Colonialism (Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2nd ed.)

Studies in Social and Political Thought, 2011

This class is an advanced introduction to the broad topic of coloniality and decoloniality. It is an interdisciplinary class in nature, with a heavy focus on historical, theoretical, sociological and anthropological readings. The class starts with an introduction of some key concepts on coloniality and decoloniality, such as the colonial and the post-colonial and the de-colonial, as well as the meaning and the nature of the colonial structure and the centrality of race in the colonial project. The class is divided into four parts. The first part is examining some examples from different historical waves of colonialisms such as the colonialism of the "new" world, and the scramble for Africa, with a brief examination of some selected cases. The second part is the study of some of the key approaches to study colonialism and imperialism, such as the Marxist approaches, post-colonial theory, indigenous perspectives, the black radical tradition and sociological approaches. The third part is an examination of the key types of colonialisms such as settler-colonialism, and imperialisms/new imperialism, as well as some of the key problematics in the field as the relationship between the state and the colonial project and the gendered nature of colonialism and imperialism. The class concludes with the study of decoloniality as a theoretical approach and as a praxis.

Kronos, 2021

Decoloniality emerged in the last two decades as a new mode of critique against colonialism and coloniality. While its insights are inspired by dependency and postcolonial theories, decoloniality challenges them both, particularly their inability to depart with modern Western epistemology. Written in response to Arjun Appadurai's recent critique of On Decoloniality by Catherine E. Walsh and Walter D. Mignolo, this article attempts to articulate decoloniality's approach to epistemology and discourse analysis. Whereas Appadurai describes Walsh and Mignolo's position as an anachronistic attempt to "return to the precolonial past," this article underlines his inability to transcend the modern linear order of time.

Journal of Commonwealth & Postcolonial Studies, 2018

During the 1990s, various disciplinary debates took place within Latin Americanist circles regarding whether Latin America indeed falls under the category of the postcolonial. Many argue that Latin America, being a former Spanish colony, has, ultimately, very little in common with the conditions and legacies of colonization as elaborated by British and French postcolonial critics and theorists. These discussions went on for years, and in many ways have never ceased. As a result of these rather unresolved debates Latin America never fully obtained critically as a site of postcolonial inquiry. Instead, the field came to see what is now known as decolonial theory, and not postcolonial thought, emerge over the past twenty years as an increasingly prominent analytic approach for the study of Latin America's colonial legacies. Defined in opposition to postcolonialism, which many Latin Americanist critics found to be still too imbedded within the Western critical tradition, "Decoloniality" or the "decolonial option" came to serve as the name for a theoretico-political paradigm promoting indigenous, aboriginal, or other previously colonized and relegated modes of knowledge as a means to challenge Western Reason's claim to universality. Walter Mignolo differentiates between the two in the following way, "decolonial thinking is differentiated from postcolonial theory or postcolonial studies in that the genealogy of these are located in French post-structuralism more than in the dense history of planetary decolonial thinking ("Epistemic Disobedience" 46). While this distinction is carried out somewhat tautologically, the point made is that while postcolonial theory continues to rely heavily on certain strands of post-structural thought, decoloniality claims not to. Through concepts such as border thinking, delinking (Walter Mignolo), transm odernity (Enrique Dussel), and the coloniality of pow er (Anibal Quijano) decoloniality positions itself as a uniquely non-eurocentric critical tradition that diverges from and aims to surpass other prominent theoretical models such as Marxism, deconstruction, as well as postcolonial theory itself. Within various fields and disciplines, ranging from literary and cultural studies to history and anthropology, the decolonial option has become established as a methodological platform and has been heralded by some as a revolutionary paradigm for the cultural and political emancipation of formerly colonized cultures from western modes of knowledge and power.

Emerging from sociological and philosophical inquiry into the history of the colonial encounter in Latin America, the notion of coloniality (and the larger field of decolonial theory with which it is now associated) has become a crucial theoretical resource for scholars across a range of disciplines. Investigations of the structure and processes of coloniality challenge received ideas about power, knowledge, and identity in modernity, and these investigations have significant implications for educational philosophy. Nevertheless, decolonial scholarship remains less known among educational theorists than postcolonial theory, with which it shares many concerns but from which it also sharply differs in crucial respects. In our presentation of the notion of coloniality, we first describe the history and key dimensions of this idea. The second part of the article develops several of the most crucial implications of the notion of coloniality for scholars and educators, with particular attention to how this tradition offers a rethinking of familiar categories in critical theory and pedagogy.

Public Culture, 2002

Imperialism and colonialism insistently intrude upon political and cultural discussion despite the disappearance of imperialism from political language except as a term of critical approbation, and formal repudiation of colonialism as a legitimate or acceptable practice in world politics. Within the context of an international order based upon globally recognized norms of national sovereignty, the relationships these terms refer to seem much more problematic than they were in the heyday of a Euromodern order in the early twentieth century, when "empire" was born as a badge of honor, and colonial possessions were proudly displayed in world's fairs as signs of civilizational ascendancy. 1 As imperialism and colonialism were disavowed after 1945, the persistence of the inequalities they had shaped and the struggles of postcolonial states for development rendered them much more complicated as concepts than simple descriptions of domination and submission, Scholarship on imperialism and colonialism, especially the latter, has proliferated since the early 1950s, albeit with fluctuations in interest, as well as shifting pardigms. 2 The relationships suggested by those terms, and how we understand them, have been blurred further by economic and cultural globalization, which may account for the extensive interest in the subject the last two decades.

Political Geography, 2022

2002

2019

The current paper is an attempt to review and present few main undercurrents and arguments of ‘colonialism’ and ‘postcolonialism,’ and try to articulate how these concepts help us to understand wider aspects of both these movements, and the resultant influence on colonizer and colonized peoples, cultures as well as literatures. The paper, however, will mainly rely on understanding the basic concepts of both these movements and locate them in historical perspectives to situate the emergence as well as decadence of colonialism and the gradual growth of postcolonial culture and literature across the countries that were once part of the vicious colonization project of the Europe.