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126 books match the query 'Decolonization' and 8 start with m

cover of Magical Habits

Magical Habits

Monica Huerta

Duke University Press, 2021

In Magical Habits Monica Huerta draws on her experiences growing up in her family's Mexican restaurants and her life as a scholar of literature and culture to meditate on how relationships among self, place, race, and storytelling contend with both the afterlives of history and racial capitalism. Whether dwelling on mundane aspects of everyday life, such as the smell of old kitchen grease, or grappling with the thorny, unsatisfying question of authenticity, Huerta stages a dynamic conversation among genres, voices, and archives: personal and critical essays exist alongside a fairy tale; photographs and restaurant menus complement fictional monologues based on her family's history. Developing a new mode of criticism through storytelling, Huerta takes readers through Cook County courtrooms, the Cristero Rebellion (in which her great-grandfather was martyred by the Mexican government), Japanese baths in San Francisco—and a little bit about Chaucer too. Ultimately, Huerta sketches out habits of living while thinking that allow us to consider what it means to live with and try to peer beyond history even as we are caught up in the middle of it.
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cover of Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives

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

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cover of Media, Culture, and Decolonization: Re-righting the Subaltern Histories of Ghana

Media, Culture, and Decolonization

Re-righting the Subaltern Histories of Ghana

Wunpini Fatimata Mohammed

Rutgers University Press, 2026

Media, Culture, and Decolonization: Re-righting the Subaltern Histories of Ghana invites us to look at media and culture from a decolonial perspective. Through Dagbaŋ epistemologies and knowledge systems, this book examines media by highlighting how African languages, cultures, and traditions can shift how we think of knowledge. It is an offering to anyone curious about the relationship between culture, language, and media. By focusing on African language media in Ghana such as film, television, and radio, the book emphasizes the importance of espousing a decolonial politic and praxis in the process of co-creating knowledge with Indigenous communities. It connects the struggles of global majority countries and demonstrates the ways in which (neo)colonialism and imperialism impede the work toward liberatory futures. This book demonstrates the potential that African language media hold as tools of cultural and epistemological decolonization.

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cover of Memory, migration and (de)colonisation in the Caribbean and beyond

Memory, migration and (de)colonisation in the Caribbean and beyond

Edited by Jack Daniel Webb, Roderick Westmaas, Maria del Pilar Kaladeen, and William Tantam

University of London Press, 2019

In recent years, academics, policy makers and media outlets have increasingly recognised the importance of Caribbean migrations and migrants to the histories and cultures of countries across the Northern Atlantic. Memory, migration and (de)colonisation furthers our understanding of the lives of many of these migrants, and the contexts through which they lived and continue to live. In particular, it focuses on the relationship between Caribbean migrants and processes of decolonisation. The chapters in this book range across disciplines and time periods to present a vibrant understanding of the ever-changing interactions between Caribbean peoples and colonialism as they migrated within and between colonial contexts. At the heart of this book are the voices of Caribbean migrants themselves, whose critical reflections on their experiences of migration and decolonisation are interwoven with the essays of academics and activists.
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cover of Mexican-Origin Foods, Foodways, and Social Movements: Decolonial Perspectives

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.
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cover of Modernism’s Magic Hat: Architecture and the Illusion of Development without Capital

Modernism’s Magic Hat

Architecture and the Illusion of Development without Capital

Ijlal Muzaffar

University of Texas Press, 2024

Examines the role of architecture in the history of global development and decolonization.

In Modernism’s Magic Hat, Ijlal Muzaffar examines how modern architects and planners help resolve one of the central dilemmas of the mid-twentieth-century world order: how to make decolonization plausible without accounting for centuries of capital drain under colonial rule. In the years after World War II, architects and planners found extensive opportunities in new international institutions—such as the World Bank, the UN, and the Ford Foundation—and helped shape new models of global intervention that displaced the burden of change onto the inhabitants. Muzaffar argues that architecture in this domain didn’t just symbolically represent power, but formed the material domain through which new modes of power acquired sense. Looking at a series of architectural projects across the world, from housing in Ghana to village planning in Nigeria and urban planning in Venezuela and Pakistan, Muzaffar explores how architects and planners shaped new ideas of time, land, climate, and the decolonizing body, making them appear as sources of untapped value. What resulted, Muzaffar argues, is a widespread belief in spontaneous Third World “development” without capital, which continues to foreclose any global discussion of colonial theft.

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cover of Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines

Monetary Authorities

Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines

Allan E. S. Lumba

Duke University Press, 2022

In Monetary Authorities Allan E. S. Lumba explores how the United States used monetary policy and banking systems to justify racial and class hierarchies, enforce capitalist exploitation, and counter movements for decolonization in the American colonial Philippines. Lumba shows that colonial economic experts justified American imperial authority by claiming that Filipinos did not possess the racial capacities to properly manage money. Financial independence, then, became a key metric of racial capitalism by which Filipinos had to prove their ability to self-govern. At the same time, the colonial state used its monetary authority to police the economic activities of colonized subjects and to curb movements for decolonization. It later offered a conditional form of decolonization that left the Philippines reliant on U.S. financial institutions. By showing how imperial governance was entwined with the racialization and regulation of monetary systems in the Philippines, Lumba illuminates a key mechanism through which the United States securitized the imperial world order.
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cover of Multisituated: Ethnography as Diasporic Praxis

Multisituated

Ethnography as Diasporic Praxis

Kaushik Sunder Rajan

Duke University Press, 2021

In Multisituated Kaushik Sunder Rajan evaluates the promises and potentials of multisited ethnography with regard to contemporary debates around decolonizing anthropology and the university. He observes that at the current moment, anthropology is increasingly peopled by diasporic students and researchers, all of whom are accountable to multiple communities beyond the discipline. In this light, Sunder Rajan draws on his pedagogical experience and dialogues to reconceptualize ethnography as a multisituated practice of knowledge production, ethical interlocution, and political intervention. Such a multisituated ethnography responds to contemporary anthropology’s myriad commitments as it privileges attention to questions of scale, comparison, and the politics of ethnographic encounters. Foregrounding the conditions of possibility and difficulty for those doing and teaching ethnography in the twenty-first-century, Sunder Rajan gestures toward an ethos and praxis of ethnography that would open new forms of engagement and research.
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