wolf Warrior regime has offered a distinct, more subversive worlding project. I argue here that the utopia immanent in this project can be revealed by interpretively turning this Wolf universe inside out through a deimperial queer analysis that honors and combines a Third World feminist lens and the “Asia as Method” approach with Danmei/BL and Slash queer-feminist fanfiction hacks. Danmei is a Chinese (originally mainly Tawainese) fanfiction genre that subverts mainstream heteronormative narratives by erotically aestheticizing and renarrating male-male intimacies within mainstream plotlines from feminist perspectives. BL (short for “boylove ”) is a similar Japanese fanfiction genre, and Slash is the term used in English for the queer/feminist hacking and excavation of sublimated and particularly utopian gender and sexuality plots from within seemingly conventional heteronormative or patriarchal popular-cultural texts. The everted or inside-out epistemology given expression here uses a set of non-phallogocentric lenses and decolonial feminist decoding practices. At stake is the urgency of not repeating the epistemic violence of conventional “anti-imperial” arguments, which tend to be heteronormative, statist, macho, and monolithic. Instead, the form of critique elaborated here brings questions of gender, race, and sexuality to the fore through a three-part approach. First, I identify the homoerotic register of the techno-infrastructural elements in the film. I generate close readings that detail the visual and genre codes of battle scenes, thug subjects, and piracy plots that forge a homoerotic model of rogue or “wolf” governmentality and that act as a metaphor for China’s techno -infrastructural rule. Second, this essay explores the gendered hauntings of supremacist humanism. I deploy a decolonial feminist lens to map the configuration of African women, female doctors, Maoist women insurgents, and feminized “flowerboys” as a rebel protectorate overseen by China’s phallic prerogative that is itself haunted by the specters of Euro-American humanist betrayal and white supremacy. Third, Paul Amar 421 I trace queer kinship utopias. I demonstrate that Wolf Warrior 2 rejuvenates a non-Western, queer, globalist kinship structure that triangulates Asian, white, and Black through adoption dramas and bromance bonds. Through these intimacies, an... (shrink)

Neo-liberalism often reduces pluralism to a social fact based on the collapse of the big ideals that once claimed to stand in for the ideal of humanity. Tolerance of inevitable value diversity is all that can be offered by the rationalized modern western state. This understanding of pluralism is completely inadequate in the post colony. Ernst Cassirer offers a philosophical understanding of symbolic plurality that allows us to respect divergent symbolic forms, including myth and religion. This understanding of pluralism opens (...) the space for respect for the customary law and the great indigenous ideals such as uBuntu which has often been denigrated as mythical and thus outdated or, worse yet, not law at all. This denigration is inseparable from colonial violence, and demands a process of transculturation as integral to this struggle to transform the new South Africa into a society that lives up to the Constitution’s call for the respect of all of its citizens. This respect can only be done if there are serious economic reforms and a challenge to the hegemonic neo-liberal capitalism. (shrink)

The high rate of inequality in South Africa is rooted in colonial dispossession and racial exploitation, and still runs primarily along the racial divide. Policy initiatives taken to redress past economic injustices through the black economic empowerment (BEE) have failed to bring economic transformation. Using the twin lenses of epistemic violence and racial capitalism, this study analyses how entangled interests aimed to co-opt the ruling party elite by the apartheid-era business elite led to the BEE impasse. The pervasiveness (...) of cultural alienation in BEE failure suggests that a shift to restorative justice is necessary to break from the impasse. (shrink)

The act of remaking one's history into a heritage, a conscientiously crafted narrative placed over the past, is a thriving industry in almost every postcolonial culture. This is surprising, given the tainted role of heritage in so much of colonialism's history. Yet the postcolonial state, like its European predecessor of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, deploys heritage institutions and instruments, museums, courts of law, and universities to empower itself with unity, longevity, exaltation of value, origin, and destiny. Bringing the eye (...) of a philosopher, the pen of an essayist, and the experience of a public intellectual to the study of heritage, Daniel Herwitz reveals the febrile pitch at which heritage is staked. In this absorbing book, he travels to South Africa and unpacks its controversial and robust confrontations with the colonial and apartheid past. He visits India and reads in its modern art the gesture of a newly minted heritage idealizing the precolonial world as the source of Indian modernity. He traverses the United States and finds in its heritage of incessant invention, small town exceptionalism, and settler destiny a key to contemporary American media-driven politics. Showing how destabilizing, ambivalent, and potentially dangerous heritage is as a producer of contemporary social, aesthetic, and political realities, Herwitz captures its perfect embodiment of the struggle to seize culture and society at moments of profound social change. (shrink)

This article employs a critical Black Atlantic frame to re-examine, re-evaluate and reinterpret the historical memory of the Black Peril in South Africa. It exposes the Black Peril as a wide-ranging racist discourse that demonised Black men as potential rapists of white women. This racist narrative was vehemently expressed in early twentieth-century South Africa. A key finding of this work is that the Black Peril was a highly successful racist campaign because it not only led to the (...) criminalisation of interracial sex between Black men and white women but was also used to justify racist laws that had far-reaching effects on social relations in the broader society – eventually yielding a white supremacist state (apartheid) – which proceeded to use the Black Peril discourse to mobilise an aggressive racialisation process for both whites and Blacks. (shrink)

Since the end of apartheid and the advent of democratic elections, South Africa has made great strides, but we still continue, at times, to be unable to practise sawubona. On one level, this is not surprising given our history of separateness. The article asks whether fresh expressions of church, such as the community supper at St Peters in Mowbray, Cape Town, indeed create a space for genuinely ‘seeing’ each other and practicing being human together. The article also explores some (...) of the problems inherent in ethnographic work amongst the poor and the vulnerable by asking whether some types of ethnographic work actually practice a form of epistemic violence and muses upon the idea of the postcolonial gaze and ‘othering’ in ethnography in contexts of poverty in the global South. Can ethnography, in some cases, be a form of academic pornography? (shrink)

During this period, when disciples were growing in number, a grievance arose on the part of those who spoke Greek, against those who spoke the language of the Jews; they complained that their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution. When Americans think of ethnic conflict, conflict between blacks and whites comes to mind most immediately. Yet ethnic conflict is pervasive around the world. Azerbijanis and Turks in the Soviet Union; Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland; Arabs and Jews (...) in the Middle East; Maoris and English settlers in New Zealand; Muslims and Hindus in India and Pakistan; French and English speakers in Quebec; Africans, Afrikaaners, and mixed-race people in South Africa, in addition to the tribal warfare among the Africans themselves: these are just a few of the more obvious conflicts currently in the news. We observe an even more dizzying array of ethnic conflicts if we look back just a few years. Japanese and Koreans; Mongols and Chinese; Serbs and Croats; Christians and Buddhists in Viet Nam: these ancient antagonisms are not immediately in the news, but they could erupt at any time. And the history of the early Christian Church recounted in the Acts of the Apostles reminds us that suspicion among ethnic groups is not a modern phenomenon; rather, it is ancient. The present paper seeks to address the problem of ethnic conflict in modern western democracies. How can our tools and traditions of participatory governments, relatively free markets, and the common law contribute to some resolution of the ancient problems that we find within our midst? In particular, I want to focus here on the question of ethnic integration. (shrink)

During this period, when disciples were growing in number, a grievance arose on the part of those who spoke Greek, against those who spoke the language of the Jews; they complained that their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution. When Americans think of ethnic conflict, conflict between blacks and whites comes to mind most immediately. Yet ethnic conflict is pervasive around the world. Azerbijanis and Turks in the Soviet Union; Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland; Arabs and Jews (...) in the Middle East; Maoris and English settlers in New Zealand; Muslims and Hindus in India and Pakistan; French and English speakers in Quebec; Africans, Afrikaaners, and mixed-race people in South Africa, in addition to the tribal warfare among the Africans themselves: these are just a few of the more obvious conflicts currently in the news. We observe an even more dizzying array of ethnic conflicts if we look back just a few years. Japanese and Koreans; Mongols and Chinese; Serbs and Croats; Christians and Buddhists in Viet Nam: these ancient antagonisms are not immediately in the news, but they could erupt at any time. And the history of the early Christian Church recounted in the Acts of the Apostles reminds us that suspicion among ethnic groups is not a modern phenomenon; rather, it is ancient. The present paper seeks to address the problem of ethnic conflict in modern western democracies. How can our tools and traditions of participatory governments, relatively free markets, and the common law contribute to some resolution of the ancient problems that we find within our midst? In particular, I want to focus here on the question of ethnic integration. (shrink)

This article utilizes the lens of disposability to explore recent conditions of low-wage temporary migrant labour, whose numbers and economic sectors have expanded in the 21stcentury. A central argument is that disposability is a discursive and material relation of power that creates and reproduces invidious distinctions between the value of “legitimate” Canadian settler-citizens and the lack of worth of undesirable migrant populations working in Canada, often for protracted periods of time. The analytical lens of migrant disposability draws upon theorizing (...) within Marxian, critical modernity studies, and decolonizing settler colonial frameworks. This article explores the technologies of disposability that lay waste to low wage workers in sites such as immigration law and provincial/territorial employment legislation, the workplace, transport, living conditions, access to health care and the practice of medical repatriation of injured and ill migrant workers. The mounting evidence that disposability is immanent within low-wage migrant labour schemes in Canada has implications for migrant social justice. The failure to protect migrant workers from a vast array of harms reflects the historical foundations of Canada’s contemporary migrant worker schemes in an “inherited background field [of settler colonialism] within which market, racist, patriarchal and state relations converge”. Incremental liberal reform has made little headway insofar as the administration and in some cases reversal of more progressive reforms such as guaranteed pathways to citizenship prioritize employers’ labour interests and the lives and health of primarily white, middle class Canadian citizens at the expense of a shunned and racialized but growing population of migrants from the global South. Transformational change and social justice for migrant workers can only occur by reversing the disposability and hyper-commodification intrinsic to low-wage migrant programs and granting full permanent legal status to migrant workers. (shrink)

The last two presidents of the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republic and the Republic of the Orange Free State, S.J.P. Kruger and M.T. Steyn, both stood in the tradition of the Christian Afrikaner. Kruger as the symbol of Afrikaner republicanism in the 19th century and Steyn as a younger and more modern Afrikaner, tried to base their policies openly and clearly on Biblical and Christian principles. Kruger as a member and recognised minister of the Reformed Churches in South Africa formulated his views (...) in a typical Dutch neo-Calvinistic way, while Steyn used Reformed concepts combined with his academic background in jurisprudence and the law of nations to foster the same ideas. Kruger and Steyn trusted one another, agreed on core issues and worked together rather well. Each strived to maintain the independence of his republic. (shrink)

This article is motivated by a concern about the increasing embrace of apolitical and ahistorical notions of racial “mixedness” and “impurity.” It draws on recent examples from the United States and South Africa in order to direct attention to the difficulties of identifying logics that, on the face of it, seem to evade conventional claims of racism, but nevertheless, as it will argue, rely on racist notions that must be challenged. These include examples in the United States and (...) class='Hi'>South Africa of individuals self-identifying as a stand-alone mixed race category as well as white Afrikaners in South Africa uncritically appropriating claims to mixed heritage. This article is critical of these phenomena because of what it finds to be a lack of politically and historically situated understandings of the notions of purity and impurity and their relation to racism. (shrink)

Structures of oppression and administrative systems in white supremacist settler colonial societies rely on epistemological foundations to orient them toward their goals of containment and land dispossession. Structural gaslighting refers to the justifying stories and mythologies produced in these societies to normalize, obscure, and uphold structures of oppression. Such epistemic legwork often works by naturalizing socially produced inequalities through positing biological or cultural deficiencies in the target populations. This paper develops the concept of structural gaslighting introduced in (...) Berenstain (2020) as “any conceptual work that functions to obscure the non-accidental connections between structures of oppression and the patterns of harm that they produce and license” and explores its relationship to scientific and philosophical knowledge production. Case studies including historical and contemporary forms of scientific racism, philosophical justifications for ableist violence, and the link between disableization and dispossession for the purpose of settler colonial land theft are considered. (shrink)

A credible fear test is an in-depth interview process given to undocumented people of any age arriving at a U.S. port of entry to determine qualification for asylum-seeking. Credible fear tests as a typical immigration procedure demonstrate not only what structural epistemic violence looks like but also how this violence lives in and through the design of asylum policy. Key terms of credible fear tests such as “significant possibility,” “evidence,” “consistency,” and “credibility” can never be neutral in the context (...) of colonial administrative violence. We argue that these terms function as mechanisms of exclusion and demonstrate that the capacity to be violent (i.e. to be an instrument of violence) is built into these tests, ready to be deployed when an administration wants to stop certain people from certain places from entering without regard to their own ongoing occupation of Indigenous lands. Not only are such practices instruments of violence, but the concept of ‘violence’ continues to be organized, defined, and conceived within settler colonial epistemologies so as to exclude these administrative forms of violence deployed against Indigenous peoples and people of color from recognition and nameability. We argue that this is an intentional strategy of colonial power preservation that is functionalized through social processes that remain structurally stable and self-regenerating across historical and political changes. (shrink)

The hermeneutic resources necessary for understanding Indigenous women’s lives in Latin America have been obscured by the tools of Western feminist philosophical practices and their travel in North-South contexts. Not only have ongoing practices of European colonization disrupted pre-colonial ways of knowing, but colonial lineages create contemporary public policies, institutions, and political structures that reify and solidify colonial epistemologies as the only legitimate forms of knowledge. I argue that understanding this foreclosure of Amerindian linguistic communities’ ability to collectively engage (...) in interpretive processes of culture and be heard and understood as coherent is an essential background condition to conceiving and theorizing the multiplicity of social oppressions and their intersections in contemporary Latin American contexts. Further, the work of disrupting and disobeying colonial interpretive frameworks has long been practiced by Indigenous women in Latin America, whose testimonies and expressions have been made sub-audible by design in colonial systems of meaning-making. This is part of the extensive legacy of the long quillwork of communal alphabets of survival. (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)

During the 1980's and the early 1990's South Africa experienced disturbing political violence of an unprecedented scope, intensity and nature. It was disturbing because it entailed acts of horrifying brutality, notably the ‘necklace' and the massacre, all of this against the background of ‘civilized' and measured com promise and negotiation. It stubbornly continued despite the unbanning of the liberation political organisations, and the holding of ‘free and fair' elections in April 1994. And it was unprecedented in a whole range (...) of ways, but mainly because of the fact that it was intracommunal, or black- on- black, violence. It was the first time that Black political organisations had turned on each other rather than their white oppressors. For our purposes, what is interesting is the range of responses emanating from South African social scientists in explaining this new phenomenon. Historically, explaining Black political violence in South Africa has had a difficult time of it. Starting with Pierre van den Berghe in 1962, predictions of imminent revolution against the apartheid regime have been so regularly and frequently proved wrong, that a whole industry has arisen in explaining quiescence rather than violence. The first cluster of theories spawned by the 1976 schools uprising, as Frank Molteno noted in his 1979 review, were analytically disappointing, if not crudely racist. Subsequent overviews by Manganyi & du Toit in 1990, and Beinart in 1992 have born evidence of considerably greater sophistication.; Manganyi, N & A du Toit, ; Beinart, W ). Nevertheless, as I shall show, most have remained within quite conventional theoretical and structuralist parameters. Many have their roots in the earlier dominant Marxism of the 1970's. In this sense they tend towards structural and class determinism, towards absolutist notions of power, and absolutist moral judgement of both apartheid and the individuals associated, however indirectly, with it. In consequence, Black incumbents of apartheid structures were inevitably depicted as willess and powerless puppets dancing to the tune of omnipotent White masters. In this context, it was wrong to talk of black- on- black violence, since one side of this equation, in reality, represented white interests. Much of this analysis also started from quite easy notions of the origins of violence. In this view it was sufficient to show conflicts of interest, or contra diction, in order to conclude that violence had been adequately explained. Against this background the more hermeneutic contribution by André du Toit to the debate stands out as theoretically innovative, nuanced and bold. This is not to say that it is with out problems. But I do wish to present a picture of a social theorist of considerable imagination and subtletly. Looking back over these theories, it would be tempting to say that the first category of structuralist accounts, should be supplemented with the second category of hermeneutic, accounts. But simply adding theoretically discrepant accounts together is too easy. It is only when the whole notion of structure, employed in the first category, is rethought in post-structuralist form, that an integration of the two elements becomes feasible. This paper follows a Giddensian line in pursuing this reconceptualization. (shrink)

During the 1980's and the early 1990's South Africa experienced disturbing political violence of an unprecedented scope, intensity and nature. It was disturbing because it entailed acts of horrifying brutality, notably the ‘necklace' and the massacre, all of this against the background of ‘civilized' and measured com promise and negotiation. It stubbornly continued despite the unbanning of the liberation political organisations, and the holding of ‘free and fair' elections in April 1994. And it was unprecedented in a whole range (...) of ways, but mainly because of the fact that it was intracommunal, or black- on- black, violence. It was the first time that Black political organisations had turned on each other rather than their white oppressors. For our purposes, what is interesting is the range of responses emanating from South African social scientists in explaining this new phenomenon. Historically, explaining Black political violence in South Africa has had a difficult time of it. Starting with Pierre van den Berghe in 1962, predictions of imminent revolution against the apartheid regime have been so regularly and frequently proved wrong, that a whole industry has arisen in explaining quiescence rather than violence (P. van den Berghe, 1965). The first cluster of theories spawned by the 1976 schools uprising, as Frank Molteno noted in his 1979 review, were analytically disappointing, if not crudely racist. Subsequent overviews by Manganyi & du Toit in 1990, and Beinart in 1992 have born evidence of considerably greater sophistication (Molteno, F (1979).; Manganyi, N & A du Toit, (1990); Beinart, W (1992)). Nevertheless, as I shall show, most have remained within quite conventional theoretical and structuralist parameters. Many have their roots in the earlier dominant Marxism of the 1970's. In this sense they tend towards structural and class determinism, towards absolutist notions of power, and absolutist moral judgement of both apartheid and the individuals associated, however indirectly, with it. In consequence, Black incumbents of apartheid structures were inevitably depicted as willess and powerless puppets dancing to the tune of omnipotent White masters. In this context, it was wrong to talk of black- on- black violence, since one side of this equation, in reality, represented white interests. Much of this analysis also started from quite easy notions of the origins of violence. In this view it was sufficient to show (objective) conflicts of interest, or contra diction, in order to conclude that violence had been adequately explained. Against this background the more hermeneutic contribution by André du Toit to the debate stands out as theoretically innovative, nuanced and bold. This is not to say that it is with out problems. But I do wish to present a picture of a social theorist of considerable imagination and subtletly. Looking back over these theories, it would be tempting to say that the first category of structuralist accounts, should be supplemented with the second category of hermeneutic, accounts. But simply adding theoretically discrepant accounts together is too easy. It is only when the whole notion of structure, employed in the first category, is rethought in post-structuralist form, that an integration of the two elements becomes feasible. This paper follows a Giddensian line in pursuing this reconceptualization. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.20(1) 2001: 102-123. (shrink)