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- Convenors:
-
Claudia Ledderucci
(University of Turin)
Laura Burke (University of Sussex)
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- Chairs:
-
Stefan Millar
(University of Helsinki)
Khalil Betz-Heinemann (University of Helsinki)
Brian Campbell (University of Plymouth)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Location:
- Facultat de Filologia Aula 1.3
- Sessions:
- Thursday 25 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
Colonial relations are presented as binary coloniser/colonised identities. Shifting attention to lived experiences that problematise coloniser/colonised binaries at the heart of decolonisation today, can point to ways beyond the divisions at the heart of colonialism.
Long Abstract:
Colonial relations are often presented in academic and political discourse as binary coloniser/colonised identities. However, closer scrutiny of historical and anthropological accounts show colonial efforts to assimilate and integrate colonial subjects. These accounts shift attention to lived experiences that problematise coloniser/colonised binaries still at the heart of decolonisation today ( Fanon 1952, Stoller 2002, Cooper & Stoller 1997, Hagerdal 2012,). We suggest these binaries downplay remnants of colonialism within post-colonial regimes (Richardson 2020, Hindmarch & Hillier 2022) and the ongoing effects of ‘divide-and-rule’ policies. Moreover, the coloniser/colonised binary obscures the adoption of colonial tactics adopted by postcolonial governments, as well as class, gender and racial solidarities that intersect the colonial/colonised binary. Perhaps most important is that these binaries reproduce a dualism at the heart of colonialism expressed in contemporary scientific, modernist, statist and capitalist projects rooted in an inability to overcome the subject-object dichotomy without denying it (D'Souza 2009). Therefore, to identify modes of decolonisation effectively, we must recognise and unsettle binary subjectivities of coloniality; Not because they do not have material and mortal consequences, but precisely because they do. Paradoxically, also recognising who and what these identities are useful for (e.g. cases of self determination) and for whom they are dangerous (e.g. political oppressions and violent conflict) (Mamdami 2002) or whether identity is even a helpful configuration of colonialism to use? What ethnographies point to ways to theorise beyond this dualism and associated identities, in ways that reconfigure the conversation and the power entailed therein?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 25 July, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
With the global proliferation of borders controls, resettlement has become an increasingly rare option for onward mobility beyond containment spaces. In this paper, we explore how the unequal distribution and access to mobility is creating new configurations of mimicry in the post-colonial period.
Paper long abstract:
In Kakuma Refugee Camp, the UNHCR is responsible for the processing of resettlement claims to third countries. For many refugees, resettlement can be described as the ideal outcome from the prolonged displacement, but the likelihood of receiving resettlement is extremely rare due to increasing rise of anti-immigration rhetoric from states in the global north. To be eligible for resettlement, refugees must undergo rigorous interviewing, cross-checking, and medical examinations. Successful applicants for resettlement, often emphasize their vulnerability and qualities as a “good” global citizen. Such performances, we argue, are a form of mimicry, where refugees perform subservience to UNHCR through appropriating the UN’s narratives. However, refugees are not powerless to this process, and many are conscious of these performances, often playing into them to access resettlement. Based on Millar’s twelve months of ethnographic research and Majok’s personal experiences of living in Kakuma and being resettled to Canada, we explore how resettlement in Kakuma creates a neo-colonial relationship between refugees and the governing agencies. Taking inspiration from postcolonial theory regarding mimicry (Bhabha 1994), we intend to critically address the process of resettlement, by demonstrating how the UNHCR attempts subjugates refugees through the process of resettlement. We argue that the UNHCR attempts to contain refugees in camps with the promise of resettlement, effectively tethering their future-aspirations to the camp. However, refugees have capacity to navigate beyond this binary neo-colonial relationship, finding alternative routes to mobility beyond the control of the UNHCR.
Paper short abstract:
The enlargement of the roles of the army in French overseas dependencies couples with the expansion of market-oriented civic-educational offers aimed at disciplining marginal categories of citizens. These patterns are eagerly embraced by local actors and unsettle the dualism of colonizer/colonized.
Paper long abstract:
« Le Polynésien peux devenir président! » exclaimed Noa to the amazed-looking class sitting in front of him. He continued by praising the Service Militaire Adapté (SMA), saying that through this vocational military program they – the young and disoriented newly enrolled soldiers attending the class – could become, one day, successful men like him. The SMA, founded in the 1960s to overcome imperial anxieties and to foster French territorial cohesion in the overseas dependencies, is today renowned for offering a second chance to struggling youth and boosting everyone’s capacity by teaching specific professionalizing skills. Such an enlargement of the roles and functions carried out by the army in French overseas dependencies coupled with the expansion of market-oriented civic-educational offers aimed at regimenting and disciplining marginal categories of citizens. These patterns of neoliberal paternalism in the management of poor and marginalized categories are eagerly embraced by local actors, as the example of Noa shows. Joining the army allows Polynesian social actors to express their will to succeed given the limited aspirations available to them and sets the base for the creation of asymmetrical relations of power not only among French metropolitans and Polynesians but also among Polynesians who join the army and obtain privileges (while reproducing colonial patterns and behaviors) and those who decide not to enter the corps. Such a paradoxical positioning, being both of and against the empire, unsettles the dualism of colonizer and colonized showing the coloniality inscribed in the system itself.
Paper short abstract:
This paper aims to explore the role of Pakistan’s Military as a neo-colonial hireling by unsettling the coloniser/colonised binary. Most of the research on Pakistan’s Military is framed through these binaries, downplaying the remnants of colonialism & restricting the space to redefine decolonization
Paper long abstract:
Pakistan Army is the continuation of the British Royal Indian Army. The logic of these armies is constructed upon the logic of colonialism: extraction of surplus from the indigenous population through the monopolisation of means of force and coercion on the one hand and the means of production on the other: It should not be surprising to see that the Pakistan Army is the largest capitalist empire in the country that produces cornflakes, cement, fertilisers, insurance companies, real estate etc,. It is a simple case of a monopoly over the means of violence transforming into a monopoly on politics and economics.
Most of the research on Pakistan’s military is analysed through coloniser/colonised binary.Furthermore, it overlooks the persistent 'divide and rule' project evident in the governance system, with Pakistan's military serving as the ultimate arbiter in the country's politics. As Gramsci emphasises- long term system of domination survives because its ideological roots become so powerful that it replicates itself. Then how change is possible? This research also focuses on exploring how the system of domination is replicated by Pakistan’s military through creating a new monolithic Pakistani identity. Can we pursue indigenous development as long as we operate within the confines of that colonial logic of binaries? This research paper is a mini ethnography that draws data from secondary sources (historical accounts), interviews, and lived experiences (having worked with Pakistan’s Military for a brief period). It aims to contribute to a more nuanced decolonization debate by analysing the role of Pakistan’s Military.
Paper short abstract:
Combining historical epidemiology with social anthropology I explore why malaria eradication was successful in 1940s Colonial Cyprus and identify what can be learnt for addressing mosquito diseases today. I then explore the more theoretical question of the relationship between location and disease.
Paper long abstract:
In the late 1940's the Anopheles Eradication Programme (AEP) led to Cyprus becoming arguably the first country to eradicate malaria. The programme was designed and led by 'a local' on behalf of intersecting colonial interests within a colonially occupied country. This programme barely exists within the collective memory of Cypriots and is almost entirely absent from global histories of malaria despite being widely celebrated at the time. How do we make sense of this programme? A programme that breaks multiple binaries; around human health vs wildlife health in relation to short term and long term consequences of DDT, a colonial programme that eradicated malaria within a colony - an amazing feat of public health under colonialism, a programme that actually worked yet remains absent from the discourse of a billion dollar industry supposedly invested in controlling and eradicating malaria. What is going on? How does this make sense? How were Cypriots, who had spent decades being told they couldn't look after themselves but needed British leaders, able to rise to the occasion and lead this momentous feat of public health?
Based on extensive archival research across three continents, participant observation across all areas of Cyprus, filmmaking, ethnography, and a range of multimodal methods this paper draws on the work of Green (2005, 2022), D'Souza (2009) and Napier (2003) to explore the connections and disconnections that configure mosquito-relations in Cyprus past and present.
Paper short abstract:
Based on ethnographic research I will elaborate on how the memoryscape of Białowieża, once Tsarist's private property, is perceived. Who relates to the Tsar's time in Białowieża as oppressive, and who recalls the opposite? How is this linked to contemporary control of resources and discourse?
Paper long abstract:
There has been discussion on defining the situation of East-Central Europe as a postcolonial condition (Cervinkova 2012, Chari, Verdery 2009). Much of it covers the imperialism of Tsarist Russia, which led to the research project on how institutional actors and local communities dealt with heritage/s from tsarist times in various parts of Poland.
In my presentation, I will focus on Białowieża - a big village settled in the heart of the Białowieża Primeval Forest (BPF) with a multi-ethnic and multi-religious community. Based on discourse analyses, 20 IDI, and ethnographic observations I will elaborate on how the memoryscape of Białowieża (whose dominant layout originated when Białowieża Forrest was a Tsarist's private property with the palace in the centre) has been treated and is variously remembered.
Not only the complexity of state and ethnic heritage but also the presence of a powerful symbolic resource as the last primeval forest make Białowieża not a typical village (Franklin 2000; Niedziałkowski et al. 2012; Winiarski et. al. 2012). During my research, I mapped vital sources of divisions and a sense of oppression among part incumbents related to the establishment of Polish statehood in 1918 and the arrival of the uniformed services of State Forest and National Park, which complicate the identities of colonisers. Thus I will provocatively propose the application of the perspective of “green colonialism” (Kwashirai 2009; Normann, 2020; Kartveit 2021) coined in reference to former colonies in Africa, and put it on the discussion about this case study.
Paper short abstract:
International oligarchs seeking Maltese passports have occupied ruined imperial infrastructures and revived economies and expectations established during British rule. Requiring local compliance, their presence unsettles the colonial/post-colonial dichotomy on which Maltese historiography relies.
Paper long abstract:
In 2019, a prominent Maltese human-rights NGO urged compatriots direct their anger not at harmless sub-Saharan migrants, but at international oligarchs, whose quest for Maltese (and thus EU) passports required them to buy expensive apartments in newly-constructed gated-communities. The legal and construction industries servicing these elites provided newfound wealth for Malta’s landowners. The NGO feared, however, that they were jeopardising Malta’s reputation and making the island inaccessible and inhospitable to upcoming generations. These cosmopolitan elites were thus likened to “White Walkers” from ‘Game of Thrones’; otherworldly necromancers whose presence zombifies humans and kills the land.
“White walkers” are perceived as a disruptive unprecedented product of late capitalism. This paper instead argues they have snugly occupied ruined imperial infrastructures and re-activated dormant colonial relations and expectations established during British rule. Their presence unsettles the dichotomies (coloniser/colonised; colonial/post-colonial) on which Maltese historiography and conceptions of sovereignty are built. In Malta, British authorities differentiated between “civil” and “military” affairs. All military business took placed in fortified enclaves, barred to the natives. Following “independence”, these enclaves fell into ruin, being unsuitable for industrial or residential development. “Heterotopias” par excellence, they now house global elites, whose ivory towers mushroom atop their foundations.
The indifference of the Maltese to re-enclavisation (and the sale of passports) is dismissed by activists, scholars, and European politicians as a sign of Malta’s failure to fulfil its post-colonial responsibilities. Unwritten household histories, however, suggest acute awareness that survival in a “fragmented ecosystem” requires flirtation and compliance with dangerous forces from oversees.
Paper short abstract:
I will present my ongoing research on Campesino settlers land tenure engagements in Chiquitanía, as anthropogenic environmental transformations reconfigure livelihoods, knowledges, and the ‘motley’ territorial networks in this agrarian extractive frontier.
Paper long abstract:
The agricultural transformation of the dry-forests of Chiquitanía in the Bolivian lowlands has multi-scalar consequences for ecologies, livelihoods, and rural communities. In the last decade, land fires, commonplace in refashioning and reinvigorating ecologies, have been appropriated, scaled, and run wild, spurring eco-political crises. Campesinos are ‘hybrid’ settlers in this landscape, in frictional relations with extractive processes and local indigenous territorial struggles. Portrayed by agroindustrial elites as Andean colonizers uncaringly spurring fires, these internal settlers stem from impoverished communities across high- and lowlands. They represent a de-territorialized, pluri-national, and market-oriented indigeneity challenging essentialist frameworks for understanding (de)colonization, only uncomfortably aligned with MaS government policies (Fabricant 2012).
Rather than being just destructive ‘aliens’, ‘hybrid’ smallholder settlers across Latin America cultivate ecological ethics through land tenures (Campos 2008). In Bolivia, state exemptions to settler deforestation pave the way for Campesinos to hold land, affording subsistence and economic participative citizenship, but cycles of debt and ecological degradation. and obtuse land titling push them toward maximizing short-term profit. I present my ongoing research on Campesino settlers land tenure engagements in Chiquitanía, as anthropogenic environmental transformations reconfigure livelihoods, knowledges, and the horizons for ‘motley’ territorial networks. I portray how biophysical processes such as anthropogenic (wild)fires gather disparate territorial worlds, shaping territorial spill-overs, contestations, and collaborations. Investigating Campesino territorial entanglements with extractive landscape transformation, I explore how territorialities, situated in livelihoods, ecological knowledges and practices as matters of care (Bellacasa 2017), intersect with regionalist, extractivist, and indigenous politics in the (re)fashioning of (de)colonial territorial projects in Chiquitanía.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on the theoretical discussions on the articulation between whiteness, Europeanness and coloniality, this paper analyses how whiteness, as a colonial privilege, can be constructed in one context and sometimes contested in another, in particular through processes of migrantisation.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on the perspectives of critical whiteness and post/decoloniality, in particular on the theoretical discussions on the articulation between whiteness, Europeanness and coloniality, this paper analyses how whiteness, as a colonial privilege, can be constructed in one context and sometimes deconstructed or at least contested in another, in particular through migrantisation processes, often synonymous for racialisation.
These perspectives show that whiteness and coloniality are intrinsically linked and (re)produce processes of racialisation. Migration studies drawing on these perspectives show how the combination of whiteness and coloniality produces hierarchical categories of migrants, as in the case of immigration policies differentiating according to people’s ‘origin’. Furthermore, these categories are often used as synonyms for race. And Switzerland is no exception.
Therefore, I propose to put into perspective two national contexts for the construction of whiteness, Chile and Switzerland, based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with Chileans of European descent who have a migration experience to Switzerland, to examine several spaces in which this whiteness-coloniality nexus operates as a power relationship.
Participants’ life trajectories highlight the colonial construction of whiteness in Chile and, above all, the privileges it confers on people marked as European/white in this context. On the other hand, in the Swiss context, the hierarchical and often racialised categorisations of migration are affecting them at the institutional level and beyond, in their everyday lives, questioning the continuity of their privilege.