Journal articles on the topic 'Anticolonial practices'

Since the early twentieth century, various strands of “anticolonial” scholarship have been and are concerned with how colonial encounters and practices constitute differences. In recent years, this scholarship maps the uneven implications of “coloniality” for subjects and bodies marked as different, for example, “feminine,” “raced,” “queer,” or trans. Along with feminism, anticolonial scholarship's analytical goals—to link the body with body politics—are closely tied to its political ones: to correct the wrongs of colonial encounters and practices. The current avatars of anticolonial scholarship include postcolonial, decolonial, and settler-colonial variants.

This article explores anticolonial memory and anticolonial archiving as entry points into broader questions of time, temporality, and the politics of the present. Thinking with Egypt's project of decolonization in the mid-twentieth century, it demonstrates the varying ways in which anticolonial pasts express themselves in the present, and what this might suggest about the future. It thinks through two forms of anticolonial memory: one fleeting and fragmented, the other institutionalized and material, and asks how these different forms of memory constitute different types of anticolonial archives. Both forms of memory and practices of archiving appear in the present, albeit in vastly differing ways. The first form is a series of vignettes around Gamal Abdel Nasser and Patrice Lumumba, and the connections between them, their families, and anticolonial Egypt and anticolonial Congo during the 1950s and 1960s. The second form is the practice of economic nationalization that was a central pillar of Nasser's project in Egypt throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Through these two forms, the article demonstrates both the urgency of the past and the present in Egypt, as well as the ways in which the crisis of the anticolonial past has structured the crisis of the postcolonial present.

The Ghadar Party introduced a radical anticolonial praxis to Punjab, British India, in the early 1910s. Much of the literature on the Ghadar Party situates the birth of the movement among Punjabi peasants along the Pacific coast of North America who returned to their homeland intent on waging an anticolonial mutiny. One strand of argumentation locates the failure of the Ghadar Party in a problem of incompatibility between their migrant political consciousness and the conditions and experiences of their co-patriots in Punjab. I use Antonio Gramsci's concept of “translation,” a semi-metaphorical means to describe political practices that transform existing political struggles, to demonstrate how the Ghadar Party's work of political education was not unidirectional, but rather consisted of learning from peasant experiences and histories of struggle, as well as transforming extant forms of peasant resistance – such as, banditry – for building a radical anticolonial movement. Translation is an anticolonial practice that works on subaltern experiences and struggles. The Ghadar Party's praxis of translating subaltern struggles into anticolonialism is demonstrative of how movements learn from and transform existing movements.

Abstract This article examines the strategies, structures, and practices that allowed for the emergence of communities without police institutions during two Palestinian uprisings, the 1936–39 revolt and the 1987–91 intifada. For each period, the article identifies efforts to disengage from and disempower the state police, to establish alternative systems of anticolonial justice, and to employ disciplinary violence to serve the imperatives and enforce the decisions of Palestinian nationalist bodies. In particular, Palestinian systems of anticolonial justice drew on communal reconciliation (sulh) and other preexisting local iterations of communal justice. These local forms relied on discourses of egalitarianism and consensus, which produced stability in periods of upheaval but also obscured the inequalities they reproduced. Ultimately, the anticolonial structures that Palestinians established proved unable to withstand intense internal and external pressure, and some elements of the coercive forces that served them were absorbed into state police institutions.

This article aims to further the concept of dialogue beyond language exchange that includes a strategic element in anticolonialism. It examines the concept of dialogue found in the thought of two of modern-day Latin America’s most influential thinkers: Paulo Freire and Pope Francis. It argues that in different manners, both authors’ concept of dialogue can be considered anticolonial. The article compares and contrasts Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed with Francis’ recent encyclical Fratelli Tutti. Both texts culminate in a deep and detailed analysis of dialogue. Bringing these two important thinkers into conversation reveals central characteristics of dialogue from a colonized perspective and the importance that dialogue has in anticolonial discourses and practises. The article gives a detailed presentation of each author’s understanding of dialogue before highlighting common and complementary features. It then explores some resonances that Freire and Francis’ approach to dialogue has with anticolonial concerns. Dialogue as an anticolonial practise is for both Freire and Francis rooted in a philosophical and theological anthropology of what is means to be human and what de-humanizing practices look like. The article concludes by suggesting themes such as pluriversality, polycentrism, border-crossing, and critical thinking that are found in Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Fratelli Tutti mark these works as achievements in anti/decolonial thought.

O presente texto visa traçar um olhar panorâmico sobre práticas performativas disruptivas anti-imperialistas que compõem o que o autor chama de performance-arsenal. Nele são analisadas ações do Exército Zapatista da Libertação Nacional (EZLN, México) e suas consequência na luta contra o imperialismo canibal e predatório executado por megacorporações e legitimado pelos Estados nacionais. Palavras-chave: Artivismo. Performance. Anticolonial. Abstract This text aims to provide a panoramic view of disruptive anti-imperialist performative practices that make up what the author calls performance-arsenal. The text analyzes actions of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN, Mexico) and their consequences in the fight against cannibalistic and predatory imperialism carried out by megacorporations and legitimized by National States. Keywords: Artivism. Performance. Anticolonial.

Abstract This essay discusses how forms like political magazines, cultural journals, and party newspapers produced by twentieth-century anticolonial, left, and oppositional movements instituted practices of alternative pedagogy and political education across the Global South. These “revolutionary papers” served as a pedagogical infrastructure encompassing a critical curriculum drawn from ongoing movements, alternative histories, and regional literary production, to be used for collective practices of debate and inquiry. The essay introduces a series of digital teaching tools featured in the issue that study revolutionary periodicals such as the Cairo-based Afro-Asian literary magazine Lotus and underground pamphlets from the Mau Mau movement in Kenya. These teaching tools are accessible, interactive resources that provide archival, literary, and historical insights on movements and associated print cultures and are designed as pedagogical aids for the classroom and for political education in community settings. Along the way, the essay reflects on anticolonial periodicals as a resource for ongoing debates around decolonizing the university, and the possibilities presented by digital humanities approaches for the study of anticolonialism and Global South cultures.

This article attempts to rethink Indian anticolonial agitator Bhagat Singh within four alternative lineages, rooted in his often undiscussed love of early Hindi and American cinema. To date, Bhagat Singh has often been confined within the rubrics of a properly political form of revolution, whereby revolution is recognizable to the colonial state. To rethink revolution requires scholars to question the repetition of these colonial logics by moving away from the “recognizably political” to other forms of anti-authorial, anticolonial practices. This article focuses on Bhagat Singh’s viewing and response to the 1927 American iteration of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the 1927 Hindi film Wildcat of Bombay. The article considers the ways in which Bhagat Singh moved beyond “properly political” forms of agitation in favor of affective, aesthetic, and experiential models of movie-going in the early twentieth century. By doing so, it reorganizes the categories of “world literature” away from the nation-state in favor of worldwide circulation, distribution, and interpretation.

This article aims to articulate a political formation that I term Indigenous internationalist feminism, which centers a critique of US imperialism and is premised on three intellectual and political traditions: radical Indigenous internationalism, Black left feminism, and queer Indigenous feminism. Indigenous internationalist feminism provides a framework for transnational Indigenous practices that seek to build counterhegemonic power with other anticolonial, anti-imperial, and anti-capitalist liberation struggles, both within and outside of the United States. At the center of these practices is an ethics of expansive relationality between humans, and between humans and our other-than-human kin.

Abstract: This article argues that sustainable and robust Indigenous philosophies of land on Turtle Island predate colonial impact and are characterized by active regard for land as a relative, as a material or maternal provider, as a person, and as an origin of identity, ethics, and religion. These philosophies continue to inform political resistance to settler colonialism today of radical resurgence and decolonizing praxis. Conceptual and experiential linkages between Indigenous philosophies convey strong intercultural values characterized by dovetailing yet self-determined "systems of responsibilities," illuminating the ability of Indigenous nations to live prosperously alongside each other and unite against the common threat of colonialism. Understanding the independent legitimacy of Native worlds is an initial step to meaningful listening within intercultural philosophical contexts. For Western philosophical research, which often fails to center the significance of land as a philosophical concept , understanding the sophisticated nature of Indigenous philosophies of land is pivotal for disrupting practices that further erase Indigenous nations, peoples, thinkers, and worldviews and approaching the possibility of "meaningful solidarities" and camaraderie in decolonizing action and resistance.

Abstract: This article combines environmental humanities, legal studies, sound studies, and cultural studies to analyze how Wayuu poetry and film challenge conceptions of wind within the context of Colombia's energy transition. Based on an analysis of the poem " Tejiendo sueños " by Livio Suárez Urariyuu and the short film Somos hombres cascabel by Jorge Mario Suárez Iguarán, we discuss wind as a source of electric power in La Guajira. An aural perspective on Wayuu cultural products is adopted to trace links among sound, dreams, wind, and conceptions of cleanliness, renewability, and sustainability in contemporary climate-change discourse. Thinking with the poem and short film by Wayuu cultural producers, we interrogate wind energy's relationship to a neoextractivist logic; harnessed as part of Colombia's energy future, wind-based energy disrupts and pollutes La Guajira's soundscape and the Wayuu people's ability to dream. In so doing, wind turbines pose an existential threat and reinforce the relevance of the soundscape as the site of anticolonial struggles.

Abstract Seeing with Palestine was a constitutive possibility in the anticolonial way of seeing from the moment of the Nakba, meaning “catastrophe,” the destruction of Palestinian society in 1948. This article traces this way of seeing in the genealogy of visual culture that emerged in Britain in dialogue with Black British cultural studies and art practice, based on the practices of Stuart Hall, George Lamming, John Berger, and Jean Mohr. It then discusses Palestinian artist Randa Maddah, whose work Berger described as “landswept.” The conclusion speculates on how to “see in the dark” via the Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou Rahme.

oiron Pollution is Colonialism Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2021 ISBN: 978-1-4780-1413-3 (PB) $24.95. 214 pp. Amidst growing discussions about how to mitigate the current climate and pollution crisis, Max Liboiron presents a stunning critique of colonial practices in Western scientific research methodologies. Throughout the work Pollution is Colonialism, Max Liboiron, founder of the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR) Memorial University in Newfoundland, argues three interrelated ideas. First, settler science supports violent structures of colonialism through assuming access to Indigenous land without permission and perceiving the environment as a manageable waste sink. Scientific research, even if well-intentioned, can reproduce colonial structures by working to manage, not eliminate, industrial toxicants. Second, anticolonial science is possible through specific, contextual and place-based methods which attend to scientists' obligations to their relations. Anticolonial science is community-oriented and respects Indigenous traditions, claims to the land and the local right to refuse a scientific study; the local community should own the results of research. Third, 'methodologies - whether scientific, writerly, readerly or otherwise - are always already part of Land relations and thus are a key site in which to enact good relations (sometimes called ethics)' (pp 6-7). Liboiron's work challenges management-based practices towards the environment and pollution, the colonial assumption that researchers own research, and the settler practice of conducting research in places they never were never granted permission to enter. Liboiron's demonstration of anticolonial praxis begins in the acknowledgements. These acknowledge that the text was written on the ancestral homeland of the Beothuk, that the island of Newfoundland is the ancestral homeland of the Mi'kmaq and Beothuk, and recognise 'the Inuit of Nunatsiavut and NunatuKavut and the Innu of Nitassinan, and their ancestors, as the original people of Labrador' (p. vii). Liboiron then details personal guiding relations of family and genealogy, the ethic of gratitude and reciprocity enacted through footnotes, and those whose presence and advice made the book possible. The acknowledgements are a clear demonstration of the book's guiding ethic: knowledge is not a thing that is owned, but a relationship that is shared. What must be acknowledged is not only sources of funding and a researcher's support structure, but on whose Land the research was conducted. The first two chapters, 'Land, Nature, Resource, Property' and 'Scale, Harm, Violence, Land', generate a keyword vocabulary to describe colonial science's relationship to Indigenous Land. This review uses Liboiron's capitalisation to denote such

This article examines convergences and divergences between various expressions of communism, French republicanism, and pan-black solidarity in overseas France and among metropolitan communities of activists from the 1920s to the rise of the Popular Front against fascism in the mid-1930s. From the time of the first administrative reforms arising from France’s official anti-communist colonial policies in 1922, until the formation of the Popular Front in 1936, anticolonial activism and anti-revolutionary policy dialectically produced sites of judicialization, with agitators deliberately harnessing legal processes to contest the policies, practices and politics of imperial France, and French officials variously legislating against protest, including by extra-parliamentary decree. Experiments in anti-revolutionary legislation culminated in 1935, when the French Minister of the Interior collaborated with the Minister of the Colonies and governors of overseas territories to legislate against ‘acts of disorder or demonstrations against French sovereignty’ whether committed by French citizens, subjects, or protected persons, and regardless of their location. By the early to mid-1930s, legalists on the French left – whether Marxist or republican and in large part due to their involvement with anticolonial activist groups in overseas France – viewed extra-parliamentary legislation and judicial irregularity in overseas France as a sign of increasingly authoritarian French governance. Many joined forces to mobilize against what some agitators described as fascist tendencies in French governance.

How might diasporic experiences of loss and displacement aid immigrants in responding to and acknowledging Indigenous lands and territories? Drawing from my own immigrant experience, I retrace and reinvent my movement in Tkaronto through walking practices that recover memories of migrancy as a newcomer to the land known as Canada. Such memories can be useful sources for immigrants to consider their relationship to settler colonialism. Reactivating them through movement might elicit a new responsiveness to the land as well as recognition of its caretakers and their struggles. I reflect on the possibilities that such a practice of walking and thinking through embodied memories can open up for undoing the coloniality of thought that underpins migrant aspirations for “a better-than-survival kind of living” (Berlant) and that so often results in assimilation to, and participation in, a settler colonial state.

Abstract In 2019 several funerals were held for glaciers. If enough glaciers die, could they go extinct? Is there geologic extinction? Yes. This article develops three arguments to support this claim. The first revisits Georges Cuvier’s original argument for extinction and its reliance on geology, especially glaciers. Retracing connections to glaciers and the narrowing of extinction to biological species in the nineteenth century, the author argues that anthropogenic forcing on how the Earth system functions—the Anthropocene—warrants rethinking extinction geologically. The second argument examines the specificity of ice loss and multiple practices responding to this loss: from art exhibits at United Nations climate change meetings to anticolonial claims for the right to be cold. The third argument consolidates a theme built across the article regarding how Isabelle Stengers’s notion of ecologies of practices provides an approach to geologic extinction that recognizes both relational and nonrelational loss.

Abstract International news, and the technological infrastructures required to collect, distribute, and publish it, have long been battlegrounds of imperial ambition and anticolonial contestation. In the early 1960s, press professionals, engineers, and telecom officials from the global South elaborated a wide-ranging structural critique of the status quo, arguing that developing mass media required decolonizing international networks and global governance practices that perpetuated media inequality. But over the course of the decade, UNESCO began to invite research and expertise from American social scientists and engineers, who came to define UNESCO’s approach to satellite-based media development. By redefining the scope of media development to an instrumentalist vision of Westernization, such research eclipsed a broad, structural vision of reform, casting southern experts’ more radical designs into shadow. By recovering this history, the article tells a new story of the ideologies and governance practices that helped sustain global news inequality in the satellite age.

Abstract As an institutionalized “indigenous” system of medicine in India, nature cure derives directly from ideas and practices developed within the rubric of Lebensreform, a radical, back-to-nature health reform movement that took shape in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century central Europe. Nature cure developed in twentieth-century India as a deeply embodied manifestation of Swadeshi, a social, cultural, and anticolonial political movement intimately concerned with independence and liberation. Significant parallels between Lebensreform and Swadeshi point toward an understanding of medicine based on the habitus of class and global countercultural practices. Using examples from the work of Adolf Just and other Germans writing at the turn of the nineteenth century and the case of Arogya Mandir, a nature cure hospital established by Vithal Das Modi in Gorakhpur in 1940, this essay examines how the radical, utopian ideals of Lebensreform were translated into institutionalized medical practice that facilitated the embodiment of Swadeshi as a political philosophy of health reform in colonial India.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the underlying meanings, effects and cultural patterns of metadata standards, focusing on Dublin Core (DC), and explore the ways in which anticolonial metadata tools can be applied to exercise and promote Indigenous data sovereignty. Design/methodology/approach Applying an anticolonial approach, this paper examines the assumptions underpinning the stated roles of two of DC’s metadata elements, rights and creator. Based on that examination, the paper considers the limitations of DC for appropriately documenting Indigenous traditional knowledge (TK). Introduction of the TK labels and their implementation are put forward as an alternative method to such limitations in metadata standards. Findings The analysis of the rights and creator elements revealed that DC’s universality and supposed neutrality threaten the rightful attribution, specificity and dynamism of TK, undermining Indigenous data sovereignty. The paper advocates for alternative descriptive methods grounded within tribal sovereignty values while recognizing the difficulties of dealing with issues of interoperability by means of metadata standards given potentially innate tendencies to customization within communities. Originality/value This is the first paper to directly examine the implications of DC’s rights and creator elements for documenting TK. The paper identifies ethical practices and culturally appropriate tools that unsettle the universality claims of metadata standards. By introducing the TK labels, the paper contributes to the efforts of Indigenous communities to regain control and ownership of their cultural and intellectual property.

Despite neo-Victorianism's theoretical awareness of how colonial structures continue to infuse imaginations of the long nineteenth century, and how neo-Victorian culture might challenge both Victorian and contemporary ideological structures, common practices of neo-Victorian scholarship too often remain constricted in their geographical and conceptual breadth. In thinking about the structural convergences and challenges between Victorian studies and neo-Victorian studies, this keyword entry emphasizes texts and cultural traditions that have rarely been the purview of the neo-Victorian. Informed by Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong's analysis of race as a central function in Victorian studies, it charts alternative neo-Victorian genealogies in anglophone African and Black British literatures and cultures. On this basis, it asks how conceptions of the neo-Victorian will need to change if the field is to take seriously its anticolonial potential.

Abstract The author focuses on the project exhibition, “The Potosí Principle,” curated by Alice Creischer, Max Hinderer, and Andreas Siekmann Initially installed in Madrid in 2010 and then traveling to Berlin and La Paz, the show cut across the institutionally defined and often rigorously guarded boundaries between curatorial practice, aesthetic expression, and scholarly research to explore global capitalism's dynamics from the perspective of the Spanish colonial empire and its distinctive imagery. However, despite the exhibition's creative installation techniques and revisionist history, it generated a considerable scandal when a self-organized group of La Paz-based artists and scholars committed to anticolonial practices accused the curators of continuing the logic through which the modern West has represented others. The author argues that this criticism parallels the often-fraught negotiations between artists, curators, and curated cultures at the boundary zones between art frameworks.

Abstract The critical onboarding of ethnography evinced by scholars in theology, religious studies and Christian ethics compellingly generates ecclesiologies and other theologies inclusive of non-academic life. Yet, in a critical reflection on methodologies in ecclesiological research, this paper questions the growing predominance of ethnography, specifically ethnographic thickness. Drawing upon the work of anthropologist Audra Simpson, this paper argues that the ethnographic turn in religious ethics and theology and religious studies misses (at best) or ignores (at worst) the epistemological violence lurking at the root of this method. By looking into practices of ethnographic thinness and refusal, this paper highlights apophasis as the best theological grounding for scholars engaging with ethnography. Ethnographic apophasis requires practitioners to heed the colonial and settler colonial realities inherent in the method of ethnography itself; ethically pushing notions of solidarity into anticolonial practice.

In colonial Yucatán, Mexico, the owners of plantation-like estates known as haciendas conscripted saints and cows to expropriate land from Indigenous Maya farming communities. In this paper, I trace the role of hacienda saints by framing them as an introduced or adventive species, capable of forming both mutualistic and invasive interspecies relationships in their new habitat. I examine the introduction of saints to the region by Franciscans, early attempts by Maya people to build anticolonial coalitions with saints and cows, the participation of hacienda saints in extractivist ranching practices, and the ultimate reclaiming and possible naturalization of saints by Maya rebels. This paper extends conceptualizations of the plantation—as both a site of species extinction and a site of interspecies collaboration—to include Catholic saints, so as to interrogate the dynamic role of supernatural entities in deep and ongoing histories of extractivism.

Appearing on the back pages of the Cairo daily newspaperal-Muʾayyadin September 1891 and December 1889, respectively, these brief reports, juxtaposed, encapsulate some central arguments of the books under review. They exemplify everyday resort to state apparatuses for individual or collective ends, and invoke consumption practices viewed as inimical to national health and reputation at a time when the new nationalist press was beginning to voice senses of collective pride, political unease, and anticolonial antagonism. They entail perceptions of transgressed boundaries, wayward actions, or gender-inappropriate behaviors impervious to commonly recognized moral and political authority. They illustrate blurrings of “public” and “private” actions and spaces, whether in the name of public good or for ill, that might have threatened Egyptians’ felt values of moral propriety—the disciplining pull of “respectability”—in urban Egyptian society at that time. And the reportage, publication, and circulation of such stories illustrate (and make) an emerging “public sphere” of narrative, commentary, and reader consumption, simultaneously constructing and interrogating an emerging nationalist master-narrative that placed gender-marked acts and sexual practices, transgressive or not, at the center of national/ist efficacy and perceived threats to it.

Indigenous knowledge is a multilayered knowledge system that can effectively manage global ecosystem and biodiversity conservation. Conservation is an applied discipline with the goal of preserving the world's biodiversity and ecosystems. However, settler–coloniser conservation practices often fail to fully examine how settler–coloniser epistemologies are centred at the expense of Indigenous conservation praxis. Evaluating how conservation practices outside of an Indigenous lens can become more inclusive and just is a critical area for research and reflection. We draw on our own experiences as early-career researchers working towards anticolonial, just and inclusive approaches to conservation science and practice by discussing what it means to be for a Place. We believe that a non-Indigenous conservationist who is for a Place advocates for inclusive stewardship with Indigenous Peoples and other marginalised communities to conserve species and ecosystems and the connections that bind communities to their landscapes. As an example of how settler–coloniser conservation practitioners can be for a Place, we discuss writing a policy statement in 2019 on behalf of the Society for Conservation Biology opposing the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawai‘i. We describe the thought process behind our policy statement and provide examples of other actions for conservation researchers and practitioners working to be for a Place. We aim to provide our colleagues, particularly those trained in settler–coloniser conservation practices, an opportunity to identify more just practices for the Places we aspire to conserve.

Indigenous knowledge is a multilayered knowledge system that can effectively manage global ecosystem and biodiversity conservation. Conservation is an applied discipline with the goal of preserving the world's biodiversity and ecosystems. However, settler–coloniser conservation practices often fail to fully examine how settler–coloniser epistemologies are centred at the expense of Indigenous conservation praxis. Evaluating how conservation practices outside of an Indigenous lens can become more inclusive and just is a critical area for research and reflection. We draw on our own experiences as early-career researchers working towards anticolonial, just and inclusive approaches to conservation science and practice by discussing what it means to be for a Place. We believe that a non-Indigenous conservationist who is for a Place advocates for inclusive stewardship with Indigenous Peoples and other marginalised communities to conserve species and ecosystems and the connections that bind communities to their landscapes. As an example of how settler–coloniser conservation practitioners can be for a Place, we discuss writing a policy statement in 2019 on behalf of the Society for Conservation Biology opposing the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawai‘i. We describe the thought process behind our policy statement and provide examples of other actions for conservation researchers and practitioners working to be for a Place. We aim to provide our colleagues, particularly those trained in settler–coloniser conservation practices, an opportunity to identify more just practices for the Places we aspire to conserve.

This interdisciplinary case study research centers anticolonial theories and Chicana feminist epistemology (Bernal, 1998) to interrogate the experiences of Chicana maestras during their clinical teaching semester. The experiences of Chicana maestras is often silenced in educational research, especially in the research of prospective middle grades educators. This work seeks to challenge the often-colonizing practices of teaching and research and seeks to serve as a model of the possibilities for research in middle level teacher education. The findings of this research center on the collective power of Chicanas experiencing teaching and learning as a collective through the creation of vignettes. These vignettes highlight the themes of maestras and comunidad, exploring and solidifying identity, thriving colonialism, clinical chingonas, and sharing of knowledge. Each of these themes, and the collective work that went into this research, demonstrate the importance of Chicanas in middle level education.

This essay examines three historical moments in the signification of the term cimarrón across the hispanophone Caribbean. It explores its origin during the conquest, simultaneously naming runaway livestock and Native and Black enslaved peoples who challenged colonization. In the twentieth century, the cimarrón became attached to masculinist nationalist tropes key to postwar anticolonial movements. In the new millennium, Black and Brown women and LBTQ+ folks use the term to convey an ethos of antipatriarchal, community-centered activism. The essay argues that the origins of the term demand a close consideration of the relationship between conquest, othering, racialization, commodification, and the reordering of the animal world with human animals as supreme beings. The contemporary reappropriation of the term alludes to a decolonial reframing, a unique opportunity to reject Western ontologies grounded on the violent practices of othering while also pointing us toward new conditions of possibility based on relationality.

Informed by the epistemic shift and anticolonial project of critical Indigenous Studies, this study reframes the narratives of progress and assimilation that have been told about the healing practices on display in the Lacnunga (BL MS Harley 585) and CCCC MS 41. Recent scholarship has highlighted the scientific efficacy of the Old English charms and oriented them within a Latinate tradition in an effort to challenge previous characterizations of these texts as relics of a primitive pagan past. Drawing on Indigenous scholars’ theorizations of healing practices that address other-than-humans, this article positions the “Nine Herbs Charm” within a poetic-scientific tradition distinct from the materialisms of Insular grammatica and modern Western science. This reading suggests that Solomon’s lesson in prayer (in Solomon and Saturn I) enacts a colonial logic, in that it assimilates the charm’s theory but overwrites its practice of respecting the memories of other-than-human beings. By appealing to the convenient notion that health can be catalyzed by a singular mechanism, Solomon turns the charm into a practice that celebrates the objectification and domination of people unlike himself. Finally, the article posits that the colonial narrative of progress that underwrites nineteenth- and twentieth-century readings of the charms also structures the rhetoric on effective healing practices delivered by figures of the Benedictine Reform, such as Solomon and Ælfric.

From the archivist logic of erasure made by rewriting ruled in deconstruction as construc-tion, it intended to read some writing scenes of the book O Kit de Sobrevivência do Descobridor Portu-guês no Mundo Anticolonial (2020), by Patrícia Lino, in which is verified a poetic made by irony, hybridism and parody that opposes to the conception of total History. It appears from the injunctive descriptions “what is it/are they” and “how to use/to play” a reflection about the notion of archive as a speech con-struction made by remnants as well as it is possible to verify in these same constructions the way to relate with objects, images and words built in power relations through different enunciative practices. It is concluded that those intersemiotic objects – images and joke poems – tension elements from the Portuguese past by the delegitimation of crystallized meanings through the new ways of archiving and to think about the poetry-archive relation as post-autonomous constructions.

These books demonstrate in various ways the momentous progress achieved in the study of Sufism over the past three decades while pointing to lacunae and problems that remain. Until the 1970s, Western scholarship on Sufism was shaped by a set of paradigms that originated among orientalists, travelers, colonial officials, and modernist Muslims in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Scholars privileged the mystical insights and poetry of great Sufi masters and championed personal and unmediated religious forms. Sufism's devotional and corporate aspects were unappreciated, as were the Sufi practitioners, especially ragged dervishes and worshippers at saints' tombs. It was common to separate such practitioners and practices from “genuine” mysticism through a schema of elite versus popular religion. A related paradigm of decline cast later Sufi practice as a corruption of the classical mystical tradition and a culprit in a wider decline of Muslim civilization, while yet another focused on the Sufi brotherhoods as networks of anticolonial Muslim activism and hence purveyors of “fanaticism.”

This article reflects upon objects and actions of counter-memory activism in Brazil in the wake of anticolonial demonumentalizations. Initially, it focuses on statues symbolizing colonial and traumatic pasts, notably the Borba Gato statue in São Paulo, dedicated to a colonial explorer. The monument was set ablaze in July 2021, sparking widespread debate. The discussion deepens with the commemoration of Marielle Franco, a councilwoman and human rights advocate who was murdered in 2018. The interplay between memory initiatives and political activism is examined, with tributes analyzed as collective authorship by black and feminist movements. Ethnographic data from Rio de Janeiro and digital environments inform this analysis. Events related to monuments and other objects are viewed as political rituals in the struggle against forgetting. Statues, street signs, graffiti, posters, and other forms of counter-memory supports are identified as focal points for understanding the relationship between objects, artistic-political practices, and public life.

This contribution discusses selected historical photographs of the research project, collection, and photobook The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890–1950 published in 2013 by Santu Mofokeng (1956–2020), both within the original context of their emergence as well as taking Mofokeng’s intention in editing the photobook into account. Furthermore, the location of the image content and its aesthetics in the colonial context of South Africa 1890–1950 and within the Victorian photographic dispositive are in the focus. The analysis of the The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890–1950 considers the Victorian photographic discourse of the late 19th century as an influential frame. This discourse entails ongoing mechanisms of epistemic violence in the visual representation of the Black community. Furthermore, the paper perceives the photographs found by Mofokeng as a material testimony of practiced anticolonial resistance. This perspective contributes productively to the critical discussion of Mofokeng’s question, if these images are “evidence of mental colonisation” or did they serve to challenge prevailing images of ‘African people’ in the ‘West’. Article received: April 5, 2022; Article accepted: June 21, 2022; Published online: September 15, 2022; Original scholarly paper

Abstract This article examines the National Council of Negro Women's (NCNW) participation in the founding conference of the United Nations. Moving beyond a focus on formal actors, it situates Mary McLeod Bethune, the organization's founder and president and the only African American woman to serve as an official representative, alongside her contemporaries on whom she relied. It argues that recovering the activism of Dorothy Boulding Ferebee, Eunice Hunton Carter, Sue Bailey Thurman, Anna Arnold Hedgeman, and a host of other Black women is to recognize a polity that, by all accounts, was not supposed to be present or active in San Francisco. These women's activities at the conference and in the decades that followed illuminate the broad contours of Black women's antisexist, antiracist, and anticolonial activism during the Second World War into the Cold War period. Akin to their efforts at the founding conference, this population's creative practices and cultural diplomacy reveal that the councilwomen maintained an enduring commitment to global freedom and the United Nations’ radical potential.

Abstract Vernacular Korean letters were exchanged routinely in the royal and elite families of Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910), and women were at least on one side of a letter’s itinerary. While male-centered literary Chinese learning held highest prestige, the patriarchal families of the time cherished their private archives, in which vernacular letters were sentimental mementos, testaments of women’s learning, and status symbols. This familial epistolary archive received varying elaborations as it transitioned into museums and departments of national literature in South Korea. While elite vernacular epistolary style (naeganch’e) embodies the core of tradition and national literature for such colonial-era intellectuals as Yi Pyŏnggi (1891–1968) and Yi T’aejun (1904–?), the anticolonial and antifeudal current of the post-1945 South Korean scholarship overlooks the elite tradition. This explains the persistent invisibility of women-centered elite vernacular culture in the contemporary scholarship of Chosŏn Korea. Developing the notion of itinerary—the transition, appropriation, and recoding of elite vernacular letters—this article ponders the implication of archival practices upon the study of the past, and highlights the knowledge systems that determined the visibility and meaning of elite vernacular culture in Korea’s modern era.

In both the Gospel of Mark and The Thunder: Perfect Mind, paradoxically powerful voices sound through broken bodies thrown into contact with other broken bodies and social outcasts. While Mark brings a (semi-)divine man into contact with the suffering, sick, and hungry multitudes as he journeys through Galilee and Judea on his way to eventual death at the hands of Roman authorities, Thunder’s (semi-)divine speaker contains these multitudes, inhabiting or being inhabited by them, speaking as many, Legion-like, with no particular narrative climax. Through gender dynamics that express and instigate feelings of vulnerability and humiliation, as well as claims to triumph and divine association, Mark’s Jesus and Thunder’s speaker exemplify and confound social, gendered inflections of vulnerability, virility, and divinity. As texts composed in the midst of cultural upheaval and anticolonial anguish, Mark and Thunder function as trauma narratives that present pained and creative responses to violence and oppression. Following Ann Cvetkovich’s work on public feelings and affective archives, I treat Mark and Thunder as archives of feeling that enable or mark the vital traces of new practices and publics and gesture toward counterpublic responses to trauma.

The period between 1960 and 1974 constituted the time span of the liberation struggles from Portuguese colonialism in several colonized territories in the African continent. The struggles that developed then can be also described as a Bulimundo period. Bulimundo, a Guinean and Creole expression, meant bulir o mundo – to agitate the world. In a way, it means to set a revolution in motion. It was also in this time span that the liberation movements in Portuguese-speaking Africa, such as FRELIMO (Mozambique, the PAIGC (Cape Vert and Guinea-Bissau) and the MPLA (Angola), developed anticolonial and decolonial educational practices. This article focuses on the production and circulation of the two math textbooks developed between 1969 and 1973 for Mozambican schools. It uncovers a narrative of transnational solidarity and unforeseen collaborations that went beyond the ideological trench warfare of the Cold War in the context of the liberation movements during in 1960s and 1970s. Based on interviews and German archival material, the article analyses the political messages incorporated in the textbooks’ exercises, keeping in mind the period of armed liberation struggle and the transition to socialism, the political direction the territory was heading towards following independence.

Abstract In 2013, the artist now known as American Artist changed their legal name to a generic singular, making themselves impermeable to authorial identification. Manifesting both their official entry in the art world and a withdrawal from it, this name change literally hacked Artist into the white American art canon, as their work now appears alongside Jackson Pollock's or Edward Hopper's in an internet search. This performative act was only the first in a series investigating issues of recognizable form and practices of identification. In 2021 Mother of All Demos II, a computer encased in dirt, the main piece in Artist's installation Black Gooey Universe, fringed on material formlessness as black goo oozed out of the keyboard, spilled over the desk and into the white box of the gallery space, its viscous drops suspended midair, rewriting the racial history of computer technology. This article traces these refusals of form in American Artist's Black Gooey Universe. Drawing on Zakiyyah Jackson's analysis of Western ontology, the article theorizes the edges in Artist's sculptures as sites of undoing, suspension, and speculation. Undoing the form of the GUI to find the “gooey,” Artist's installation ties an archaeological reframing of technology to a reimagining of anticolonial cosmology.

This essay, co-written by a dendrochronologist (Nick) and a narrative theorist (Erin), considers how these two disciplines can meet to illuminate alternative narratives in tree rings. At the basis of our conversation is a desire to tease apart tree experience and the signification entangled within human practices of storytelling. First, Nick explains recent developments in dendrochronology and critical physical geography (CPG) that call attention to the ways in which tree-ring sciences often naturalize imperial narratives and demand alternative methodologies. Second, Erin dives into the imperial narratives of two case study tree bodies, throwing light upon the human and vegetal stories that these dominant narratives obscure and silence. Third, Nick turns to an experiment in critical participatory action research (CPAR) to suggest an approach to tree-ring dating—material dating—that takes its cues not from imperial histories but from a simultaneous interest in community engagement, anticolonial scholarship, and tree agency and signification. Fourth, Erin explains how material dating, via foregrounding personal experience, stands to produce a narrative more sensitive to a particular tree’s situated experience and better able to foment understanding among tree body viewers for the tree as a living and communicating organism. Finally, Nick and Erin use material dating to produce an alternative narrative for one of our case studies and provide directions for other scholars to replicate our process.

This article examines the circulation and articulation of fascist ideas and practices among the so-called cooperating nationalist party Partai Indonesia Raya (Parindra) and its youth wing Surya Wirawan in late colonial Indonesia. After the radical nationalist parties demanding Indonesian independence had been crushed by the Dutch colonial government in 1934, only parties refraining from making such radical demands could operate in public. Since their frustratingly weak bargaining position in the political arena was hard to conceal, leading Parindra politicians such as Soetomo (1888–1938) evoked powerful images of a ‘glorious Indonesia’ (Indonesia Moelia) to keep the nationalist project alive. The ideas of Soetomo, who was an expressed admirer of Mussolini, Hitler, and Japanese imperialism, had a considerable impact on Parindra’s political course. Others, such as the journalist Soedarjo Tjokrosisworo were particularly vocal about their fascist sympathies. Tjokrosisworo played an influential role in modelling the ‘scout group’ on the example of fascist fighting squads and other paramilitary units. The article argues that Parindra’s philofascist demeanor was an integral part of a strategy to achieve an aura of power. However, the party’s dynamism and glory was just ‘staged’ to compensate for Parindra’s lacking scope of political action. Generally, the party’s incorporation of fascist elements raises important questions about the relationship between anticolonial nationalism and fascism since the latter entered Indonesia during a time when the nationalist project was still very much in the making.

Cultural erasure and land dispossession form the core of the settler colonization of Turtle Island (Canada), a colonization thatseeks the production of colonial space through processes such as colonial naming which aims at erasing the presence of the Indigenous peoples, invalidating their cultures and claiming ownership over their lands. In their resistance to their cultural and physical eradication and the occupation of their land by the settler colonizers, the Indigenous writers adopt the revitalization of their languages as an anticolonial discourse of Indigenous cultural preservation. Many past studies investigated the decolonization processes in Indigenous Canadian poetry. However, renaming as a decolonizing act of Indigenous cultural revitalization is notapproached in the selected poems. Thus, this article examinesthe renaming practices in Duncan Mercredi’s “mahikan”(1991), Marilyn Dumont’s “nomenclature” (2007)* and extracts from Louise Bernice Halfe’s book-length poem, Blue Marrow(1998). The article applies the ideas on naming expressed in Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples(2012), as well as the concept of ‘generative refusal’ which is conceptualized by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson in her book As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance(2017). The article concludes that renaming as it is adopted by the selected poets serves as a counter-narrative thatunsettles the colonial discourse of Indigenous cultural erasure and land dispossession by reasserting the presence of the Indigenous peoples and their spiritual connections to their land and culture.

The Interbellum era passed under the sign of competition between supporters of various models of colonial order, due to the growth of rebel activity in the British Empire after the Great War. Discussions on this issue reflected theoretical and doctrinal contradictions, as well as the rivalry of the security services and disputes between the military and civilian authorities over the boundaries of their responsibility in these conditions. The article analyzes changes in the military’s approaches to determining the parameters for ensuring internal security in the British Empire after the Great War due to budget restrictions and new challenges to colonial rule (nationalism, communism and pan-Islamism). The focus of the study is the attitude of the military to the phenomenon of rapid urbanization of anticolonial protest against the background of disagreements between the authorities over the choice of a military-political course for resolving conflicts of this kind in the interwar period. Particular attention is paid to the problem of understanding the guerrilla of “developed” peoples and the peculiarities of armed underground struggle in the urban environment. This perspective of the study made it possible to raise in a new way the question not only of the role of the army in the modernization of management practices at the final stage of the development of the British imperial project. Institutional features of self-perception of this security service in the context of the increasing importance of military force and the simultaneous reduction of the possibility of using other levers of influence on the preservation of the metropolis’ power over the colonies and other dependent territories are also considered in this article.

Postcolonial Perspectives on Sara Lidman’s Writings from South Africa 1960–1961 The Swedish writer Sara Lidman (1923–2004) wrote Jag och min son (I and My Son) after a brief stint in apartheid’s South Africa in 1960–1961, from where she was expelled for a violation of the Immorality Act. Based on a close, interrelated study of her diary, her letters and the two manuscripts (first published in 1961 and revised and re-published in 1963), this essay (»’To outlive the slave in me’: Postcolonial Perspectives on Sara Lidman in Apartheid’s South Africa 1960–1961«) examines the colonial boundary crisis of the Self. The major protagonists in the novel(s) embody variously aspects of the writer’s angst as it developed in the Johannesburg colonial setting of persecuted ANC members, the elite of the local Swedish community, and the pressure of her anticolonial frustrations. Sexuality is a major element in the »nervous condition« that characterizes the fragmented and confusing conceptualization of the novel. Its extensive rewriting was an attempt at strengthening its ideological, anti-imperial modus, pushing the novel into the environs of the postcolonial allegory such as in such texts as Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988) and Bessie Head’s A Question of Power (1974). A second self-castigating theme, this essay claims, is the impact of the religious background of the author as born into – but never at peace with – strong evangelical and paternal practices. »Outliving the slave« (a quote from one of her letters) in the title of the essay proposes a Fanonian reading of the circulatory and traumatizing notion of rebellion (against Apartheid) and submission (to it). The third theme involves the idealization of the child that also involves a colonial cul-desac of self-positioning expressed both in the novel and the writer’s attempts at adopting an African child (never realized).

Abstract: This afterword offers a broad commentary on the urgency of comparative studies of ethnic and religious revivalisms across Latin America. Combining attention to the contemporary revival and refashioning of Christian, Black, and Indigenous traditions in their intersections with nationalism, reparation demands, inculturation projects, and anti-extractivist politics, this volume of American Religion attends to the fleshy underbelly of an ostensibly abstracted religion in the modern world. This approach refuses to relegate these political formations either to inherited religious orders (colonial Catholicism), timeless difference (Indigenous culture), or a detached only emergent order (earth rights, other-than-human political claims, or emergent indigeneity). Likewise, the pieces refute normative social scientific paradigms that would slot such practices either on the side only of a redemptive anti-colonial politics, on the one hand, or a strangulated or domesticated difference evacuated of force through the powers of secular modernity, on the other. We have instead a supple and nuanced, fleshed out and embodied, account of how vernacular theologies and other-than-human entanglements are transforming the scope of the political. As the authors show, not only have we "never been modern," but the "we" that can assert such a stance is one that is presumed to have passed through a historical era defined by mediation by secular liberal virtues. This issue calls such absolute mediation into question, not only for Latin America, but also more broadly for the contemporary world. Resumen: Este epílogo ofrece un comentario amplio sobre la urgencia de realizar estudios comparativos de los resurgimientos étnicos y religiosos en toda América Latina. Combinando la atención al renacimiento contemporáneo y la remodelación de las tradiciones cristianas, negras e indígenas en sus intersecciones con el nacionalismo, las reclamaciones de reparaciones, los proyectos de enculturación y las políticas antiextractivistas, este volumen de American Religion aborda la carnosidad de la religión ostensiblemente abstracta en el mundo moderno. Este enfoque se niega a relegar estas formaciones políticas a las órdenes religiosas heredadas (el catolicismo colonial), a percepciones de diferencias atemporales indigenas, o un orden emergente separado (derechos sobre la tierra, reivindicaciones políticas no humanas o indigenismo emergente). Asimismo, los autores refutan los paradigmas científicos sociales normativos que situarían estas prácticas del lado de una política anticolonial redentora, por un lado, o de una diferencia domesticada y desempoderada a través de los poderes de la modernidad secular, por otro. En su lugar, tenemos un relato flexible y matizado, desarrollado y encarnado, de cómo las teologías vernáculas y los enredos con otros no humanos están transformando el alcance de lo político. Como muestran los autores, no sólo "nunca hemos sido modernos", sino que el "nosotros" que puede afirmar tal postura es el que se supone que ha pasado por una era histórica definida por la mediación de las virtudes liberales seculares. Este número cuestiona esa mediación absoluta, no sólo para América Latina, sino más ampliamente para el mundo contemporáneo.

Christianity was the religion of spirit (and freedom), and critiqued Islam as a religion of flesh (and slavery); later, Christianity was the religion of reason, and critiqued Islam as the religion of fideism; later still, Christianity was the religion of the critique of religion, and critiqued Islam as the most atavistic of religions. Even now, when the West has critiqued its own Chris- tianity enough to be properly secular (because free, rational, and critical), it continues to critique Islam for being not secular enough. In contrast to Christianity or post-Christian secularism, then, and despite their best ef- forts, Islam does not know (has not learned from) critique. This sentiment is articulated at multiple registers, academic and popular and governmen- tal: Muslims are fanatical about their repressive law; they interpret things too literally; Muslims do not read their own revelation critically, let alone literature or cartoons; their sartorial practices are unreasonable; the gates of ijtihād closed in 900CE; Ghazali killed free inquiry in Islam… Such claims are ubiquitous enough to be unremarkable, and have political traction among liberals and conservatives alike. “The equation of Islam with the ab- sence of critique has a longer genealogy in Western thought,” Irfan Ahmad writes in this book, “which runs almost concurrently with Europe’s colonial expansion” (8). Luther and Renan figure in that history, as more recently do Huntington and Gellner and Rushdie and Manji.Meanwhile in the last decade an interdisciplinary conversation about the stakes, limits, complicities, and possibilities of critique has developed in the anglophone academy, a conversation of which touchstones include the polemical exchange between Saba Mahmood and Stathis Gourgouris (2008); the co-authored volume Is Critique Secular? (2009), by Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Mahmood; journal special issues dedi- cated to the question (e.g. boundary 2 40, no. 1 [2013]); and Gourgouris’s Lessons in Secular Criticism (2013), among others. At the same time, the discipline of religious studies remains trapped in an argument over the lim- its of normative analysis and the possibility of critical knowledge.Religion as Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Mar- ketplace seeks to turn these debates on their head. Is critique secular? Decidedly not—but understanding why that is, for Ahmad, requires revising our understanding of critique itself. Instead of the object of critique, reli- gion here emerges as an agent of critique. By this account, God himself is the source of critique, and the prophets and their heirs are “critics par ex- cellence” (xiv). The book is divided into two parts bookended by a prologue and epilogue. “Formulation” comprises three chapters levying the shape of the argument. “Illustration” comprises three chapters taking up the case study of the South Asian reformer Abul-A‘la Maududi and his critics (es- pecially regarding his views on the state and on women) as well as a fourth chapter that seeks to locate critique in the space of the everyday. There are four theses to Ahmad’s argument, none of them radically original on their own but newly assembled. As spelled out in the first chap- ter (“Introduction”), the first thesis holds that the Enlightenment reconfig- uration of Christianity was in fact an ethnic project by which “Europe/the West constituted its identity in the name of reason and universalism against a series of others,” among them Islam (14). The second thesis is that no crit- ic judges by reason alone. Rather, critique is always situated, directed, and formed: it requires presuppositions and a given mode to be effective (17). The third thesis is that the Islamic tradition of critique stipulates the com- plementarity of intellect (‘aql, dimāgh) and heart (qalb, dil); this is a holistic anthropology, not a dualistic one. The fourth thesis is that critique should not be understood as the exclusive purview of intellectuals (especially when arguing about literature) or as simply a theoretical exercise. Instead, cri- tique should be approached as part of life, practiced by the literate and the illiterate alike (18).The second chapter, “Critique: Western and/or Islamic,” focuses on the first of these theses. The Enlightenment immunized the West from critique while subjecting the Rest to critique. An “anthropology of philosophy” approach can treat Kant’s transcendental idealism as a social practice and in doing so discover that philosophy is “not entirely independent” from ethnicity (37). The certainty offered by the Enlightenment project can thus be read as “a project of security with boundaries.” Ahmad briefly consid- ers the place of Islam across certain of Kant’s writings and the work of the French philosophes; he reads their efforts to “secure knowledge of humani- ty” to foreclose the possibility of “knowledge from humanity” (42), namely Europe’s others. Meanwhile, ethnographic approaches to Muslim debates shy away from according them the status of critique, but in so doing they only maintain the opposition between Western reason and Islamic unrea- son. In contrast to this view (from Kant through Foucault), Ahmad would rather locate the point of critical rupture with the past in the axial age (800-200BCE), which would include the line of prophets who reformed (critiqued) their societies for having fallen into corruption and paganism. This alternative account demonstrates that “critical inquiry presupposes a tradition,” that is, that effective critique is always immanent (58). The third chapter, “The Modes: Another Genealogy of Critique,” con- tests the reigning historiography of “critique” (tanqīd/naqd) in South Asia that restricts it to secular literary criticism. Critique (like philosophy and democracy) was not simply founded in Grecian antiquity and inherited by Europe: Ahmad “liberates” critique from its Western pedigree and so allows for his alternative genealogy, as constructed for instance through readings of Ghalib. The remainder of the chapter draws on the work of Maududi and his critics to present the mission of the prophets as critiquing to reform (iṣlāḥ) their societies. This mandate remains effective today, and Maududi and his critics articulate a typology of acceptable (tanqīd) and unacceptable (ta‘īb, tanqīṣ, tazhīk, takfīr, etc.) critiques in which the style of critique must be considered alongside its object and telos. Religion as Critique oscillates between sweeping literature reviews and close readings. Readers may find the former dizzying, especially when they lose in depth what they gain in breadth (for example, ten pages at hand from chapter 2 cite 44 different authors, some of whom are summarizing or contesting the work of a dozen other figures named but not cited di- rectly). Likewise there are moments when Ahmad’s own dogged critiques may read as tendentious. The political purchase of this book should not be understated, though the fact that Muslims criticize themselves and others should come as no surprise. Yet it is chapters 4–6 (on Maududi and his critics) which substantiate the analytic ambition of the book. They are the most developed chapters of the book and detail a set of emerging debates with a fine-grained approach sometimes found wanting elsewhere (espe- cially in the final chapter). They show how Islam as a discursive tradition is constituted through critique, and perhaps always has been: for against the disciplinary proclivities of anthropologists (who tend to emphasize discon- tinuity and rupture, allowing them to discover the modern invention of traditions), Ahmad insists on an epistemic connection among precolonial and postcolonial Islam. This connection is evident in how the theme of rupture/continuity is itself a historical topos of “Islamic critical thinking.” Chapter 4 (“The Message: A Critical Enterprise”) approaches Maududi (d. 1979) as a substantial political thinker, not simply the fundamentalist ideologue he is often considered to be. Reading across Maududi’s oeuvre, Ahmad gleans a political-economic critique of colonial-capitalist exploita- tion (95), a keen awareness of the limits of majoritarian democracy, and a warning about the dispossessive effects of minoritization. Maududi’s Isla- mism (“theodemocracy”), then, has to be understood within his broader project of the revival of religion to which tanqīd (“critique”), tajdīd (“re- newal”), and ijtihād (“understanding Islam’s universal principles to de- termine change”) were central (103). He found partial historical models for such renewal in ‘Umar b. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, Ghazali, Ibn Taymiyya, Ahmad Sirhindi, and Shah Wali Ullah. A key element of this critique is that it does not aim to usher in a different future. Instead it inhabits a more complicated temporality: it clarifies what is already the case, as rooted in the primordial nature of humans (fiṭra), and in so doing aligns the human with the order of creation. This project entails the critique and rejection of false gods, in- cluding communism, fascism, national socialism, and capitalism (117). Chapter 5 (“The State: (In)dispensible, Desirable, Revisable?”) weaves together ethnographic and textual accounts of Maududi’s critics and de- fenders on the question of the state (the famous argument for “divine sov- ereignty”). In doing so the chapter demonstrates how the work of critique is undertaken in this Islamic tradition, where, Ahmad writes, “critique is connected to a form of life the full meaning of which is inseparable from death” (122). (This also means that at stake in critique is also the style and principles of critique.) The critics surveyed in this chapter include Manzur Nomani, Vahiduddin Khan, Abul Hasan Ali Nadvi, Amir Usmani, Sadrud- din Islahi, Akram Zurti, Rahmat Bedar, Naqi Rahman, Ijaz Akbar, and others, figures of varying renown but all of whom closely engaged, defend- ed, and contested Maududi’s work and legacy in the state politics of his Jamaat-e Islami. Chapter 6 (“The Difference: Women and In/equality”) shows how Maududi’s followers critique the “neopatriarchate” he proposes. Through such critique, Ahmad also seeks to affirm the legitimacy of a “nonpatri- archal reading of Islam” (156). If Maududi himself regarded the ḥarem as “the mightiest fortress of Islamic culture” (159)—a position which Ahmad notes is “enmeshed in the logic of colonial hegemony”—he also desired that women “form their own associations and unbiasedly critique the govern- ment” (163). Maududi’s work and legacy is thus both “disabling” and “en- abling” for women at the same time, as is borne out by tracing the critiques it subsequently faced (including by those sympathetic to his broader proj- ect). The (male) critics surveyed here include Akram Zurti, Sultan Ahmad Islahi, Abdurrahman Alkaf, and Mohammad Akram Nadwi, who seriously engaged the Quran and hadith to question Maududi’s “neopatriarchate.” They critiqued his views (e.g. that women were naturally inferior to men, or that they were unfit for political office) through alternative readings of Islamic history and theology. Chapter 7 (“The Mundane: Critique as Social-Cultural Practice”) seeks to locate critique at “the center of life for everyone, including ordinary sub- jects with no educational degrees” (179). Ahmad writes at length about Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (d. 1988), the anticolonial activist who led a massive movement against colonial domination, and whose following faced British brutality with nonviolence. The Khudai Khidmatgār movement he built was “a movement of critique” (195), Ahmad writes, composed of or- dinary men and women, peasants and the unlettered. The brief remainder of the chapter suggests that the proverbs which punctuate everyday life (for example, in the trope of the greedy mullah) also act as critiques. By the end of Religion as Critique it is difficult not to see critique na- scent in every declaration or action. This deflates the analytic power of the term—but perhaps that is one unstated aim of the project, to reveal critique as simply a part of life. Certainly the book displaces the exceptional West- ern claim to critique. Yet this trope of exposure—anthropology as cultural critique, the ethnographer’s gaze turned inward—also raises questions of its own. In this case, the paradigmatic account of critique (Western, sec- ular) has been exposed as actually being provincial. But the means of this exposure have not come from the alternative tradition of critique Ahmad elaborates. That is, Ahmad is not himself articulating an Islamic critique of Western critique. (Maududi serves as an “illustration” of Ahmad’s ar- gument; Maududi does not provide the argument itself.) In the first chap- ters (“Formulation”) he cites a wide literature that practices historicism, genealogy, archeology, and deconstruction in order to temper the universal claims of Western supremacists. The status of these latter critical practices however is not explored, as to whether they are in themselves sufficient to provincialize or at least de-weaponize Western critique. Put more directly: is there is a third language (of political anthropology, for example) by which Ahmad analytically mediates the encounter between rival traditions of cri- tique? And if there is such a language, and if it is historically, structurally, and institutionally related to one of the critical traditions it is mediating, then what is the status of the non-Western “illustration”? The aim of this revision of critique, Ahmad writes, is “genuinely dem- ocratic dialogue with different traditions” (xii). As much is signalled in its citational practices, which (for example) reference Talal Asad and Viveiros de Castro together in calling for “robust comparison” (14) between West- ern and Islamic notions of critique, and reference Maududi and Koselleck together in interpreting critique to be about judgment (203). No matter that Asad and de Castro or Maududi and Koselleck mean different things when using the same words; these citations express Ahmad’s commitment to a dialogic (rather than dialectical) mode in engaging differences. Yet because Ahmad does not himself explore what is variously entailed by “comparison” or “judgment” in these moments, such citations remain as- sertions gesturing to a dialogue to come. In this sense Religion as Critique is a thoroughly optimistic book. Whether such optimism is warranted might call for a third part to follow “Formulation” and “Illustration”: “Reckoning.” Basit Kareem IqbalPhD candidate, Department of Anthropologyand Program in Critical TheoryUniversity of California, Berkeley

Developmentalism is the idea that progress entails the temporal movement of societies along a universal trajectory. Prevailing accounts conceptualize Eurocentric developmental discourses as ideological weapons of imperial domination, specifically because they defer colonial claims to popular self-rule. Rejecting the idea that these historical entanglements exhaust the meanings of developmental thought, this article sheds light on anticolonial debates over developmentalism. Turning to Guyanese scholar-activist Walter Rodney, it reconstructs what I call “popular anticolonial developmentalism,” as a way of construing popular legitimation in actual contexts of anticolonial and postcolonial politics. From the premise that capitalist-imperialism “deflected” the historical motion of colonized societies, popular anticolonial developmentalism places the agencies of progressive transformation with democratically empowered popular subjects. Shifting the lens of “decolonizing political theory” from epistemic critique to worldly anticolonialism shows how developmentalism became a primary idiom for contesting and reimagining anticolonial futures. In turn, anticolonial practices reshaped developmentalism’s very conceptual parameters.

AbstractIn this essay, Michalinos Zembylas revisits the tension between decolonization and other social justice projects in education scholarship, focusing in particular on the arguments for and against the notion of decolonization as land return. While different colonized communities are justifiably projecting their own political priorities in struggles against specific colonial forms of domination, Zembylas argues that education as scholarship and practice would be well served to recover the anticolonial as a shared intellectual and political project for understanding the different practices and experiences of resistance to colonialism and imperialism around the world. Anticolonial thought and praxis offer education scholars, activists, and practitioners an intellectual and political framework of connectivity and anticolonial solidarity that neither erases differences between decolonization and other political projects, nor fails to foreground community building between fields, approaches, and geographical regions. Instead of seeing different political projects as competing against one another — e.g., by considering social justice projects that do not prioritize land return as misguided or misplaced — anticolonialism seeks to theorize and act against a broad range of colonial practices and by‐products that include racism, militarism, resources exploitation, land dispossession, and so on.

Abstract On 24 December 1949, two thousand women marched on the prison at Grand Bassam in protest of the detention of militants of the Parti Démocratique de Côte d'Ivoire (PDCI). Considered the first mass demonstration by West African women against French colonial rule, the march on Grand Bassam was a watershed moment in the Ivoirian anticolonial movement. Though party officials have framed women's activism as a political ‘awakening’, women's militancy was in keeping with longstanding practices of public motherhood, whereby women's status as caregivers — both biological and symbolic — authorized their moral interventions in community life. Maternal authority enabled a variety of powerful political tactics, yet in an Ivoirian anticolonial context dominated by elite negotiations, it also circumscribed women's activism. This article examines the women's march on Grand Bassam as a case study for understanding the possibilities and limits of women's participation in the Ivoirian anticolonial movement.

Geography as a discipline is entangled in settler colonial regimes that continue to shape geographic practice and the boundaries of geographical knowledge. Digital technologies play an instrumental role in shaping the view of geography and sociospatial relations. This paper traces the construction of the settler imaginary in geographic thought through scholarship in digital geographies and anticolonialism. By bridging anticolonial scholarship in digital geographies, this paper contributes to debates on anticolonial and decolonial refusal politics and its role in realizing reciprocal land-life relations. The (re)imagining of digital knowledge politics begins with accountable digital geographic practices on the terms of Indigenous peoples’.