Kersplebedeb, October 28, 2000 EC: Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat is a book which had a major impact on many North American anti-imperialists. How did this book come about, and what was so new about its way of looking at things? JS: Settlers completely came about by accident, not design. And what was so…
Category: Decolonization
Interrogating Systemic Racism and the White Academic Field
Nelson Maldonado-Torres “As a university and as an academic institution, you can say we are against systemic racism. But you as an academic institution are systemic racism.” Kalin Pont-Tate, co-chair of the Black Student Union at the University of California, Riverside.[1] Institutions of higher learning are following the trend in the media, public institutions,…
Notes on the Coloniality of Peace
Nelson Maldonado-Torres The allusion to peace, to peace as a state of harmony within an established order, has long been an indispensable tool in the arsenal of colonialism and racism. First comes the brutal war: people killed, bodies in pieces, raped, and mutilated, subjects subdued, ancestors disrespected, lands taken, rivers with water turning viscous and…
Franz Fanon: The Psychopathology of Colonization
Frantz Fanon’s relatively short life yielded two potent and influential statements of anti-colonial revolutionary thought, Black Skin White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), works which have made Fanon a prominent contributor to postcolonial studies. Fanon was born in 1925, to a middle-class family in the French colony of Martinique. He left…
Aime Cesaire: Discourse on Colonialism
Discourse on Colonialism Discourse on Colonialism (French: Discours sur le colonialisme) is an essay by Aimé Césaire, a poet and politician from Martinique who helped found the négritude movement in Francophone literature. Césaire first published the essay in 1950 in Paris with Éditions Réclame, a small publisher associated with the French Communist Party (PCF). Five…
Decolonization, Decoloniality, and the Future of African Studies: A Conversation with Dr. Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni
Duncan Omanga At the sidelines of the recently concluded African Studies Association (ASA) annual meeting held in Boston (November 21–23, 2019), Prof. Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, a prominent voice on the debate on decolonization, had a conversation with Duncan Omanga, program officer for the African Peacebuilding Network and the Next Generation Social Sciences program, on the…
Fundamental Black and Native Opposition to White Settler State
Blacks and Native Americans continue to pose a threat to the “conquistador white settler nation,” agues Tiffany King, author of “The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies.” King is a professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Georgia. “There are impulses within both Black abolition and Native decolonization…
Fanon and (Digital) Self-Determination
Lizzie O’Shea Fanon was committed to the idea of self-determination. How can his thinking influence our fight for digital self-determination? An excerpt from Future Histories by Lizzie O’Shea. Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Can Teach Us about Digital Technology Fanon wrote about seeing himself, a black man, in a world…
“Who’s Land?” The Trials and Tribulations of Territorial Acknowledgement
Rowland “Ena͞emaehkiw” Keshena Robinson During the autumn of 2016, in October, my sister and I, both of us Indigenous Ph.D. students in philosophy and sociology respectively, attended a conference held at St. Paul’s University College, an affiliate of the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, entitled Decolonizing Education/Integrating Knowledges. The summit was part of a broader…
Coalition & Dependency: On the Devaluation of the Capacity to Act
Time and again we hear this as a truism, so supposedly obvious that it needs no explanation. When we examine it, however, it blows away into dust. – E. Tani & Kae Sera (1985, 202) Ena͞emaehkiw Kesīqnaeh The truism that is being discussed in this opening epigraph by E. Tani and Kae Sera, authors of the…
Anti-Eurocentrism & the Critique of Settler Colonialism
Ena͞emaehkiw Kesīqnaeh Earlier this year there was a small-scale three-way split within the U.S.-based Marxist-Leninist/communist organization known as the Workers World Party (WWP). This split, which occurred in stages, was the result of apparent conflict between what at first seemed to be the core organizational leadership of the WWP and the membership of the Huntington,…
Settler Fragility: Why Settler Privilege is So Hard to Talk About
Dina Gilio-Whitaker Robin DiAngelo’s brilliant 2018 manifesto on white fragility was a much-needed truth bomb at a time when it’s more clear than ever that we are light years away from the “post-racial state.” Perhaps most important about the book was its clarity that racism is systemic and structural, that no white people are immune…
