Coloniality as a Barrier to Climate Action: Hierarchies of Power in a Coal-Based Economy

South Africa has a coal-based energy system and extractive economy, largely responsible for its high emission levels relative to countries with similar GDP. This extractive, coal-based economy began during British colonisation and today shows few signs of transitioning rapidly to limit climate change. This paper interrogates the role of coloniality in climate delay, given that colonisation is responsible for establishing fossil fuel dependence in South Africa. Combining theory on decolonisation, specifically colonial hierarchies of power, with a critical discourse analysis, this research uses interview and policy data to show how colonial power hierarchies can lead to climate delay in South Africa, through normalising emissions intensive development and silencing alternatives. In doing so, it highlights the need to recognise the colonial foundations of climate change and the potential for a coalition between decolonisation and climate action to motivate for radical change both in South Africa and at a global level.     

2. SOME KEYWORDS TOWARD DECOLONIAL METHODS: STUDYING SETTLER COLONIAL HISTORIES AND ENVIRONMENTAL VIOLENCE FROM TKARONTO

This article provides keywords and reflections for decolonial methods, drawing on insights from the Indigenous-led Land and the Refinery project, which concerns the history of Canada's Chemical Valley. This project is crucially organized as Indigenous people co-researching the Imperial Oil Refinery, not as academics studying Aamjiwnaang, and asks how Indigenous and decolonial methods might reorient the use of archives toward other futures. Together, the keywords begin to outline a particular place-based theory of change within decolonial historical practice.     

Truth as historical recapitulation: the dead of Cape Town’s District One

In this essay, I reflect on the massive and dramatic re-emergence of the dead of Cape Town’s District One in 2003, and its aftermath. I discuss how the resurfacing of these ancestors helps us understand how heritage discourses operate in Cape Town, and how their agency forces us to consider what it means to live in the city during post-apartheid urban renewal. I argue that the agency of the District One dead hinges on their exposure of the internal workings of discourse and the associated disciplinary practices through which we experience Cape Town and its heritage. This story ends ambiguously. I discuss how, following the storage of the District One dead in the Prestwich Ossuary, the gaze on Cape Town was redirected away from the city’s past and towards its future; I explore how their reinterment foreclosed a series of discussions regarding the reconciliation of past events with the present realities of Cape Town. I argue, finally, that truth at District One can be understood as a form of historical recapitulation.     

Colonialism Otherwise and the Poetics of Solidarity: A Methodological Intervention De-b/ordering Kashmir

This paper reflects deeply on possibilities for developing solidarity with Kashmiri freedom struggles by mobilising a memorialisation praxis informed by poetics. We coin the term “colonialism otherwise” to describe the particular instruments and effects of postcolonial colonialism as they appear in the intimate space of family narratives, memories, and feelings. Foregrounding the works of the Kashmiri poet, essayist, and filmmaker, Uzma Falak, we write our memorialisations to respond to the poet's demands to bear witness to Kashmiri people's abjection. Our memorialisation praxis is guided by the questions: how do we know Kashmir as a place, and relatedly, what are the political limitations of our articulated solidarity with the anti-colonial struggle for azaadi?     

Youth and Decolonial Politics in a Relational Context

The lives of children and young people are conditioned in important ways by the imperial and colonial intimacies that have shaped our world. Yet, we know relatively little about how they encounter and comprehend the histories, legacies, and continuities of colonisation and racial capitalism, nor how this comes to shape their political orientations and practices. This article introduces a series of five papers that examine the everyday practices, reflections, and desires of young people in different parts of the world as they seek to understand where they fit in imperial constellations that cross generations, borders, and oceans.     

Decolonial Challenges and Post-Genocide Archaeological Politics in Rwanda

Abstract

This paper narrates in an autobiographical manner PhD research regarding pre-colonial Rwandan archaeology and its contemporary socio-political relevance. The paper re?ects on the decolonial challenge that inspired the research and the ways in which, and reasons why, the research fell short of achieving its decolonial aims. In response to this complex personal, national, and disciplinary case study, the paper questions activist archaeologies and suggests that, whilst political engagement remains essential, the outcomes of well-intentioned approaches may actually perpetuate the undesirable political paradigms they seek to challenge. In conclusion, the paper proposes a hybrid set of decolonial responses that might be usefully employed in African Archaeology and the colonial discipline of archaeology more broadly.     

Professionals’ and amateurs’ pasts: a decolonizing reading of post-war Romanian histories of gendered interwar activism

This article provides an illustration of a decolonial and gendered approach that can shape ‘new global labour histories’ by re-reading histories of Communist women’s interwar activism produced in state-socialist Romania with attention to the power context in which they were created and the clues about the work of social reproduction during the interwar that these histories provide. After discussing the main concepts and rationale in the first section, in the second section the author shows that women’s history and women historians were marginalized in Romania after 1958 despite promising post-war beginnings. She shows that this evolution was made possible by the symbiosis between nationalist historians and autochthonist politicians in search of a break with Stalinist policies. She then hones in, in the third part of the paper, on the content of the Revue des Etudés Sud-Est Européenes (RESEE) and two women’s history volumes, as publications issuing from the conditions described in the second part. With regard to the standalone volumes, the author shows that in this body of work, the interwar period is described as one of women’s increased activism within the social-democratic or Communist movements. On the other hand, the period is also described as one of worsening living conditions for proletarians. The intersection of these two narratives creates in this rather limited historiographical body the surprising effect of granting high visibility to reproductive labour.     

“The impulse is cartographic”: Counter-Mapping Indonesia’s Resource Frontiers in the Context of Coloniality

Resource frontiers continue to expand globally across Indigenous lands as states and corporations enact forms of expropriation redolent of the formal colonial era for the sake of extraction. In the face of this expansion, the burden remains largely on frontline communities to defend their ecologies using the tools available to them. Across Indonesia’s resource frontiers, the “cartographic impulse” Edward Said once named to describe anticolonial struggles is apparent in the form of counter-mapping, which seeks to secure adat (customary) rights and defend Indigenous lands against extractivist expansion. This article revisits this practice and argues that the counter-map and its goals remain tenuous—mapping in its scalable form risks processing complex and multi-dimensional ways of relating to land into two-dimensional representations appropriate for a liberal property regime, while adat itself is a contingent and mutable legal goal. Ultimately, the article echoes emerging calls for the burden to be shifted away from frontline communities through the pursuit of just transitions to post-extractivism. Pemburuan sumber daya ke wilayah-wilayah baru yang masih kaya (resource frontiers) di tanah masyarakat adat semakin meluas secara global, seiring praktek-praktek perampasan berbau kolonial yang dilakukan oleh negara dan korporasi demi tujuan ekstraksi. Berhadapan dengan ekspansi ini, masyarakat di gugus depanlah yang menanggung beban terbesar untuk mempertahankan lingkungan hidup mereka, dengan menggunakan sarana yang tersedia bagi mereka. Di wilayah-wilayah baru ekstraksi sumber daya alam di Indonesia, apa yang pernah disebut Edward Said sebagai ‘cartographic impulse’ untuk menggambarkan perjuangan anti-kolonial terlihat jelas dalam bentuk counter-mapping, yang bertujuan untuk mempertahankan tanah-tanah adat dari ekspansi ekstravistik. Artikel ini hendak meninjau kembali praktek counter-mapping ini dan berargumen bahwa counter-map dan tujuan-tujuannya masih lemah– mapping dalam bentuk yang dapat diukur mengalami masalah dengan persoalan proses dan persoalan corak multidimensioanal dari hubungan dengan tanah dalam kaitan dengan representasi dua-dimensi yang hanya cocok dengan rezim kepemilikan liberal; sementara adat sendiri adalah tujuan legal yang sifatnya kontingen dan terbuka terhadap perubahan. Pada akhirnya artikel ini ikut menyuarakan seruan yang banyak muncul, bahwa beban harus dialihkan dari masyarakat frontline melalui usaha untuk transisi-transisi yang adil menuju post-extractivism.     

Gendered Geographies of Elimination: Decolonial Feminist Geographies in Latin American Settler Contexts

Gendered geographies of elimination further settler colonialism's influence on conceptual discussions in human geography on contemporary forms of the place‐based death of indigenous peoples. Through work stemming from scholarship on the gendering of settler colonialism, this paper adds to narratives on place annihilation and dispossession of indigenous territory tied to the slow death of racialised, gendered and sexualised populations. Building on incipient reflections in geography with settler colonialism, I explore the geographic implications from the perspective of Epera women, indigenous women belonging to a trinational ethnicity experiencing elimination along the Ecuador–Colombia borderland from the perspective of decolonial feminist geography frameworks. I claim that attrition implied in settler colonialism's logic of elimination is a territorial project demonstrated in place‐based elimination and gendered embodied elimination.     

The decolonial subject and the problem of non-Western authenticity

It is argued in this paper that some decolonising strategies in the study of global politics are precluded by the problem of non-Western authenticity. I question the idea of an identifiable non-Western geo-cultural context that could significantly reconstitute what already is a post-Western subject. I claim that in most cases the asymmetrical encounter between the colonised and the coloniser has fundamentally and extensively redefined human subjectivity in a way that largely negates decolonial emancipatory projects. This is the result of the all-encompassing penetration of Western coloniality (in its political, economic and cultural representations) into the spaces of pre-colonial or uncolonised forms of subjectivity. I draw from Frantz Fanon’s and Jacques Lacan’s theories to argue that attempts to recover non-Western forms of self-identification are useful albeit illusory psychological mechanisms to stabilise hybrid postcolonial subjectivities rather than an actual restoration of non-colonial and purified forms of existing in the world. I suggest that an effective anticolonial politics of resistance will necessarily entail the understanding of post-Western subjectivity in terms of psychological ‘hybridity’ rather than decolonial ‘authenticity’.