and rural health in Cameroon as a window into the global politics of decolonization in Africa. French government officials and doctors in Cameroon saw the enthusiasm of the Cameroonian government for WHO proposals and the development of the medical
Search Results
Introduction
Globalizing the History of French Decolonization
Jessica Lynne Pearson
studying the history of France and its empire, this special issue encourages scholars of French decolonization—or decolonizations, plural—to draw inspiration from the recent transnational and global turns as a way of facilitating a deeper engagement with
Decolonization and Restitution: Moving Towards a More Holistic and Relational Approach
Report on the Panel on Ethnographic Museums and Indigenous People, ICOM Kyoto, September 2019
Michèle Rivet
At the twenty-fifth triennial ICOM International General Conference, which took place in Kyoto, Japan, on 1 to 7 September 2019, decolonization and restitution were discussed during a whole afternoon under the heading “Decolonization and
Giuliana Chamedes and Elizabeth A. Foster
Scholarly attention to decolonization in the French Empire and beyond has largely focused on the political transitions from colonies to nation-states. This introduction, and the essays in this special issue, present new ways of looking at decolonization by examining how religious communities and institutions imagined and experienced the end of French Empire. This approach adds valuable perspectives obscured by historiographical emphasis on French republican secularism and on the workings of the colonial state. Bringing together histories of religion and decolonization sheds new light on the late colonial period and the early successor states of the French empire. It also points to the importance of international institutions and transnational religious communities in the transitions at the end of empire.
“Like Alice, I was Brave”
The Girl in the Text in Olemaun’s Residential School Narratives
Roxanne Harde
(and, therefore, an agent of decolonization), and it seems no accident that they were published during the years that Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) convened. The picturebooks were published after the chapter books; the first of them
Matthew P. Romaniello
Russian imperialism continues to leave a strong imprint on indigenous cultures across Siberia, and throughout the Russian Federation and the post-Soviet republics. Imperialism is invasive and persistent, and it might be impossible to escape its consequences. In 1986, African novelist and postcolonial theorist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o published his influential essay collection, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. One of his arguments is that no postcolonial subject could be free from the constraints of imperialism until she or he succeeded in freeing the mind from the trap of an imposed (and foreign) language. Ngũgĩ’s experience was based on his own life growing up in Kenya, but his lesson is as applicable to Siberia as it is for East Africa. For indigenous Siberians, language and education are at the forefront of the ongoing postcolonial struggle to maintain their cultural identities in modern Russia.
Canon Fire
Decolonizing the Curriculum
Andrew Sanchez
decolonization). However, all academics have life experiences that shape how they approach anthropology; I know that I certainly do. It is therefore important that despite decades of sustained critical attention to colonialism and racialized structures of power
Girls with Disabilities in the Global South
Rethinking the Politics of Engagement
Xuan Thuy Nguyen
can transform all forms of exclusion, we need to address the challenges of visual approaches critically to understand the extent to which methods such as drawing and photovoice can address inclusion and exclusion. Decolonizing Methodologies
Samuel Kalman
Few scholars today question the binary relationship between imperialism and violence, and French historians are no exception. In recent years, a multitude of studies have appeared concerning the violence inherent in the conquest of the nineteenth-century Gallic empire, the maintenance and defense of the colonial system, and the decolonization process—massacres and torture during the Algerian War, for example. Such works often reflect Etienne Balibar’s definition of “structural violence”: an essential component of a repressive system, maintaining unequal social relations while defending “the interests, power positions, and forms of social domination.”1 This hegemony took various guises at different times throughout the history of French imperialism, operating in tandem with assaults on the indigènes (the term adopted by the authorities for natives). It could involve surveillance and intelligence gathering, security forces, and judicial-penal institutions employed to harass and control the colonized. Yet it also resulted from the forced pacification of native peoples (Alice Conklin refers to this policy as an “act of state-sanctioned violence”) and the imposition of the indigénat—the loose collection of rules that granted extraordinary police and disciplinary powers to the colonial administration, along with the imposition of forced labor and taxation.2 The ultimate defense of this system, and indeed its brutal apogee, emerged during the wars of decolonization, in which tens of thousands of the colonized were killed in Algeria and Indochina, while countless others were subjected to torture and incarceration.
Introduction
Politics of Recognition and Myths of Race
George Baca
At the time of this writing, the world is watching incredulously as terror and deprivation ravage the poorest citizens of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The region’s middle class and elite fled the disaster, while federal authorities’ inaction resulted in starvation for those too poor to leave. Such callousness embodied in US civil society and state institutions has been made transparent to the world, illuminating the increasing class inequality that has evolved since the passage of the Civil Rights Act. In light of this conflation of racism and class inequality, this forum focuses on the ways that multi-cultural politics mystify such power relations with romantic recollections of popular resistance to racism in the post–World War II era: decolonization, the US civil rights movement, and the fall of apartheid in South Africa.