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68 books about Decolonization
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Aazheyaadizi: Worldview, Language, and the Logics of Decolonization
Mark D. Freeland
Michigan State University Press, 2020
Library of Congress E99.C6F675 2020 | Dewey Decimal 497.333

Many of the English translations of Indigenous languages that we commonly use today have been handed down from colonial missionaries whose intent was to fundamentally alter or destroy prior Indigenous knowledge and praxis. In this text, author Mark D. Freeland develops a theory of worldview that provides an interrelated logical mooring to shed light on the issues around translating Indigenous languages in and out of colonial languages. In tandem with other linguistic and narrative methods, this theory of worldview can be employed to help root out the reproduction of colonial culture in Indigenous languages and can be a useful addition to the repertoire of tools needed to return to life-giving relationships with our environment. These issues of decolonization are highlighted in the trajectory of treaty language associated with relationships to land and their present-day importance. This book uses the 1836 Treaty of Washington and its contemporary manifestation in Great Lakes fishing rights and the State of Michigan’s 2007 Inland Consent Decree as a means of identifying the role of worldview in deciphering the logics embedded in Anishinaabe thought associated with these relationships to land. A fascinating study for students of Indigenous and linguistic disciplines, this book deftly demonstrates the significance of worldview theory in relation to the logics of decolonization of Indigenous thought and praxis.
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African Catholic: Decolonization and the Transformation of the Church
Elizabeth A. Foster
Harvard University Press, 2019
Library of Congress BX1675.F67 2018 | Dewey Decimal 282.670917541

Elizabeth Foster examines how French imperialists and the Africans they ruled imagined the religious future of sub-Saharan Africa in the years just before and after decolonization. The story encompasses the transition to independence, Catholic contributions to black intellectual currents, and efforts to create an authentically “African” church.
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African Intellectuals and Decolonization
Nicholas M. Creary
Ohio University Press, 2012
Library of Congress DT30.5.A3634 2012 | Dewey Decimal 306.096

Decades after independence for most African states, the struggle for decolonization is still incomplete, as demonstrated by the fact that Africa remains associated in many Western minds with chaos, illness, and disorder. African and non-African scholars alike still struggle to establish the idea of African humanity, in all its diversity, and to move Africa beyond its historical role as the foil to the West.

As this book shows, Africa’s decolonization is an ongoing process across a range of fronts, and intellectuals—both African and non-African—have significant roles to play in that process. The essays collected here examine issues such as representation and retrospection; the roles of intellectuals in the public sphere; and the fundamental question of how to decolonize African knowledges. African Intellectuals and Decolonization outlines ways in which intellectual practice can serve to de-link Africa from its global representation as a debased, subordinated, deviant, and inferior entity.

Contributors
Lesley Cowling, University of the Witwatersrand
Nicholas M. Creary, University at Albany
Marlene De La Cruz, Ohio University
Carolyn Hamilton, University of Cape Town
George Hartley, Ohio University
Janet Hess, Sonoma State University
T. Spreelin McDonald, Ohio University
Ebenezer Adebisi Olawuyi, University of Ibadan
Steve Odero Ouma, University of Nairobi
Oyeronke Oyewumi, State University of New York
at Stony Brook
Tsenay Serequeberhan, Morgan State University

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American Visions of the Netherlands East Indies/Indonesia: US Foreign Policy and Indonesian Nationalism 1920-1949
Frances Gouda and Thijs Brocades Zaalberg
Amsterdam University Press, 2002
Library of Congress E183.8.I5G68 2002 | Dewey Decimal 327.73059809041

The result of a Fulbright senior research fellowship celebrating the simultaneous 50th anniversaries of the Fulbright Exchange Foundation and the Indonesian Republic, this book offers a new perspective on American attitudes toward Dutch colonial rule and Indonesia’s struggle for independence. Drawing on extensive research in American, Dutch, Indonesian, and Australian diplomatic records and archival documents, as well as the archives of the United Nations, the authors give a new overview of the political background and changing rationale of American foreign policies.
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Autobiography and Decolonization: Modernity, Masculinity, and the Nation-State
Philip Holden
University of Wisconsin Press, 2008
Library of Congress CT25.H65 2008 | Dewey Decimal 808.06692

Philip Holden reveals deeply gendered connections between the writing of individual lives and of the narratives of nations emerging from colonialism. Autobiography and Decolonization is the first book to give serious academic attention to autobiographies of nationalist leaders in the process of decolonization, attending to them not simply as partial historical documents, but as texts involved in remaking the world views of their readers.
            Holden examines Mohandas K. Gandhi’s An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Marcus Garvey’s fragmentary Autobiography,Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford’s Ethiopia Unbound, Lee Kuan Yew’s The Singapore Story, Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, Jawaharlal Nehru’s An Autobiography, and Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana:The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah.
            Holden argues that these examples of life writing have had significant influence on the formation of new, and often profoundly gendered, national identities. These narratives constitute the nation less as an imagined community than as an imagined individual. Moving from the past to the promise of the future, they mediate relationships between public and private, and between individual and collective stories. Ultimately, they show how the construction of modern selfhood is inextricably linked to the construction of a postcolonial polity.
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Beyond Man: Race, Coloniality, and Philosophy of Religion
Yountae An and Eleanor Craig, editors
Duke University Press, 2021
Library of Congress JV51.B49 2021

Beyond Man reimagines the meaning and potential of a philosophy of religion that better attends to the inextricable links among religion, racism, and colonialism. An Yountae, Eleanor Craig, and the contributors reckon with the colonial and racial implications of the field's history by staging a conversation with Black, Indigenous, and decolonial studies. In their introduction, An and Craig point out that European-descended Christianity has historically defined itself by its relation to the other while paradoxically claiming to represent and speak to humanity in its totality. The topics include secularism, the Eucharist's relation to Blackness, and sixteenth-century Brazilian cannibalism rituals as well as an analysis of how Mircea Eliade's conception of the sacred underwrites settler colonial projects and imaginaries. Throughout, the contributors also highlight the theorizing of Afro-Caribbean thinkers such as Sylvia Wynter, C. L. R. James, Frantz Fanon, and Aimé Césaire whose work disrupts the normative Western categories of religion and philosophy.

Contributors. An Yountae, Ellen Armour, J. Kameron Carter, Eleanor Craig, Amy Hollywood, Vincent Lloyd, Filipe Maia, Mayra Rivera, Devin Singh, Joseph R. Winters
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The Blood of the Colony
Owen White
Harvard University Press, 2020
Library of Congress HD9387.A4W55 2021 | Dewey Decimal 338.476632009651

The surprising story of the wine industry’s role in the rise of French Algeria and the fall of empire.

“We owe to wine a blessing far more precious than gold: the peopling of Algeria with Frenchmen,” stated agriculturist Pierre Berthault in the early 1930s. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Europeans had displaced Algerians from the colony’s best agricultural land and planted grapevines. Soon enough, wine was the primary export of a region whose mostly Muslim inhabitants didn’t drink alcohol.

Settlers made fortunes while drawing large numbers of Algerians into salaried work for the first time. But the success of Algerian wine resulted in friction with French producers, challenging the traditional view that imperial possessions should complement, not compete with, the metropole. By the middle of the twentieth century, amid the fight for independence, Algerians had come to see the rows of vines as an especially hated symbol of French domination. After the war, Algerians had to decide how far they would go to undo the transformations the colonists had wrought—including the world’s fourth-biggest wine industry. Owen White examines Algeria’s experiment with nationalized wine production in worker-run vineyards, the pressures that resulted in the failure of that experiment, and the eventual uprooting of most of the country’s vines.

With a special focus on individual experiences of empire, from the wealthiest Europeans to the poorest laborers in the fields, The Blood of the Colony shows the central role of wine in the economic life of French Algeria and in its settler culture. White makes clear that the industry left a long-term mark on the development of the nation.
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Britain, France and the Decolonization of Africa: Future Imperfect?
Edited by Andrew W.M. Smith and Chris Jeppesen
University College London, 2017

Looking at decolonization in the conditional tense, this volume teases out the complex and uncertain ends of British and French empire in Africa during the period of ‘late colonial shift’ after 1945. Rather than view decolonization as an inevitable process, the contributors together explore the crucial historical moments in which change was negotiated, compromises were made, and debates were staged. Three core themes guide the analysis: development, contingency and entanglement. The chapters consider the ways in which decolonization was governed and moderated by concerns about development and profit. A complementary focus on contingency allows deeper consideration of how colonial powers planned for ‘colonial futures’, and how divergent voices greeted the end of empire. Thinking about entanglements likewise stresses both the connections that existed between the British and French empires in Africa, and those that endured beyond the formal transfer of power.
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Cold War and Decolonization in Guinea, 1946–1958
Elizabeth Schmidt
Ohio University Press, 2007
Library of Congress DT543.75.S35 2007 | Dewey Decimal 966.5203

In September 1958, Guinea claimed its independence, rejecting a constitution that would have relegated it to junior partnership in the French Community. In all the French empire, Guinea was the only territory to vote “No.” Orchestrating the “No” vote was the Guinean branch of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA), an alliance of political parties with affiliates in French West and Equatorial Africa and the United Nations trusts of Togo and Cameroon. Although Guinea’s stance vis-à-vis the 1958 constitution has been recognized as unique, until now the historical roots of this phenomenon have not been adequately explained.

Clearly written and free of jargon, Cold War and Decolonization in Guinea argues that Guinea’s vote for independence was the culmination of a decade-long struggle between local militants and political leaders for control of the political agenda. Since 1950, when RDA representatives in the French parliament severed their ties to the French Communist Party, conservative elements had dominated the RDA. In Guinea, local cadres had opposed the break. Victimized by the administration and sidelined by their own leaders, they quietly rebuilt the party from the base. Leftist militants, their voices muted throughout most of the decade, gained preeminence in 1958, when trade unionists, students, the party’s women’s and youth wings, and other grassroots actors pushed the Guinean RDA to endorse a “No” vote. Thus, Guinea’s rejection of the proposed constitution in favor of immediate independence was not an isolated aberration. Rather, it was the outcome of years of political mobilization by activists who, despite Cold War repression, ultimately pushed the Guinean RDA to the left.

The significance of this highly original book, based on previously unexamined archival records and oral interviews with grassroots activists, extends far beyond its primary subject. In illuminating the Guinean case, Elizabeth Schmidt helps us understand the dynamics of decolonization and its legacy for postindependence nation-building in many parts of the developing world.

Examining Guinean history from the bottom up, Schmidt considers local politics within the larger context of the Cold War, making her book suitable for courses in African history and politics, diplomatic history, and Cold War history.

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Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes
Lisa Yoneyama
Duke University Press, 2016
Library of Congress D804.J3Y59 2016

In Cold War Ruins Lisa Yoneyama argues that the efforts intensifying since the 1990s to bring justice to the victims of Japanese military and colonial violence have generated what she calls a "transborder redress culture." A product of failed post-World War II transitional justice that left many colonial legacies intact, this culture both contests and reiterates the complex transwar and transpacific entanglements that have sustained the Cold War unredressability and illegibility of certain violences. By linking justice to the effects of American geopolitical hegemony, and by deploying a conjunctive cultural critique—of "comfort women" redress efforts, state-sponsored apologies and amnesties, Asian American involvement in redress cases, the ongoing effects of the U.S. occupation of Japan and Okinawa, Japanese atrocities in China, and battles over WWII memories—Yoneyama helps illuminate how redress culture across Asia and the Pacific has the potential to bring powerful new and challenging perspectives on American exceptionalism, militarized security, justice, sovereignty, forgiveness, and decolonization.
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The Colonial Politics of Global Health: France and the United Nations in Postwar Africa
Jessica Lynne Pearson
Harvard University Press, 2018
Library of Congress RA395.A35P43 2018 | Dewey Decimal 362.109660917541

Jessica Lynne Pearson explores the collision between imperial and international visions of health and development in French Africa as postwar decolonization movements gained strength. The consequences of putting politics above public health continue to play out in constraints placed on international health organizations half a century later.
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Colonial Strangers: Women Writing the End of the British Empire
Lassner, Phyllis
Rutgers University Press, 2004
Library of Congress PR888.I54L37 2004 | Dewey Decimal 820.9358

Colonial Strangers revolutionizes modern British literary studies by showing how our interpretations of the postcolonial must confront World War II and the Holocaust. Phyllis Lassner’s analysis reveals how writers such as Muriel Spark, Olivia Manning, Rumer Godden, Phyllis Bottome, Elspeth Huxley, and Zadie Smith insist that World War II is critical to understanding how and why the British Empire had to end.

Drawing on memoirs, fiction, reportage, and film adaptations, Colonial Strangers explores the critical perspectives of writers who correct prevailing stereotypes of British women as agents of imperialism. They also question their own participation in British claims of moral righteousness and British politics of cultural exploitation. These authors take center stage in debates about connections between the racist ideologies of the Third Reich and the British Empire.

Colonial Strangers reveals how the literary responses of key artists represent not only compelling reading, but also a necessary intervention in colonial and postcolonial debates and the canons of modern British fiction.


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Connections after Colonialism: Europe and Latin America in the 1820s
Edited by Mathew Brown and Gabriel Pacquette
University of Alabama Press, 2013
Library of Congress F1416.E85C66 2013 | Dewey Decimal 327.804009034

Contributing to the historiography of transnational and global transmission of ideas, Connections after Colonialism examines relations between Europe and Latin America during the tumultuous 1820s.
 
In the Atlantic World, the 1820s was a decade marked by the rupture of colonial relations, the independence of Latin America, and the ever-widening chasm between the Old World and the New. Connections after Colonialism, edited by Matthew Brown and Gabriel Paquette, builds upon recent advances in the history of colonialism and imperialism by studying former colonies and metropoles through the same analytical lens, as part of an attempt to understand the complex connections—political, economic, intellectual, and cultural—between Europe and Latin America that survived the demise of empire.
 
Historians are increasingly aware of the persistence of robust links between Europe and the new Latin American nations. This book focuses on connections both during the events culminating with independence and in subsequent years, a period strangely neglected in European and Latin American scholarship. Bringing together distinguished historians of both Europe and America, the volume reveals a new cast of characters and relationships ranging from unrepentant American monarchists, compromise seeking liberals in Lisbon and Madrid who envisioned transatlantic federations, and British merchants in the River Plate who saw opportunity where others saw risk to public moralists whose audiences spanned from Paris to Santiago de Chile and plantation owners in eastern Cuba who feared that slave rebellions elsewhere in the Caribbean would spread to their island.
Contributors
Matthew Brown / Will Fowler / Josep M.
Fradera / Carrie Gibson / Brian Hamnett /
Maurizio Isabella / Iona Macintyre / Scarlett
O’Phelan Godoy / Gabriel Paquette / David
Rock / Christopher Schmidt-Nowara / Jay
Sexton / Reuben Zahler
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Constructing the Pluriverse: The Geopolitics of Knowledge
Bernd Reiter, editor
Duke University Press, 2018
Library of Congress CB245.C66 2018

The contributors to Constructing the Pluriverse critique the hegemony of the postcolonial Western tradition and its claims to universality by offering a set of “pluriversal” approaches to understanding the coexisting epistemologies and practices of the different worlds and problems we inhabit and encounter. Moving beyond critiques of colonialism, the contributors rethink the relationship between knowledge and power, offering new perspectives on development, democracy, and ideology while providing diverse methodologies for non-Western thought and practice that range from feminist approaches to scientific research to ways of knowing expressed through West African oral traditions. In combination, these wide-ranging approaches and understandings form a new analytical toolbox for those seeking creative solutions for dismantling Westernization throughout the world.

Contributors. Zaid Ahmad, Manuela Boatcă, Hans-Jürgen Burchardt, Raewyn Connell, Arturo Escobar, Sandra Harding, Ehsan Kashfi, Venu Mehta, Walter D. Mignolo, Ulrich Oslender, Issiaka Ouattara, Bernd Reiter, Manu Samnotra, Catherine E. Walsh, Aram Ziai
 
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Creolizing the Nation
Kris F. Sealey
Northwestern University Press, 2020
Library of Congress HM1272.S43 2020 | Dewey Decimal 303.482

Creolizing the Nation identifies the nation-form as a powerful resource for political struggles against colonialism, racism, and other manifestations of Western hegemony in the Global South even as it acknowledges the homogenizing effects of the politics of nationalism. Drawing on Caribbean, decolonial, and Latina feminist resources, Kris F. Sealey argues that creolization provides a rich theoretical ground for rethinking the nation and deploying its political and cultural apparatus to imagine more just, humane communities.

Analyzing the work of thinkers such as Édouard Glissant, Frantz Fanon, Gloria Anzaldúa, María Lugones, and Mariana Ortega, Sealey shows that a properly creolizing account of the nation provides an alternative imaginary out of which collective political life might be understood. Creolizing practices are always constitutive of anticolonial resistance, and their ongoing negotiations with power should be understood as everyday acts of sabotage. Sealey demonstrates that the conceptual frame of the nation is not fated to re-create colonial instantiations of nationalism but rather can support new possibilities for liberation and justice.

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Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies
Joanne Barker, editor
Duke University Press, 2017
Library of Congress E76.8.C75 2017

Critically Sovereign traces the ways in which gender is inextricably a part of Indigenous politics and U.S. and Canadian imperialism and colonialism. The contributors show how gender, sexuality, and feminism work as co-productive forces of Native American and Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and epistemology. Several essays use a range of literary and legal texts to analyze the production of colonial space, the biopolitics of “Indianness,” and the collisions and collusions between queer theory and colonialism within Indigenous studies. Others address the U.S. government’s criminalization of traditional forms of Diné marriage and sexuality, the Iñupiat people's changing conceptions of masculinity as they embrace the processes of globalization, Hawai‘i’s same-sex marriage bill, and stories of Indigenous women falling in love with non-human beings such as animals, plants, and stars. Following the politics of gender, sexuality, and feminism across these diverse historical and cultural contexts, the contributors question and reframe the thinking about Indigenous knowledge, nationhood, citizenship, history, identity, belonging, and the possibilities for a decolonial future.

Contributors. Jodi A. Byrd, Joanne Barker, Jennifer Nez Denetdale, Mishuana Goeman,  J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Melissa K. Nelson, Jessica Bissett Perea, Mark Rifkin
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Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives
Anne Mcclintock
University of Minnesota Press, 1997
Library of Congress JC312.D36 1997 | Dewey Decimal 306.2

The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options
Walter D. Mignolo
Duke University Press, 2011
Library of Congress CB245.M495 2011 | Dewey Decimal 909.09821

During the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, coloniality emerged as a new structure of power as Europeans colonized the Americas and built on the ideas of Western civilization and modernity as the endpoints of historical time and Europe as the center of the world. Walter D. Mignolo argues that coloniality is the darker side of Western modernity, a complex matrix of power that has been created and controlled by Western men and institutions from the Renaissance, when it was driven by Christian theology, through the late twentieth century and the dictates of neoliberalism. This cycle of coloniality is coming to an end. Two main forces are challenging Western leadership in the early twenty-first century. One of these, “dewesternization,” is an irreversible shift to the East in struggles over knowledge, economics, and politics. The second force is “decoloniality.” Mignolo explains that decoloniality requires delinking from the colonial matrix of power underlying Western modernity to imagine and build global futures in which human beings and the natural world are no longer exploited in the relentless quest for wealth accumulation.
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Decolonization and Independence in Kenya, 1940–1993
B. A. Ogot
Ohio University Press, 1995
Library of Congress DT433.58.D4 1995 | Dewey Decimal 967.62

This is a sharply observed assessment of the history of the last half century by a distinguished group of historians of Kenya. At the same time the book is a courageous reflection in the dilemmas of African nationhood.

Professor B. A. Ogot says:

“The main purpose of the book is to show that decolonization does not only mean the transfer of alien power to sovereign nationhood; it must also entail the liberation of the worlds of spirit and culture, as well as economics and politics.

“The book also raises a more fundamental question, that is: How much independence is available to any state, national economy or culture in today’s world? It asks how far are Africa’s miseries linked to the colonial past and to the process of decolonization?

“In particular the book raises the basic question of how far Kenya is avoidably neo-colonial? And what does neo-colonial dependence mean? The book answers these questions by discussing the dynamic between the politics of decolonization, the social history of class formation and the economics of dependence. The book ends with a provocative epilogue discussing the transformation of the post-colonial state from a single-party to a multi-party system.”

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Decolonization and the Decolonized
Albert Memmi
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
Library of Congress JV51.M4213 2006 | Dewey Decimal 325.309174927

In this time of global instability and widespread violence, Albert Memmi—author of the highly influential and groundbreaking work The Colonizer and the Colonized—turns his attention to the present-day situation of formerly colonized peoples. In Decolonization and the Decolonized, Memmi expands his intellectual engagement with the subject and examines the manifold causes of the failure of decolonization efforts throughout the world.As outspoken and controversial as ever, Memmi initiates a much-needed discussion of the ex-colonized and refuses to idealize those who are too often painted as hapless victims. He shows how, in light of a radically changed world, it would be problematic—and even irresponsible—to continue to deploy concepts that were useful and valid during the period of anticolonial struggle.Decolonization and the Decolonized contributes to the most current debates on Islamophobia in France, the “new” anti-Semitism, and the unrelenting poverty gripping the African continent. Memmi, who is Jewish, was born and raised in Tunis, and focuses primarily on what he calls the Arab-Muslim condition, while also incorporating comparisons with South America, Asia, Black Africa, and the United States. In Decolonization and the Decolonized, Memmi has written that rare book—a manifesto informed by intellect and animated by passion—that will propel public analysis of the most urgent global issues to a new level.Albert Memmi is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Paris, Nanterre, and the author of Racism (Minnesota, 1997).Robert Bononno, a teacher and translator, lives in New York City.
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The Decolonization Of Africa
David Birmingham
Ohio University Press, 1995
Library of Congress DT31.B5 1995 | Dewey Decimal 960.3

This bold, popularizing synthesis presents a readily accessible introduction to one of the major themes of twentieth-century world history. Between 1922, when self-government was restored to Egypt, and 1994, when nonracial democracy was achieved in South Africa, 54 new nations were established in Africa. Written within the parameters of African history, as opposed to imperial history, this study charts the processes of nationalism, liberation and independence that recast the political map of Africa in these years. Ranging from Algeria in the North, where a French colonial government used armed force to combat Algerian aspirations to home-rule, to the final overthrow of apartheid in the South, this is an authoritative survey that will be welcomed by all students tackling this complex and challenging topic.
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Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science
Carolina Alonso-Bejarano, Lucia López Juárez, Mirian A. Mijangos García, and Daniel M. Goldstein
Duke University Press, 2019
Library of Congress LC191.98.D44A46 2019

In August 2011, ethnographers Carolina Alonso Bejarano and Daniel M. Goldstein began a research project on undocumented immigration in the United States by volunteering at a center for migrant workers in New Jersey. Two years later, Lucia López Juárez and Mirian A. Mijangos García—two local immigrant workers from Latin America—joined Alonso Bejarano and Goldstein as research assistants and quickly became equal partners for whom ethnographic practice was inseparable from activism. In Decolonizing Ethnography the four coauthors offer a methodological and theoretical reassessment of social science research, showing how it can function as a vehicle for activism and as a tool for marginalized people to theorize their lives. Tacking between personal narratives, ethnographic field notes, an original bilingual play about workers' rights, and examinations of anthropology as a discipline, the coauthors show how the participation of Mijangos García and López Juárez transformed the project's activist and academic dimensions. In so doing, they offer a guide for those wishing to expand the potential of ethnography to serve as a means for social transformation and decolonization.
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Decolonizing the Map: Cartography from Colony to Nation
Edited by James R. Akerman
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Library of Congress GA108.7.D44 2017 | Dewey Decimal 526

Almost universally, newly independent states seek to affirm their independence and identity by making the production of new maps and atlases a top priority. For formerly colonized peoples, however, this process neither begins nor ends with independence, and it is rarely straightforward. Mapping their own land is fraught with a fresh set of issues: how to define and administer their territories, develop their national identity, establish their role in the community of nations, and more. The contributors to Decolonizing the Map explore this complicated relationship between mapping and decolonization while engaging with recent theoretical debates about the nature of decolonization itself.
 
These essays, originally delivered as the 2010 Kenneth Nebenzahl, Jr., Lectures in the History of Cartography at the Newberry Library, encompass more than two centuries and three continents—Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Ranging from the late eighteenth century through the mid-twentieth, contributors study topics from mapping and national identity in late colonial Mexico to the enduring complications created by the partition of British India and the racialized organization of space in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. A vital contribution to studies of both colonization and cartography, Decolonizing the Map is the first book to systematically and comprehensively examine the engagement of mapping in the long—and clearly unfinished—parallel processes of decolonization and nation building in the modern world.
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Define and Rule
Mahmood Mamdani
Harvard University Press, 2012
Library of Congress JV412.M36 2012 | Dewey Decimal 325.3

When Britain abandoned its attempt to eradicate difference between conqueror and conquered and introduced a new idea of governance as the definition and management of difference, lines of political identity were drawn between settler and native, and between natives according to tribe. Out of this colonial experience arose a language of pluralism.
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Diné Perspectives: Revitalizing and Reclaiming Navajo Thought
Edited by Lloyd L. Lee; Foreword by Gregory Cajete
University of Arizona Press, 2014
Library of Congress E99.N3+ | Dewey Decimal 979.10049726

What does it mean to be a Navajo (Diné) person today? What does it mean to “respect tradition”? How can a contemporary life be informed by the traditions of the past? These are the kinds of questions addressed by contributors to this unusual and pathbreaking book.
 
All of the contributors are coming to personal terms with a phrase that underpins the matrix of Diné culture: Sa’ah Naagháí Bik’eh Hózhóón. Often referred to simply as SNBH, the phrase can be translated in many ways but is generally understood to mean “one’s journey of striving to live a long, harmonious life.” The book offers a variety of perspectives of Diné men and women on the Diné cultural paradigm that is embedded in SNBH. Their writings represent embodied knowledge grounded in a way of knowing that connects thought, speech, experience, history, tradition, and land. Some of the contributors are scholars. Some are Diné who are fighting for justice and prosperity for the Navajo Nation. Some are poets and artists. They are united in working to preserve both intellectual and cultural sovereignty for Diné peoples. And their contributions exemplify how Indigenous peoples are creatively applying tools of decolonization and critical research to re-create Indigenous thought and culture in a present day that rarely resembles the days of their ancestors.
 
More than 300,000 people self-identify as Diné today. Every one must grapple with how to make a life that acknowledges Sa’ah Naagháí Bik’eh Hózhóón. Diné Perspectives is unique in bringing such personal journeys to the public eye.
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Earth Politics: Religion, Decolonization, and Bolivia's Indigenous Intellectuals
Waskar Ari
Duke University Press, 2014
Library of Congress F3320.C43 2014 | Dewey Decimal 984.051

Earth Politics focuses on the lives of four indigenous activist-intellectuals in Bolivia, key leaders in the Alcaldes Mayores Particulares (AMP), a movement established to claim rights for indigenous education and reclaim indigenous lands from hacienda owners. The AMP leaders invented a discourse of decolonization, rooted in part in native religion, and used it to counter structures of internal colonialism, including the existing racial systems. Waskar Ari calls their social movement, practices, and discourse earth politics, both because the AMP emphasized the idea of the earth and the place of Indians on it, and because of the political meaning that the AMP gave to the worship of the Aymara gods. Depicting the social worlds and life work of the activists, Ari traverses Bolivia's political and social landscape from the 1920s into the early 1970s. He reveals the AMP 's extensive geographic reach, genuine grassroots quality, and vibrant regional diversity. Ari had access to the private archives of indigenous families, and he collected oral histories, speaking with men and women who knew the AMP leaders. The resulting examination of Bolivian indigenous activism is one of unparalleled nuance and depth.
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Encounters on Contested Lands: Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Québec
Julie Burelle
Northwestern University Press, 2019
Library of Congress PN2051.B87 2019 | Dewey Decimal 792.089970714

Winner, 2019 John W. Frick Book Award
Winner, 2020 Ann Saddlemyer Award
Finalist, ATHE Outstanding Book Award for 2020
Mention Spéciale, Société québécoise d'études théâtrale


In Encounters on Contested Lands, Julie Burelle employs a performance studies lens to examine how instances of Indigenous self-representation in Québec challenge the national and identity discourses of the French Québécois de souche—the French-speaking descendants of white European settlers who understand themselves to be settlers no more but rather colonized and rightfully belonging to the territory of Québec. 

Analyzing a wide variety of performances, Burelle brings together the theater of Alexis Martin and the film L'Empreinte, which repositions the French Québécois de souche as métis, with protest marches led by Innu activists; the Indigenous company Ondinnok's theater of repatriation; the films of Yves Sioui Durand, Alanis Obomsawin, and the Wapikoni Mobile project; and the visual work of Nadia Myre. These performances, Burelle argues, challenge received definitions of sovereignty and articulate new ones while proposing to the province and, more specifically, to the French Québécois de souche, that there are alternative ways to imagine Québec's future and remember its past. 

The performances insist on Québec's contested nature and reframe it as animated by competing sovereignties. Together they reveal how the "colonial present tense" and "tense colonial present" operate in conjunction as they work to imagine an alternative future predicated on decolonization. Encounters on Contested Lands engages with theater and performance studies while making unique and needed contributions to Québec and Canadian studies, as well as to Indigenous and settler-colonial studies.
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The End of Empires: African Americans and India
Gerald Horne
Temple University Press, 2009
Library of Congress E185.61.H82 2008 | Dewey Decimal 303.4825407309

In the past fifty years, according to Christine So, the narratives of many popular Asian American books have been dominated by economic questions-what money can buy, how money is lost, how money is circulated, and what labor or objects are worth. Focusing on books that have achieved mainstream popularity, Economic Citizens unveils the logic of economic exchange that determined Asian Americans’ transnational migrations and national belonging.

With penetrating insight, So examines literary works that have been successful in the U.S. marketplace but have been read previously by critics largely as narratives of alienation or assimilation, including Fifth Chinese Daughter, Flower Drum Song, Falling Leaves and Turning Japanese. In contrast to other studies that have focused on the marginalization of Asian Americans, Economic Citizens examines how Asian Americans have entered into the public sphere.

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Eros Ideologies: Writings on Art, Spirituality, and the Decolonial
Laura E. Pérez
Duke University Press, 2018
Library of Congress N7445.2.P469 2019

In Eros Ideologies Laura E. Pérez explores the decolonial through Western and non-Western thought concerning personal and social well-being. Drawing upon Jungian, people-of-color, and spiritual psychology alongside non-Western spiritual philosophies of the interdependence of all life-forms, she writes of the decolonial as an ongoing project rooted in love as an ideology to frame respectful coexistence of social and cultural diversity. In readings of art that includes self-portraits by Frida Kahlo, Ana Mendieta, and Yreina D. Cervántez, the drawings and paintings of Chilean American artist Liliana Wilson, and Favianna Rodriguez's screen-printed images, Pérez identifies art as one of the most valuable laboratories for creating, imagining, and experiencing new forms of decolonial thought. Such art expresses what Pérez calls eros ideologies: understandings of social and natural reality that foreground the centrality of respect and care of self and others as the basis for a more democratic and responsible present and future. Employing a range of writing styles and voices—from the poetic to the scholarly—Pérez shows how art can point to more just and loving ways of being.
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Erotic Cartographies: Decolonization and the Queer Caribbean Imagination
Krystal Nandini Ghisyawan
Rutgers University Press, 2022

Erotic Cartographies uses subjective mapping, a participatory data collection technique, to demonstrate how Trinidadian same-sex-loving women use their gender performance, erotic autonomy, and space-making practices to reinforce and resist colonial ascriptions on subject bodies. The women strategically embody their sexual identities to challenge imposed subject categories and to contest their invisibility and exclusion from discourses of belonging. Erotic Cartographies refers to the processes of mapping territories of self-knowing and self-expression, both cognitively in the imagination and on paper during the mapping exercise, exploring how meaning is given to space, and how it is transformed. Using the women’s quotes and maps, the book focuses on the false binary of public-private, the practices of home and family, and religious nationalism and spiritual self-seeking, to demonstrate the women’s challenges to the structural, symbolic, and interpersonal violence of colonial discourses and practices related to gender, knowledge, and power in Trinidadian society.
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Food Fight!: Millennial Mestizaje Meets the Culinary Marketplace
Paloma Martinez-Cruz
University of Arizona Press, 2019
Library of Congress HM621.M3714 2019 | Dewey Decimal 306.0973

From the racial defamation and mocking tone of “Mexican” restaurants geared toward the Anglo customer to the high-end Latin-inspired eateries with Anglo chefs who give the impression that the food was something unattended or poorly handled that they “discovered” or “rescued” from actual Latinos, the dilemma of how to make ethical choices in food production and consumption is always as close as the kitchen recipe, coffee pot, or table grape.

In Food Fight! author Paloma Martinez-Cruz takes us on a Chicanx gastronomic journey that is powerful and humorous. Martinez-Cruz tackles head on the real-world politics of food production from the exploitation of farmworkers to the appropriation of Latinx bodies and culture, and takes us right into transformative eateries that offer a homegrown, mestiza consciousness.

The hard-hitting essays in Food Fight! bring a mestiza critique to today’s pressing discussions of labeling, identity, and imaging in marketing and dining. Not just about food, restaurants, and coffee, this volume employs a decolonial approach and engaging voice to interrogate ways that mestizo, Indigenous, and Latinx peoples are objectified in mainstream ideology and imaginary.
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Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World
Gary Wilder
Duke University Press, 2015
Library of Congress JV1818.W553 2015

Freedom Time reconsiders decolonization from the perspectives of Aimé Césaire (Martinique) and Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal) who, beginning in 1945, promoted self-determination without state sovereignty. As politicians, public intellectuals, and poets they struggled to transform imperial France into a democratic federation, with former colonies as autonomous members of a transcontinental polity. In so doing, they revitalized past but unrealized political projects and anticipated impossible futures by acting as if they had already arrived. Refusing to reduce colonial emancipation to national independence, they regarded decolonization as an opportunity to remake the world, reconcile peoples, and realize humanity’s potential. Emphasizing the link between politics and aesthetics, Gary Wilder reads Césaire and Senghor as pragmatic utopians, situated humanists, and concrete cosmopolitans whose postwar insights can illuminate current debates about self-management, postnational politics, and planetary solidarity. Freedom Time invites scholars to decolonize intellectual history and globalize critical theory, to analyze the temporal dimensions of political life, and to question the territorialist assumptions of contemporary historiography.
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From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945-1962
Hannah Feldman
Duke University Press, 2014
Library of Congress N72.P6F45 2014

From a Nation Torn provides a powerful critique of art history's understanding of French modernism and the historical circumstances that shaped its production and reception. Within art history, the aesthetic practices and theories that emerged in France from the late 1940s into the 1960s are demarcated as postwar. Yet it was during these very decades that France fought a protracted series of wars to maintain its far-flung colonial empire. Given that French modernism was created during, rather than after, war, Hannah Feldman argues that its interpretation must incorporate the tumultuous "decades of decolonization"and their profound influence on visual and public culture. Focusing on the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) and the historical continuities it presented with the experience of the Second World War, Feldman highlights decolonization's formative effects on art and related theories of representation, both political and aesthetic. Ultimately, From a Nation Torn constitutes a profound exploration of how certain populations and events are rendered invisible and their omission naturalized within histories of modernity.
 
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Hong Kong Art: Culture and Decolonization
David Clarke
Duke University Press, 2002
Library of Congress N7346.H66C58 2002 | Dewey Decimal 709.512509045

Hong Kong Art is the first comprehensive survey of contemporary art from Hong Kong presented within the changing social and political context of the territory’s 1997 handover from British to Chinese sovereignty. Tracing a distinctive and increasingly vibrant art scene from the late 1960s through the present, David Clarke discusses a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, photography, video, and installations, as well as other kinds of visual production such as architecture, fashion, graphic design, and graffiti.
Clarke shows how a sense of local identity emerged in Hong Kong as the transition approached and found expression in the often politicized art produced. Given the recent international exposure of mainland Chinese contemporary art, this book considers the uniqueness of the art of China’s most cosmopolitan city. With a modern visual culture that was flourishing even when the People’s Republic was still closed to the outside world, Hong Kong has established itself as an exemplary site for both local and transnational elements to formulate into brilliant and groundbreaking art.
The author writes about individual artists and art works with a detail that will appeal to artists, curators, and art historians, as well as to postcolonial scholars, cultural studies scholars, and others.
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Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies
Dylan Robinson
University of Minnesota Press, 2020
Library of Congress ML3563.R63 2020 | Dewey Decimal 780.8997071

Reimagining how we understand and write about the Indigenous listening experience?

Hungry Listening is the first book to consider listening from both Indigenous and settler colonial perspectives. A critical response to what has been called the “whiteness of sound studies,” Dylan Robinson evaluates how decolonial practices of listening emerge from increasing awareness of our listening positionality. This, he argues, involves identifying habits of settler colonial perception and contending with settler colonialism’s “tin ear” that renders silent the epistemic foundations of Indigenous song as history, law, and medicine. 

With case studies on Indigenous participation in classical music, musicals, and popular music, Hungry Listening examines structures of inclusion that reinforce Western musical values. Alongside this inquiry on the unmarked terms of inclusion in performing arts organizations and compositional practice, Hungry Listening offers examples of “doing sovereignty” in Indigenous performance art, museum exhibition, and gatherings that support an Indigenous listening resurgence.

Throughout the book, Robinson shows how decolonial and resurgent forms of listening might be affirmed by writing otherwise about musical experience. Through event scores, dialogic improvisation, and forms of poetic response and refusal, he demands a reorientation toward the act of reading as a way of listening. Indigenous relationships to the life of song are here sustained in writing that finds resonance in the intersubjective experience between listener, sound, and space. 

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Indianizing Film: Decolonization, the Andes, and the Question of Technology
Schiwy, Freya
Rutgers University Press, 2009
Library of Congress F3320.1.G6S35 2009 | Dewey Decimal 302.234308998084

Latin American indigenous media production has recently experienced a noticeable boom, specifically in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia. Indianizing Film zooms in on a selection of award-winning and widely influential fiction and docudrama shorts, analyzing them in the wider context of indigenous media practices and debates over decolonizing knowledge. Within this framework, Freya Schiwy approaches questions of gender, power, and representation.

Schiwy argues that instead of solely creating entertainment through their work indigenous media activists are building communication networks that encourage interaction between diverse cultures. As a result, mainstream images are retooled, permitting communities to strengthen their cultures and express their own visions of development and modernization. Indianizing Film encourages readers to consider how indigenous media contributes to a wider understanding of decolonization and anticolonial study against the universal backdrop of the twenty-first century.

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Living with Nkrumahism: Nation, State, and Pan-Africanism in Ghana
Jeffrey S. Ahlman
Ohio University Press, 2017
Library of Congress DT510.62A35 2017 | Dewey Decimal 966.705

In the 1950s, Ghana, under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah and the Convention People’s Party, drew the world’s attention as anticolonial activists, intellectuals, and politicians looked to it as a model for Africa’s postcolonial future. Nkrumah was a visionary, a statesman, and one of the key makers of contemporary Africa. In Living with Nkrumahism, Jeffrey S. Ahlman reexamines the infrastructure that organized and consolidated Nkrumah’s philosophy into a political program.

Ahlman draws on newly available source material to portray an organizational and cultural history of Nkrumahism. Taking us inside bureaucracies, offices, salary structures, and working routines, he painstakingly reconstructs the political and social milieu of the time and portrays a range of Ghanaians’ relationships to their country’s unique position in the decolonization process. Through fine attunement to the nuances of statecraft, he demonstrates how political and philosophical ideas shape lived experience.

Living with Nkrumahism stands at the crossroads of the rapidly growing fields of African decolonization, postcolonial history, and Cold War studies. It provides a much-needed scholarly model through which to reflect on the changing nature of citizenship and political and social participation in Africa and the broader postcolonial world.

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Lusophone Africa: Beyond Independence
Fernando Arenas
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Library of Congress DT36.1.A74 2011 | Dewey Decimal 960.097569

Lusophone Africa: Beyond Independence is a study of the contemporary cultural production of Portuguese-speaking Africa and its critical engagement with globalization in the aftermath of colonialism, especially since the advent of multiparty politics and market-oriented economies.

Exploring the evolving relationship of Lusophone Africa with Portugal, its former colonial power, and Brazil, Fernando Arenas situates the countries on the geopolitical map of contemporary global forces. Drawing from popular music, film, literature, cultural history, geopolitics, and critical theory to investigate the postcolonial condition of Portuguese-speaking Africa, Arenas offers an entirely original discussion of world music phenomenon Cesária Évora, as well as the most thorough examination to date of Lusophone African cinema and of Angolan post-civil-war fiction.

Throughout, Arenas evokes the rich multidimensionality of this community of African nations as a whole and of its individual parts: Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe since they gained their independence in the mid-1970s. In doing so, he puts forth a conceptual framework for understanding, for the first time, recent cultural and historical developments in Portuguese-speaking Africa.
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Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives
Christopher J. Lee
Ohio University Press, 2010
Library of Congress DS35.2.L44 2010 | Dewey Decimal 327.116

In April 1955, twenty-nine countries from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East came together for a diplomatic conference in Bandung, Indonesia, intending to define the direction of the postcolonial world. Representing approximately two-thirds of the world’s population, the Bandung conference occurred during a key moment of transition in the mid-twentieth century—amid the global wave of decolonization that took place after the Second World War and the nascent establishment of a new cold war world order in its wake. Participants such as Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Zhou Enlai of China, and Ahmed Sukarno of Indonesia seized this occasion to attempt the creation of a political alternative to the dual threats of Western neocolonialism and the cold war interventionism of the United States and the Soviet Union.

The essays in this volume explore the diverse repercussions of this event, tracing the diplomatic, intellectual, and sociocultural histories that have emanated from it. Making a World after Empire consequently addresses the complex intersection of postcolonial history and cold war history and speaks to contemporary discussions of Afro-Asianism, empire, and decolonization, thus reestablishing the conference’s importance in twentieth-century global history.

Contributors: Michael Adas, Laura Bier, James R. Brennan, G. Thomas Burgess, Antoinette Burton, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Julian Go, Christopher J. Lee, Jamie Monson, Jeremy Prestholdt, Denis M. Tull

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Mapping the End of Empire
Aiyaz Husain
Harvard University Press, 2014
Library of Congress DS63.18.H86 2014 | Dewey Decimal 956.04

By 1945 Washington and London envisioned a new era in which the U.S. shouldered global responsibilities while Britain focused its regional interests narrowly. Mapping the End of Empire reveals how Anglo-American perceptions of geography and perspectives on the Muslim world shaped postcolonial futures from the Middle East to South Asia.
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Mexican-Origin Foods, Foodways, and Social Movements: Decolonial Perspectives
Devon Peña
University of Arkansas Press, 2017
Library of Congress TX716.M4M48 2017

Winner, 2018 ASFS (Association for the Study of Food and Society) Book Award, Edited Volume

This collection of new essays offers groundbreaking perspectives on the ways that food and foodways serve as an element of decolonization in Mexican-origin communities.

The writers here take us from multigenerational acequia farmers, who trace their ancestry to Indigenous families in place well before the Oñate Entrada of 1598, to tomorrow’s transborder travelers who will be negotiating entry into the United States. Throughout, we witness the shifting mosaic of Mexican-origin foods and foodways in the fields, gardens, and kitchen tables from Chiapas to Alaska.

Global food systems are also considered from a critical agroecological perspective, including the ways colonialism affects native biocultural diversity, ecosystem resilience, and equality across species, human groups, and generations.

Mexican-Origin Foods, Foodways, and Social Movements is a major contribution to the understanding of the ways that Mexican-origin peoples have resisted and transformed food systems. It will animate scholarship on global food studies for years to come.
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A Modern History of the Somali: Nation and State in the Horn of Africa
I. M. Lewis
Ohio University Press, 2002
Library of Congress DT403.L395 2002 | Dewey Decimal 967.73

This latest edition of A Modern History of the Somali brings I. M. Lewis’s definitive history up to date and shows the amazing continuity of Somali forms of social organization. Lewis’s history portrays the ingeniousness with which the Somali way of life has been adapted to all forms of modernity.

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Native Space: Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism
Natchee Blu Barnd
Oregon State University Press, 2017
Library of Congress E77.B22 2017 | Dewey Decimal 973.0497

Native Space explores how indigenous communities and individuals sustain and create geographies through place-naming, everyday cultural practices, and artistic activism, within the boundaries of the settler colonial nation of the United States. Diverging from scholarship that tends to treat indigenous geography as an analytical concept, Natchee Blu Barnd instead draws attention to the subtle manifestations of everyday cultural practices—the concrete and often mundane activities involved in the creation of indigenous space.
 
What are the limits and potentials of indigenous acts of spatial production? Native Space argues that control over the notion of “Indianness” still sits at the center of how space is produced in a neocolonial nation, and shows how non-indigenous communities uniquely deploy Native   identities in the direct construction of colonial geographies. In short, “the Indian” serves to create White space in concrete ways.  Yet, Native geographies effectively reclaim indigenous identities, assert ongoing relations to the land, and refuse the claims of settler colonialism. 
 
Barnd creatively and persuasively uses original cartographic research and demographic data, a series of interrelated stories set in the Midwestern Plains states of Kansas and Oklahoma, an examination of visual art by contemporary indigenous artists, and discussions of several forms of indigenous activism to support his argument. With its highly original, interdisciplinary approach, Native Space makes a significant contribution to the literature in cultural and critical geography, comparative ethnic studies, indigenous studies, cultural studies, American Studies, and related fields.
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Navigating CHamoru Poetry: Indigeneity, Aesthetics, and Decolonization
Craig Santos Perez
University of Arizona Press

Navigating CHamoru Poetry focuses on Indigenous CHamoru (Chamorro) poetry from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam). Poet and scholar Craig Santos Perez brings critical attention to a diverse and intergenerational collection of CHamoru poetry and scholarship. Throughout this book, Perez develops an Indigenous literary methodology called “wayreading” to navigate the complex relationship between CHamoru poetry, cultural identity, decolonial politics, diasporic migrations, and native aesthetics. Perez argues that contemporary CHamoru poetry articulates new and innovative forms of indigeneity rooted in CHamoru customary arts and values, while also routed through the profound and traumatic histories of missionization, colonialism, militarism, and ecological imperialism.

This book shows that CHamoru poetry has been an inspiring and empowering act of protest, resistance, and testimony in the decolonization, demilitarization, and environmental justice movements of Guåhan. Perez roots his intersectional cultural and literary analyses within the fields of CHamoru studies, Pacific Islands studies, Native American studies, and decolonial studies, using his research to assert that new CHamoru literature has been—and continues to be—a crucial vessel for expressing the continuities and resilience of CHamoru identities. This book is a vital contribution that introduces local, national, and international readers and scholars to contemporary CHamoru poetry and poetics.
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Necropolitics
Achille Mbembe
Duke University Press, 2019
Library of Congress JC328.6.M3913 2019

In Necropolitics Achille Mbembe, a leader in the new wave of francophone critical theory, theorizes the genealogy of the contemporary world, a world plagued by ever-increasing inequality, militarization, enmity, and terror as well as by a resurgence of racist, fascist, and nationalist forces determined to exclude and kill. He outlines how democracy has begun to embrace its dark side---what he calls its “nocturnal body”---which is based on the desires, fears, affects, relations, and violence that drove colonialism. This shift has hollowed out democracy, thereby eroding the very values, rights, and freedoms liberal democracy routinely celebrates. As a result, war has become the sacrament of our times in a conception of sovereignty that operates by annihilating all those considered enemies of the state. Despite his dire diagnosis, Mbembe draws on post-Foucauldian debates on biopolitics, war, and race as well as Fanon's notion of care as a shared vulnerability to explore how new conceptions of the human that transcend humanism might come to pass. These new conceptions would allow us to encounter the Other not as a thing to exclude but as a person with whom to build a more just world.
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Neoliberal Apartheid: Palestine/Israel and South Africa after 1994
Andy Clarno
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Library of Congress DT1756.C55 2017 | Dewey Decimal 956.953044

In recent years, as peace between Israelis and Palestinians has remained cruelly elusive, scholars and activists have increasingly turned to South African history and politics to make sense of the situation. In the early 1990s, both South Africa and Israel began negotiating with their colonized populations. South Africans saw results: the state was democratized and black South Africans gained formal legal equality. Palestinians, on the other hand, won neither freedom nor equality, and today Israel remains a settler-colonial state. Despite these different outcomes, the transitions of the last twenty years have produced surprisingly similar socioeconomic changes in both regions: growing inequality, racialized poverty, and advanced strategies for securing the powerful and policing the racialized poor. Neoliberal Apartheid explores this paradox through an analysis of (de)colonization and neoliberal racial capitalism.

After a decade of research in the Johannesburg and Jerusalem regions, Andy Clarno presents here a detailed ethnographic study of the precariousness of the poor in Alexandra township, the dynamics of colonization and enclosure in Bethlehem, the growth of fortress suburbs and private security in Johannesburg, and the regime of security coordination between the Israeli military and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The first comparative study of the changes in these two areas since the early 1990s, the book addresses the limitations of liberation in South Africa, highlights the impact of neoliberal restructuring in Palestine, and argues that a new form of neoliberal apartheid has emerged in both contexts.
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No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Decolonization
Yoav Di-Capua
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Library of Congress B5295.D54 2018 | Dewey Decimal 181

It is a curious and relatively little-known fact that for two decades—from the end of World War II until the late 1960s—existentialism’s most fertile ground outside of Europe was in the Middle East, and Jean-Paul Sartre was the Arab intelligentsia’s uncontested champion. In the Arab world, neither before nor since has another Western intellectual been so widely translated, debated, and celebrated.
 
By closely following the remarkable career of Arab existentialism, Yoav Di-Capua reconstructs the cosmopolitan milieu of the generation that tried to articulate a political and philosophical vision for an egalitarian postcolonial world. He tells this story by touring a fascinating selection of Arabic and Hebrew archives, including unpublished diaries and interviews. Tragically, the warm and hopeful relationships forged between Arab intellectuals, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and others ended when, on the eve of the 1967 war, Sartre failed to embrace the Palestinian cause. Today, when the prospect of global ethical engagement seems to be slipping ever farther out of reach, No Exit provides a timely, humanistic account of the intellectual hopes, struggles, and victories that shaped the Arab experience of decolonization and a delightfully wide-ranging excavation of existentialism’s non-Western history.
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On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis
Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh
Duke University Press, 2018
Library of Congress JV51.M544 2018

In On Decoloniality Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh explore the hidden forces of the colonial matrix of power, its origination, transformation, and current presence, while asking the crucial questions of decoloniality's how, what, why, with whom, and what for. Interweaving theory-praxis with local histories and perspectives of struggle, they illustrate the conceptual and analytic dynamism of decolonial ways of living and thinking, as well as the creative force of resistance and re-existence. This book speaks to the urgency of these times, encourages delinkings from the colonial matrix of power and its "universals" of Western modernity and global capitalism, and engages with arguments and struggles for dignity and life against death, destruction, and civilizational despair.
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Our Own Way in This Part of the World: Biography of an African Community, Culture, and Nation
Kwasi Konadu
Duke University Press, 2019
Library of Congress DT511.3.D66K66 2019

Kofi Dᴐnkᴐ was a blacksmith and farmer, as well as an important healer, intellectual, spiritual leader, settler of disputes, and custodian of shared values for his Ghanaian community. In Our Own Way in This Part of the World Kwasi Konadu centers Dᴐnkᴐ's life story and experiences in a communography of Dᴐnkᴐ's community and nation from the late nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth, which were shaped by historical forces from colonial Ghana's cocoa boom to decolonization and political and religious parochialism. Although Dᴐnkᴐ touched the lives of thousands of citizens and patients, neither he nor they appear in national or international archives covering the region. Yet his memory persists in his intellectual and healing legacy, and the story of his community offers a non-national, decolonized example of social organization structured around spiritual forces that serves as a powerful reminder of the importance for scholars to take their cues from the lived experiences and ideas of the people they study.
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Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas
Jinah Kim
Duke University Press, 2019
Library of Congress E184.A75K53 2019

In Postcolonial Grief Jinah Kim explores the relationship of mourning to transpacific subjectivities, aesthetics, and decolonial politics since World War II. Kim argues that Asian diasporic subjectivity exists in relation to afterlives because the deaths of those killed by U.S. imperialism and militarism in the Pacific remain unresolved and unaddressed. Kim shows how primarily U.S.-based Korean and Japanese diasporic writers, artists, and filmmakers negotiate the necropolitics of Asia and how their creative refusal to heal from imperial violence may generate transformative antiracist and decolonial politics. She contests prevalent interpretations of melancholia by engaging with Frantz Fanon's and Hisaye Yamamoto's decolonial writings; uncovering the noir genre's relationship to the U.S. war in Korea; discussing the emergence of silenced colonial histories during the 1992 Los Angeles riots; and analyzing the 1996 hostage takeover of the Japanese ambassador's home in Peru. Kim highlights how the aesthetic and creative work of the Japanese and Korean diasporas offers new insights into twenty-first-century concerns surrounding the state's erasure of military violence and colonialism and the difficult work of remembering histories of war across the transpacific.
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Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria
Chika Okeke-Agulu
Duke University Press, 2015
Library of Congress N7399.N5O394 2014

Written by one of the foremost scholars of African art and featuring 129 color images, Postcolonial Modernism chronicles the emergence of artistic modernism in Nigeria in the heady years surrounding political independence in 1960, before the outbreak of civil war in 1967. Chika Okeke-Agulu traces the artistic, intellectual, and critical networks in several Nigerian cities. Zaria is particularly important, because it was there, at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, that a group of students formed the Art Society and inaugurated postcolonial modernism in Nigeria. As Okeke-Agulu explains, their works show both a deep connection with local artistic traditions and the stylistic sophistication that we have come to associate with twentieth-century modernist practices. He explores how these young Nigerian artists were inspired by the rhetoric and ideologies of decolonization and nationalism in the early- and mid-twentieth century and, later, by advocates of negritude and pan-Africanism. They translated the experiences of decolonization into a distinctive "postcolonial modernism" that has continued to inform the work of major Nigerian artists.
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Postcoloniality-Decoloniality-Black Critique: Joints and Fissures
Edited by Sabine Broeck and Carsten Junker
Campus Verlag, 2014
Library of Congress JV51.P672 2014 | Dewey Decimal 305.8

Can Western modernity be analyzed and critiqued through the lens of enslavement and colonial history? As this volume reveals, such analysis is not only possible, it is essential to our understanding of contemporary race relations and society generally. Drawing from the fields of  postcolonial, decolonial, and black studies, this book assembles contributions from renowned scholars that offer timely and critical perspectives from a variety of disciplines, including history, sociology, political science, gender studies, cultural and literary studies, and philosophy.
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¡Presente!: The Politics of Presence
Diana Taylor
Duke University Press, 2020
Library of Congress BD355.T39 2020

In ¡Presente! Diana Taylor asks what it means to be physically and politically present in situations where it seems that nothing can be done. As much an act, a word, an attitude, a theoretical intervention, and a performance pedagogy, Taylor maps ¡presente! at work in scenarios ranging from conquest, through colonial enactments and resistance movements, to present moments of capitalist extractivism and forced migration in the Americas. ¡Presente!—present among, with, and to; a walking and talking with others; an ontological and epistemic reflection on presence and subjectivity as participatory and relational, founded on mutual recognition—requires rethinking and unlearning in ways that challenge colonial epistemologies. Showing how knowledge is not something to be harvested but a process of being, knowing, and acting with others, Taylor models a way for scholarship to be present in political struggles.
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Prince Charoon et al: South East Asia
Andrew Dalby
Haus Publishing, 2010
Library of Congress DS526.6.D35 2010 | Dewey Decimal 327.59

Southeast Asia needs to be dealt with as a whole, because, although the one national delegation from the region (Siam) took a minor part, nationalist movements in several Southeast Asian countries reached an early climax - significant though inconclusive - in the years 1919-1920. The planned Peace Conference, Wilson's Fourteen Points, and the victory of Communism in Russia, all contributed to this activity, and in spite of national differences it needs to be seen as a whole. The focus of the book will be on developments around 1919; thus it will bring out for the first time the unexpected significance for South-east Asia of the 1919 milestone. It will also have a biographical bias - taking a special interest in the personalities of major figures in this important period, in order to show the influences and the patterns of thought that underlie their activities at the time of the Peace Conference. Following a brief introduction making the link between world events in 1919 and South-east Asia, the book sets the scene in the region. Succeeding chapters deal with the five countries - Siam, Vietnam, Burma, Indonesia, Philippines - in which the years 1919-21 were of special significance, as well as the impact of the peace conferences in relationships with their neighbours, the growth of international Communism and global politics in later years.
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Radical Utu: Critical Ideas and Ideals of Wangari Muta Maathai
Besi Brillian Muhonja
Ohio University Press, 2020
Library of Congress DT433.582.M24M84 2020 | Dewey Decimal 967.6204092

Wangari Muta Maathai was a scholar-activist known for founding the Green Belt Movement, an environmental campaign that earned her the Nobel Peace Prize. While many studies of Maathai highlight her activism, few examine Maathai as a scholar whose contributions to various disciplines and causes spanned more than three decades.

In Radical Utu: Critical Ideas and Ideals of Wangari Muta Maathai, Besi Brillian Muhonja presents the words and works of Maathai as theoretical concepts attesting to her contributions to gender equality, democratic spaces, economic equity and global governance, and indigenous African languages and knowledges. Muhonja’s well-rounded portrait of Maathai’s ideas offers a corrective to the one-dimensional characterization of Maathai typical of other works.

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Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonization
John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Library of Congress JV51.K455 2001 | Dewey Decimal 325.9611

In 1983 Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities revolutionized the anthropology of nationalism. Anderson argued that "print capitalism" fostered nations as imagined communities in a modular form that became the culture of modernity.

Now, in Represented Communities, John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan offer an extensive and devastating critique of Anderson's depictions of colonial history, his comparative method, and his political anthropology. The authors build a forceful argument around events in Fiji from World War II to the 2000 coups, showing how focus on "imagined communities" underestimates colonial history and obscures the struggle over legal rights and political representation in postcolonial nation-states. They show that the "self-determining" nation-state actually emerged with the postwar construction of the United Nations, fundamentally changing the politics of representation.

Sophisticated and impassioned, this book will further anthropology's contribution to the understanding of contemporary nationalisms.
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Seeing Like a Citizen: Decolonization, Development, and the Making of Kenya, 1945–1980
Kara Moskowitz
Ohio University Press, 2019
Library of Congress DT433.58.M67 2019 | Dewey Decimal 967.6204

In Seeing Like a Citizen, Kara Moskowitz approaches Kenya’s late colonial and early postcolonial eras as a single period of political, economic, and social transition. In focusing on rural Kenyans—the vast majority of the populace and the main targets of development interventions—as they actively sought access to aid, she offers new insights into the texture of political life in decolonizing Kenya and the early postcolonial world.

Using multisited archival sources and oral histories focused on the western Rift Valley, Seeing Like a Citizen makes three fundamental contributions to our understanding of African and Kenyan history. First, it challenges the widely accepted idea of the gatekeeper state, revealing that state control remained limited and that the postcolonial state was an internally varied and often dissonant institution. Second, it transforms our understanding of postcolonial citizenship, showing that its balance of rights and duties was neither claimed nor imposed, but negotiated and differentiated. Third, it reorients Kenyan historiography away from central Kenya and elite postcolonial politics. The result is a powerful investigation of experiences of independence, of the meaning and form of development, and of how global political practices were composed and recomposed on the ground in local settings.

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Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-Determination in International Law
Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui
University of Minnesota Press, 1996
Library of Congress JX4054.G77 1996 | Dewey Decimal 320.15096

Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans was first published in 1996. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

In this trenchant critique, Siba N'Zatioula Grovogui demonstrates the failure of international law to address adequately the issues surrounding African self-determination during decolonization. Challenging the view that the only requirement for decolonization is the elimination of the legal instruments that provided for direct foreign rule, Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans probes the universal claims of international law.

Grovogui begins by documenting the creation of the "image of Africa" in European popular culture, examining its construction by conquerors and explorers, scientists and social scientists, and the Catholic Church. Using the case of Namibia to illuminate the general context of Africa, he demonstrates that the principles and rules recognized in international law today are not universal, but instead reflect relations of power and the historical dominance of specific European states.

Grovogui argues that two important factors have undermined the universal applicability of international law: its dependence on Western culture and the way that international law has been structured to preserve Western hegemony in the international order. This dependence on Europeandominated models and legal apparatus has resulted in the paradox that only rights sanctioned by the former colonial powers have been accorded to the colonized, regardless of the latter's needs. In the case of Namibia, Grovogui focuses on the discursive strategies used by the West and their southern African allies to control the legal debate, as well as the tactics used by the colonized to recast the terms of the discussion.

Grovogui blends critical legal theory, historical research, political economy, and cultural studies with profound knowledge of contemporary Africa in general and Namibia in particular. Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans represents the very best of the new scholarship, moving beyond narrow disciplinary boundaries to illuminate issues of decolonization in Africa.

Siba N'Zatioula Grovogui is assistant professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. He previously practiced law in his native Guinea.

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Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization
Scott Lauria Morgensen
University of Minnesota Press, 2011
Library of Congress E98.S48M67 2011 | Dewey Decimal 325.30973

We are all caught up in one another, Scott Lauria Morgensen asserts, we who live in settler societies, and our interrelationships inform all that these societies touch. Native people live in relation to all non-Natives amid the ongoing power relations of settler colonialism, despite never losing inherent claims to sovereignty as indigenous peoples. Explaining how relational distinctions of “Native” and “settler” define the status of being “queer,” Spaces between Us argues that modern queer subjects emerged among Natives and non-Natives by engaging the meaningful difference indigeneity makes within a settler society.

Morgensen’s analysis exposes white settler colonialism as a primary condition for the development of modern queer politics in the United States. Bringing together historical and ethnographic cases, he shows how U.S. queer projects became non-Native and normatively white by comparatively examining the historical activism and critical theory of Native queer and Two-Spirit people.

Presenting a “biopolitics of settler colonialism”—in which the imagined disappearance of indigeneity and sustained subjugation of all racialized peoples ensures a progressive future for white settlers—Spaces between Us newly demonstrates the interdependence of nation, race, gender, and sexuality and offers opportunities for resistance in the United States.

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Spiral to the Stars: Mvskoke Tools of Futurity
Laura Harjo
University of Arizona Press, 2019
Library of Congress E99.C9H276 2019 | Dewey Decimal 975.00497385

All communities are teeming with energy, spirit, and knowledge, and Spiral to the Stars taps into and activates this dynamism to discuss Indigenous community planning from a Mvskoke perspective. This book poses questions about what community is, how to reclaim community, and how to embark on the process of envisioning what and where the community can be.

Geographer Laura Harjo demonstrates that Mvskoke communities have what they need to dream, imagine, speculate, and activate the wishes of ancestors, contemporary kin, and future relatives—all in a present temporality—­which is Indigenous futurity.

Organized around four methodologies—radical sovereignty, community knowledge, collective power, and emergence geographies—Spiral to the Stars provides a path that departs from traditional community-making strategies, which are often extensions of the settler state. Readers are provided a set of methodologies to build genuine community relationships, knowledge, power, and spaces for themselves. Communities don’t have to wait on experts because this book helps them activate their own possibilities and expertise. A detailed final chapter provides participatory tools that can be used in workshop settings or one on one.

This book offers a critical and concrete map for community making that leverages Indigenous way-finding tools. Mvskoke narratives thread throughout the text, vividly demonstrating that theories come from lived and felt experiences. This is a must-have book for community organizers, radical pedagogists, and anyone wishing to empower and advocate for their community.
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Third World Studies: Theorizing Liberation
Gary Y. Okihiro
Duke University Press, 2016
Library of Congress D16.4.D44O35 2016

In 1968 the Third World Liberation Front at San Francisco State College demanded the creation of a Third World studies program to counter the existing curricula that ignored issues of power—notably, imperialism and oppression. The administration responded by institutionalizing an ethnic studies program; Third World studies was over before it began. Detailing the field's genesis and premature death, Gary Y. Okihiro presents an intellectual history of ethnic studies and Third World studies and shows where they converged and departed by identifying some of their core ideas, concepts, methods, and theories. In so doing, he establishes the contours of a unified field of study—Third World studies—that pursues a decolonial politics by examining the human condition broadly, especially in regard to oppression, and critically analyzing the locations and articulations of power as manifested in the social formation. Okihiro's framing of Third World studies moves away from ethnic studies' liberalism and its U.S.-centrism to emphasize the need for complex thinking and political action in the drive for self-determination. 
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Transfigurations Of The Maghreb: Feminism, Decolonization, and Literatures
Winfred Woodhull
University of Minnesota Press, 1993
Library of Congress PQ3988.N6W66 1993 | Dewey Decimal 840.992870961

Trustee for the Human Community: Ralph J. Bunche, the United Nations, and the Decolonization of Africa
Robert A. Hill
Ohio University Press, 2010
Library of Congress E748.B885T78 2010 | Dewey Decimal 341.233092

Ralph J. Bunche (1904–1971), winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, was a key U.S. diplomat in the planning and creation of the United Nations in 1945. In 1947 he was invited to join the permanent UN Secretariat as director of the new Trusteeship Department. In this position, Bunche played a key role in setting up the trusteeship system that provided important impetus for postwar decolonization ending European control of Africa as well as an international framework for the oversight of the decolonization process after the Second World War.

Trustee for the Human Community is the first volume to examine the totality of Bunche’s unrivalled role in the struggle for African independence both as a key intellectual and an international diplomat and to illuminate it from the broader African American perspective.

These commissioned essays examine the full range of Ralph Bunche’s involvement in Africa. The scholars explore sensitive political issues, such as Bunche’s role in the Congo and his views on the struggle in South Africa. Trustee for the Human Community stands as a monument to the profoundly important role of one of the greatest Americans in one of the greatest political movements in the history of the twentieth century. Contributors: David Anthony, Ralph A. Austen, Abena P. A. Busia, Neta C. Crawford, Robert R. Edgar, Charles P. Henry, Robert A. Hill, Edmond J. Keller, Martin Kilson, Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, Jon Olver, Pearl T. Robinson, Elliott P. Skinner, Crawford Young
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Ubuntu Relational Love: Decolonizing Black Masculinities
Devi Dee Mucina
University of Manitoba Press, 2019
Library of Congress B5315.U28M83 2019

Unpopular Sovereignty: Rhodesian Independence and African Decolonization
Luise White
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Library of Congress DT2981.W45 2015 | Dewey Decimal 968.9104

In 1965 the white minority government of Rhodesia (after 1980 Zimbabwe) issued a unilateral declaration of independence from Britain, rather than negotiate a transition to majority rule. In doing so, Rhodesia became the exception, if not anathema, to the policies and practices of the end of empire. In Unpopular Sovereignty, Luise White shows that the exception that was Rhodesian independence did not, in fact, make the state that different from new nations elsewhere in Africa: indeed, this history of Rhodesian political practices reveals some of the commonalities of mid-twentieth-century thinking about place and race and how much government should link the two.  

White locates Rhodesia’s independence in the era of decolonization in Africa, a time of great intellectual ferment in ideas about race, citizenship, and freedom. She shows that racists and reactionaries were just as concerned with questions of sovereignty and legitimacy as African nationalists were and took special care to design voter qualifications that could preserve their version of legal statecraft. Examining how the Rhodesian state managed its own governance and electoral politics, she casts an oblique and revealing light by which to rethink the narratives of decolonization.
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Vehicles of Decolonization: Public Transit in the Palestinian West Bank
Maryam S. Griffin
Temple University Press, 2022

The Visceral Logics of Decolonization
Neetu Khanna
Duke University Press, 2020
Library of Congress PK5416.K43 2020

In The Visceral Logics of Decolonization Neetu Khanna rethinks the project of decolonization by exploring a knotted set of relations between embodied experience and political feeling that she conceptualizes as the visceral. Khanna focuses on the work of the Progressive Writers' Association (PWA)—a Marxist anticolonial literary group active in India between the 1930s and 1950s—to show how anticolonial literature is a staging ground for exploring racialized emotion and revolutionary feeling. Among others, Khanna examines novels by Mulk Raj Anand, Ahmed Ali, and Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, as well as the feminist writing of Rashid Jahan and Ismat Chughtai, who each center the somatic life of the body as a fundamental site of colonial subjugation. In this way, decolonial action comes not solely from mental transformation, but from a reconstitution of the sensorial nodes of the body. The visceral, Khanna contends, therefore becomes a critical dimension of Marxist theories of revolutionary consciousness. In tracing the contours of the visceral's role in decolonial literature and politics, Khanna bridges affect and postcolonial theory in new and provocative ways.
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Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States
David Luis-Brown
Duke University Press, 2008
Library of Congress F1789.A1L85 2008 | Dewey Decimal 305.800972

In Waves of Decolonization, David Luis-Brown reveals how between the 1880s and the 1930s, writer-activists in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States developed narratives and theories of decolonization, of full freedom and equality in the shadow of empire. They did so decades before the decolonization of Africa and Asia in the mid-twentieth century. Analyzing the work of nationalist leaders, novelists, and social scientists, including W. E. B. Du Bois, José Martí, Claude McKay, Luis-Brown brings together an array of thinkers who linked local struggles against racial oppression and imperialism to similar struggles in other nations. With discourses and practices of hemispheric citizenship, writers in the Americas broadened conventional conceptions of rights to redress their loss under the expanding United States empire. In focusing on the transnational production of the national in the wake of U.S. imperialism, Luis-Brown emphasizes the need for expanding the linguistic and national boundaries of U.S. American culture and history.

Luis-Brown traces unfolding narratives of decolonization across a broad range of texts. He explores how Martí and Du Bois, known as the founders of Cuban and black nationalisms, came to develop anticolonial discourses that cut across racial and national divides. He illuminates how cross-fertilizations among the Harlem Renaissance, Mexican indigenismo, and Cuban negrismo in the 1920s contributed to broader efforts to keep pace with transformations unleashed by ongoing conflicts over imperialism, and he considers how those transformations were explored in novels by McKay of Jamaica, Jesús Masdeu of Cuba, and Miguel Ángel Menéndez of Mexico. Focusing on ethnography’s uneven contributions to decolonization, he investigates how Manuel Gamio, a Mexican anthropologist, and Zora Neale Hurston each adapted metropolitan social science for use by writers from the racialized periphery.

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68 books about Decolonization
Aazheyaadizi
Worldview, Language, and the Logics of Decolonization
Mark D. Freeland
Michigan State University Press, 2020
Many of the English translations of Indigenous languages that we commonly use today have been handed down from colonial missionaries whose intent was to fundamentally alter or destroy prior Indigenous knowledge and praxis. In this text, author Mark D. Freeland develops a theory of worldview that provides an interrelated logical mooring to shed light on the issues around translating Indigenous languages in and out of colonial languages. In tandem with other linguistic and narrative methods, this theory of worldview can be employed to help root out the reproduction of colonial culture in Indigenous languages and can be a useful addition to the repertoire of tools needed to return to life-giving relationships with our environment. These issues of decolonization are highlighted in the trajectory of treaty language associated with relationships to land and their present-day importance. This book uses the 1836 Treaty of Washington and its contemporary manifestation in Great Lakes fishing rights and the State of Michigan’s 2007 Inland Consent Decree as a means of identifying the role of worldview in deciphering the logics embedded in Anishinaabe thought associated with these relationships to land. A fascinating study for students of Indigenous and linguistic disciplines, this book deftly demonstrates the significance of worldview theory in relation to the logics of decolonization of Indigenous thought and praxis.
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African Catholic
Decolonization and the Transformation of the Church
Elizabeth A. Foster
Harvard University Press, 2019
Elizabeth Foster examines how French imperialists and the Africans they ruled imagined the religious future of sub-Saharan Africa in the years just before and after decolonization. The story encompasses the transition to independence, Catholic contributions to black intellectual currents, and efforts to create an authentically “African” church.
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African Intellectuals and Decolonization
Nicholas M. Creary
Ohio University Press, 2012

Decades after independence for most African states, the struggle for decolonization is still incomplete, as demonstrated by the fact that Africa remains associated in many Western minds with chaos, illness, and disorder. African and non-African scholars alike still struggle to establish the idea of African humanity, in all its diversity, and to move Africa beyond its historical role as the foil to the West.

As this book shows, Africa’s decolonization is an ongoing process across a range of fronts, and intellectuals—both African and non-African—have significant roles to play in that process. The essays collected here examine issues such as representation and retrospection; the roles of intellectuals in the public sphere; and the fundamental question of how to decolonize African knowledges. African Intellectuals and Decolonization outlines ways in which intellectual practice can serve to de-link Africa from its global representation as a debased, subordinated, deviant, and inferior entity.

Contributors
Lesley Cowling, University of the Witwatersrand
Nicholas M. Creary, University at Albany
Marlene De La Cruz, Ohio University
Carolyn Hamilton, University of Cape Town
George Hartley, Ohio University
Janet Hess, Sonoma State University
T. Spreelin McDonald, Ohio University
Ebenezer Adebisi Olawuyi, University of Ibadan
Steve Odero Ouma, University of Nairobi
Oyeronke Oyewumi, State University of New York
at Stony Brook
Tsenay Serequeberhan, Morgan State University

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American Visions of the Netherlands East Indies/Indonesia
US Foreign Policy and Indonesian Nationalism 1920-1949
Frances Gouda and Thijs Brocades Zaalberg
Amsterdam University Press, 2002
The result of a Fulbright senior research fellowship celebrating the simultaneous 50th anniversaries of the Fulbright Exchange Foundation and the Indonesian Republic, this book offers a new perspective on American attitudes toward Dutch colonial rule and Indonesia’s struggle for independence. Drawing on extensive research in American, Dutch, Indonesian, and Australian diplomatic records and archival documents, as well as the archives of the United Nations, the authors give a new overview of the political background and changing rationale of American foreign policies.
[more]

Autobiography and Decolonization
Modernity, Masculinity, and the Nation-State
Philip Holden
University of Wisconsin Press, 2008
Philip Holden reveals deeply gendered connections between the writing of individual lives and of the narratives of nations emerging from colonialism. Autobiography and Decolonization is the first book to give serious academic attention to autobiographies of nationalist leaders in the process of decolonization, attending to them not simply as partial historical documents, but as texts involved in remaking the world views of their readers.
            Holden examines Mohandas K. Gandhi’s An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Marcus Garvey’s fragmentary Autobiography,Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford’s Ethiopia Unbound, Lee Kuan Yew’s The Singapore Story, Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, Jawaharlal Nehru’s An Autobiography, and Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana:The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah.
            Holden argues that these examples of life writing have had significant influence on the formation of new, and often profoundly gendered, national identities. These narratives constitute the nation less as an imagined community than as an imagined individual. Moving from the past to the promise of the future, they mediate relationships between public and private, and between individual and collective stories. Ultimately, they show how the construction of modern selfhood is inextricably linked to the construction of a postcolonial polity.
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Beyond Man
Race, Coloniality, and Philosophy of Religion
Yountae An and Eleanor Craig, editors
Duke University Press, 2021
Beyond Man reimagines the meaning and potential of a philosophy of religion that better attends to the inextricable links among religion, racism, and colonialism. An Yountae, Eleanor Craig, and the contributors reckon with the colonial and racial implications of the field's history by staging a conversation with Black, Indigenous, and decolonial studies. In their introduction, An and Craig point out that European-descended Christianity has historically defined itself by its relation to the other while paradoxically claiming to represent and speak to humanity in its totality. The topics include secularism, the Eucharist's relation to Blackness, and sixteenth-century Brazilian cannibalism rituals as well as an analysis of how Mircea Eliade's conception of the sacred underwrites settler colonial projects and imaginaries. Throughout, the contributors also highlight the theorizing of Afro-Caribbean thinkers such as Sylvia Wynter, C. L. R. James, Frantz Fanon, and Aimé Césaire whose work disrupts the normative Western categories of religion and philosophy.

Contributors. An Yountae, Ellen Armour, J. Kameron Carter, Eleanor Craig, Amy Hollywood, Vincent Lloyd, Filipe Maia, Mayra Rivera, Devin Singh, Joseph R. Winters
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The Blood of the Colony
Owen White
Harvard University Press, 2020
The surprising story of the wine industry’s role in the rise of French Algeria and the fall of empire.

“We owe to wine a blessing far more precious than gold: the peopling of Algeria with Frenchmen,” stated agriculturist Pierre Berthault in the early 1930s. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Europeans had displaced Algerians from the colony’s best agricultural land and planted grapevines. Soon enough, wine was the primary export of a region whose mostly Muslim inhabitants didn’t drink alcohol.

Settlers made fortunes while drawing large numbers of Algerians into salaried work for the first time. But the success of Algerian wine resulted in friction with French producers, challenging the traditional view that imperial possessions should complement, not compete with, the metropole. By the middle of the twentieth century, amid the fight for independence, Algerians had come to see the rows of vines as an especially hated symbol of French domination. After the war, Algerians had to decide how far they would go to undo the transformations the colonists had wrought—including the world’s fourth-biggest wine industry. Owen White examines Algeria’s experiment with nationalized wine production in worker-run vineyards, the pressures that resulted in the failure of that experiment, and the eventual uprooting of most of the country’s vines.

With a special focus on individual experiences of empire, from the wealthiest Europeans to the poorest laborers in the fields, The Blood of the Colony shows the central role of wine in the economic life of French Algeria and in its settler culture. White makes clear that the industry left a long-term mark on the development of the nation.
[more]

Britain, France and the Decolonization of Africa
Future Imperfect?
Edited by Andrew W.M. Smith and Chris Jeppesen
University College London, 2017
Looking at decolonization in the conditional tense, this volume teases out the complex and uncertain ends of British and French empire in Africa during the period of ‘late colonial shift’ after 1945. Rather than view decolonization as an inevitable process, the contributors together explore the crucial historical moments in which change was negotiated, compromises were made, and debates were staged. Three core themes guide the analysis: development, contingency and entanglement. The chapters consider the ways in which decolonization was governed and moderated by concerns about development and profit. A complementary focus on contingency allows deeper consideration of how colonial powers planned for ‘colonial futures’, and how divergent voices greeted the end of empire. Thinking about entanglements likewise stresses both the connections that existed between the British and French empires in Africa, and those that endured beyond the formal transfer of power.
[more]

Cold War and Decolonization in Guinea, 1946–1958
Elizabeth Schmidt
Ohio University Press, 2007

In September 1958, Guinea claimed its independence, rejecting a constitution that would have relegated it to junior partnership in the French Community. In all the French empire, Guinea was the only territory to vote “No.” Orchestrating the “No” vote was the Guinean branch of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA), an alliance of political parties with affiliates in French West and Equatorial Africa and the United Nations trusts of Togo and Cameroon. Although Guinea’s stance vis-à-vis the 1958 constitution has been recognized as unique, until now the historical roots of this phenomenon have not been adequately explained.

Clearly written and free of jargon, Cold War and Decolonization in Guinea argues that Guinea’s vote for independence was the culmination of a decade-long struggle between local militants and political leaders for control of the political agenda. Since 1950, when RDA representatives in the French parliament severed their ties to the French Communist Party, conservative elements had dominated the RDA. In Guinea, local cadres had opposed the break. Victimized by the administration and sidelined by their own leaders, they quietly rebuilt the party from the base. Leftist militants, their voices muted throughout most of the decade, gained preeminence in 1958, when trade unionists, students, the party’s women’s and youth wings, and other grassroots actors pushed the Guinean RDA to endorse a “No” vote. Thus, Guinea’s rejection of the proposed constitution in favor of immediate independence was not an isolated aberration. Rather, it was the outcome of years of political mobilization by activists who, despite Cold War repression, ultimately pushed the Guinean RDA to the left.

The significance of this highly original book, based on previously unexamined archival records and oral interviews with grassroots activists, extends far beyond its primary subject. In illuminating the Guinean case, Elizabeth Schmidt helps us understand the dynamics of decolonization and its legacy for postindependence nation-building in many parts of the developing world.

Examining Guinean history from the bottom up, Schmidt considers local politics within the larger context of the Cold War, making her book suitable for courses in African history and politics, diplomatic history, and Cold War history.

[more]

Cold War Ruins
Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes
Lisa Yoneyama
Duke University Press, 2016
In Cold War Ruins Lisa Yoneyama argues that the efforts intensifying since the 1990s to bring justice to the victims of Japanese military and colonial violence have generated what she calls a "transborder redress culture." A product of failed post-World War II transitional justice that left many colonial legacies intact, this culture both contests and reiterates the complex transwar and transpacific entanglements that have sustained the Cold War unredressability and illegibility of certain violences. By linking justice to the effects of American geopolitical hegemony, and by deploying a conjunctive cultural critique—of "comfort women" redress efforts, state-sponsored apologies and amnesties, Asian American involvement in redress cases, the ongoing effects of the U.S. occupation of Japan and Okinawa, Japanese atrocities in China, and battles over WWII memories—Yoneyama helps illuminate how redress culture across Asia and the Pacific has the potential to bring powerful new and challenging perspectives on American exceptionalism, militarized security, justice, sovereignty, forgiveness, and decolonization.
[more]

The Colonial Politics of Global Health
France and the United Nations in Postwar Africa
Jessica Lynne Pearson
Harvard University Press, 2018
Jessica Lynne Pearson explores the collision between imperial and international visions of health and development in French Africa as postwar decolonization movements gained strength. The consequences of putting politics above public health continue to play out in constraints placed on international health organizations half a century later.
[more]

Colonial Strangers
Women Writing the End of the British Empire
Lassner, Phyllis
Rutgers University Press, 2004
Colonial Strangers revolutionizes modern British literary studies by showing how our interpretations of the postcolonial must confront World War II and the Holocaust. Phyllis Lassner’s analysis reveals how writers such as Muriel Spark, Olivia Manning, Rumer Godden, Phyllis Bottome, Elspeth Huxley, and Zadie Smith insist that World War II is critical to understanding how and why the British Empire had to end.

Drawing on memoirs, fiction, reportage, and film adaptations, Colonial Strangers explores the critical perspectives of writers who correct prevailing stereotypes of British women as agents of imperialism. They also question their own participation in British claims of moral righteousness and British politics of cultural exploitation. These authors take center stage in debates about connections between the racist ideologies of the Third Reich and the British Empire.

Colonial Strangers reveals how the literary responses of key artists represent not only compelling reading, but also a necessary intervention in colonial and postcolonial debates and the canons of modern British fiction.


[more]

Connections after Colonialism
Europe and Latin America in the 1820s
Edited by Mathew Brown and Gabriel Pacquette
University of Alabama Press, 2013
Contributing to the historiography of transnational and global transmission of ideas, Connections after Colonialism examines relations between Europe and Latin America during the tumultuous 1820s.
 
In the Atlantic World, the 1820s was a decade marked by the rupture of colonial relations, the independence of Latin America, and the ever-widening chasm between the Old World and the New. Connections after Colonialism, edited by Matthew Brown and Gabriel Paquette, builds upon recent advances in the history of colonialism and imperialism by studying former colonies and metropoles through the same analytical lens, as part of an attempt to understand the complex connections—political, economic, intellectual, and cultural—between Europe and Latin America that survived the demise of empire.
 
Historians are increasingly aware of the persistence of robust links between Europe and the new Latin American nations. This book focuses on connections both during the events culminating with independence and in subsequent years, a period strangely neglected in European and Latin American scholarship. Bringing together distinguished historians of both Europe and America, the volume reveals a new cast of characters and relationships ranging from unrepentant American monarchists, compromise seeking liberals in Lisbon and Madrid who envisioned transatlantic federations, and British merchants in the River Plate who saw opportunity where others saw risk to public moralists whose audiences spanned from Paris to Santiago de Chile and plantation owners in eastern Cuba who feared that slave rebellions elsewhere in the Caribbean would spread to their island.
Contributors
Matthew Brown / Will Fowler / Josep M.
Fradera / Carrie Gibson / Brian Hamnett /
Maurizio Isabella / Iona Macintyre / Scarlett
O’Phelan Godoy / Gabriel Paquette / David
Rock / Christopher Schmidt-Nowara / Jay
Sexton / Reuben Zahler
[more]

Constructing the Pluriverse
The Geopolitics of Knowledge
Bernd Reiter, editor
Duke University Press, 2018
The contributors to Constructing the Pluriverse critique the hegemony of the postcolonial Western tradition and its claims to universality by offering a set of “pluriversal” approaches to understanding the coexisting epistemologies and practices of the different worlds and problems we inhabit and encounter. Moving beyond critiques of colonialism, the contributors rethink the relationship between knowledge and power, offering new perspectives on development, democracy, and ideology while providing diverse methodologies for non-Western thought and practice that range from feminist approaches to scientific research to ways of knowing expressed through West African oral traditions. In combination, these wide-ranging approaches and understandings form a new analytical toolbox for those seeking creative solutions for dismantling Westernization throughout the world.

Contributors. Zaid Ahmad, Manuela Boatcă, Hans-Jürgen Burchardt, Raewyn Connell, Arturo Escobar, Sandra Harding, Ehsan Kashfi, Venu Mehta, Walter D. Mignolo, Ulrich Oslender, Issiaka Ouattara, Bernd Reiter, Manu Samnotra, Catherine E. Walsh, Aram Ziai
 
[more]

Creolizing the Nation
Kris F. Sealey
Northwestern University Press, 2020

Creolizing the Nation identifies the nation-form as a powerful resource for political struggles against colonialism, racism, and other manifestations of Western hegemony in the Global South even as it acknowledges the homogenizing effects of the politics of nationalism. Drawing on Caribbean, decolonial, and Latina feminist resources, Kris F. Sealey argues that creolization provides a rich theoretical ground for rethinking the nation and deploying its political and cultural apparatus to imagine more just, humane communities.

Analyzing the work of thinkers such as Édouard Glissant, Frantz Fanon, Gloria Anzaldúa, María Lugones, and Mariana Ortega, Sealey shows that a properly creolizing account of the nation provides an alternative imaginary out of which collective political life might be understood. Creolizing practices are always constitutive of anticolonial resistance, and their ongoing negotiations with power should be understood as everyday acts of sabotage. Sealey demonstrates that the conceptual frame of the nation is not fated to re-create colonial instantiations of nationalism but rather can support new possibilities for liberation and justice.

[more]

Critically Sovereign
Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies
Joanne Barker, editor
Duke University Press, 2017
Critically Sovereign traces the ways in which gender is inextricably a part of Indigenous politics and U.S. and Canadian imperialism and colonialism. The contributors show how gender, sexuality, and feminism work as co-productive forces of Native American and Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and epistemology. Several essays use a range of literary and legal texts to analyze the production of colonial space, the biopolitics of “Indianness,” and the collisions and collusions between queer theory and colonialism within Indigenous studies. Others address the U.S. government’s criminalization of traditional forms of Diné marriage and sexuality, the Iñupiat people's changing conceptions of masculinity as they embrace the processes of globalization, Hawai‘i’s same-sex marriage bill, and stories of Indigenous women falling in love with non-human beings such as animals, plants, and stars. Following the politics of gender, sexuality, and feminism across these diverse historical and cultural contexts, the contributors question and reframe the thinking about Indigenous knowledge, nationhood, citizenship, history, identity, belonging, and the possibilities for a decolonial future.

Contributors. Jodi A. Byrd, Joanne Barker, Jennifer Nez Denetdale, Mishuana Goeman,  J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Melissa K. Nelson, Jessica Bissett Perea, Mark Rifkin
[more]

Dangerous Liaisons
Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives
Anne Mcclintock
University of Minnesota Press, 1997

The Darker Side of Western Modernity
Global Futures, Decolonial Options
Walter D. Mignolo
Duke University Press, 2011
During the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, coloniality emerged as a new structure of power as Europeans colonized the Americas and built on the ideas of Western civilization and modernity as the endpoints of historical time and Europe as the center of the world. Walter D. Mignolo argues that coloniality is the darker side of Western modernity, a complex matrix of power that has been created and controlled by Western men and institutions from the Renaissance, when it was driven by Christian theology, through the late twentieth century and the dictates of neoliberalism. This cycle of coloniality is coming to an end. Two main forces are challenging Western leadership in the early twenty-first century. One of these, “dewesternization,” is an irreversible shift to the East in struggles over knowledge, economics, and politics. The second force is “decoloniality.” Mignolo explains that decoloniality requires delinking from the colonial matrix of power underlying Western modernity to imagine and build global futures in which human beings and the natural world are no longer exploited in the relentless quest for wealth accumulation.
[more]

Decolonization and Independence in Kenya, 1940–1993
B. A. Ogot
Ohio University Press, 1995

This is a sharply observed assessment of the history of the last half century by a distinguished group of historians of Kenya. At the same time the book is a courageous reflection in the dilemmas of African nationhood.

Professor B. A. Ogot says:

“The main purpose of the book is to show that decolonization does not only mean the transfer of alien power to sovereign nationhood; it must also entail the liberation of the worlds of spirit and culture, as well as economics and politics.

“The book also raises a more fundamental question, that is: How much independence is available to any state, national economy or culture in today’s world? It asks how far are Africa’s miseries linked to the colonial past and to the process of decolonization?

“In particular the book raises the basic question of how far Kenya is avoidably neo-colonial? And what does neo-colonial dependence mean? The book answers these questions by discussing the dynamic between the politics of decolonization, the social history of class formation and the economics of dependence. The book ends with a provocative epilogue discussing the transformation of the post-colonial state from a single-party to a multi-party system.”

[more]

Decolonization and the Decolonized
Albert Memmi
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
In this time of global instability and widespread violence, Albert Memmi—author of the highly influential and groundbreaking work The Colonizer and the Colonized—turns his attention to the present-day situation of formerly colonized peoples. In Decolonization and the Decolonized, Memmi expands his intellectual engagement with the subject and examines the manifold causes of the failure of decolonization efforts throughout the world.As outspoken and controversial as ever, Memmi initiates a much-needed discussion of the ex-colonized and refuses to idealize those who are too often painted as hapless victims. He shows how, in light of a radically changed world, it would be problematic—and even irresponsible—to continue to deploy concepts that were useful and valid during the period of anticolonial struggle.Decolonization and the Decolonized contributes to the most current debates on Islamophobia in France, the “new” anti-Semitism, and the unrelenting poverty gripping the African continent. Memmi, who is Jewish, was born and raised in Tunis, and focuses primarily on what he calls the Arab-Muslim condition, while also incorporating comparisons with South America, Asia, Black Africa, and the United States. In Decolonization and the Decolonized, Memmi has written that rare book—a manifesto informed by intellect and animated by passion—that will propel public analysis of the most urgent global issues to a new level.Albert Memmi is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Paris, Nanterre, and the author of Racism (Minnesota, 1997).Robert Bononno, a teacher and translator, lives in New York City.
[more]

The Decolonization Of Africa
David Birmingham
Ohio University Press, 1995
This bold, popularizing synthesis presents a readily accessible introduction to one of the major themes of twentieth-century world history. Between 1922, when self-government was restored to Egypt, and 1994, when nonracial democracy was achieved in South Africa, 54 new nations were established in Africa. Written within the parameters of African history, as opposed to imperial history, this study charts the processes of nationalism, liberation and independence that recast the political map of Africa in these years. Ranging from Algeria in the North, where a French colonial government used armed force to combat Algerian aspirations to home-rule, to the final overthrow of apartheid in the South, this is an authoritative survey that will be welcomed by all students tackling this complex and challenging topic.
[more]

Decolonizing Ethnography
Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science
Carolina Alonso-Bejarano, Lucia López Juárez, Mirian A. Mijangos García, and Daniel M. Goldstein
Duke University Press, 2019
In August 2011, ethnographers Carolina Alonso Bejarano and Daniel M. Goldstein began a research project on undocumented immigration in the United States by volunteering at a center for migrant workers in New Jersey. Two years later, Lucia López Juárez and Mirian A. Mijangos García—two local immigrant workers from Latin America—joined Alonso Bejarano and Goldstein as research assistants and quickly became equal partners for whom ethnographic practice was inseparable from activism. In Decolonizing Ethnography the four coauthors offer a methodological and theoretical reassessment of social science research, showing how it can function as a vehicle for activism and as a tool for marginalized people to theorize their lives. Tacking between personal narratives, ethnographic field notes, an original bilingual play about workers' rights, and examinations of anthropology as a discipline, the coauthors show how the participation of Mijangos García and López Juárez transformed the project's activist and academic dimensions. In so doing, they offer a guide for those wishing to expand the potential of ethnography to serve as a means for social transformation and decolonization.
[more]

Decolonizing the Map
Cartography from Colony to Nation
Edited by James R. Akerman
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Almost universally, newly independent states seek to affirm their independence and identity by making the production of new maps and atlases a top priority. For formerly colonized peoples, however, this process neither begins nor ends with independence, and it is rarely straightforward. Mapping their own land is fraught with a fresh set of issues: how to define and administer their territories, develop their national identity, establish their role in the community of nations, and more. The contributors to Decolonizing the Map explore this complicated relationship between mapping and decolonization while engaging with recent theoretical debates about the nature of decolonization itself.
 
These essays, originally delivered as the 2010 Kenneth Nebenzahl, Jr., Lectures in the History of Cartography at the Newberry Library, encompass more than two centuries and three continents—Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Ranging from the late eighteenth century through the mid-twentieth, contributors study topics from mapping and national identity in late colonial Mexico to the enduring complications created by the partition of British India and the racialized organization of space in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. A vital contribution to studies of both colonization and cartography, Decolonizing the Map is the first book to systematically and comprehensively examine the engagement of mapping in the long—and clearly unfinished—parallel processes of decolonization and nation building in the modern world.
[more]

Define and Rule
Mahmood Mamdani
Harvard University Press, 2012
When Britain abandoned its attempt to eradicate difference between conqueror and conquered and introduced a new idea of governance as the definition and management of difference, lines of political identity were drawn between settler and native, and between natives according to tribe. Out of this colonial experience arose a language of pluralism.
[more]

Diné Perspectives
Revitalizing and Reclaiming Navajo Thought
Edited by Lloyd L. Lee; Foreword by Gregory Cajete
University of Arizona Press, 2014
What does it mean to be a Navajo (Diné) person today? What does it mean to “respect tradition”? How can a contemporary life be informed by the traditions of the past? These are the kinds of questions addressed by contributors to this unusual and pathbreaking book.
 
All of the contributors are coming to personal terms with a phrase that underpins the matrix of Diné culture: Sa’ah Naagháí Bik’eh Hózhóón. Often referred to simply as SNBH, the phrase can be translated in many ways but is generally understood to mean “one’s journey of striving to live a long, harmonious life.” The book offers a variety of perspectives of Diné men and women on the Diné cultural paradigm that is embedded in SNBH. Their writings represent embodied knowledge grounded in a way of knowing that connects thought, speech, experience, history, tradition, and land. Some of the contributors are scholars. Some are Diné who are fighting for justice and prosperity for the Navajo Nation. Some are poets and artists. They are united in working to preserve both intellectual and cultural sovereignty for Diné peoples. And their contributions exemplify how Indigenous peoples are creatively applying tools of decolonization and critical research to re-create Indigenous thought and culture in a present day that rarely resembles the days of their ancestors.
 
More than 300,000 people self-identify as Diné today. Every one must grapple with how to make a life that acknowledges Sa’ah Naagháí Bik’eh Hózhóón. Diné Perspectives is unique in bringing such personal journeys to the public eye.
[more]

Earth Politics
Religion, Decolonization, and Bolivia's Indigenous Intellectuals
Waskar Ari
Duke University Press, 2014
Earth Politics focuses on the lives of four indigenous activist-intellectuals in Bolivia, key leaders in the Alcaldes Mayores Particulares (AMP), a movement established to claim rights for indigenous education and reclaim indigenous lands from hacienda owners. The AMP leaders invented a discourse of decolonization, rooted in part in native religion, and used it to counter structures of internal colonialism, including the existing racial systems. Waskar Ari calls their social movement, practices, and discourse earth politics, both because the AMP emphasized the idea of the earth and the place of Indians on it, and because of the political meaning that the AMP gave to the worship of the Aymara gods. Depicting the social worlds and life work of the activists, Ari traverses Bolivia's political and social landscape from the 1920s into the early 1970s. He reveals the AMP 's extensive geographic reach, genuine grassroots quality, and vibrant regional diversity. Ari had access to the private archives of indigenous families, and he collected oral histories, speaking with men and women who knew the AMP leaders. The resulting examination of Bolivian indigenous activism is one of unparalleled nuance and depth.
[more]

Encounters on Contested Lands
Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Québec
Julie Burelle
Northwestern University Press, 2019
Winner, 2019 John W. Frick Book Award
Winner, 2020 Ann Saddlemyer Award
Finalist, ATHE Outstanding Book Award for 2020
Mention Spéciale, Société québécoise d'études théâtrale


In Encounters on Contested Lands, Julie Burelle employs a performance studies lens to examine how instances of Indigenous self-representation in Québec challenge the national and identity discourses of the French Québécois de souche—the French-speaking descendants of white European settlers who understand themselves to be settlers no more but rather colonized and rightfully belonging to the territory of Québec. 

Analyzing a wide variety of performances, Burelle brings together the theater of Alexis Martin and the film L'Empreinte, which repositions the French Québécois de souche as métis, with protest marches led by Innu activists; the Indigenous company Ondinnok's theater of repatriation; the films of Yves Sioui Durand, Alanis Obomsawin, and the Wapikoni Mobile project; and the visual work of Nadia Myre. These performances, Burelle argues, challenge received definitions of sovereignty and articulate new ones while proposing to the province and, more specifically, to the French Québécois de souche, that there are alternative ways to imagine Québec's future and remember its past. 

The performances insist on Québec's contested nature and reframe it as animated by competing sovereignties. Together they reveal how the "colonial present tense" and "tense colonial present" operate in conjunction as they work to imagine an alternative future predicated on decolonization. Encounters on Contested Lands engages with theater and performance studies while making unique and needed contributions to Québec and Canadian studies, as well as to Indigenous and settler-colonial studies.
[more]

The End of Empires
African Americans and India
Gerald Horne
Temple University Press, 2009

In the past fifty years, according to Christine So, the narratives of many popular Asian American books have been dominated by economic questions-what money can buy, how money is lost, how money is circulated, and what labor or objects are worth. Focusing on books that have achieved mainstream popularity, Economic Citizens unveils the logic of economic exchange that determined Asian Americans’ transnational migrations and national belonging.

With penetrating insight, So examines literary works that have been successful in the U.S. marketplace but have been read previously by critics largely as narratives of alienation or assimilation, including Fifth Chinese Daughter, Flower Drum Song, Falling Leaves and Turning Japanese. In contrast to other studies that have focused on the marginalization of Asian Americans, Economic Citizens examines how Asian Americans have entered into the public sphere.

[more]

Eros Ideologies
Writings on Art, Spirituality, and the Decolonial
Laura E. Pérez
Duke University Press, 2018
In Eros Ideologies Laura E. Pérez explores the decolonial through Western and non-Western thought concerning personal and social well-being. Drawing upon Jungian, people-of-color, and spiritual psychology alongside non-Western spiritual philosophies of the interdependence of all life-forms, she writes of the decolonial as an ongoing project rooted in love as an ideology to frame respectful coexistence of social and cultural diversity. In readings of art that includes self-portraits by Frida Kahlo, Ana Mendieta, and Yreina D. Cervántez, the drawings and paintings of Chilean American artist Liliana Wilson, and Favianna Rodriguez's screen-printed images, Pérez identifies art as one of the most valuable laboratories for creating, imagining, and experiencing new forms of decolonial thought. Such art expresses what Pérez calls eros ideologies: understandings of social and natural reality that foreground the centrality of respect and care of self and others as the basis for a more democratic and responsible present and future. Employing a range of writing styles and voices—from the poetic to the scholarly—Pérez shows how art can point to more just and loving ways of being.
[more]

Erotic Cartographies
Decolonization and the Queer Caribbean Imagination
Krystal Nandini Ghisyawan
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Erotic Cartographies uses subjective mapping, a participatory data collection technique, to demonstrate how Trinidadian same-sex-loving women use their gender performance, erotic autonomy, and space-making practices to reinforce and resist colonial ascriptions on subject bodies. The women strategically embody their sexual identities to challenge imposed subject categories and to contest their invisibility and exclusion from discourses of belonging. Erotic Cartographies refers to the processes of mapping territories of self-knowing and self-expression, both cognitively in the imagination and on paper during the mapping exercise, exploring how meaning is given to space, and how it is transformed. Using the women’s quotes and maps, the book focuses on the false binary of public-private, the practices of home and family, and religious nationalism and spiritual self-seeking, to demonstrate the women’s challenges to the structural, symbolic, and interpersonal violence of colonial discourses and practices related to gender, knowledge, and power in Trinidadian society.
[more]

Food Fight!
Millennial Mestizaje Meets the Culinary Marketplace
Paloma Martinez-Cruz
University of Arizona Press, 2019
From the racial defamation and mocking tone of “Mexican” restaurants geared toward the Anglo customer to the high-end Latin-inspired eateries with Anglo chefs who give the impression that the food was something unattended or poorly handled that they “discovered” or “rescued” from actual Latinos, the dilemma of how to make ethical choices in food production and consumption is always as close as the kitchen recipe, coffee pot, or table grape.

In Food Fight! author Paloma Martinez-Cruz takes us on a Chicanx gastronomic journey that is powerful and humorous. Martinez-Cruz tackles head on the real-world politics of food production from the exploitation of farmworkers to the appropriation of Latinx bodies and culture, and takes us right into transformative eateries that offer a homegrown, mestiza consciousness.

The hard-hitting essays in Food Fight! bring a mestiza critique to today’s pressing discussions of labeling, identity, and imaging in marketing and dining. Not just about food, restaurants, and coffee, this volume employs a decolonial approach and engaging voice to interrogate ways that mestizo, Indigenous, and Latinx peoples are objectified in mainstream ideology and imaginary.
[more]

Freedom Time
Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World
Gary Wilder
Duke University Press, 2015
Freedom Time reconsiders decolonization from the perspectives of Aimé Césaire (Martinique) and Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal) who, beginning in 1945, promoted self-determination without state sovereignty. As politicians, public intellectuals, and poets they struggled to transform imperial France into a democratic federation, with former colonies as autonomous members of a transcontinental polity. In so doing, they revitalized past but unrealized political projects and anticipated impossible futures by acting as if they had already arrived. Refusing to reduce colonial emancipation to national independence, they regarded decolonization as an opportunity to remake the world, reconcile peoples, and realize humanity’s potential. Emphasizing the link between politics and aesthetics, Gary Wilder reads Césaire and Senghor as pragmatic utopians, situated humanists, and concrete cosmopolitans whose postwar insights can illuminate current debates about self-management, postnational politics, and planetary solidarity. Freedom Time invites scholars to decolonize intellectual history and globalize critical theory, to analyze the temporal dimensions of political life, and to question the territorialist assumptions of contemporary historiography.
[more]

From a Nation Torn
Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945-1962
Hannah Feldman
Duke University Press, 2014
From a Nation Torn provides a powerful critique of art history's understanding of French modernism and the historical circumstances that shaped its production and reception. Within art history, the aesthetic practices and theories that emerged in France from the late 1940s into the 1960s are demarcated as postwar. Yet it was during these very decades that France fought a protracted series of wars to maintain its far-flung colonial empire. Given that French modernism was created during, rather than after, war, Hannah Feldman argues that its interpretation must incorporate the tumultuous "decades of decolonization"and their profound influence on visual and public culture. Focusing on the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) and the historical continuities it presented with the experience of the Second World War, Feldman highlights decolonization's formative effects on art and related theories of representation, both political and aesthetic. Ultimately, From a Nation Torn constitutes a profound exploration of how certain populations and events are rendered invisible and their omission naturalized within histories of modernity.
 
[more]

Hong Kong Art
Culture and Decolonization
David Clarke
Duke University Press, 2002
Hong Kong Art is the first comprehensive survey of contemporary art from Hong Kong presented within the changing social and political context of the territory’s 1997 handover from British to Chinese sovereignty. Tracing a distinctive and increasingly vibrant art scene from the late 1960s through the present, David Clarke discusses a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, photography, video, and installations, as well as other kinds of visual production such as architecture, fashion, graphic design, and graffiti.
Clarke shows how a sense of local identity emerged in Hong Kong as the transition approached and found expression in the often politicized art produced. Given the recent international exposure of mainland Chinese contemporary art, this book considers the uniqueness of the art of China’s most cosmopolitan city. With a modern visual culture that was flourishing even when the People’s Republic was still closed to the outside world, Hong Kong has established itself as an exemplary site for both local and transnational elements to formulate into brilliant and groundbreaking art.
The author writes about individual artists and art works with a detail that will appeal to artists, curators, and art historians, as well as to postcolonial scholars, cultural studies scholars, and others.
[more]

Hungry Listening
Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies
Dylan Robinson
University of Minnesota Press, 2020

Reimagining how we understand and write about the Indigenous listening experience?

Hungry Listening is the first book to consider listening from both Indigenous and settler colonial perspectives. A critical response to what has been called the “whiteness of sound studies,” Dylan Robinson evaluates how decolonial practices of listening emerge from increasing awareness of our listening positionality. This, he argues, involves identifying habits of settler colonial perception and contending with settler colonialism’s “tin ear” that renders silent the epistemic foundations of Indigenous song as history, law, and medicine. 

With case studies on Indigenous participation in classical music, musicals, and popular music, Hungry Listening examines structures of inclusion that reinforce Western musical values. Alongside this inquiry on the unmarked terms of inclusion in performing arts organizations and compositional practice, Hungry Listening offers examples of “doing sovereignty” in Indigenous performance art, museum exhibition, and gatherings that support an Indigenous listening resurgence.

Throughout the book, Robinson shows how decolonial and resurgent forms of listening might be affirmed by writing otherwise about musical experience. Through event scores, dialogic improvisation, and forms of poetic response and refusal, he demands a reorientation toward the act of reading as a way of listening. Indigenous relationships to the life of song are here sustained in writing that finds resonance in the intersubjective experience between listener, sound, and space. 

[more]

Indianizing Film
Decolonization, the Andes, and the Question of Technology
Schiwy, Freya
Rutgers University Press, 2009
Latin American indigenous media production has recently experienced a noticeable boom, specifically in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia. Indianizing Film zooms in on a selection of award-winning and widely influential fiction and docudrama shorts, analyzing them in the wider context of indigenous media practices and debates over decolonizing knowledge. Within this framework, Freya Schiwy approaches questions of gender, power, and representation.

Schiwy argues that instead of solely creating entertainment through their work indigenous media activists are building communication networks that encourage interaction between diverse cultures. As a result, mainstream images are retooled, permitting communities to strengthen their cultures and express their own visions of development and modernization. Indianizing Film encourages readers to consider how indigenous media contributes to a wider understanding of decolonization and anticolonial study against the universal backdrop of the twenty-first century.

[more]

Living with Nkrumahism
Nation, State, and Pan-Africanism in Ghana
Jeffrey S. Ahlman
Ohio University Press, 2017

In the 1950s, Ghana, under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah and the Convention People’s Party, drew the world’s attention as anticolonial activists, intellectuals, and politicians looked to it as a model for Africa’s postcolonial future. Nkrumah was a visionary, a statesman, and one of the key makers of contemporary Africa. In Living with Nkrumahism, Jeffrey S. Ahlman reexamines the infrastructure that organized and consolidated Nkrumah’s philosophy into a political program.

Ahlman draws on newly available source material to portray an organizational and cultural history of Nkrumahism. Taking us inside bureaucracies, offices, salary structures, and working routines, he painstakingly reconstructs the political and social milieu of the time and portrays a range of Ghanaians’ relationships to their country’s unique position in the decolonization process. Through fine attunement to the nuances of statecraft, he demonstrates how political and philosophical ideas shape lived experience.

Living with Nkrumahism stands at the crossroads of the rapidly growing fields of African decolonization, postcolonial history, and Cold War studies. It provides a much-needed scholarly model through which to reflect on the changing nature of citizenship and political and social participation in Africa and the broader postcolonial world.

[more]

Lusophone Africa
Beyond Independence
Fernando Arenas
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Lusophone Africa: Beyond Independence is a study of the contemporary cultural production of Portuguese-speaking Africa and its critical engagement with globalization in the aftermath of colonialism, especially since the advent of multiparty politics and market-oriented economies.

Exploring the evolving relationship of Lusophone Africa with Portugal, its former colonial power, and Brazil, Fernando Arenas situates the countries on the geopolitical map of contemporary global forces. Drawing from popular music, film, literature, cultural history, geopolitics, and critical theory to investigate the postcolonial condition of Portuguese-speaking Africa, Arenas offers an entirely original discussion of world music phenomenon Cesária Évora, as well as the most thorough examination to date of Lusophone African cinema and of Angolan post-civil-war fiction.

Throughout, Arenas evokes the rich multidimensionality of this community of African nations as a whole and of its individual parts: Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe since they gained their independence in the mid-1970s. In doing so, he puts forth a conceptual framework for understanding, for the first time, recent cultural and historical developments in Portuguese-speaking Africa.
[more]

Making a World after Empire
The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives
Christopher J. Lee
Ohio University Press, 2010

In April 1955, twenty-nine countries from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East came together for a diplomatic conference in Bandung, Indonesia, intending to define the direction of the postcolonial world. Representing approximately two-thirds of the world’s population, the Bandung conference occurred during a key moment of transition in the mid-twentieth century—amid the global wave of decolonization that took place after the Second World War and the nascent establishment of a new cold war world order in its wake. Participants such as Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Zhou Enlai of China, and Ahmed Sukarno of Indonesia seized this occasion to attempt the creation of a political alternative to the dual threats of Western neocolonialism and the cold war interventionism of the United States and the Soviet Union.

The essays in this volume explore the diverse repercussions of this event, tracing the diplomatic, intellectual, and sociocultural histories that have emanated from it. Making a World after Empire consequently addresses the complex intersection of postcolonial history and cold war history and speaks to contemporary discussions of Afro-Asianism, empire, and decolonization, thus reestablishing the conference’s importance in twentieth-century global history.

Contributors: Michael Adas, Laura Bier, James R. Brennan, G. Thomas Burgess, Antoinette Burton, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Julian Go, Christopher J. Lee, Jamie Monson, Jeremy Prestholdt, Denis M. Tull

[more]

Mapping the End of Empire
Aiyaz Husain
Harvard University Press, 2014
By 1945 Washington and London envisioned a new era in which the U.S. shouldered global responsibilities while Britain focused its regional interests narrowly. Mapping the End of Empire reveals how Anglo-American perceptions of geography and perspectives on the Muslim world shaped postcolonial futures from the Middle East to South Asia.
[more]

Mexican-Origin Foods, Foodways, and Social Movements
Decolonial Perspectives
Devon Peña
University of Arkansas Press, 2017
Winner, 2018 ASFS (Association for the Study of Food and Society) Book Award, Edited Volume

This collection of new essays offers groundbreaking perspectives on the ways that food and foodways serve as an element of decolonization in Mexican-origin communities.

The writers here take us from multigenerational acequia farmers, who trace their ancestry to Indigenous families in place well before the Oñate Entrada of 1598, to tomorrow’s transborder travelers who will be negotiating entry into the United States. Throughout, we witness the shifting mosaic of Mexican-origin foods and foodways in the fields, gardens, and kitchen tables from Chiapas to Alaska.

Global food systems are also considered from a critical agroecological perspective, including the ways colonialism affects native biocultural diversity, ecosystem resilience, and equality across species, human groups, and generations.

Mexican-Origin Foods, Foodways, and Social Movements is a major contribution to the understanding of the ways that Mexican-origin peoples have resisted and transformed food systems. It will animate scholarship on global food studies for years to come.
[more]

A Modern History of the Somali
Nation and State in the Horn of Africa
I. M. Lewis
Ohio University Press, 2002

This latest edition of A Modern History of the Somali brings I. M. Lewis’s definitive history up to date and shows the amazing continuity of Somali forms of social organization. Lewis’s history portrays the ingeniousness with which the Somali way of life has been adapted to all forms of modernity.

[more]

Native Space
Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism
Natchee Blu Barnd
Oregon State University Press, 2017
Native Space explores how indigenous communities and individuals sustain and create geographies through place-naming, everyday cultural practices, and artistic activism, within the boundaries of the settler colonial nation of the United States. Diverging from scholarship that tends to treat indigenous geography as an analytical concept, Natchee Blu Barnd instead draws attention to the subtle manifestations of everyday cultural practices—the concrete and often mundane activities involved in the creation of indigenous space.
 
What are the limits and potentials of indigenous acts of spatial production? Native Space argues that control over the notion of “Indianness” still sits at the center of how space is produced in a neocolonial nation, and shows how non-indigenous communities uniquely deploy Native   identities in the direct construction of colonial geographies. In short, “the Indian” serves to create White space in concrete ways.  Yet, Native geographies effectively reclaim indigenous identities, assert ongoing relations to the land, and refuse the claims of settler colonialism. 
 
Barnd creatively and persuasively uses original cartographic research and demographic data, a series of interrelated stories set in the Midwestern Plains states of Kansas and Oklahoma, an examination of visual art by contemporary indigenous artists, and discussions of several forms of indigenous activism to support his argument. With its highly original, interdisciplinary approach, Native Space makes a significant contribution to the literature in cultural and critical geography, comparative ethnic studies, indigenous studies, cultural studies, American Studies, and related fields.
[more]

Navigating CHamoru Poetry
Indigeneity, Aesthetics, and Decolonization
Craig Santos Perez
University of Arizona Press
Navigating CHamoru Poetry focuses on Indigenous CHamoru (Chamorro) poetry from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam). Poet and scholar Craig Santos Perez brings critical attention to a diverse and intergenerational collection of CHamoru poetry and scholarship. Throughout this book, Perez develops an Indigenous literary methodology called “wayreading” to navigate the complex relationship between CHamoru poetry, cultural identity, decolonial politics, diasporic migrations, and native aesthetics. Perez argues that contemporary CHamoru poetry articulates new and innovative forms of indigeneity rooted in CHamoru customary arts and values, while also routed through the profound and traumatic histories of missionization, colonialism, militarism, and ecological imperialism.

This book shows that CHamoru poetry has been an inspiring and empowering act of protest, resistance, and testimony in the decolonization, demilitarization, and environmental justice movements of Guåhan. Perez roots his intersectional cultural and literary analyses within the fields of CHamoru studies, Pacific Islands studies, Native American studies, and decolonial studies, using his research to assert that new CHamoru literature has been—and continues to be—a crucial vessel for expressing the continuities and resilience of CHamoru identities. This book is a vital contribution that introduces local, national, and international readers and scholars to contemporary CHamoru poetry and poetics.
[more]

Necropolitics
Achille Mbembe
Duke University Press, 2019
In Necropolitics Achille Mbembe, a leader in the new wave of francophone critical theory, theorizes the genealogy of the contemporary world, a world plagued by ever-increasing inequality, militarization, enmity, and terror as well as by a resurgence of racist, fascist, and nationalist forces determined to exclude and kill. He outlines how democracy has begun to embrace its dark side---what he calls its “nocturnal body”---which is based on the desires, fears, affects, relations, and violence that drove colonialism. This shift has hollowed out democracy, thereby eroding the very values, rights, and freedoms liberal democracy routinely celebrates. As a result, war has become the sacrament of our times in a conception of sovereignty that operates by annihilating all those considered enemies of the state. Despite his dire diagnosis, Mbembe draws on post-Foucauldian debates on biopolitics, war, and race as well as Fanon's notion of care as a shared vulnerability to explore how new conceptions of the human that transcend humanism might come to pass. These new conceptions would allow us to encounter the Other not as a thing to exclude but as a person with whom to build a more just world.
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Neoliberal Apartheid
Palestine/Israel and South Africa after 1994
Andy Clarno
University of Chicago Press, 2017
In recent years, as peace between Israelis and Palestinians has remained cruelly elusive, scholars and activists have increasingly turned to South African history and politics to make sense of the situation. In the early 1990s, both South Africa and Israel began negotiating with their colonized populations. South Africans saw results: the state was democratized and black South Africans gained formal legal equality. Palestinians, on the other hand, won neither freedom nor equality, and today Israel remains a settler-colonial state. Despite these different outcomes, the transitions of the last twenty years have produced surprisingly similar socioeconomic changes in both regions: growing inequality, racialized poverty, and advanced strategies for securing the powerful and policing the racialized poor. Neoliberal Apartheid explores this paradox through an analysis of (de)colonization and neoliberal racial capitalism.

After a decade of research in the Johannesburg and Jerusalem regions, Andy Clarno presents here a detailed ethnographic study of the precariousness of the poor in Alexandra township, the dynamics of colonization and enclosure in Bethlehem, the growth of fortress suburbs and private security in Johannesburg, and the regime of security coordination between the Israeli military and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The first comparative study of the changes in these two areas since the early 1990s, the book addresses the limitations of liberation in South Africa, highlights the impact of neoliberal restructuring in Palestine, and argues that a new form of neoliberal apartheid has emerged in both contexts.
[more]

No Exit
Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Decolonization
Yoav Di-Capua
University of Chicago Press, 2018
It is a curious and relatively little-known fact that for two decades—from the end of World War II until the late 1960s—existentialism’s most fertile ground outside of Europe was in the Middle East, and Jean-Paul Sartre was the Arab intelligentsia’s uncontested champion. In the Arab world, neither before nor since has another Western intellectual been so widely translated, debated, and celebrated.
 
By closely following the remarkable career of Arab existentialism, Yoav Di-Capua reconstructs the cosmopolitan milieu of the generation that tried to articulate a political and philosophical vision for an egalitarian postcolonial world. He tells this story by touring a fascinating selection of Arabic and Hebrew archives, including unpublished diaries and interviews. Tragically, the warm and hopeful relationships forged between Arab intellectuals, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and others ended when, on the eve of the 1967 war, Sartre failed to embrace the Palestinian cause. Today, when the prospect of global ethical engagement seems to be slipping ever farther out of reach, No Exit provides a timely, humanistic account of the intellectual hopes, struggles, and victories that shaped the Arab experience of decolonization and a delightfully wide-ranging excavation of existentialism’s non-Western history.
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On Decoloniality
Concepts, Analytics, Praxis
Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh
Duke University Press, 2018
In On Decoloniality Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh explore the hidden forces of the colonial matrix of power, its origination, transformation, and current presence, while asking the crucial questions of decoloniality's how, what, why, with whom, and what for. Interweaving theory-praxis with local histories and perspectives of struggle, they illustrate the conceptual and analytic dynamism of decolonial ways of living and thinking, as well as the creative force of resistance and re-existence. This book speaks to the urgency of these times, encourages delinkings from the colonial matrix of power and its "universals" of Western modernity and global capitalism, and engages with arguments and struggles for dignity and life against death, destruction, and civilizational despair.
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Our Own Way in This Part of the World
Biography of an African Community, Culture, and Nation
Kwasi Konadu
Duke University Press, 2019
Kofi Dᴐnkᴐ was a blacksmith and farmer, as well as an important healer, intellectual, spiritual leader, settler of disputes, and custodian of shared values for his Ghanaian community. In Our Own Way in This Part of the World Kwasi Konadu centers Dᴐnkᴐ's life story and experiences in a communography of Dᴐnkᴐ's community and nation from the late nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth, which were shaped by historical forces from colonial Ghana's cocoa boom to decolonization and political and religious parochialism. Although Dᴐnkᴐ touched the lives of thousands of citizens and patients, neither he nor they appear in national or international archives covering the region. Yet his memory persists in his intellectual and healing legacy, and the story of his community offers a non-national, decolonized example of social organization structured around spiritual forces that serves as a powerful reminder of the importance for scholars to take their cues from the lived experiences and ideas of the people they study.
[more]

Postcolonial Grief
The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas
Jinah Kim
Duke University Press, 2019
In Postcolonial Grief Jinah Kim explores the relationship of mourning to transpacific subjectivities, aesthetics, and decolonial politics since World War II. Kim argues that Asian diasporic subjectivity exists in relation to afterlives because the deaths of those killed by U.S. imperialism and militarism in the Pacific remain unresolved and unaddressed. Kim shows how primarily U.S.-based Korean and Japanese diasporic writers, artists, and filmmakers negotiate the necropolitics of Asia and how their creative refusal to heal from imperial violence may generate transformative antiracist and decolonial politics. She contests prevalent interpretations of melancholia by engaging with Frantz Fanon's and Hisaye Yamamoto's decolonial writings; uncovering the noir genre's relationship to the U.S. war in Korea; discussing the emergence of silenced colonial histories during the 1992 Los Angeles riots; and analyzing the 1996 hostage takeover of the Japanese ambassador's home in Peru. Kim highlights how the aesthetic and creative work of the Japanese and Korean diasporas offers new insights into twenty-first-century concerns surrounding the state's erasure of military violence and colonialism and the difficult work of remembering histories of war across the transpacific.
[more]

Postcolonial Modernism
Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria
Chika Okeke-Agulu
Duke University Press, 2015
Written by one of the foremost scholars of African art and featuring 129 color images, Postcolonial Modernism chronicles the emergence of artistic modernism in Nigeria in the heady years surrounding political independence in 1960, before the outbreak of civil war in 1967. Chika Okeke-Agulu traces the artistic, intellectual, and critical networks in several Nigerian cities. Zaria is particularly important, because it was there, at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, that a group of students formed the Art Society and inaugurated postcolonial modernism in Nigeria. As Okeke-Agulu explains, their works show both a deep connection with local artistic traditions and the stylistic sophistication that we have come to associate with twentieth-century modernist practices. He explores how these young Nigerian artists were inspired by the rhetoric and ideologies of decolonization and nationalism in the early- and mid-twentieth century and, later, by advocates of negritude and pan-Africanism. They translated the experiences of decolonization into a distinctive "postcolonial modernism" that has continued to inform the work of major Nigerian artists.
[more]

Postcoloniality-Decoloniality-Black Critique
Joints and Fissures
Edited by Sabine Broeck and Carsten Junker
Campus Verlag, 2014
Can Western modernity be analyzed and critiqued through the lens of enslavement and colonial history? As this volume reveals, such analysis is not only possible, it is essential to our understanding of contemporary race relations and society generally. Drawing from the fields of  postcolonial, decolonial, and black studies, this book assembles contributions from renowned scholars that offer timely and critical perspectives from a variety of disciplines, including history, sociology, political science, gender studies, cultural and literary studies, and philosophy.
[more]

¡Presente!
The Politics of Presence
Diana Taylor
Duke University Press, 2020
In ¡Presente! Diana Taylor asks what it means to be physically and politically present in situations where it seems that nothing can be done. As much an act, a word, an attitude, a theoretical intervention, and a performance pedagogy, Taylor maps ¡presente! at work in scenarios ranging from conquest, through colonial enactments and resistance movements, to present moments of capitalist extractivism and forced migration in the Americas. ¡Presente!—present among, with, and to; a walking and talking with others; an ontological and epistemic reflection on presence and subjectivity as participatory and relational, founded on mutual recognition—requires rethinking and unlearning in ways that challenge colonial epistemologies. Showing how knowledge is not something to be harvested but a process of being, knowing, and acting with others, Taylor models a way for scholarship to be present in political struggles.
[more]

Prince Charoon et al
South East Asia
Andrew Dalby
Haus Publishing, 2010
Southeast Asia needs to be dealt with as a whole, because, although the one national delegation from the region (Siam) took a minor part, nationalist movements in several Southeast Asian countries reached an early climax - significant though inconclusive - in the years 1919-1920. The planned Peace Conference, Wilson's Fourteen Points, and the victory of Communism in Russia, all contributed to this activity, and in spite of national differences it needs to be seen as a whole. The focus of the book will be on developments around 1919; thus it will bring out for the first time the unexpected significance for South-east Asia of the 1919 milestone. It will also have a biographical bias - taking a special interest in the personalities of major figures in this important period, in order to show the influences and the patterns of thought that underlie their activities at the time of the Peace Conference. Following a brief introduction making the link between world events in 1919 and South-east Asia, the book sets the scene in the region. Succeeding chapters deal with the five countries - Siam, Vietnam, Burma, Indonesia, Philippines - in which the years 1919-21 were of special significance, as well as the impact of the peace conferences in relationships with their neighbours, the growth of international Communism and global politics in later years.
[more]

Radical Utu
Critical Ideas and Ideals of Wangari Muta Maathai
Besi Brillian Muhonja
Ohio University Press, 2020

Wangari Muta Maathai was a scholar-activist known for founding the Green Belt Movement, an environmental campaign that earned her the Nobel Peace Prize. While many studies of Maathai highlight her activism, few examine Maathai as a scholar whose contributions to various disciplines and causes spanned more than three decades.

In Radical Utu: Critical Ideas and Ideals of Wangari Muta Maathai, Besi Brillian Muhonja presents the words and works of Maathai as theoretical concepts attesting to her contributions to gender equality, democratic spaces, economic equity and global governance, and indigenous African languages and knowledges. Muhonja’s well-rounded portrait of Maathai’s ideas offers a corrective to the one-dimensional characterization of Maathai typical of other works.

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Represented Communities
Fiji and World Decolonization
John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan
University of Chicago Press, 2001
In 1983 Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities revolutionized the anthropology of nationalism. Anderson argued that "print capitalism" fostered nations as imagined communities in a modular form that became the culture of modernity.

Now, in Represented Communities, John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan offer an extensive and devastating critique of Anderson's depictions of colonial history, his comparative method, and his political anthropology. The authors build a forceful argument around events in Fiji from World War II to the 2000 coups, showing how focus on "imagined communities" underestimates colonial history and obscures the struggle over legal rights and political representation in postcolonial nation-states. They show that the "self-determining" nation-state actually emerged with the postwar construction of the United Nations, fundamentally changing the politics of representation.

Sophisticated and impassioned, this book will further anthropology's contribution to the understanding of contemporary nationalisms.
[more]

Seeing Like a Citizen
Decolonization, Development, and the Making of Kenya, 1945–1980
Kara Moskowitz
Ohio University Press, 2019

In Seeing Like a Citizen, Kara Moskowitz approaches Kenya’s late colonial and early postcolonial eras as a single period of political, economic, and social transition. In focusing on rural Kenyans—the vast majority of the populace and the main targets of development interventions—as they actively sought access to aid, she offers new insights into the texture of political life in decolonizing Kenya and the early postcolonial world.

Using multisited archival sources and oral histories focused on the western Rift Valley, Seeing Like a Citizen makes three fundamental contributions to our understanding of African and Kenyan history. First, it challenges the widely accepted idea of the gatekeeper state, revealing that state control remained limited and that the postcolonial state was an internally varied and often dissonant institution. Second, it transforms our understanding of postcolonial citizenship, showing that its balance of rights and duties was neither claimed nor imposed, but negotiated and differentiated. Third, it reorients Kenyan historiography away from central Kenya and elite postcolonial politics. The result is a powerful investigation of experiences of independence, of the meaning and form of development, and of how global political practices were composed and recomposed on the ground in local settings.

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Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans
Race and Self-Determination in International Law
Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui
University of Minnesota Press, 1996

Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans was first published in 1996. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

In this trenchant critique, Siba N'Zatioula Grovogui demonstrates the failure of international law to address adequately the issues surrounding African self-determination during decolonization. Challenging the view that the only requirement for decolonization is the elimination of the legal instruments that provided for direct foreign rule, Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans probes the universal claims of international law.

Grovogui begins by documenting the creation of the "image of Africa" in European popular culture, examining its construction by conquerors and explorers, scientists and social scientists, and the Catholic Church. Using the case of Namibia to illuminate the general context of Africa, he demonstrates that the principles and rules recognized in international law today are not universal, but instead reflect relations of power and the historical dominance of specific European states.

Grovogui argues that two important factors have undermined the universal applicability of international law: its dependence on Western culture and the way that international law has been structured to preserve Western hegemony in the international order. This dependence on Europeandominated models and legal apparatus has resulted in the paradox that only rights sanctioned by the former colonial powers have been accorded to the colonized, regardless of the latter's needs. In the case of Namibia, Grovogui focuses on the discursive strategies used by the West and their southern African allies to control the legal debate, as well as the tactics used by the colonized to recast the terms of the discussion.

Grovogui blends critical legal theory, historical research, political economy, and cultural studies with profound knowledge of contemporary Africa in general and Namibia in particular. Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans represents the very best of the new scholarship, moving beyond narrow disciplinary boundaries to illuminate issues of decolonization in Africa.

Siba N'Zatioula Grovogui is assistant professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. He previously practiced law in his native Guinea.

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Spaces between Us
Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization
Scott Lauria Morgensen
University of Minnesota Press, 2011

We are all caught up in one another, Scott Lauria Morgensen asserts, we who live in settler societies, and our interrelationships inform all that these societies touch. Native people live in relation to all non-Natives amid the ongoing power relations of settler colonialism, despite never losing inherent claims to sovereignty as indigenous peoples. Explaining how relational distinctions of “Native” and “settler” define the status of being “queer,” Spaces between Us argues that modern queer subjects emerged among Natives and non-Natives by engaging the meaningful difference indigeneity makes within a settler society.

Morgensen’s analysis exposes white settler colonialism as a primary condition for the development of modern queer politics in the United States. Bringing together historical and ethnographic cases, he shows how U.S. queer projects became non-Native and normatively white by comparatively examining the historical activism and critical theory of Native queer and Two-Spirit people.

Presenting a “biopolitics of settler colonialism”—in which the imagined disappearance of indigeneity and sustained subjugation of all racialized peoples ensures a progressive future for white settlers—Spaces between Us newly demonstrates the interdependence of nation, race, gender, and sexuality and offers opportunities for resistance in the United States.

[more]

Spiral to the Stars
Mvskoke Tools of Futurity
Laura Harjo
University of Arizona Press, 2019
All communities are teeming with energy, spirit, and knowledge, and Spiral to the Stars taps into and activates this dynamism to discuss Indigenous community planning from a Mvskoke perspective. This book poses questions about what community is, how to reclaim community, and how to embark on the process of envisioning what and where the community can be.

Geographer Laura Harjo demonstrates that Mvskoke communities have what they need to dream, imagine, speculate, and activate the wishes of ancestors, contemporary kin, and future relatives—all in a present temporality—­which is Indigenous futurity.

Organized around four methodologies—radical sovereignty, community knowledge, collective power, and emergence geographies—Spiral to the Stars provides a path that departs from traditional community-making strategies, which are often extensions of the settler state. Readers are provided a set of methodologies to build genuine community relationships, knowledge, power, and spaces for themselves. Communities don’t have to wait on experts because this book helps them activate their own possibilities and expertise. A detailed final chapter provides participatory tools that can be used in workshop settings or one on one.

This book offers a critical and concrete map for community making that leverages Indigenous way-finding tools. Mvskoke narratives thread throughout the text, vividly demonstrating that theories come from lived and felt experiences. This is a must-have book for community organizers, radical pedagogists, and anyone wishing to empower and advocate for their community.
[more]

Third World Studies
Theorizing Liberation
Gary Y. Okihiro
Duke University Press, 2016
In 1968 the Third World Liberation Front at San Francisco State College demanded the creation of a Third World studies program to counter the existing curricula that ignored issues of power—notably, imperialism and oppression. The administration responded by institutionalizing an ethnic studies program; Third World studies was over before it began. Detailing the field's genesis and premature death, Gary Y. Okihiro presents an intellectual history of ethnic studies and Third World studies and shows where they converged and departed by identifying some of their core ideas, concepts, methods, and theories. In so doing, he establishes the contours of a unified field of study—Third World studies—that pursues a decolonial politics by examining the human condition broadly, especially in regard to oppression, and critically analyzing the locations and articulations of power as manifested in the social formation. Okihiro's framing of Third World studies moves away from ethnic studies' liberalism and its U.S.-centrism to emphasize the need for complex thinking and political action in the drive for self-determination. 
[more]

Transfigurations Of The Maghreb
Feminism, Decolonization, and Literatures
Winfred Woodhull
University of Minnesota Press, 1993

Trustee for the Human Community
Ralph J. Bunche, the United Nations, and the Decolonization of Africa
Robert A. Hill
Ohio University Press, 2010
Ralph J. Bunche (1904–1971), winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, was a key U.S. diplomat in the planning and creation of the United Nations in 1945. In 1947 he was invited to join the permanent UN Secretariat as director of the new Trusteeship Department. In this position, Bunche played a key role in setting up the trusteeship system that provided important impetus for postwar decolonization ending European control of Africa as well as an international framework for the oversight of the decolonization process after the Second World War.

Trustee for the Human Community is the first volume to examine the totality of Bunche’s unrivalled role in the struggle for African independence both as a key intellectual and an international diplomat and to illuminate it from the broader African American perspective.

These commissioned essays examine the full range of Ralph Bunche’s involvement in Africa. The scholars explore sensitive political issues, such as Bunche’s role in the Congo and his views on the struggle in South Africa. Trustee for the Human Community stands as a monument to the profoundly important role of one of the greatest Americans in one of the greatest political movements in the history of the twentieth century. Contributors: David Anthony, Ralph A. Austen, Abena P. A. Busia, Neta C. Crawford, Robert R. Edgar, Charles P. Henry, Robert A. Hill, Edmond J. Keller, Martin Kilson, Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, Jon Olver, Pearl T. Robinson, Elliott P. Skinner, Crawford Young
[more]

Ubuntu Relational Love
Decolonizing Black Masculinities
Devi Dee Mucina
University of Manitoba Press, 2019

Unpopular Sovereignty
Rhodesian Independence and African Decolonization
Luise White
University of Chicago Press, 2015
In 1965 the white minority government of Rhodesia (after 1980 Zimbabwe) issued a unilateral declaration of independence from Britain, rather than negotiate a transition to majority rule. In doing so, Rhodesia became the exception, if not anathema, to the policies and practices of the end of empire. In Unpopular Sovereignty, Luise White shows that the exception that was Rhodesian independence did not, in fact, make the state that different from new nations elsewhere in Africa: indeed, this history of Rhodesian political practices reveals some of the commonalities of mid-twentieth-century thinking about place and race and how much government should link the two.  

White locates Rhodesia’s independence in the era of decolonization in Africa, a time of great intellectual ferment in ideas about race, citizenship, and freedom. She shows that racists and reactionaries were just as concerned with questions of sovereignty and legitimacy as African nationalists were and took special care to design voter qualifications that could preserve their version of legal statecraft. Examining how the Rhodesian state managed its own governance and electoral politics, she casts an oblique and revealing light by which to rethink the narratives of decolonization.
[more]

Vehicles of Decolonization
Public Transit in the Palestinian West Bank
Maryam S. Griffin
Temple University Press, 2022

The Visceral Logics of Decolonization
Neetu Khanna
Duke University Press, 2020
In The Visceral Logics of Decolonization Neetu Khanna rethinks the project of decolonization by exploring a knotted set of relations between embodied experience and political feeling that she conceptualizes as the visceral. Khanna focuses on the work of the Progressive Writers' Association (PWA)—a Marxist anticolonial literary group active in India between the 1930s and 1950s—to show how anticolonial literature is a staging ground for exploring racialized emotion and revolutionary feeling. Among others, Khanna examines novels by Mulk Raj Anand, Ahmed Ali, and Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, as well as the feminist writing of Rashid Jahan and Ismat Chughtai, who each center the somatic life of the body as a fundamental site of colonial subjugation. In this way, decolonial action comes not solely from mental transformation, but from a reconstitution of the sensorial nodes of the body. The visceral, Khanna contends, therefore becomes a critical dimension of Marxist theories of revolutionary consciousness. In tracing the contours of the visceral's role in decolonial literature and politics, Khanna bridges affect and postcolonial theory in new and provocative ways.
[more]

Waves of Decolonization
Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States
David Luis-Brown
Duke University Press, 2008
In Waves of Decolonization, David Luis-Brown reveals how between the 1880s and the 1930s, writer-activists in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States developed narratives and theories of decolonization, of full freedom and equality in the shadow of empire. They did so decades before the decolonization of Africa and Asia in the mid-twentieth century. Analyzing the work of nationalist leaders, novelists, and social scientists, including W. E. B. Du Bois, José Martí, Claude McKay, Luis-Brown brings together an array of thinkers who linked local struggles against racial oppression and imperialism to similar struggles in other nations. With discourses and practices of hemispheric citizenship, writers in the Americas broadened conventional conceptions of rights to redress their loss under the expanding United States empire. In focusing on the transnational production of the national in the wake of U.S. imperialism, Luis-Brown emphasizes the need for expanding the linguistic and national boundaries of U.S. American culture and history.

Luis-Brown traces unfolding narratives of decolonization across a broad range of texts. He explores how Martí and Du Bois, known as the founders of Cuban and black nationalisms, came to develop anticolonial discourses that cut across racial and national divides. He illuminates how cross-fertilizations among the Harlem Renaissance, Mexican indigenismo, and Cuban negrismo in the 1920s contributed to broader efforts to keep pace with transformations unleashed by ongoing conflicts over imperialism, and he considers how those transformations were explored in novels by McKay of Jamaica, Jesús Masdeu of Cuba, and Miguel Ángel Menéndez of Mexico. Focusing on ethnography’s uneven contributions to decolonization, he investigates how Manuel Gamio, a Mexican anthropologist, and Zora Neale Hurston each adapted metropolitan social science for use by writers from the racialized periphery.

[more]




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