The Boomerang Effect Of Decolonization

The 1978 publication of Edward Said's Orientalism unsettled the world. Over two decades earlier Aimé Césaire had famously spoken of the boomerang effect of colonization, which dehumanized both the colonizer and the colonized. Over time, Said and his 1978 book took Césaire’s anti-imperial critique one step further by enabling the boomerang effect of decolonization. Inspired by that intellectual trajectory, The Boomerang Effect of Decolonization redefines post-Orientalism in a relational and integrative way. This volume draws on the reception and critique of Said’s ideas as well as his own attempts to appropriate the boomerang’s recursive nature and empower decolonial processes that aimed to transform everyone, regardless of differences both imagined and real, for the betterment of all. Reflecting upon Orientalism, its legacies, and the myriad conversations it has generated, scholars from various disciplines examine acts of anti-racism and liberation through the lens of critical race theory. Covering topics including Said’s anti-Orientalist world, Métis/Michif consciousness, writing by the French scholar Jacques Berque, the politics of allyship in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the convergence between healthcare and settler-colonialism in Northwestern Ontario, contributors explore the different paths critiques of imperial cultures and their politics of difference have travelled in Canada and abroad. Said’s Orientalism reoriented both decolonization itself and his readers’ imaginations. By redefining post-Orientalism as a relational and inclusive mode of liberation, this volume offers tools to think about difference differently, centring its anti-racist framework on the relationship between misrepresented people and their rewritten histories. Contributors include Yasmeen Abu-Laban (Alberta), Rachad Antonius (UQAM), Sung Eun Choi (Bentley), Mary-Ellen Kelm (Simon Fraser), Allyson Stevenson (Saskatchewan), Mira Sucharov (Carleton), and Lorenzo Veracini (Swinborne).

Canada as a Settler Colony on the Question of Palestine explores Canada-Palestine relations through a settler colonial lens. The authors argue that there are direct parallels between Canada’s settler colonial project and its support for the Israeli settler colonial dispossession of Palestinians. Chapters reflect on community politics and activism, migration, orientalism, and critical race theory. Among its unique contributions, the volume provides a fresh look at Canada’s foreign policy as informed and shaped by its own history of settler colonialism. The collection also illuminates the breadth and depth of Palestinian life in Canada. Throughout, the chapters are connected by common themes of settler colonial destruction, dispossession, segregation, and otherness, as well as accounts of people challenging those processes in search of a better and fairer world. The book will be of interest to scholars in Indigenous Studies, International Relations, Peace and Conflict Studies, Canadian Studies, Palestine Studies, and beyond. Contributors: Samer Abdelnour, Nadia Abu-Zahra, Rachad Antonius, Lina Assi, M. Muhannad Ayyash, Peige Desjarlais, Randa Farah, Azeezah Kanji, Maurice Jr. Labelle, Nadia Naser-Najjab, Emily Regan Wills, Mira Sucharov, Jeremy Wildeman. Foreword by Veldon Coburn.

Fanon and the Decolonization of Philosophy explores the range of ways in which Frantz Fanon's decolonization theory can reveal new answers to perennial philosophical questions and new paths to social justice. The aim is to show not just that Fanon's thought remains philosophically relevant, but that it is relevant to an even wider range of philosophical issues than has previously been realized. The essays in this book are written by both renowned Fanon scholars and new scholars who are emerging as experts in aspects of Fanonian thought as diverse as humanistic psychiatry, the colonial roots of racial violence and marginalization, and decolonizing possibilities in law, academia, and tourism. In addition to examining philosophical concerns that arise from political decolonization movements, many of the essays turn to the discipline of philosophy itself and take up the challenge of suggesting ways that philosophy might liberate itself from colonial_and colonizing_assumptions. This collection will be useful to those interested in political theory, feminist theory, existentialism, phenomenology, Africana studies, and Caribbean philosophy. Its Fanon-inspired vision of social justice is endorsed in the foreword by his daughter, Mireille Fanon-Mend_s France, a noted human rights defender in the French-speaking world.

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.

Anticolonial theorists and revolutionaries have long turned to dialectical thought as a central weapon in their fight against oppressive structures and conditions. This relationship was never easy, however, as anticolonial thinkers have resisted the historical determinism, teleology, Eurocentrism, and singular emphasis that some Marxisms place on class identity at the expense of race, nation, and popular identity. In recent decades, the conflict between dialectics and postcolonial theory has only deepened. In Decolonizing Dialectics George Ciccariello-Maher breaks this impasse by bringing the work of Georges Sorel, Frantz Fanon, and Enrique Dussel together with contemporary Venezuelan politics to formulate a dialectics suited to the struggle against the legacies of colonialism and slavery. This is a decolonized dialectics premised on constant struggle in which progress must be fought for and where the struggles of the wretched of the earth themselves provide the only guarantee of historical motion.

Freedom is celebrated as the definitive ideal of modern western civilization. Yet in western thought and practice, freedom has been defined through opposition to the unfreedom of most of the world's people. Allison Weir draws on Indigenous political theories and practices of decolonization in dialogue with western theories, to reconstruct a tradition of relational freedom as a distinctive political conception of freedom: a radically democratic mode of engagement and participation in social and political relations with an infinite range of strange and diverse beings perceived as free agents in interdependent relations in a shared world.

Decolonizing Democracy: Intersections of Philosophy and Postcolonial Theory analyzes the concept and the discourse of democracy. Ferit Güven demonstrates how democracy is deployed as a neo-colonial tool to discipline and further subjugate formerly colonized peoples and spaces. The book explains why increasing democratization of the political space in the last three decades produced an increasing dissatisfaction and alienation from the process of governance, rather than a contentment as one might have expected from "the rule of the people.” Decolonizing Democracy aims to provide a conceptual response to the crisis of democracy in contemporary world. With both a unique scope and argument, this book will appeal to both philosophy and political science scholars, as well as those involved in postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and peace studies.

"Enticements: Queer Legal Studies is an interdisciplinary volume that provides an array of queer theoretic descriptions of and prescriptions for the legal regulation of sex, gender and sexuality"--