Colonial legacies and racial hierarchies in the global economy: a review article

This article reviews two recent books on persistent inequalities in the global economy and the role of colonial legacies and racial hierarchies in explaining them. Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking after Empire (2019) and Franklin Obeng-Odoom’s Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa (2020) draw on the Black Radical Tradition and stratification economics respectively to challenge mainstream understandings of racial hierarchies. After first outlining the strengths and key insights of each book, the author discusses how they could be expanded in a more radical manner, along the lines of anti-colonial, decolonial and black Marxism. She argues that in order to understand how racial hierarchies are connected to the development of capitalism, further engagement with radical scholarship that sees race and class as co-constituted would be required.

Nusantarazation Environmental Paradigm: Sustaining Biodiversity and Culture in Nusantara Malay Archipelago with Local Ecological Knowledge (LEK)

Since Nusantara Malay Archipelago is a maritime community, its indigenous knowledge and local wisdom is largely connected to sea life and water. Nevertheless, there are also mountains, valleys, forests and flatlands; hence, local knowledge is also connected to these landscapes and spaces. This article submits the environmental paradigm of Nusantarazation and its interconnectedness with local ecological knowledge (LEK) as well as reports on findings in the form of case exemplars in the field related to these constructs. The authors argue that Nusantarazation is an epistemological paradigm which is able to decolonize environment knowledge and provide an integrative framework for LEK, sustainable practices and technological know-how. The spatial scope covers mainly areas in Malaysia and Indonesia as these are part of Nusantara. Among the key findings are that LEK tend to be accompanied with seemingly unscientific or mythical narratives but are translated into practices that promote sustainability either in the land or waters. This article also capture various local constructs and beliefs that capture the underlying value systems which are integral to conservation and ecological balance. Nevertheless, the Nusantarazation environmental paradigm encounters challenges from colonial legacies of power modern practices and industrial complex that threaten to harm the environment and humanity.

Networks of Global Social Policy Diffusion: The Effects of Culture, Economy, Colonial Legacies, and Geographic Proximity

The introductory chapter to the volume by Mossig, Windzio, Seitzer and Besche-Truthe defines the core concepts, such as diffusion and contagion, and gives an example of an application diffusion and contagion in epidemiology. The most important underlying functions, namely the logistic density and cumulative logistic density function, are explained, followed by a very brief introduction to the core concepts of event history analysis. In the network diffusion model, contagion, or, in other words, the adoption of information or innovation, is based on the concept of exposure which will be elaborated in this chapter. Finally, after describing and visualizing the four different networks and their correlations, exponential random graph models are used to analyze structural and substantive properties of these networks. The introduction concludes with a brief overview of the chapters.

Colonial Legacies and Maternal Health in South Asia

This chapter provides important insights into why culturalist, technocratic, and neoliberal approaches to maternal and neonatal health have persisted in South Asia despite critiques by bringing together a historical analysis of the ‘problem of childbirth’ under colonialism with the interdisciplinary literature on the medicalization of childbirth. This chapter establishes the central role of British women doctors who fashioned themselves as colonial experts on maternal health in shaping developmental discourses regionally and internationally. British women doctors’ professional project drove their participation in a wider international epistemic community and the creation of infrastructure to improve maternal health in South Asia which emulated British maternalist discourses. Their interventions influenced anti-colonial nationalist attempts to reform reproduction and initiatives by middle-class South Asian women. These reformist discourses, which braided eugenicist concerns with communal polarization and marginalized subaltern medical auxiliaries, continue to pervade post-colonial interventions. The chapter also explores the emergence of international health organizations in the interwar period which produced a discourse linking health and governance to which critiques of conditions of maternity in South Asia responded.

Colonial Legacies

In Colonial Legacies, Gabriella Nugent examines a generation of contemporary artists born or based in the Congo whose lens-based art attends to the afterlives and mutations of Belgian colonialism in postcolonial Congo. Focusing on three artists and one artist collective, Nugent analyses artworks produced by Sammy Baloji, Michèle Magema, Georges Senga and Kongo Astronauts, each of whom offers a different perspective onto this history gleaned from their own experiences. In their photography and video art, these artists rework existent images and redress archival absences, making visible people and events occluded from dominant narratives. Their artworks are shown to offer a re-reading of the colonial and immediate post-independence past, blurring the lines of historical and speculative knowledge, documentary and fiction. Nugent demonstrates how their practices create a new type of visual record for the future, one that attests to the ramifications of colonialism across time.