Postcolonialism

Sumak Kawsay, Interculturality and Decolonialization

By
1
15 April 2013
Sumak

Many com­ment­at­ors have been high­light­ing the nov­elty of the Ecuadorian constitution’s recog­ni­tion of the right to nature and even the con­cepts of buen vivir and sumak kawsay (‘good liv­ing’ in Span­ish and Quechua respect­ively), ana­lyz­ing them as though they were simple vari­ations of lib­eral con­cepts that can be found in other Latin Amer­ican con­sti­tu­tions. How­ever, the sub­ject encom­passes themes that have not yet been suf­fi­ciently explored. First, the con­cepts of both sumak kawsay and suma qamaña, of the Quechua-​Aymara tra­di­tion, are loc­ated within an indi­gen­ous cos­mo­logy based on the fol­low­ing prin­ciples: (a) the rela­tion­ship of the whole as the life force by which it exists; (b) cor­res­pond­ence, where the dif­fer­ent aspects, regions and fields of real­ity cor­res­pond har­mo­ni­ously with ...
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Chávez and the Future of Chávismo

By
1
13 March 2013
Open Revolt

The most cha­ris­matic, demo­cratic polit­ical leader in dec­ades is dead. Whenever cha­risma plays a role in a demo­cratic con­text, it estab­lishes a par­tic­u­larly mobil­iz­ing polit­ical rela­tion­ship between rulers and the ruled, as it adds to demo­cratic legit­im­acy an iden­tity of belong­ing and a shar­ing of goals that go way bey­ond polit­ical rep­res­ent­a­tion. Well used to being hit by a dis­tant, oppress­ive power (which tends to thrive in low intens­ity demo­cra­cies), the pop­u­lar classes come to exper­i­ence a bridging of the gap between the rep­res­en­ted and their rep­res­ent­at­ives. Oppon­ents will then speak of pop­u­lism and author­it­ari­an­ism, but they will sel­dom con­vince any voters. This is because, in a demo­cratic con­text, cha­risma allows for levels of demo­cratic civic edu­ca­tion that are oth­er­wise very dif­fi­cult to attain. Such unique ...
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Hugo Chavez: The Revolution Will Not be Televised

By
3
6 March 2013
roy-lichtenstein-drowning-girl-1

We were saddened to see the death of Hugo Chavez today — and the barely con­tained joy from parts of the global elite. The focus on the ‘restric­tions to the media’ in par­tic­u­lar forms the cent­ral plank of the vari­ous lib­eral, neo-​liberal and neo-​con responses to his gov­ern­ment. We thought it would be good to post a reminder of the reason why par­tic­u­lar media out­lets in Venezuela were restric­ted over the last dec­ade. The Revolu­tion will not be Tele­vised is a fly-​on-​the-​wall doc­u­ment­ary from an Irish film crew who happened to be in Venezuela when the coup against Chavez began. It is com­pel­ling watch­ing, although its cir­cu­la­tion has been sur­pris­ingly cur­tailed by its distributers.
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Eco-​Technics: Notes on the Thought of Jean-​Luc Nancy

By
0
28 February 2013

Nancy coins the term eco-​technics to describe the cur­rent global politico-​economic con­junc­ture. Hil­lis Miller explains: ‘“Eco” comes from the Greek word oikos, the house or home. The pre­fix “eco-​” is used more broadly now to refer to the total envir­on­ment within which one or another “liv­ing” creature “dwells”’ (Hil­lis Miller 2012, 66). Thus, at stake in the term is the man­ner in which the ‘eco’ is tech­no­lo­gic­ally determ­ined and enframed. For Nancy, eco­tech­nics is closely asso­ci­ated with glob­al­iz­a­tion, which he sug­gests should be ana­lysed as a double phe­nomenon: that is as the eco­tech­no­lo­gical enfram­ing of the world in global cap­it­al­ism, and the mon­di­al­isa­tion or world-​formation that ‘main­tains the ref­er­ence to the world’s hori­zon, as a space of human rela­tions, as a space ...
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On the Right to Peace and the Environment

By
0
18 February 2013
War and Destruction / Kuwait

Peace and the envir­on­ment are two equally wide-​reaching top­ics, and con­sequently they could be stud­ied sep­ar­ately and from a vari­ety of per­spect­ives. In this art­icle, we will endeav­our to demon­strate the rela­tion­ship between peace and the envir­on­ment start­ing with the idea that the pre­ser­va­tion of both is sig­ni­fic­antly com­prom­ised by the cur­rent eco­nomic sys­tem. Our cent­ral premise is that both peace and an eco­lo­gic­ally bal­anced envir­on­ment are incom­pat­ible with con­tem­por­ary eco­nomic practices. The mar­ket eco­nomy, which has been the pre­dom­in­ant sys­tem since the Age of Dis­cov­ery took hold in the six­teenth cen­tury, is sus­tained by the incess­ant exploit­a­tion of nat­ural resources and by viol­ent con­flict. Both our envir­on­mental exploit­a­tion and our con­flicts have been becom­ing increas­ingly intense and soph­ist­ic­ated, to ...
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The People’s Law Tribunals in Pakistan

By
4
10 January 2013
Okara 09/01

QM: A set of move­ments you have been involved with in Pun­jab is the sath, a form of people’s law. What is a sath and how does it trans­late? What areas are gov­erned by sath? What is your involve­ment? Finally, can you explain how the exper­i­ence of law and justice dif­fers between state law and the people’s sath? AF: The exper­i­ence of sath began in South­ern Pun­jab. Before we begin to explain the sath, it is import­ant to under­stand the pos­i­tion of South­ern Pun­jab within Pun­jab and Pakistan. The com­munit­ies settled in the South are heav­ily impov­er­ished, mar­gin­al­ised and sub­ject to a pecu­liar form of dis­place­ment within their own ter­rit­ory. This form of extrac­tion involves the set­tle­ment of Cent­ral Pun­j­abis and the estab­lish­ment ...
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Are we aware of the current recolonisation of the South?

By
0
18 October 2012
Oswaldo Guayasamin – Hands of Protest

It would not be sur­pris­ing if, in the con­text of an inter­na­tional con­fer­ence, a group of jur­ists from dif­fer­ent nations iden­ti­fied a set of com­mon jur­idical ref­er­ences based on dif­fer­ent legal sys­tems. This occur­rence would be attrib­uted to the pro­cess of glob­al­isa­tion. How­ever, it might also not be con­sidered curi­ous if a his­toric study about law in the nine­teenth cen­tury were to con­clude that legal sys­tems from vari­ous corners of the world shared a set of com­mon legal prin­ciples. It is com­mon for jur­ists from a sig­ni­fic­ant vari­ety of coun­tries to encounter the same legal and her­men­eutic mod­els as well as the same con­cep­tions of fun­da­mental rights, account­ab­il­ity, gov­ernance, and demo­cracy. In the past, as in the present, these mod­els were imposed on dif­fer­ent ...
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The Political Economy of Indigenous Dispossession: Bare and Dispensable Lives in the Andes

By
2
9 October 2012
Soscial Conflict, Cusco, Peru

The expan­sion of the extract­ive indus­tries has, as coun­ter­parts, first, the reac­tion of indi­gen­ous com­munit­ies in the defense of their com­munal goods (land, water, graz­ing, etc.), and second, the viol­ent counter-​​attack of the state through police and mil­it­ary repres­sion, legit­im­ated many times by the of excep­tion (in Peru the “state of emer­gency”, a kind of state of excep­tion, has been applied by gov­ern­ments in pre­vi­ous years to con­trol socio-​​environmental protests). Polit­ical eco­nomy and legal policy are both rel­ev­ant to this situ­ation and both are func­tion­ally connected. In respect of polit­ical eco­nomy, let us bring to mind what David Har­vey calls “accu­mu­la­tion by dis­pos­ses­sion”, which is just the the­or­et­ical update of the “prim­it­ive accu­mu­la­tion” described by Karl Marx, that is to ...
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Australian government asked to leave aboriginal community

By
4
5 September 2012
Amoonguna

Just over five years ago, on 21 June 2007, Australia’s then prime min­is­ter John Howard announced that rates of child sex abuse in the country’s North­ern Ter­rit­ory abori­ginal com­munit­ies were so high that they con­sti­tuted a national emer­gency. Draw­ing on the fed­eral government’s con­sti­tu­tional power to over­ride Ter­rit­ory legis­la­tion, and sus­pend­ing Australia’s Racial Dis­crim­in­a­tion Act 1975, Howard led the fed­eral gov­ern­ment in rush­ing through the North­ern Ter­rit­ory National Emer­gency Response Act 2007. Pushed through par­lia­ment in less than four weeks, there was an almost total lack of con­sulta­tion with the abori­ginal com­munit­ies that were to be affected. The Act and its asso­ci­ated amend­ing legis­la­tion, which quickly became known as ‘the inter­ven­tion’, intro­duced a range of racist and highly pater­nal­istic meas­ures to ‘pre­scribed ...
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Austerity by way of the Colonies: Workfare in the UK

By
2
28 August 2012
The_Snapshot_of_poor_law_of_1834

The taxi took an altern­ate route to the air­port that day, the day before the Queen’s Jubilee parade, to avoid the very early morn­ing rehears­als of mil­it­ary per­son­nel, horses, and oth­ers involved in orches­trat­ing the impend­ing cel­eb­ra­tions. Arriv­ing at my des­tin­a­tion 22 hours later, in a time zone 13 hours behind GMT, I went to the Guard­ian web­site and saw the head­line “Unem­ployed Bussed in to Stew­ard River Pageant”. Had the jet­lag affected my cog­nit­ive capa­cit­ies, or had the gov­ern­ment actu­ally forced the unem­ployed poor to sleep under bridges and to work, for no pay, for the cel­eb­ra­tion of the 50th year of the Queen’s sov­er­eign reign? This seemed more feudal than Dick­ensian. The fero­city of Tory aus­ter­ity meas­ures had forced ...
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Racism, Sexism and Swimming at the London Olympics

By
5
6 August 2012
chinese-swimmer-ye-shiwen-2012-london-olympics-gold-09

I’ve been a little taken aback this week at the level of racism against China in the Brit­ish and US media, and on longer-​than-​usual com­ment threads on vari­ous friends’ face­book walls. I mean, I know that racism in sport and in the media is noth­ing new, and I know that being mixed race white-​Chinese, I’m tak­ing the vari­ous swipes being thrown at Chinese ath­letes par­tic­u­larly per­son­ally. But still, the obsess­ive furore that has sur­roun­ded the 16 year-​old swim­mer Ye Shi­wen has brought out so many hack­neyed ori­ent­al­ist ste­reo­types, it would be bor­ing if it wasn’t so hurt­ful and infuriating. For any­one who’s been asleep this past week, Ye Shi­wen broke the 400 metre indi­vidual med­ley world record, break­ing her own per­sonal best time by 5 seconds ...
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Argentina’s Expropriation of Repsol’s YPF (A Reversal of Fortune): Understanding the Decolonial Turn in Latin America

By
0
3 May 2012
Vultures

Far from being an implaus­ible para­dox, the dif­fer­ence between what is hap­pen­ing in Europe and in Latin Amer­ica lies at the epi­cen­ter of a 500-​year long farce: colo­ni­al­ity. In a monu­mental reversal of for­tune, the peoples of Latin Amer­ica are decon­struct­ing colo­ni­al­ity from its core, while within Europe this seems to be the new tune of power. What is occur­ring in Europe — the “Troika” devour­ing Greece, turn­ing its people into new colo­nial and oppressed polit­ical sub­jects, the new racism against Span­ish and Por­tuguese lazi­ness, the Irish melt­down as a sign of pro­vin­cial reck­less­ness and lack of dis­cip­line — has been pretty much the his­tory of Latin Amer­ica, that is, until now. Today (3 May 2012), the Argen­tine National Con­gress is due to approve Pres­id­ent Fernández’s plan to ...
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Delinking, Decoloniality & Dewesternization: Interview with Walter Mignolo (Part II)

By
1
2 May 2012
Walter Mignolo

Christopher Mattison: To continue our earlier discussion about Bolivia in relation to “refunding” or “decolonizing”—you’ve stated on a number of occasions that capitalism or socialism, as they are currently constituted, are not the answers? One of the alternatives that you offer to this issue is “delinking.” Could you expand on what you mean by delinking in this particular instance and how it integrates into modes of dewesternization and the various layers of decolonization? ¶ Walter Mignolo: Let me first re-state that the world is currently moving towards both rewesternization and dewesternization. The political ambition of the US (announced by Hillary Clinton in Honolulu and followed up by President Obama) is to mold the Pacific into the American Century. This ...
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Toxic Mega-​mining in Mexico: Death and Despoilment 500 Years On

By
0
26 March 2012
BVS

On 15 March this year, when many families were preparing to get away for the bridge weekend (or in reality the few able to), Bernardo Vázquez Sánchez, leader of the committee of the United Peoples of Ocotlán (Coordinadora de Pueblos Unidos del Valle de Ocotlán, CPUVO) was killed in a shooting that also left Rosalinda Canseco and Andrés Vázquez Sánchez wounded. The gunmen – clearly identified by the community – were sent by the Mayor of San José de Progreso, Alberto Mauro Sánchez who, accused of assassinating another opponent of the mining project on 18 January 2012, is a fugitive from justice. But it was the Canadian mining company, Fortuna Silver Mines (operating in Mexico under the name Minera ...
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Neither Capitalism nor Communism, but Decolonization: Interview with Walter Mignolo (Part I)

By
5
21 March 2012
Walter Mignolo

Cris Mattison : During an interview that you gave with Madina Tlostanova in 2009, you posed the question (as a response) “Why save it at all?”—in regards to the economic system and the looming financial crisis. You continued by stating that it wasn’t the institutions that required saving, but rather our planet and the entwined human network. Or rather, that the primary concern should be with individuals rather than with institutions. Now, three years later, a great deal of effort has been spent on propping up these institutions, which leaves us  where  in terms of the individuals tied to the institutions? Walter Mignolo : Certainly the debate over the relationships between the State and the Market has been revamped ...
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