scholarly journals Debt and Destruction: The Global Abuse of Haiti and Unbalancing the Myth of Benevolent Canada

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 66-71
Author(s):  
Sabrina Uwase

An integral responsibility of nation-states is to provide protection and the means for attaining a fulfilling life to those it governs. Given the fact that most current global powers were not founded with the needs of racialized peoples in mind, one is infuriated but not surprised, at the cyclical pattern of disregard and exploitation that people of colour in the Americas experience. Indigenous and Black communities in the Americas are not just disregarded by the state, but are actively targeted for exploitation and undermining. Analyzing Haiti’s post-colonial history and Canada’s domestic and international mining operations, I argue that nations in the Caribbean and Latin America have been extensively exploited economically by imperial powers, and their survival undermined by colonial legacies. Numerous countries in the region, to varying degrees, continue to experience the wrath of state-sponsored white supremacy and crippling debt that prevent authentic development. I advance the position that coerced debt and resource extraction have been weaponized against already ostracized communities by behemoth states that employ the myth of being a post-racial democracy. This paper also highlights a complex set of global relationships by linking extraction, state-corporate relations, and North-South divides, with a focus on Canadian mining in Latin America.

2021 ◽  
pp. 001041402199717
Author(s):  
Joan Ricart-Huguet

Political elites tend to favor their home region when distributing resources. But what explains how political power is distributed across a country’s regions to begin with? Explanations of cabinet formation focus on short-term strategic bargaining and some emphasize that ministries are allocated equitably to minimize conflict. Using new data on the cabinet members (1960–2010) of 16 former British and French African colonies, I find that some regions have been systematically much more represented than others. Combining novel historical and geospatial records, I show that this regional political inequality derives not from colonial-era development in general but from colonial-era education in particular. I argue that post-colonial ministers are partly a byproduct of civil service recruitment practices among European administrators that focused on levels of literacy. Regional political inequality is an understudied pathway through which colonial legacies impact distributive politics and unequal development in Africa today. JEL: F54, I26, N37, N47


2012 ◽  
pp. 39-54
Author(s):  
Marianna Scarfone

After briefly considering the influence of Gramsci's thought on the founders of Subaltern Studies in India, the author outlines the theoretical and thematic transformation which the approach went through since the mid eighties, under the inspiration of the "cultural turn". In the second part of her essay Scarfone traces the spread of Subaltern Studies to other parts of the world, such as East Asia, Latin America and Europe, thanks also to the multiplier function of American and European universities. Whereas its influence on post-colonial and cultural studies is sizable, Subaltern Studies never became a widely recognized model to the practice of historiography, partly because of its later full immersion in postmodern waters. However, its contribution to the theory of history as a discipline and as practice should not be underestimated.


Modern Italy ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Andall ◽  
Charles Burdett ◽  
Derek Duncan

The articles in this special issue were first presented at the 2001 ASMI conference on ‘Italian Colonialism and Post-Colonial Legacies’. This collection of papers is the first in a series of publications planned on different aspects of Italian colonialism. A second collection, offering new historical interpretations of Italian colonialism, will be published in the Journal of Modern Italian Studies later this year. A third group of essays on the legacy and memory of Italian colonialism will be published by Peter Lang in early 2004.


1998 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 337-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. J. Stockwell

It is a commonplace that European rule contributed both to the consolidation of the nation-states of Southeast Asia and to the aggravation of disputes within them. Since their independence, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam have all faced the upheavals of secessionism or irredentism or communalism. Governments have responded to threats of fragmentation by appeals to national ideologies like Sukarno's pancasila (five principles) or Ne Win's ‘Burmese way to socialism’. In attempting to realise unity in diversity, they have paraded a common experience of the struggle for independence from colonial rule as well as a shared commitment to post-colonial modernisation. They have also ruthlessly repressed internal opposition or blamed their problems upon the foreign forces of neocolonialism, world communism, western materialism, and other threats to Asian values. Yet, because its effects were uneven and inconsistent while the reactions to it were varied and frequently equivocal, the part played by colonialism in shaping the affiliations and identities of Southeast Asian peoples was by no means clear-cut.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martyne Alphonso

This study analyzes regional editorial content as produced by Vogue magazine. Vogue has developed an empire comprised of 22 international editions. Vogue Mexico & Latin America, and Vogue Arabia, are the only two editions that encompass numerous countries, cultures, and voices. Using discourse analysis through a cultural studies lens, this study analyzes six editorial spreads to uncover what cultural messages are being produced, how these images impact national identities, and who is or is not represented in the fashion image. Intersections of fashion with culture, identity, race, and gender, are analyzed through critical discourse analysis to address constructions of power, specifically within a cultural and postcolonial framework. Visual narratives in Vogue Arabia and Vogue Mexico & Latin America reflect values seemingly distinct to their region, but are charged with cultural assumptions and inaccuracies. For postcolonial cultures vying for identities independent of their colonial past, these marketable stereotypes continue to suppress their structural agency.


2013 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 362-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Glenn Penny

German interactions with Latin America have a long history. Indeed, early modern historians have demonstrated that people from German-speaking central Europe took part in all aspects of the European conquest of Central and South America. They have shown that these people were critical to mining operations and publishing in sixteenth-century Mexico; they have found them among Portuguese and Spanish sailors and soldiers almost everywhere; and they have located them playing important roles in a wide range of professions from Mexico to the south of Chile.


2013 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Vinita Damodaran

The article examines the ways in which the British imperial context, ideologies relating to national heritage—both cultural and natural—were not just extended but developed in a colonial context, and how they have been subsequently redefined and reconstituted in the post-colonial era. From a nineteenth-century romantic antiquarianism drawn to the ruins of a lost civilization, we can see the growth in status of scientific disciplines of archaeology and palaeontology and natural history in the colonies, and an equivalent diffusion of heritage legislation from the Indian subcontinent to East and Southern Africa and even to metropolitan Britain by men like Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, whose interest in monumental architecture led him to protect the Taj Mahal and later to take these interests to Britain where he was instrumental in helping to formulate the ancient monuments’ consolidation and amendment Act in 1913.


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