The Biopolitical Logics of Settler Colonialism and Disruptive Relationality

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
René Dietrich
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
The Political ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Western Thought ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Way

This essay argues that the biopolitical logics of settler colonialism function according to a naturalization in Western thought of politics as a project of hierarchically ordering life in relation to the sphere of politics. Significantly, such a mode of thinking discredits socio-political orders that operate on the basis of a non-hierarchical place-based relationality of all life forms including the land. Through a reading of Foucault and Agamben in their use of Aristotle, I want to show how hierarchy as a principle of the political is already implemented in the premise they draw upon for analyzing the biopolitical. In the same way it remains unrecognized in their analysis of biopolitics, this principle also becomes operative within settler colonial logics of life and land. Recently, however, Indigenous scholars and writers have mobilized relationality in its formative characteristic for Indigenous polities and politics as strategy to disrupt biopolitical logics and denaturalize settler colonial rule, which I want to show through engaging Daniel Heath Justice’s Indigenous fantasy trilogy The Way of Thorn and Thunder: The Kynship Chronicles as a site of disruptive relationality and political knowledge production.

Reform in fragments: Sovereignty, colonialism, and the Sikh tradition

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Rajbir Singh Judge
Keyword(s):  
Reference Point ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Religious Reform ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
A Site

Abstract This article rethinks how we understand religious reform under colonial rule by examining Maharaja Duleep Singh, the deposed ruler of the Sikh empire, and how the Singh Sabha, a Sikh reform movement, debated, deployed, and organized around him in the late nineteenth century. I demonstrate how religious reform was a site of intense conflict that reveals the processes of argumentation within the contours of a tradition, even as the colonial state sought to continually mediate the terms. Embedded within a frame of inquiry provided by the Sikh tradition, the contestations that constituted reform within the tradition remained intimately tied in with the question of sovereignty. Ranjit Singh's empire in Panjab had only been annexed 30 years earlier in 1849 and remained a central reference point for thinking about the political at the turn of the century. These debates surrounding Duleep Singh, therefore, disclose the contentious engagements within a tradition that cannot be reduced to binary designations such as colonial construct/indigenous inheritance or religious/political.

Political Theory as a Vocation

1969 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 1062-1082 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheldon S. Wolin
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Political World ◽  
The Way

The purpose of this paper is to sketch some of the implications, prospective and retrospective, of the primacy of method in the present study of politics and to do it by way of a contrast, which is deliberately heightened, but hopefully not caricatured, between the vocation of the “methodist” and the vocation of the theorist. My discussion will be centered around the kinds of activity involved in the two vocations. During the course of the discussion various questions will be raised, primarily the following: What is the idea which underlies method and how does it compare with the older understanding of theory? What is involved in choosing one rather than the other as the way to political knowledge? What are the human or educational consequences of the choice, that is, what is demanded of the person who commits himself to one or the other? What is the typical stance towards the political world of the methodist and how does it compare to the theorist's?The discussion which follows will seek, first, to locate the idea of method in the context of the “behavioral revolution,” and, second, to examine the idea itself in terms of some historical and analytical considerations. Then, proceeding on the assumption that the idea of method, like all important intellectual choices, carries a price, the discussion will concentrate on some of the personal, educational, vocational, and political consequences of this particular choice. Finally, I shall attempt to relate the idea of the vocation of political theory to these same matters.

scholarly journals Disability, Climate Change, and Environmental Violence: The Politics of Invisibility and the Horizon of Hope

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Watts Belser
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Environmental Harm ◽  
The Political ◽  
Environmental Damage ◽  
Cultural Patterns ◽  
Disability Theory ◽  
Justice Movements ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Way

This article brings disability theory and activism into conversation with environmental justice, a conversation that has often been stymied by a fundamental difference in approaching disability. Environmental justice movements position disability as a visceral marker of environmental harm, while disability movements claim disability as a site of value and vitality, a position I call "disability embrace." Rather than adjudicate these differences, I use them to pinpoint a barrier to political alliance: environmental disability is a consequence of structural violence. I argue that disability politics offer vital resources for grappling with climate change. Applying insights from disability studies and disability activism to the analysis of environmental damage reveals the political stakes of diagnosis—the way power contours how, when, and to what ends we recognize human and ecological impairment. Disability insights illuminate pervasive cultural patterns of invisibility and climate denial. Disability critiques of futurity and cure can also reconfigure the way we approach hope and help fashion a new narrative of what it might mean to live well in the Anthropocene.

Postcolonial Theory

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
J Daniel Elam
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Social Impact ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
Global Modernity ◽  
The Way

Postcolonial theory is a body of thought primarily concerned with accounting for the political, aesthetic, economic, historical, and social impact of European colonial rule around the world in the 18th through the 20th century. Postcolonial theory takes many different shapes and interventions, but all share a fundamental claim: that the world we inhabit is impossible to understand except in relationship to the history of imperialism and colonial rule. This means that it is impossible to conceive of “European philosophy,” “European literature,” or “European history” as existing in the absence of Europe’s colonial encounters and oppression around the world. It also suggests that colonized world stands at the forgotten center of global modernity. The prefix “post” of “postcolonial theory” has been rigorously debated, but it has never implied that colonialism has ended; indeed, much of postcolonial theory is concerned with the lingering forms of colonial authority after the formal end of Empire. Other forms of postcolonial theory are openly endeavoring to imagine a world after colonialism, but one which has yet to come into existence. Postcolonial theory emerged in the US and UK academies in the 1980s as part of a larger wave of new and politicized fields of humanistic inquiry, most notably feminism and critical race theory. As it is generally constituted, postcolonial theory emerges from and is deeply indebted to anticolonial thought from South Asia and Africa in the first half of the 20th century. In the US and UK academies, this has historically meant that its focus has been these regions, often at the expense of theory emerging from Latin and South America. Over the course of the past thirty years, it has remained simultaneously tethered to the fact of colonial rule in the first half of the 20th century and committed to politics and justice in the contemporary moment. This has meant that it has taken multiple forms: it has been concerned with forms of political and aesthetic representation; it has been committed to accounting for globalization and global modernity; it has been invested in reimagining politics and ethics from underneath imperial power, an effort that remains committed to those who continue to suffer its effects; and it has been interested in perpetually discovering and theorizing new forms of human injustice, from environmentalism to human rights. Postcolonial theory has influenced the way we read texts, the way we understand national and transnational histories, and the way we understand the political implications of our own knowledge as scholars. Despite frequent critiques from outside the field (as well as from within it), postcolonial theory remains one of the key forms of critical humanistic interrogation in both academia and in the world.

scholarly journals The Curious Case of ‘Schools’ of IR: From the Sociology to the Geopolitics of Knowledge

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 429-454 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yongjin Zhang ◽  
Peter Marcus Kristensen
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Sociology Of Knowledge ◽  
Contentious Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Core ◽  
A Site ◽  
Epistemic Diversity ◽  
Recent Insight

Abstract This article interrogates the questions evoked by the curious case of ‘schools’ of thought in International Relations (IR) through the twin perspectives of the sociology of knowledge and geopolitics of knowledge. Drawing inspirations from the tradition of the sociology of IR pioneered by E. H. Carr, the paper first explores how geo-epistemic diversity can help understand the sociologically problematic nature of IR knowledge production in the existing discipline. Taking cues from Randall Collins’s sociology of philosophies, the article moves to identify four clusters of sociological conditions and dynamics that, we argue, facilitate the formation and sustain the operation of schools of thought in IR. Taking seriously the recent insight from geopolitics of knowledge, the article then looks at why and how school labelling constitutes a battleground for contestation and legitimation of knowledge. While the ‘core’ uses the school label to create a parallel, and explicitly inferior, universe of knowledge production to localize theoretical noises from the peripheries, the school label, we argue, has been proactively appropriated by those at peripheries and semi-peripheries for three strategic purposes: to engage in a purposely contentious politics, to question the claim of the American ‘core’ as the creator, depositor, and distributor of universal knowledge, and to unveil the geo-historical linkage between the political and the epistemic. School labelling matters, we further argue, because it has become a site of contestation of geopolitics of knowledge and reflects the perils and promises in our collective pursuit of constructing a truly global IR.

scholarly journals For an international journal in transnational times

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (267-268) ◽  
pp. 213-218
Author(s):  
Joseph Sung-Yul Park
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Academic Capitalism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Academic Journals ◽  
Linguistic Practice ◽  
A Site ◽  
Colonial Capitalism

Abstract Academic journals are a site of tension between the perspective of the transnational and international – between an emphasis on the agency and creativity of linguistic practice that transcends boundaries of nations and languages and a focus on the enduring relations of colonial capitalism that impose bounded and hierarchized order upon our social and linguistic life. Being an international journal in transnational times comes with the challenge of having to facilitate transnational flows of knowledge without reifying the oppressive structure of the political economy of knowledge production. The International Journal of the Sociology of Language’s response to this challenge may lie in its commitment to solidarity and collaboration, where it serves as a ground for resisting the pressures of academic capitalism and for collectively seeking an agenda for research which dismantle hierarchies and boundaries that sustain and rationalize inequalities.

Tracing Settler Colonialism: A Genealogy of a Paradigm in the Sociology of Knowledge Production in Israel

2021 ◽  
pp. 003232922199990
Author(s):  
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Sociology Of Knowledge ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Critical Sociology ◽  
Critical Potential ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of

Knowledge is inextricably bound to power in the context of settler colonialism where apprehension of the Other is a tool of domination. Tracing the development of the “settler colonial” paradigm, this article deconstructs Zionist and Israeli dispossession of Palestinian land and sovereignty, applying the sociology of knowledge production to the study of the Israeli-Palestinian case. The settler colonial paradigm, linked to Israeli critical sociology, post-Zionism, and postcolonialism, reemerged following changes in the political landscape from the mid-1990s that reframed the history of the Nakba as enduring, challenged the Jewish definition of the state, and legitimated Palestinians as agents of history. Palestinian scholars in Israel lead the paradigm’s reformulation. This article offers a phenomenology of Palestinian positionality, a critical potential for decolonizing the settler colonial structure and exclusive Jewish sovereignty, to consolidate a field of study that shapes not only research into the Israeli-Palestinian case but approaches to decolonization and liberation.

scholarly journals Perlawanan Terhadap Politik Identitas Dalam Pieter Elberveld

ATAVISME ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-88
Author(s):  
Maimunah Maimunah
Keyword(s):  
Political Identity ◽  
The Political ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Holy War ◽  
Colonial Order ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
The Way ◽  
Dutch Colonialism

The resistance against Dutch colonialism in Indonesia was not only executed collectively such as through war but also sporadically, indirectly, and individually. The resistance against the political identity in the beginning of nineteenth centuries as represented in Pieter Elberveld (1924) by Chinese writer, Tio le Soei, shows the way Elberveld strives to resist colonial order and border as a "second class" below the Europeans. In order to destroy the colonial "rust en ordre", Elberveld uses various strategies such as claiming his resistance as Jihadfi Sablill ah (holy war), converting to Moslem and collaborating with Javanese priyayi which symbolically reflects his affiliation with the native. Meanwhile, his strategy to be called as "Toean Goesti" can be seen as his attempt to be classified as a Javanese leader. Despite the fact that Elberveld's tactics are not successful, the process to construct this self-naming portrays the variety of the colonial-subject resists the colonial rule.

scholarly journals Beyond Settler Colonialism

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 93-117
Author(s):  
Charles Prior
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Early America ◽  
Political Dynamics ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Site

This paper offers a critical reflection on the appropriateness of ‘settler colonialism’ as an analytic category for understanding the political dynamics of early America. It argues that the paradigm’s focus on the elimination of the native obscures the resilience of Indian power, and the mechanisms by which that power was exercised and defended. The paper positions settler colonialism in recent treatments of the history of colonial political thought, and then presents diplomacy as a site of both sovereign formation and negotiation that enhanced the power of colonies as much as it preserved the power of Indian confederations. The final section of the paper suggests that the ‘interior’ sovereignty of Native Americans continued to shape the powers of the new republican order of states.

Friendships of 'Largeness and Freedom'

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
Rabindranath Tagore ◽  
Universal Principles ◽  
Freedom Movement ◽  
First Time ◽  
Bear Witness ◽  
Political Success ◽  
The Way

Friendships of ‘Largeness and Freedom’ presents the story of three remarkable individuals—Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, and the Anglican missionary Charles Freer Andrews. Brought together for the first time, the letters in this volume not only bear witness to their friendship but also reveal the universal principles they adopted to pursue freedom from colonial rule. Together, the three friends have given us an alternative legacy—the legacy of a nationalism that worked with complete restraint, that cried halt to the freedom movement whenever it turned violent, and that proclaimed the way forward to be in self-suffering and not in hatred of the enemy. They firmly believed that there must be no separation between the spiritual and the political, even in a political struggle. As Tagore wrote: ‘I know such spiritual faith may not lead us to political success, but I say to myself, as India has ever said: Tatah kim? Even then, what?’ Offering a glimpse into the recesses of their minds, their letters help us see what their lives were like beyond the myths and legends that often surround such iconic individuals.

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