Decolonization

Not-guilty verdicts, mistrials, and impunity for the Bundy family and many of their supporters in the armed confrontations over public land use in Nevada and Oregon. Expanded access for private oil, gas, mining, and logging industries and the downsizing of national monuments such as Bears Ears lead by Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke. A number of highly contentious debates and sensationalized events have again focused attention on land held in the public domain by the United States. This essay argues that federal land policy as a form of colonial administration has been constitutive for the logic of expectation as property in what is now the United States. From the state land cessions negotiated on behalf of the Articles of Confederation to the preemption acts (1830–1841) to the homestead acts (1862–1916) to present-day demands for land transfer, the acquisition and disposal of the so-called public domain have been central to westward colonization, the consolidation of the nation-state, and the promise of land ownership as the ostensible foundation of individual liberty. These dynamics are evident in contemporary conflicts over public lands and arguments for the transfer of public lands to either state or private ownership. Approaching the Bundy occupations as flashpoints that illuminate competing interpretations and claims to land within the history of westward colonization, this essay seeks to demonstrate the ways in which expectation emerges from particular economies of dispossession of indigenous peoples that have historically worked through and across the division of public and private property.

The dislocated, deterritorialized discourse produced by repatriates from formerly European colonies has remained overlooked in academic scholarship. One such group is the Eurasian “Indo” community that has its roots in the former Dutch East Indies, today’s Indonesia. This article focuses on Tjalie Robinson, the intellectual leader of this community from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. The son of a Dutch father and a British-Javanese mother, Robinson became the leading voice of the diasporic Indo community in the Netherlands and later also in the United States. His engagement resulted in the foundation of the Indo magazine Tong Tong and the annual Pasar Malam Besar, what was to become the world’s biggest Eurasian festival. Robinson played an essential role in the cultural awareness and self-pride of the eventually global Indo community through his elaboration of a hybrid and transnational identity concept. By placing his focus “tussen twee werelden” (in-between two worlds) and identifying “mixties-schap” (mestizaje) as the essential characteristic of Indo identity, Robinson anticipated debates on hybridity, transnationalism, and creolism that only much later would draw attention from scholars in the field of postcolonial studies. This article highlights Robinson’s pioneering role in framing a deterritorialized hybrid alternative to nationalist essentialism in the postcolonial era.

Iris Ruiz is a Lecturer in the Merritt Writing Program at UC, Merced, which is located in the heart of the Central Valley and is a designated Hispanic Serving Institution. She teaches courses in advanced composition, journal editing, first and second year composition and Chicanx Studies. She recently published Reclaiming Composition for Chicano/as and other Ethnic Minorities: A Critical History and Pedagogy and an edited collection, Decolonizing Rhetoric and Composition Studies: New Latinx Keywords for Theory and Pedagogy, which Raúl Sánchez and she are co-editing and includes many CCCC Latinx Caucus gente. Iris has been a member of the NCTE/CCCC Latinx Caucus since 2000, contributing to Writing and Working for Change projects, Reflections, the formation of the People Of Color caucus for the WPA, and she is currently working on a statement for the Caucus to consider in support of Ethnic Studies nationwide to be release soon by NCTE. She has recently been elected to the position of Co-Chair for the NCTE/CCCC Latinx Caucus. Her indigenous roots stem from her great-grandmother, Angelita Treviño, who is pure-blooded indigenous. Iris has gleaned much of what she knows about Curanderismo, indigenous spirituality, and natural healing practices from Angelita's memory. She hopes to continue to " Indigenize " Western epistemology as the world continues to go through a decolonial paradigm shift that has no due date, but that is currently in process.

For too long Indigenous queers have been forced to quiet our pleasure and intimacy to be digestible to our communities. As more Indigenous queer scholars have begun to interrogate and move in conversation between Native studies and queer and feminist theory, Indigenous queers and feminists are carefully articulating a necessary shift in approach and perspective when unpacking the erasures and displacemennt of intimacy and desire under the tyranny of cis-heteropatriarchy, settler colonialism, and occupation. In the case of Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) theories of intimacy can only emerge from the specific lessons our ʻāina (land, that which feeds) has taught us about how to practice an aloha (love, pleasure, and intimacy) that is just, generative, and deeply satisfying. Therefore, this article takes aloha and ʻāina seriously. And together as author and reader we explore the way kaona (Hawaiian literary techniques) demonstrate a deeply profound relationship between our ʻāina and the ways our kūpuna practice intimacy, pleasure, and consent with each other. These moʻolelo call us all to remember that if ʻāina and our relationship to her is our greatest model of intimacy then reestablishing an intimate connection to her and to each other are our most promising pathways towards decolonisation.

While post-development theory is very concerned with the ways in
which development has impacted upon the countries of the Global
South, there has been relatively little written on post-development
theory from an African perspective. This paper identifies some of
the ways in which post-development theory fails to adequately
understand the African experience of development. In particular,
I explore the difficulty that post-development theory confronts
when faced with the continued desire on the part of many people
in Africa for development. In his introduction to the new edition of
The Development Dictionary, Wolfgang Sachs discusses this desire,
noting that despite development’s many failures, many still associate
the concept with self-affirmation and redress. He explains this
continued desire for development as being indicative of the need
for the decolonisation of the imagination. In this paper, I show some
of the problems with this explanation and present alternative ways of
understanding the persistence of the desire for development in Africa.

This qualitative arts-based study made use of poetic inquiry to analyze and represent the stories of non-Indigenous people recognized as allies of Indigenous peoples in Canada. I adopted a theoretical foundation in critical realism, focusing on the role of agency in the emergent realities of the participants’ ally work (Archer, 2002). I grounded the study in literatures that drew from multiple Indigenous perspectives on teaching, learning and knowledge; social justice education and awareness; and postcolonial theory and decolonization. Thematically, the areas of ally experience that interested me most were their actions, emotions, and how they related to others in the spaces they occupied. Using the ally interview transcripts as raw data, I created found poems that reflected those themes. Constructing the poems while engaging in analysis led me to attempt to decolonize language and names. Hence, I made use of a disruptive strategy to bring attention to the extent to which language reflects colonization. In the final chapter of the dissertation, I outlined implications for adult education theory and practice as suggested by the study. In addition, I made suggestions for actions that allies-in-the-making may take up and directions for future study.

Background: The colonial origins of schooling and the implications these
origins have on leadership is missing from educational leadership literature. Indeed little has been published on decolonizing and indigenous ways of leading schools. Purpose: In this article, we synthesize the literature on indigenous, decolonizing education leadership values and practices across national and international spaces that have been informed to various degrees by colonial models of schooling. Methodology: Through a review of the research and keywords including colonialism, educational leadership, indigenous communities, and decolonization, we identify two overarching themes. Findings: First, we found that the literature revealed a critique of the way in which Westernized Eurocentric schooling serves as a tool of imperialism, colonization, and control in the education of Indigenous peoples. Second, we discovered that the literature provided unique, but overlapping worldviews that situate the values and approaches enacted by Indigenous leaders throughout the globe. Within this second theme, we identify five strands of an Indigenous, Decolonizing School Leadership (IDSL) framework that can contribute to the development and reflection of school leadership scholars and practitioners. Specifically, we found that the five consistent and identifiable strands across IDSL include prioritizing Indigenous ancestral knowledge, enacting self-reflection and self-determination, connecting with and empowering the community, altruism, and spirituality as expressed through servant leadership, and inclusive communication practices.
Conclusion: Based on the identified worldviews and values, we conclude by offering insights on the structure and policy of post-colonial schooling, as well as implications for the theory, research and practice needed to reclaim the co-opted contributions of Indigenous leaders in ways that decenter Western colonial approaches to leadership.

It is through specific genealogies of scholarship on race and coloniality, Indigenous feminisms, and Black feminisms that we can escape the well-rehearsed trope of 'land as body'. Within a comparative hemispheric American studies framework, I consider the centre of struggles over empire and extractivism that show the unravelling of the binary between embodiment and territories. I also consider submerged perspectives and forms of solidarity by those who refuse the material and symbolic infrastructures of racial and extractive capitalism.

Employing the tools of postcolonial studies, this paper examines the manner in which the legacy of colonialism continues to influence the analysis of the Quran in the Euro-American academy. While Muslim lands are no longer directly colonized, intellectual colonialism continues to prevail in the privileging of Eurocentric systems of knowledge production to the detriment and even exclusion of modes of analysis that developed in the Islamic world for over a thousand years. This form of intellectual hegemony results in multifaceted epistemological reductionism that denies efficacy to the analytical tools developed by the classical Islamic tradition. The presumed intellectual superiority of Euro-American analytical modes has become a constitutive and persistent feature of Quranic Studies, influencing all aspects of the field. Its persistence prevents some scholars from encountering, let alone employing, the analytical tools of the classical Islamic tradition and presents obstacles to a broader discourse in the international community of Quranic Studies scholars. Acknowledging the obstacles to which the coloniality of knowledge has given rise in Quranic Studies can help us to develop more inclusive approaches in which multiple modes of analysis are incorporated and scholars from variegated intellectual backgrounds can build a more transnational field of Quranic Studies.

This Ph.D. is an ethnographic-activist-based project. It first examines the genealogy of popular nationalist-statist and religious enforcements of postcolonial cisheteronormativity in Egypt through the examination of two case studies, the Cairo 52 case in 2001 and the transgendered case of Sally Abd Allah in 1982. It then presents my fieldwork, which documents my ethnographic narrators’ resistance to these narratives. Specifically, my fieldwork investigates the neocolonial/neoimperial conditions that inform the circulatory geopolitical relationship between Islam and queerness in non-Western societies such as franchise-colonial Egypt and settler-colonial U.S./Canada, in an age where sexual and gender diversity is a hallmark of neoliberal ‘secular’ modernity, whose advent historically exposed Arabs, North Africans, and Muslims, if not all non-Europeans, to a plethora of false competing dualisms, such as secular/religious and heterogeneity/homogeneity, as well as discourses such as homonationalism (al-qawmiyyat al-mīthlīyat) and pinkwashing (al-ghaseel al-banafsajiy). My fieldwork participants offer decolonial, gender-based, readings and formulations of queerness through their diverse and complex experiences, which evade the apparent tidiness of European feminist and narrow LGBTIQA categories that characterizes most Western/non-Western political queer scholarship. While the spiritual initiatives of diasporic queer Muslims clarifies the urgent need for a radical, decolonial, reinterpretation of Islam, the revolutionary participation of queer Egyptians in the so-called ‘Arab Spring/Islamist Winter’ offers crucial challenges to both discourses on gender/sexuality in the Middle East and academic and activist literatures on radical and revolutionary social action. In this dissertation, queer Egyptians, and queer Muslims in particular, appear as single theorists of radical political activity, not the co-opted and duped, colonized pawns of the ‘Gay Empire’. This exploration of queer interventions in revolutionary Egypt will force radical social theorists to consider postcolonial/decolonial queer politics as a primary basis for determining the shape and course of future revolutionary theory and praxis in this current xenophobic and Islamophobic geopolitical moment. Utilizing intersectional/assemblage based theories, I argue that strictly adopting sexual discourses, in the absence of accounting for colonialism/imperialism as well as engaging postcolonial, critical race and feminist discourses, is insufficient to narratively/analytically understand the dynamic nature of Arab and Muslim gender and sexualities in these Islamophobic conditions.

*The Ph.D. is a forthcoming book. Nonetheless, in an effort to provide an overview of this interdisciplinary and transnational project I’m offering the table of contents, this chapter, the Bibliography and Appendix till the impending release.

This text is a non-linear bricollage of reflections that surfaced at a keynote address at the Lapes conference in San Francisco in 2017. In this event,  I invited participants to ponder and wonder about existence, reality, meaning, and practices of political and existential resistance through interwoven images, analyses, propositions, invitations and open-ended questions. This text echoes the invitation issued in this event to re-imagine and experience education as collective onto-genesis: an expansion of horizons and constellations of knowledges, affect, lived experiences, sensibilities, temporalities, spatialities, rhythms, neuro-metabolic processes, and possibilities of (co)existence.

The AlgerianWar was one of the longest and bloodiest wars of the decolonization
period. It was also a unique conflict in that it consisted of three protagonists – the
Algerians, the French, and the French settlers – that modified the colonized/
colonizer dynamic marking the majority of other colonial independence movements.
The war was also highly controversial: for nearly half a century the term
‘AlgerianWar’was banned from official acts in France, and it was only in 1999 that
the French government started to confront with the subject.

Not everything is wrong with the idea of botanical decolonisation: science tells us that biodiversity is generally good for ecosystems. But I argue that we need to think harder, longer and in more complex ways about the chains of inference linking our thinking – from plants to animals, peoples, and territories and starting from the meaning and agency of the word “native”. This paper explores the current debate, critically addresses the idea of decolonization in the garden, and untangles the biological and symbolic threads that complicate the ways we think about plants in our backyard.

From its vivid cover, Ambelin Kwaymullina’s anti-colonial handbook, ‘Living on Stolen Land’, renders in bold brushstrokes the culture of oppression that plagues settler systems, culture and subjectivities. It addresses readers open to considering that colonialism need not be permanently with us, but is maintaining its power through the repetition of particular modes of thought and action.

A deep district-wide commitment to racial equity for African American male students, based on the framework of targeted universalism, has laid the foundation for expanding the focus to include African American girls, Latino/a students, and Asian and Pacific Islander students.

Localizada no Sudeste Asiático, a República Democrática do Timor-Leste se tornou um país independente no dia 20 de maio de 2002 com o apoio da Organização das Nações Unidas (ONU) que, através da promoção de missões de paz, realizou esforços na (re)estruturação desse país entre 1999 e 2012. Durante esse período, a República Federativa do Brasil ampliou as suas capacidades de projeção no âmbito externo e na coordenação das Forças Armadas brasileiras ao se engajar em diversas dessas operações relacionadas à questão timorense, considerada por Pepe e Mathias (2006) como um dos principais eventos das relações internacionais depois de findada a Guerra Fria. Nessa perspectiva, buscou-se depreender quais foram as motivações brasileiras e como o Brasil se engajou nas missões de paz da ONU em Timor-Leste. Para tanto, foi necessário aplicar um recorte histórico que demonstrasse a árdua trajetória timorense em busca de sua independência.

The popular Samoan adage 'o le ala i le pule o le tautua' (the pathway to leadership is through service) is commonly understood by Samoans around the world as an important life value. Writings about tautua (service) have chronicled traditional understandings of the term (Tavale 2009, Tavale 2013) and more recently with personal experiences of tautua in Samoa (Filisi, 2018) and transnational matai in their communities (Falaniko 2020, Fetui 2020). Being able to trace the links between these understandings of tautua leads to considering ways in which tautua is enacted and enabled in Samoa and transnational societies. Tavale's four stages of tautua (Tavale, 2013) and his collection of proverbial expressions that focus on tautua (Tavale, 2009) form a natural foundation for its application in Samoa and internationally. Through the eyes of matai with Samoan language fluency, we use our multiple service roles with the intent of privileging interdisciplinary Pasifika research. We introduce the three intergenerational spheres of service-tautua ia tautua (serve to serve), tautua ia pule (serve to lead) and pule ia tautua (lead to serve)-that show what tautua looks like in a lifecycle. Samoan indigenous knowledge pertaining to service foregrounds the shared experiences of tautua by the authors. The oscillation of the spheres speaks directly to service, positioning our own individual experiences as matai, as Pasifika tertiary students (Pilisi, 2020) and how we negotiate our journey of tautua within our collective contexts through the conceptualisation of the "tautua lifecycle" model-to explore the pathway to leadership through service.

Decolonization. Focus: America
There is no doubt that an in-depth knowledge of reality requires a positive, constructive approach, a clear willingness to put oneself in the other's shoes and therefore to question one's own certainties, beliefs and conventions. An articulated exercise that also requires a certain maturity, a predisposition to dialogue and above all a training and scientific basis that can support human actions.

This conceptual article explores self-directed localized open educational practices for a decolonized South African higher education curriculum. From the historical context, language demography and especially due to student protests regarding the curriculum the need for a decolonized South African curriculum is evident. In this article, an overview is presented about the context-specific issues in relation to decolonization and language. It is proposed that in order to move towards a decolonized South African curriculum, there should be a self-directed learning approach to open educational practices which would involve carefully planned and supported localization efforts. This process also implies acknowledging both internal and external localization as done in a structured or even student-driven manner. Furthermore, localization means drawing on translations study theories pertaining to specifically dynamic equivalence. This approach would require increasingly accommodating languages other than English in the higher education context and as such language attitude planning efforts are needed. Finally, open educational practices would require an open ongoing process which provides agency to South African teachers and students to use the language of their choice to engage with content applicable and relevant to their contexts. In addition, this would imply including indigenous knowledge in order to address the needs of a decolonized curriculum. In conclusion, this article presents some practical recommendations towards self-directed localized open educational practices for a decolonized South African higher education curriculum.

Found in *Teaching Arabic Literature in Translation* edited by Michelle Hartman  (MLA Publications 2018; pp 41-61), this essay is an exploration of the potential pedagogical spaces of alternative methodologies and theories for teaching Arabic literature in English translation in North American university classrooms. This proposal encourages academics—specialists, comparativists, and generalists alike—to reflect not only on the contexts of Arabic literary production (i.e., the context of the text, author, language, etc.) but also on the social relations in which educators, their students, classrooms, and institutions are enmeshed with the translation, circulation, deployment, and reading of Arabic texts within any given political moment. In exploring teaching Arabic literature in translation, this chapter takes a decolonial approach where the students and instructor not only locate themselves in regards to the text and the origins of that Arabic text (for example, in the age of  the Cold War, the American Unipolar World, or post-American Empire). But also, the pedagogical thoughtfulness considers ideological constructs of reading and writing (the commuting between the context, history and contact points of Arabic and English) that might be mutually untranslatable but also could yield ways to decenter the coloniality of the learning process in US higher education and its experience with the Global South.

In this course, students will be introduced to the sustainable development goals (SDGs), the concept of development and different discourses around them. Two key concepts, advocated by decolonial and feminist scholar-activists, for the study of local communities and their sustainable development; namely, the concepts of “delinking” and “positionality” will also be presented and discussed. The premise of this course is to show how these concepts provide us with non-normative and post-disciplinary perspectives for knowledge production on local development. In addition, these concepts are argued to also be important for sustainable development (Mignolo, 2016), especially in relation to the many attempts worldwide for the reconstitution of local ways of seeing, sensing and becoming in the world.

The story of the “oil shock” is normally linked to that of the Arab-Israeli conflict in October 1973. The purpose of this article is to trace the origins of the oil crisis well before the beginning of the Yom Kippur war, describing it as the final outcome of the ongoing common struggle by developing countries to gain control over natural resources, develop their national economy and reform the international economic institutions created at Bretton Woods.

Settler colonialism involves processes of destruction and substitution aiming to replace indigenous with European/western worlds. But indigenous worlds persist in numerous spaces, moments and interactions where distinct ontologies and ways of being-in-the-world prevail. In Aotearoa New Zealand these spaces of the Māori world persist most obviously on marae. Māori and western worlds also briefly come together in public contexts where Māori protocols are used to mark openings of various sorts, temporarily governing public space and sociability. In this paper, I explore a different case where, I argue, Māori and western worlds are entangled or knotted together in the carved pou in the atrium space of a new community building in Kaitaia.

De cynische vraag ‘Wat hebben wij aan de Antillen?’ wordt vaak gesteld, met weinig begrip en respect voor een eeuwenlange koloniale  geschiedenis. Het is met de zes Caribische eilanden niet anders dan met de Waddeneilanden: zij horen er nu eenmaal bij, en de relevante vraag is wat ‘wij’ maken van dit trans-Atlantische verband dat, inderdaad, vaak knelt, maar dat wij hoe dan ook delen.  Dat ‘wij’ betreft niet alleen de Nederlanders aan de Noordzee, maar ook de Nederlanders aan de overzijde van de Atlantische oceaan, in de Cariben. Daarover gaat dit artikel. Allereerst bespreek ik de historische achtergrond, vervolgens de dekolonisatie met het Statuut van 1954 en de spanningen die dit complexe arrangement van non-soevereiniteit onvermijdelijk blijft oproepen, om te eindigen met een pleidooi voor een bredere Koninkrijksagenda.